Published: May 20, 2009 01:37 am      

Message we should heed

THE ISSUE:President Obama’s Notre Dame address.

OUR VIEW:We don’t have to agree on all issues, but we can find common ground.

President Barack Obama illustrated in his speech at the University of Notre Dame Sunday that even those with irreconcilable differences can communicate in a civil manner.

The president recalled an e-mail he had received during his campaign for the U.S. Senate. The writer was a physician who was strongly pro-life, Obama said, and he was concerned about an entry on Obama’s campaign Web site pledging that the candidate would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.”

The doctor objected not to Obama’s stance on abortion, but to his failure to address the issue in fair-minded words. Obama responded by directing his staff to change the language on his Web site.

“And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me,” Obama said. “Because when we do that — when we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do — that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.”

We might not agree on the issue of abortion, he said, but we can still agree that it’s a heartrending decision for any woman to make. And we can work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies and making adoption more available.

Obama also recalled how Father Theodore Hesburgh, the long-time president of Notre Dame, had been part of a six-member commission that drafted the framework for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The six members came from diverse backgrounds, he said, but they finally found common ground after discovering that they were all fishermen.

“Remember that each of us, endowed with the dignity possessed by all children of God, has the grace to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we all seek the same love of family and the same fulfillment of a life well-lived,” Obama said. “Remember that in the end, we are all fishermen.”

It was an eloquent speech with a message we would all do well to heed. We don’t have to agree on all of the issues, but if we look hard enough, we surely can find common ground.

– Pharos-Tribune, Logansport, and Kokomo Tribune