Editor's note. I will be out of the loop the remainder of the week. The next four days' worth of TN&V are being written ahead of time. Please send any comments to daveandusko@hotmail.com.

It is by now a commonplace that what launched the career of pro-abortion Sen. Barack Obama was his "electrifying speech" (as it is often described) to the 2004 Democratic national convention, the same year he was running for the Senate from Illinois. But it can be argued that what really elevated Obama from crowd pleaser to rock star was his "Call to Renewal" keynote speech delivered at a "Faith, Values and Politics" forum sponsored by Sojourners magazine. The forum can probably best be seen as a dry run, testing themes that would help a party dominated by secularists to "get right" with people of faith.

The speech seems to be largely an abridged and slightly altered version of what Obama wrote in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope. The following analysis of his observations on abortion will move back and forth between the shorter speech and the longer and more in-depth observations found in the book. (TIME magazine ran the relevant excerpt when The Audacity of Hope was first published. You can find it at www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1546298,00.html.)

I hope it is obvious that I would not take issue with Obama's call for civility when debating abortion. Nor would I find fault with what he says was his decision to take down from his web page what Obama described as "within the bubble of Democratic Party politics … standard boilerplate [on abortion], designed to fire up the base."

The words were his staff's, not his, Obama writes, and he removed the language in response to a thoughtful letter from a physician. The gentleman was considering voting for his opponent not because of "my position on abortion as such," Obama writes, but because of the aforementioned "standard boilerplate" which included the usual cant about "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose."

So far, so good. However, from that point on, although leavened with a powerful narrative of his faith journey, the discussion heads south.

Obama writes about an exchange with a pro-life couple who, along with their children and a few others, was standing outside a building where he was to give a speech. After listening to the man, Obama writes that:

"I told him I understood his position but had to disagree with it. I explained my belief that few women made the decision to terminate a pregnancy casually; that any pregnant woman felt the full force of the moral issues involved and wrestled with her conscience when making that decision."

There have been over 49 million abortions since Roe v. Wade privatized the decision to take the life of the smallest member of the human community. I would never pretend to know how forthrightly any of these women wrestled with their consciences or to be able to read their hearts.

The sheer numbers would suggest a conclusion other than the one drawn by Obama as would our everyday experience. But the real question is quite different and it is one that Obama totally misses.

When abortion is the default position for unplanned pregnancies--and even more so when the girl or woman is single--how likely is she going to search her conscience? Equally important, having been inculcated with the cruel myth that abortion is a quick and legal response option and therefore the "problem" is hers alone, what are the chances the baby's father will own up to his responsibilities?

Legal on-demand abortion teaches many lessons--all of them wrong--making the choice for life a counter-cultural response, indeed often an act of courage.

Obama described his Keynote remarks as dealing with the "connection between religion and politics." As shown in The Audacity of Hope, Obama frankly concedes that it's "bad politics" for Democrats to "avoid joining a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy." The ensuing vacuum caused by their avoidance will likely be filled by "those with the most insular views of faith, or who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends"--a.k.a. the wicked Republicans.

But what is most annoying but also most telling is the two-part argument that he then slipped in: That those opposed to abortion are driven by a religious understanding that (1) does not seem to honor the connection between faith and deeds, and (2) is incapable of expressing "why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all."

Let's just bypass the obvious point that not everyone who defends the unborn is religious, or does so for explicitly religious reasons. That is not to be defensive about those who are, but merely to state a simple fact that people are driven to join our Movement for a wide variety of reasons.

The core of our Movement's understanding of the abortion dilemma is that both mother and child must be helped--that this is a "both/and" not an "either/or" situation --and that the child's father must acknowledge that he is not excused from his moral obligations just because abortion is legal. That is why women-helping centers have been in existence since before the Movement formally coalesced well over 30 years ago. That is also why the biggest new outreach is to men who have been a party to an abortion.

You cannot attend a single pro-life event aimed at high school and college age students and not hear about their concern to help women in crisis pregnancy situations. They have learned this lesson well from their fathers and mothers.

Obama embraces and lauds the role of the Black church in the Civil Rights Movement. Alluding to the inspired words of Martin Luther King (and Abraham Lincoln), he writes, "Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible and move the nation to embrace a common destiny."

I don't need to make this point for the readers of TN&V, but for those who aren't, let me say that is exactly what we are about. We are helping our great nation "embrace a common destiny," one that refuses to exclude some just because they are powerless and out of our line of view.

Then follows Obama's own mystery passage. It reads,

"What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God's will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all."

I can appreciate that Obama's entire knowledge base about pro-lifers probably consists of a couple of conversations he says he's had with us. But is he really this out of touch? Is his understanding this shallow?

Had he investigated, Obama would have discovered that one of the geniuses of our Movement is that pro-lifers have always been bilingual. That is why we are able to speak in churches and synagogues, on the one hand, and in the halls of Congress, on the other hand. In fact, apropos the apostle Paul, we can speak convincingly in any context.

We have a rich religious heritage of concern for the weakest among us that goes back millennia and which speaks of a God who knew us when we were in our mother's womb. This is one language.

The second language in which we are fluent speaks in the vocabulary of embryology, fetal development, and the continuity of life from conception until natural death. An avowed atheist can agree with what science tells us about our common humanity.

It's what you do with that knowledge that counts.

President Reagan explained it brilliantly in 1983: "The real question today is not when human life begins, but, 'What is the value of human life?' The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother's body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being."

(And not to belabor the point, not only are we conversant in both languages, we flatly deny that they are in conflict, as some would suggest. But that's another column.)

We speak in plain English, not Greek. It is our plainspokenness that so irritates our opposite numbers, who traffic in gobbledygook.

Finally--and as an extension of the previous point--Obama warns about truths that "will be true for us alone." (This follows an account of Abraham and Isaac on the mountaintop, which will not sidetrack us.)

Then he makes this remarkably revealing comment: "This is not to say that I'm unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I'm absolutely sure about--the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace."

Goodness, gracious! If I sat down and thought for the next 10 years, I could never come up with a better formulation of the pro-life philosophy than the last 21 words of that second sentence: Asking no more of others than we would want for ourselves; a refusal to sit idly by in the face of cruelty; love in the deepest and richest sense for both mother and child; and a willingness to humbly acknowledge that all of us fall short and need healing.

We will talk more about Sen. Obama in the weeks and months to come, as we will of his fellow pro-abortionist, Sen. Hillary Clinton. The irony is, of course, that the qualities they so often say they hold up as the epitome of their faith are the very ones that pro-lifers live out in full each and every day.