Admittedly, my first reaction upon hearing the news of President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize was - like many - to snicker.  While several felt outrage over giving someone who had been in office 11 days at the time of the nomination deadline an award of this caliber, I wasn't indignant or even surprised by it. 

Keep in mind this award has become cheapened to a mere political endorsement in recent years.  It has been given to a terrorist (Yasser Arafat), a bumbling weapons inspector who struggled not only to do his job but also to hide his obvious anti-Semitism (Mohammed El Baradei), and to Jimmy Carter!  But perhaps most egregiously, the Nobel committee overlooked Irena Sendler, who risked her life repeatedly to single-handedly smuggle Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto, sparing them from Hitler's human ovens.  She saved over 2,500 children, and after being captured and sentenced to death by the Nazis, escaped only by bribing the guards.  This miraculous story of risking everything to defend the defenseless didn't seem to impress the committee, as they chose to give the award to Al Gore for his slideshow on the dubious man-made global warming theory.

Given these sad examples, my initial thoughts were simply to yawn at the reality of a group of left-wing ideologues giving to one of their own an award they have sadly stripped of its meaning.

I've changed my mind.

Not because I just want another opportunity to criticize President Obama.  Not because it is merely a chance to hop on my soapbox, though those will undoubtedly be the conclusions some will choose to draw.  I've changed my mind because the idea of "peace" should mean something to us.  If we don't object to the notion of giving the highest civilian award for fostering peace on earth to a man who has no regard for the intrinsic worth of humanity, we are complicit in removing any fundamental meaning to the word.

President Obama's radical stance on the issue of abortion categorically disqualifies him from any consideration for this award.  Not only does he hold to the slave-owners ideology that some humans should be given the "choice" to deprive other humans of their inalienable rights, but he has enacted policies to use tax dollars to fund such an abominable belief.  Further, when questioned on the critical issue of when humans are to be protected and given human rights, this supposed "man of peace" takes a pass - not because he doesn't know the answer, but because the answer exposes the grotesque evil behind his position.

But don't take my word for it.  While accepting the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa powerfully stated:

"We are talking of peace...the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing - direct murder by the mother herself. And we read in the Scripture, for God says very clearly: Even if a mother could forget her child - I will not forget you - I have carved you in the palm of my hand. We are carved in the palm of His hand, so close to Him that unborn child has been carved in the hand of God. And that is what strikes me most, the beginning of that sentence, that even if a mother could forget something impossible - but even if she could forget - I will not forget you. And today the greatest means - the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion.

Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child - what is left for me to kill you and you kill me - there is nothing between."

President Obama's defenders may point to his opposition to "unjust war" and the new tone he is extending to a world that they perceive as tired of American imperialism.  Longing to end conflict and wars - something I believe our President truly desires - is a noble calling, and one worthy of admiration.

But peace is about far more than being willing to sit down at a conference table, trying to work out differences with men who want to kill you.  It's about how you view humanity itself.  It's about doing everything within your power to protect the powerless and defend the defenseless.  If President Obama wants to be considered a man of peace, he must begin by reversing policies that facilitate the slaughter of the innocent - not in Afghanistan or Iraq, but in the womb.