Working to prove they aren’t out of their element when it comes to soul-searching God-talk, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton spoke at a forum Sunday night about how faith informs their politics—an area often seen as the GOP’s home turf.

John McCain, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. Although the left-of-center Faith in Public Life sponsored the event, critics argued that McCain’s presence would have given the Republican and Baptist megachurch member an opportunity to polish his religion bona fides with voters. He has rarely spoken about his faith on the campaign trail, and Sunday’s Democrats-only exchange underscores conservative fears that McCain’s tepid handling of religion could be part of his undoing in November. (His staffers cited a scheduling conflict.)

Obama and Clinton, who have been rigorously courting the religious vote, fielded questions from a mixed group—pastors, rabbis, imams and other religious leaders—in Pennsylvania, where voters go to the polls in the state’s critical primary on April 22 — one way, for sure, to ensure their attendance.

Most of their responses were re-jiggered stump-speech boilerplate (CNN’s transcript is available here). Both defended their support for abortion rights as ardently as their commitment to justice and ending poverty. But other parts were instructive for voters interested in hearing the senators talk specifics of their Christian faith. Clinton, for example, was asked by Newsweek’s Jon Meacham to explain theodicy, or why a good God allows suffering in the world—a topic that occupied C.S. Lewis for an entire book. Her semi-rambling response—to a question, in fairness, that can leave clergymen fumbling—was that “the Lord is just waiting for us to respond to his call, because this despair, this impoverishment of body and soul is what we are expected to be spending our time responding to.”

Clinton’s oddball connections to The Fellowship (Douglas Coe’s Tolkien-sounding Christian group that organizes the annual National Prayer Breakfast) have been the subject of recent acerbic Nation and Mother Jones pieces and a forthcoming book. She told the crowd she couldn’t “have made my life’s journey without being anchored in God’s grace and without having that, you know, sense of forgiveness and unconditional love.”

Asked when life begins, Clinton said, “I believe that the potential for life begins at conception,” adding it’s not just “about a potential life” but also “the other lives involved” and noting that the Methodist church (to which she belongs) “has struggled with this issue.”

Asked the same, Obama said, “This is something that I have not, I think, come to a firm resolution on. I think it’s very hard to know what that means—when life begins. Is it when a cell separates? Is it when the soul stirs? So I don’t presume to know the answer to that question.”

Obama was still trying to weather last week’s media firestorm from “bitter”-gate, where, at a closed-door fund-raiser in San Francisco, he lumped together gun ownership, xenophobia and religion as things “bitter” Americans “cling to” in order to “explain their frustrations.” At Sunday’s forum, Clinton cut him little slack. His description of middle- and working-class voters, she said, was “elitist, out of touch and frankly patronizing.” Admitting his earlier words were “clumsy,” Obama during his turn rushed to explain that, “in my own life . . . religion is a bulwark, a foundation when other things aren’t going well.”

For conservatives who oppose the Iraq war, does John McCain—thoroughly unconservative to many of them—offer any compelling reason to vote for him in November? Right now, a majority probably believes he does. But reasons for thinking he doesn’t are gaining currency. McCain’s pool of voters shrunk by two last week when a couple notable conservative Catholics defected and endorsed Barack Obama. The surprise endorsements have since propelled the conservative blogosphere into an introspective reflection about whether McCain is in fact a good gamble.

Not surprisingly, the two endorsers, who as strong Catholics comprise a demographic sought after by Obama’s campaign, say they hung their cross-party hats on the Iraq war issue. The first was Doug Kmiec (noted in WoW here), head of the Office for Legal Counsel in the Reagan and elder Bush administrations, who wrote in his announcement in Slate that, while conservatives might consider his Obama support “party or intellectual treachery,” he believes Obama, though he may disagree, “will respect and accommodate” discussion from both sides.

The second was Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University whose son, a soldier, died in Iraq in May 2007. Bacevich outed himself in The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservative magazine, claiming that “[f]or conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one.”

The endorsements have led to endless back-and-forths over whether anti-Iraq war, pro-life conservatives should let their war opposition trump the possibility of getting enough solidly conservative Supreme Court justices, through McCain nominations, to finally overturn Roe v. Wade. (Justice John Paul Stevens is 87; two others are over 70.) In weighing McCain, conservative pundits have especially narrowed in on whether, even if Stevens and others were replaced, Bush appointees John Roberts and Samuel Alito would vote to overturn Roe. (During his confirmation, Jack Balkin has pointed out, Roberts may have betrayed the answer when he told the Senate that Roe was the “settled law of the land.”)

At his Atlantic blog, Ross Douthat argues that “to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 is to give up on overturning Roe for at least a decade, probably for two, and possibly for all time.” Douthat challenges Bacevich to make a “more detailed case for why issues of war and peace ought to outweigh the abortion issue for pro-life voters in ’08.”

Writing in Taki’s Magazine earlier this week, meanwhile, Dan McCarthy made a detailed case for why the Iraq war should trump abortion, adding that conservatives should furthermore take “a true pro-life position” by being against both the war and abortion. And Daniel Larison, who blogs at The American Conservative’s site, contends that Bacevich and Kmiec’s support for Obama “on an issue of war and peace is much more likely to lead to the desired result in the foreseeable future than voting based on the promise of future judicial appointments, whose ultimate decisions in a case many years down the road may or may not lead to the overturning of Roe.”

Still, Jim Antle, associate editor of The American Spectator, argues that Democrats have done far less to “mitigate the war” than Republicans have done to reduce the number, and restrict the availability, of abortions. (Though beyond voting against the original authorization or funding it since, it’s not clear what Antle believes Democrats were to have done.)

“There are plenty of Catholic voters, a real swing voting bloc, who oppose both the Iraq war and abortion,” muses Antle. “How many of them will side with Bacevich and Kmiec rather than the Ross Douthats who vote on the abortion issue?”

The same week that the Virginia Senate voted to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood, pro-life students outed the organization for alleged racism.

Lila Rose, UCLA sophomore and founder of The Advocate, a pro-life student magazine, recruited an actor to make phone calls to Planned Parenthood clinics in seven states posing as a racist who wanted to make a donation earmarked for the abortion of black babies. Without objection or question, every representative the actor spoke to said they would accept such a donation.

Here is the dialogue between the actor and the representative at the Idaho branch, according to a video montage Rose posted on YouTube:

Actor: …I really faced trouble with affirmative action, and I don’t want my kids to be disadvantaged against black kids.

Planned Parenthood: Yes, absolutely.

Actor: And we don’t, you know, we just think the less black kids out there the better.

Planned Parenthood: (Laughs) Understandable, understandable… This is the first time I’ve had a donor call and make this kind of request, so I’m excited and want to make sure I don’t leave anything out.

This was not the first time Rose, who claims to be a Christian, used “behind the scenes” techniques with Planned Parenthood. In November 2006, Rose posed as a pregnant 15-year-old. She used an undercover camera to record a Planned Parenthood employee advising her to claim she was 16 so they wouldn’t have to report it as a case of statutory rape. When Planned Parenthood found out, they threatened to sue Rose.

Rose told WoW that she believes Christian journalists, like government agents, are justified in going undercover, and even lying, in order to fight against human rights abuses, such as slavery and abortion.

“You see Christians in history going undercover with this kind of infiltration to save a life, or find a truth…this is the kind of thing we can do bravely,” she said.

On Thursday, Planned Parenthood’s CEO Rebecca Poedy apologized for the actions of the representative at the Idaho branch and said, “Planned Parenthood firmly and unequivocally denounces racial bias in the delivery of health care.”

The charge of racism has legs, though, because Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger helped to fund her organization by suggesting — accurately — that it would cut down the number of African-American births. A much higher percentage of black babies than white babies are now killed before birth.

The ballyhooing of Barack Obama’s cross-racial, trans-party appeal has become a deafening din and drafts even conservative Christians to its cause. Evangelicals debating whether to support him are grappling with one of the room’s several ideological elephants—abortion rights.

Many Christians who find the senator otherwise simpatico say they’re wondering if they can vote for an unflinchingly pro-abortion candidate? It’s true that recent setbacks in this department—like the fallout from Obama’s January Christianity Today interview, or the semi-anticipated release Wednesday of a July 2007 Planned Parenthood speech transcript, the text of which commits that, in the women’s rights fight, Obama “will not yield”—haven’t exactly allayed Christians’ doubts, even if John McCain still leaves some conservatives miffed.

Yet pundits in Texas, whose all-important primary is Tuesday, are quick to attribute record-setting voter numbers to disillusioned GOP crossovers who are voting for Obama, some to derail Hillary Clinton (Texas has an open primary), but many because they actually favor Obama. Reporting on the throngs of evangelical Obama supporters often misses the potential incongruence underlying it, failing to highlight what could be a deep tug-of-war between faith and politics.

Julie Lyons, a pro-life Democrat and former editor of the Village Voice Media-run alt weekly The Dallas Observer, decided to put that question straight to members of her church—a mostly black Pentecostal church at the apogee of Obama support. She asked, “Is abortion really that important?” She quotes a woman named Angela Braden as representative of the response. Braden concedes that Obama “may believe in legalized abortions,” but “he believes in giving the living what they need to live”—and that really makes him pro-life (which also hits on the growing criticism within the church that Christians spend too much time waging war on abortion and not enough decrying divorce or emphasizing adoption or helping the poor).

This is becoming a not-uncommon position in the Christian community. In a recent column, pro-life author Frank Schaeffer, son of evangelical heavyweight Francis Schaeffer, mirrors Braden’s thoughts exactly. He wrote at The Huffington Post that Obama “is actually pro-life” because he has a “world view that actually nurtures life. Obama is trying to lead this country to a place where the intrinsic worth of each individual is celebrated.”

A President Obama, Schaeffer argued, would build “a country in which all Americans are offered some sort of dignity and hopeful future”—that is “a place conducive to the kind of optimism each of us must hold in our hearts if we are to welcome children into this world.”

He contrasted this with Republicans, who are hypocritical in their pro-life ethic: “[T]hrough their puritanical war on sex education they’ve hindered our country from actually preventing unwanted pregnancy,” and the party’s “marriage to the greediest and most polluting earth-destroying corporations” has created “a climate (both moral and physical) that has scorched the earth for-profit, with no regard to future generations whatsoever.”

Usually associated with social conservatives and the Republican Party, the pro-life movement is gaining new ground among Democrats who want to make America a two-pro-life party system.

“We really need pro-life Democrats,” Kristen Day, president of Democrats for Life of America, told WoW. “Without having a pro-life majority, we’re not going to get anything done.”

According to Day, who wrote the book Democrats for Life: Pro-life Politics and the Silenced Majority, the Democratic Party has not always been staunchly pro-abortion. Twenty-five years ago, Democrats held a majority in the House with 125 of their 292 seats belonging to pro-life Democrats. The party’s pro-abortion position developed gradually as abortion-rights activists used what they had learned in the anti-war campaign to change the party platform.

Day said for the first time in 2007, the Democratic Party lent its full support to pro-life candidates, and the number of pro-life Democrats in the House and Senate increased for the first time in 25 years. There are seven pro-life Democrats in the House. Pro-life Democratic Senators include Bob Casey, Jr. and Harry Reid, Senate Democratic leader. In 2008, pro-life Democrats in Colorado and Minnesota will present pro-life language at local caucuses with the hopes of changing the party platform –a goal Day admits will be difficult to accomplish.

“There is still a sense out there that you can’t trust pro-life democrats,” Day told WoW. “If you go to a local caucus meeting and you say that you’re pro-life, people have been told not to come back. People don’t think they’re really Democrats.”

For Day, a pro-life stance is part and parcel of the Democrats’ human rights’ legacy. “The Democratic Party is very good on most of the life issues, human rights, death penalty, wages adequate for families to have enough food to eat,” Day said. “This is the next big fight that we can win, the battle for the unborn and providing civil rights for the unborn.”

In spite of a unanimous “do not pass” recommendation from a South Dakota Senate committee, supporters of a pro-life bill forced a floor vote Tuesday. The bill, presented and killed in committee last February as well, requires that doctors offer sonograms to women considering abortions.

The South Dakota House passed a similar bill Tuesday. Both bills require doctors to offer sonograms, both give any woman the right to refuse, and both require that she sign a form stating the doctor offered a sonogram. The Senate bill requires that doctors report how many women they offer sonograms, how many receive, and their resulting actions. If the House and Senate agree on one bill, legislation will move forward.

The bill’s opposition claims that it interferes with the doctor-patient relationship and puts unneeded pressure on a woman in the midst of the decision. According to the Rapid City Journal, pro-life Rep. Deb Peters voted against the bill because of her own difficult pregnancy: “You’re going to be torturing women like me who have to make a life-and-death decision, and it’s not fair.”

The bill’s supporters maintain that sonograms offer the clearest information for women considering abortion. Tim Wiener, Executive Director of Choices Medical Clinic, a Crisis Pregnancy Center in Wichita, KS (home to well-known late-term abortionists, Dr. George Tiller) told WoW that in the clinic’s experience with nearly 11,000 women, most are thankful for the opportunity to have a sonogram: “Only a handful haven’t wanted it.”

Though a legal fight is always a possibility, Mary Spaulding Balch, State Legislation Director for the National Right to Life, told WoW that as many as 11 other states have similar legislation that remains unchallenged.

If Planned Parenthood’s political schemes go according to plan, a pro-abortion candidate will rally to presidential victory in November 2008. Working through Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the world’s largest provider of abortions hopes to bring one million voters to the polls this fall.

Aside from securing a pro-abortion president and one million new abortion activists, the “One Million Strong Campaign” aspires to win key Senate, Congressional and legislative seats on Election Day 2008, creating ideal conditions for the passage of pro-abortion legislation in the future.

In a Jan. 22 press release, Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, explained that the organization’s venture into the political arena will ensure that women in America continue to receive valuable information and health services.

“Under President Bush, women have seen access to basic health care like birth control become increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible. . . . And they’ve now seen the White House and the state governments pour more than $1.5 billion into ineffective and dangerous abstinence-until-marriage programs that do nothing to prevent unintended pregnancies,” Richards said in the press release.

Jim Sedlak, vice president of American Life League, believes the organization’s campaign may falter. “Planned Parenthood has a bad name around the nation,” Sedlak told WoW. “They raise opposition among both pro-abortion and pro-life supporters and, in our opinion, their support of candidates will not be positive.”

Because of its tax-exempt status, Planned Parenthood is prohibited from endorsing a candidate or being involved in political action. Sedlak said that Planned Parenthood often skirts legality during its political ventures rather than leaving campaign work solely to its Action Fund.

“If Planned Parenthood starts putting up signs in clinics, we will file complaints with the IRS to make sure their tax-exempt status is removed,” Sedlak said. “If I was a candidate and I was getting an endorsement from Planned Parenthood, I would be worried.”

Mary was only a few days pregnant when she met up with Elizabeth, who was then six months pregnant (Luke 1:39). And this baby, to be named John the Baptist, at six months gestation, leapt for joy in the presence of the fully God, fully human, Son of God who was at that moment only a few days old.

But not all was joy. Indeed along with the incarnation, there was the slaughter of many innocent children. Herod “killed all the male children in Bethlehem… who were two years old or under…Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more” (Mt 2: 16-18). A whole village of sons slaughtered. A whole village of mothers left inconsolable in their grief.

It is important that you understand that behind our many joyful stories of babies saved and born, we are quietly, tearfully, painfully enduring losses too. Sometimes the pain is particularly brutal to bear─which is why we call this work cross-bearing for the child-bearing.

Two weeks ago, a woman came into our center in Miami and received an ultrasound. That is not unusual anymore. What was unique about this one is that the baby was confirmed to be 6 months along; the same age when John the Baptist met Jesus and worshiped Him, womb to womb! Through the ultrasound we saw a little boy fully formed and clearly visible right down to his toes and eyelashes─ a masterpiece of God. We smiled at him, talked to him, photographed him and pledged to help his mother.

This week we confirmed that this little boy was slaughtered, dismembered and discarded by one of our local Miami abortionists. The news struck like a punch in the stomach.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announces that the number of reported abortions fell by 1.1 percent in 2004. The decrease follows a 14-year downward trend in both the abortion rate (the number of abortions among all women in the U.S.) and the abortion ratio (the number of abortions for every 1,000 live births).

Randall K. O’Bannon, Director of Education and Research for the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund, said the numbers from the CDC are generally low because they come from state departments and not all abortions are reported. The law does not require states to disclose the figures and some states, like California, have not done so since 1998. Surveys that contact the abortion clinics directly, like the Alan Guttmacher Institute’s five year report, find higher numbers than the CDC.

Despite the CDC numbers’ inaccuracy, O’Bannon said the annual report helps the NRL observe trends, such as the age of aborted babies, the most common procedures, the approximate number of repeat abortions, and the women’s age and demographics. The numbers illustrate “the nature” and “the magnitude” of the problem: “It’s important because most people don’t know how many abortions there are. . . It also helps people understand that what we do in the pro-life movement makes a difference.”

He attributes the 14-year decrease to increased knowledge about the consequences of abortion and about the unborn child. During this time, the ultrasound has become more popular: “People began to see for themselves that what we are saying is true, that abortion does involve the destruction of human life.”

Also, more pregnancy resource centers have opened, and more women are aware of abortion alternatives and the practical help available to them: “We know what works, that being there and helping people makes the difference.”

The abortion debate promises to heat up as pro-life groups introduce new ballot initiatives to define “personhood” as starting from the moment of conception.

Members of Colorado for Equal Rights are trying to amend the state constitution. “This is not criminal legislation. It’s not going to make anything illegal,” Kristi Burton, the co-sponsor of the initiative, told WoW. “It’s just going to define person—put the definition of person in our constitution.”

The Colorado Supreme Court recently voted to approve the language of Burton’s petition. The court’s ruling does not endorse the petition but merely says that it is technically correct—a decision that allows Burton’s group to collect the 76,000 signatures necessary to get the initiative on the ballot.

Groups in Oregon, Montana and Georgia are introducing similar initiatives and legislation that explicitly intends to end abortion by establishing the legal personhood of an unborn child.

This move is critical to challenging the fundamental holding of Roe v. Wade that the14^th Amendment does not extend to the unborn. In the Roe. V. Wade opinion, the Supreme Court itself acknowledged that abortion rights would “collapse” if the personhood of a fetus could be established because “the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.”

Robert Muise, an attorney with the Thomas More Law Center, is handling a lawsuit against the Oregon Secretary of State and Attorney General for denying the request of an individual who wanted to circulate the initiative.

Muise told WoW if any of the groups are successful, it will prompt a court battle: “The first time someone tries to say the homicide laws apply to abortion, someone will run to the federal level. In my view, bring it on…You’ll never have a meaningful restriction on abortion so long as Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land.”

There is the question, however, of whether pro-lifers will win that court battle. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals just made a distinction between fetus-murder and abortion, ruling that a similar Texas law does not conflict with Roe v. Wade.