On Sunday, President Barack Obama delivered the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, in what is officially one of the most interesting things to ever happen in Indiana.
After giving his speech, Obama was awarded an honorary degree. Honestly, I couldn’t be more outraged at the whole affair – I’ve been working my ass off for two years and I’m halfway to getting a degree, whereas all he has to do is give one speech and they just hand him a degree, no strings attached.
I’m not the only one who’s outraged. However, others are angry for a considerably more controversial reason.
Pro-life activists from Notre Dame and other cities in the Midwest flocked to the South Bend campus to protest the school’s appointment of a pro-choice president as commencement speaker. A contingent of graduating seniors opted to skip the ceremony and instead participate in masses and demonstrations taking place at the same time. The protestors further opted to show their displeasure with the university’s choice of speaker by waving graphic, blown-up pictures of aborted fetuses, interrupting the president’s speech and equating his position on abortion to “throwing grenades at infants.”
And that’s fine. Interrupting the speech was a bit of a nasty move, but plenty of liberals spent the last eight years doing the same thing to members of the George W. Bush administration whenever they spoke in public – much to my delight – so it would be hypocritical of me to pass judgment. But abortion is an incredibly controversial issue, and as Obama said in his speech, it’s never going to go away.
The worst part about the whole situation is that some students and faculty were so incensed by Obama’s position on a single issue that they were willing to skip their own graduation ceremony and miss out on the incredible privilege of attending a commencement address by a sitting president.
I hated Bush for a wide and diverse variety of reasons. I felt as though he was elected under shady circumstances (the first time), I was convinced he had lied to the country to gain support for the war in Iraq, I was disgusted by his inattention to Hurricane Katrina, and the dumb bastard didn’t once in eight years figure out how to correctly pronounce the world “nuclear.” And all of that concentrated hatred brought about in me an even stronger sense of curiosity. I wanted to know why he was the way he was. I wanted to hear him in his own words – or, at least, in the words of his speech writers, which is about as close as one can get.
The point is, no matter how much I reviled his positions and actions on most every matter, I still wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to hear him speak, especially if he was going to be addressing the crowd at my own graduation. I imagine it would have been a supremely educational experience – that is, unless a bunch of protestors came along and tried to interrupt the ceremony.
Sure, some of the students at Notre Dame may disagree with the president on moral or religious grounds, but I would hope God wouldn’t have any problem with them at least listening to a speech from someone with a dissenting opinion. Sure, Obama supports the legality of a medical procedure that results in the termination of a pregnancy, but he’s also the first black president in American history and a public speaker of some renown. Looking back on your life, would you want to say you deprived yourself of the opportunity to hear a historical figure speak because you disagreed with one of his policies?
I am a firm believer in the notion that the world would be a much better place if everyone agreed with me all the time – I’d get a lot less hate mail and nobody would make fun of me when I talk about how much I love Styx. However, my dream is impossible, so I do the next best thing and try to live my life without demonizing people who disagree with me. Except for people who hate Styx – those guys suck.
What I hope the Notre Dame students who skipped the ceremony learn in life is that you can’t just turn your back on people who disagree with you; you’ve got to learn to coexist. Had the seniors attended commencement, they would have heard Obama say pretty much the same thing.
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