To be precise, it’s Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute that will reportedly host Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius – the official behind the birth control mandate – as its commencement speaker.
As you might imagine, the Catholic Cardinal Newman Society is furious:
It is scandalous and outrageous that America’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit university has elected to provide this prestigious platform to a publicly “pro-choice” Catholic who is most responsible for the Obama administration’s effort to restrict the Constitution’s first freedom — the right to free exercise of religion — while threatening the survival of many Catholic and other religious colleges and universities, schools, charities, hospitals and other apostolates.
Georgetown insults all Americans by this honor. The selection is especially insulting to faithful Catholics and their bishops, who are engaged in the fight for religious liberty and against abortion. The contrast is stark between Georgetown University and those faithful Catholic colleges and universities that have stood for faith and freedom.
At the American Spectator, Quin Hillyer rightly wonders why Rep. Paul Ryan’s speech at Georgetown was criticized by 90 faculty members as anti-Catholic, but they have yet to object to the Sebelius invitation:
If 90 faculty members can protest a non-honorary speech by somebody who only arguably would violate interpretive church teaching, why aren’t they not just protesting but actually threatening to publicly demonstrate against honoring a speaker who is directly trampling upon central, doctrinal church theology and mission?
If there was any doubt that Georgetown’s PPI is intentionally trying to send a message by choosing Sebelius, consider the institute’s last controversial speaker. Georgetown law student and activist Sandra Fluke gave a lecture at the institute yesterday. This seems intended as some sort of protest of Georgetown’s birth control insurance policy, which the university has refused to change, despite complaints from activists.
It's a slap in the face to Catholics and I daresay a deliberate one at that!!
+1 n nIt makes about as much sense as Goebbels speaking at Yeshiva University.
Catholic left-wingers are truly pushing the envelope. They may be taking the risk because this is a presidential election year. There are indications that Obama is losing Catholic voters—and he desperately needs them. An invitation to Kathleen Sebelius conveys the message that a good Catholic can still vote for a Democrat president. Thankfully, this ploy will not likely succeed.
Honestly, I doubt these '68-ers are conveying a message to anyone but themselves, to the effect that "we're still alive, we still matter, our ideas are not dead." For the aging cadre of boomer activists, inviting Sibelius is so much whistling past the graveyard.
I am struck by two things. First, Georgetown is a PRIVATE university, and yet faculty, staff and students have far greater freedom to dissent from its viewpoints than do similar folk at public universities where there supposedly are greater rights of free speech & expression. n nSecond, is this fighting over a $9/month handout for female students (and one has to ask if they would be providing free condoms to the guys, which I doubt) indication that the left understands that it has de-facto lost the abortion battle and is hanging on as loudly as it can to anything it can? n nThey have essentially lost the abortion battle — we don't see women proudly proclaiming that they have had an abortion the way we did 20-30 years ago, it is the exact opposite of where homosexuality was 20-30 years ago when it was kept quiet and secret. n nSo they are fighting over birth control, which while contrary to Catholic theology, isn't viewed on quite the same level as jamming a sharp object into a baby's head and sucking his brains out. And history tells us that any power group is loudest and most visible just before it falls into obscurity and irrelevance as it expends its last desperate gasp in a futile hope of sustaining power. n nThis isn't over $9/month — do you have any idea what it costs to go to Georgetown — or how expensive it is to be a young person living in DC? These kids spend $9 a *day* on impulse food and drink alone — likely more. No, this is the radical feminists drawing a line that they thought that they could hold, and they aren't even holding this one. And if I were running Georgetown, I would require the women to go back to wearing the plaid skirts just out of spite….
I think these "old school" Catholic universities like Georgetown and Notre Dame have succeeded all too well in embracing the liberal Ivy League culture. They are overrated and undeserving of being regarded as centers of serious Catholic academia. There are several, more Orthodox Catholic colleges around the United States now – Ave Maria in Florida among them.