Today I would like to point out to all McCain voters that Obama won and the country is still standing. In fact, if we give the Obama administration a few years, the country just might end up standing taller and stronger than ever. Stranger things have happened.

Before the election, I heard quite a few crazy forecasts about what would result from an Obama victory, and I didn’t even have to watch Fox News or listen to Rush Limbaugh to hear them. At a historical convention for Americans with German-Russian ancestry, someone seriously expressed a fear that a President Obama would seize everyone’s private property and turn the country into the United Communist States of America. A relative in Minnesota wondered if a President Obama would not immediately implement a massive plan of revenge on all whites for the indignities that Blacks have suffered ever since their arrival on these shores. “Taxes! Now we’ll all have sky-high taxes!” some members of my parish gasped. I never hung around long enough to hear any parishioner begin lamenting the inevitable rise in “baby killing.”

But actually some people have given up on me where that subject is concerned. If they press too hard, they know I might bring up the statistics showing that Blacks and Hispanics obtain abortions in proportionately higher numbers than “their people” do. Or that America’s poorest citizens seek abortions in greater numbers than America’s richest do. Or that the number one reason women give for seeking an abortion is economic: “I can’t afford a baby right now.” Facing these facts of American life today would, after all, remind us of the need for greater equality among the races and a fairer distribution of the wealth among all—causes that seldom excite very many people I know. Too many would rather pour their energy into forcing their religious views about when human life begins upon persons whose creeds preach something different. Don’t these anti-abortion extremists know that they can’t take religious freedom for themselves with one hand, then take it away from someone else with the other? Obama is correct when he says that the question of when human life begins ultimately has a theological answer. And until someone can demonstrably prove when a human soul becomes one with a human body, the religions of the world are simply going to have to agree to disagree in their teachings on abortion.

Murder and mayhem, destruction and ruin! What tyranny fear creates whenever it enters the body politic, and how seldom do our worst fears come true. It doesn’t seem to matter whether our pocketbooks or our holy books jumpstart the anxiety; its effects are always the same. Unchecked, fear leads to loathing and hatred of the few—Blacks, Muslims, Jews, and other minorities--as surely as hope unleashed leads to liberty and justice for all.

Thank goodness we have a new President who does not trade in the tired old coinage of fear. Having a man of hope in our nation’s top office will bode well for all of us. The tone Barack Obama sets can change the nation at large, as certainly as Ronald Reagan’s talk of “welfare queens” suddenly made advocacy for the poor a fool’s errand--and redress of economic injustice a waste of government money. With our new President, old-fashioned values like truth and justice can finally make their long-awaited comeback.

And that’s a trickle-down theory we can believe in.

SOURCES

“Abortion in Women’s Lives.” Guttmacher Institute, 2006. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/2006/05/04/AiWL.pdf .

“Trends in the Characteristics of Women Seeking Abortions, 1974-2004.” Guttmacher Institute, Aug. 2008. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/2008/09/18/Report_Trends_Women_Obtaining_Abortions.pdf .

“Abortion Absolutists.” John F. Kavanaugh. America, 15 Dec. 2008. http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11284 .