The title of the article says it all. Daniel Allott–in an article from the American Spectator, now reproduced on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page–highlights Barack Obama’s position on abortion by interviewing someone Obama would have rather seen dead:

According to Barack Obama, Gianna Jessen shouldn’t exist.

Miss Jessen is an exquisite example of what antiabortion advocates call a “survivor.” Well into her third trimester of pregnancy, Gianna’s biological mother was injected with a saline solution intended to induce a chemical abortion at a Los Angeles County abortion center. Eighteen hours later, and precious minutes before the abortionist’s arrival, Gianna emerged. Premature and with severe injuries that resulted in cerebral palsy. But alive.

Had the abortionist been present at her birth, Gianna would have been killed, perhaps by suffocation. As it was, a startled nurse called an ambulance, and Gianna was rushed to a nearby hospital, where, weighing just two pounds, she was placed in an incubator, then, months later, in foster care.

Gianna survived then, and thrives now, because, as she told me recently with a laugh, “I guess I don’t die easy.” Which is what the abortionist might have thought as he signed his victim’s birth certificate. Gianna’s medical records state that she was “born during saline abortion.”

As an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama twice opposed legislation to define as “persons” babies who survive late-term abortions. Babies like Gianna. Mr. Obama said in a speech on the Illinois Senate floor that he could not accept that babies wholly emerged from their mother’s wombs are “persons,” and thus deserving of equal protection under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

This may sound extreme for a man of moderation. And indeed, that is how the press and his campaign have sought to portray Obama: a man of calm post-partisanship and reflective balance who can deliver the change America needs. This no less true of his stance on economics than his stance on life questions. As Allott remarks, in Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope, the senator denounces extremism on the question of abortion as he does on any other issue.

But the facts from his legislative record and remarks made during his campaign tell exactly the opposite story. This is a man who declared that he doesn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby,” who promises that, “the first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” This Act, according to Allott, “would overturn hundreds of federal and state laws limiting abortion, including the federal ban on partial-birth abortion.” It all makes Allott ask, “If partial-birth abortion is, as Democratic icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan labeled it, ‘too close to infanticide,’ then what is killing fully-birthed babies?”

It is clear that Barack Obama is not another Democratic candidate who happens to support a woman’s right to choose. As Giana Jessen said, “I really hope the American people will have their eyes wide open and choose to be discerning. . . . He is extreme, extreme, extreme.”

That seems to be what Forbes magazine is after in this interview with stem-cell scientist extraordinaire James Thomson. BioEdge highlights these excerpts from Thomson:

♦ “I do think there will be some niches where transplantation is important, but I think people are grossly underestimating how hard it is going to be for most diseases.”

♦ “And I know that a lot of people are going to work on transplantation, I hope it’s successful, but I’d actually be fairly shocked if 10 or 20 years from now we didn’t have such a good understanding of the biology of that disease that we didn’t have to do transplantation.”

♦ “The hype that was created [by stem cell science] is largely a part of that political debate. Both sides played a little bit loose with the truth, I think, at various times. One side would say one thing, the other side would feel obligated to counter it, and if you say rational, reasonable things, it doesn’t get the message across. So it’s kind of understandable, but the consequence of that is that people are ill-prepared for how difficult it’s going to be to get transplantation therapies based on these cells. And that that’s to be expected, because it’s so brand-new.”

Having previously noted the techno-/theo- logical dream of transcending death through science, I’m almost pleased to note that some futurists are now throwing cold water on the idea of The Singularity. (That’s the moment when AI surpasses human intelligence, Skynet becomes self-aware, and nanobots give Glenn Reynolds the physique of an American Gladiator.)

A publication called IEE Spectrum, which playfully calls The Singularity “the Rapture for geeks,” suspects that Wired’s piece on Ray Kurzweil’s bid for immortality is bosh:

Why should a mere journalist question Kurzweil’s conclusion that some of us alive today will live indefinitely? Because we all know it’s wrong. We can sense it in the gaping, take-my-word-for-it extrapolations and the specious reasoning of those who subscribe to this form of the singularity argument. Then, too, there’s the flawed grasp of neuroscience, human physiology, and philosophy. Most of all, we note the willingness of these people to predict fabulous technological advances in a period so conveniently short it offers themselves hope of life everlasting.

This has all gone on too long. The emperor isn’t wearing anything, for heaven’s sake.

More demystifying follows. This is the techno version of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great, only funny, entertaining, and incisive. Enjoy.

This morning, a two-page advertisement against same-sex marriage appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Times. Purchased by an organization called “Tradition, Family, Property,” the ad is text heavy, putting an argument about the orgins and results of the campaign to legalize such marriages:

Same-sex “marriage” is now being imposed upon the nation by government fiat. . . . Few issues illustrate the divergence between the secularist and the Christian worldviews as does today’s cultural battle over marriage. Secularists accept same-sex “marriage,” while denying the specific reality of marriage, rooted in nature. They deny that the self-evident biological, physiological and psychological differences between men and women find their complementarity in marriage, just as they deny that the specific primary purpose of marriage is the perpetuation of the human race and the raising of children. . . .

History is a great teacher. In the twentieth century, Nazism and communism showed the world that, when society loses its moorings in the natural order and gives itself over to utopias, the inevitable result is dictatorship. This dictatorship can take many forms and be exercised from the halls of government, party headquarters, judicial chambers, or media outlets. . . .

In any situation where marriage affects society, the State will expect Christians and all people of good will to betray their consciences by condoning, through silence or act, an attack on Divine law and the natural order. Left unchecked, this anti-Christian trend will become an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and our American way of life that we do not hesitate to call persecution.

Over-the-top? A likely prediction? An unnecessary provocation? A timely warning?

It’s hard to say. The American group is one of several Tradition, Family, Property organizations around the world, all inspired by the twentieth-century Brazilian writer Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. Very conservative, they have protested films they deem blasphemous and fought hard on culture-war issues. The results of their ad today will be interesting to watch.

Oh, and Nathaniel, if you think Canada is bad, did you see what’s up at Yale? Here’s a bit from Michael Gerson’s column in yesterday’s Washington Post:

The American kickoff of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation last week unintentionally revealed the mountain of misunderstanding the former British prime minister has undertaken to scale. At an event designed to further mutual religious sympathy, two of the panelists — including the president of Yale University, Richard Levin — casually asserted that religious Americans who support pro-life restrictions on international family planning aid are as doctrinaire and exclusionary as Saudi extremists. Pro-life Catholics and evangelicals? Wahhabi extremists? What’s the difference?

Clearly, mutual religious sympathy has a ways to go in places such as Yale.

According to Canada’s National Post, the student union at York University has decided to table its proposed ban on student clubs that oppose abortion.

Gilary Massa, vice-president external of the York Federation of Students, said student clubs will be free to discuss abortion in student space, as long as they do it “within a pro-choice realm,” and that all clubs will be investigated to ensure compliance.

“You have to recognize that a woman has a choice over her own body,” Ms. Massa said. “We think that these pro-life, these anti-choice groups, they’re sexist in nature … The way that they speak about women who decide to have abortions is demoralizing. They call them murderers, all of them do … Is this an issue of free speech? No, this is an issue of women’s rights.”

Happily, the school’s administrators and many pro-choice students (including the editors of the York’s student newspaper) are opposing this decision as contrary to the university’s mission and not representative of the student body’s wishes. But the fact that a student union can unilaterally prohibit one side of the abortion debate is not a good sign for free speech in Canada’s universities.

On a blog nicely named Blog and Mablog, the blogger (and mablogger?) Douglas Wilson writes of the exchange in the new issue of First Things between Bishop N.T. Wright and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.

It’s an interesting comment from Wilson, but what caught our eye was the opening sentence, “As many of you probably know . . .” Now that’s the kind of thing editors love to hear about the correspondence section of their magazines.