Mr. FLG has got himself a comment debate going about the invitation extended to Obama to go speak at Notre Dame’s commencement and the backlash it is provoking among conservative RC’s, given Obama’s well-documented lack of concern for fetal life.  (You will hardly be surprised to learn that I think it was a terrible idea.)

I’ve already contributed a bit, but I wanted to emphasize in my own post here the danger of bandying about the word “rights” in this debate.

If we are speaking of the First Amendment, we must be very careful to remember its limitations.  It reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Emphasis on “Congress”.   That means the Guv’mint.  It does not mean anybody else.  There are plenty of instances where even if the guv’mint cannot abridge the free exercise of religion or speech, some other non-governmental authority can.  Otherwise, for example, parents would be powerless to shut up their children or make them stop watching tee vee and would have no choice but to kill them.

Now I think that this concept of 1st Amendment rights often gets turned inside out these days.  People believe that freedom of speech or religion actually means a positive obligation on the part of the guv’mint to ensure that nobody curtails what they say or hear, and when or where they say or hear it.   (And following the Orwellian logic of our day, that usually translates into a belief that the guv’mint has a positive duty to suppress expressions of religion in favor of a semi-official state secularism.)  My favorite example of this attitude occurs almost yearly at Christmastime.  There’s a middle-aged Korean guy who likes to get on the metro and sing hymns between stops.  On several occassions somebody has started shouting at him “You have no right to do that here!” -  presumably on the mistaken belief that the singer is somehow infringing on everybody else’s freedom of religion or speech when, in fact, he is only exercising his own.

From a 1st Amendment point of view, Notre Dame can choose to invite whoever the hell it wants, without guv’mint interference.  Conversely, though, from a 1st Amendment point of view other non-governmental agents may seek to influence that choice – also without guv’mint interference.  So far as I know, Notre Dame is a private university with ties directly to the Church.  It certainly holds itself out as a “Catholic” institution.   If there is any meaning left in that term, then this is exactly the kind of debate that ought to be had.

But as I say, this is God’s fight, not Uncle Sam’s.  There is absolutely nothing legally wrong with orthodox RC’s or the Church itself opposing the bringing of Obama to campus, and of doing everything they can to get the University to reconsider its invitation.   Nobody’s rights - not the students, not the faculty’s, not the Church’s, not Mr. Obama’s – are being infringed one way or the other.  It isn’t even a question.