Among the more gut-curdling and inhuman of Jerome Corsi’s repugnant distortions about Obama was the allegation that the Senator cast a vote for infanticide - a claim Corsi’s feckless partisan meat puppet of a show host, Sean Hannity, just nodded to; and a claim Corsi made on no less than three separate occasions, not counting his book.

Jerome Corsi, author of the book, The Obama Nation, falsely claimed on Hannity’s America that Sen. Barack Obama said, “Even if a child was born … the woman still had the right to kill the child in an abortion.” Corsi similarly falsely asserted on Hannity & Colmes that “[a]fter a child’s born, Obama … in the [Illinois] state Senate, wanted the child killed if the mother desired an abortion,” and on Sean Hannity’s radio program, said that “Obama’s on record as let’s kill the baby if that’s what the mother wants.” In fact, Obama has never supported giving people the right to kill their children.

Tragically, millions of Americans will likely not make the obvious assumption that such a claim is preposterous. Research shows that Corsi is being thoroughly mendacious - the law he refers to would not have defined what “born” or “alive” meant, while at the same time letting family members bring lawsuits against doctors they thought acted inadequately. It was bad law - either doomed to die quickly or to drag costly suits into its slow demise.

But this all raises the question, where does Obama stand on “life” and “choice” issues, and what, if anything, has he sought to do about them?

We are given a clearer perspective on the complexity of that answer by Obama’s handling of the Illinois Liability Law above. For Obama did support another bill, the Born Alive Act, that bestowed the full rights of a human being on a child born during the process of an abortion. In essence, it’s intent - protection of a born child - was the same, and of his interest.

Does this mean Obama is not in favor of unrestricted abortion rights? It may dismay progressives - or excite centrists and pro-lifers - to hear that he has supported banning various late-term procedures.

How does he maintain that 100% NARAL record, then? Obama has never failed to vote in support of a female individual’s right to the procedure. Yet he has claimed that the restriction of the procedure in the more gruesome instances is warranted and legal. And he has gone an extra step, taking the rhetoric he laid out in his political writings and incorporating them into the policy action of the party he had won the leadership of.

Obama, and key others in the Democratic Party and the former-GOP pro-life community, have lately strove to make abortion reduction a bi-partisan issue by putting it in the Democratic Party platform. Yes, it is now an official part of the platform to pursue the goal of reducing incidence of abortion. And, as I noted in a previous post, it is high time that they wrested this particular moral high ground from the tenuous, exploitative grasp of the GOP.

I say “exploitative,” because the GOP platform has been anti-contraception, anti-sex education, anti-natal welfare, anti-adoption, but fiercely and uncompromisingly anti-abortion. It smacks of callous calculation rather than actual concern that they have no real functional interest in preventing unwanted pregnancies or providing for the chaotic circumstances that afflict any unprepared mother, but are obsessively interested in the child when it’s in the mother. One may argue that the GOP does care about those other concerns, but it is hard to argue that their policies have made that care manifest in a way that helps.

the Republican line on abortion–the singular focus on banning it–was just a cynical ploy. I know that many GOP leaders were sincere, but overall the strategy was simply to oppose abortion symbolically while doing nothing to reduce abortions in real life. Moreover, there is evidence from history and from around the world that banning abortion would not even reduce abortions (have we ever banned anything successfully?).

Pro-life Christians are finally getting this.

This has left the “life” issue up for grabs: Not just “life” as defined as opposition to a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, but “life” that can expanded to include care and respect for all phases of the process - for the sexually active girl or woman, for the life whose fate depends on her, and for the child that must be cared for all the more after its born. And this is what the 2008 platform seeks to achieve.

The effect would be profound, in that it would turn an issue that has only been useful as partisan demonization - and hardly for limiting abortions - and transform it into a bipartisan call to provide actual care for all life. If Obama is both sincere and committed to the causes he has been bold enough to speak on extensively and candidly in the past, especially in his writing, the Republican wedge issue that only fosters the problem may be turned into an urge to support Democratic social aid programs.

Can Obama speak strongly enough to be considered sincere? All indications are that he will do just that tomorrow at the Faith Forum to be held at the Saddleback mega-church. It falls to him to not only regurgitate the Clinton-era idiom of “safe, legal and rare” about abortion, but to synthesize the effort to actually reduce abortions with the earnest concern for all life.

I trust he won’t disappoint. Obama devotes a whole chapter of Audacity of Hope to the subject. There is no doubting his depth of consideration, feeling and concern; he at one point compares the guilt of some women over their past abortions to that of former slave holders - clearly he recognizes the severity of the decision involved. And that he, not McCain, is a zealous Evangelical Christian, gives him additional premium to his claim of spiritual investment in a better life.

Today, Matthew 25 - a progressive Christian group central to the nascent efforts like those above - released a commercial for Obama.

It is the organization’s title - the Biblical passage that says that those who don’t just bide time in this life, but work at charity, are saved, and any who do less are damned - that resonates with Obama’s faith. He has been an activist for the poor, the disadvantaged and the denounced on both sides of the political spectrum. There is no doubt that he struggles for the least of us.

We’ll see what stand he takes for “the least among” the pro-life movement tomorrow.