Last weekend's forum where Barack Obama and John McCain were given individual one on one time to answer some questions by Pastor Rick Warren, of "The Purpose Driven Life" fame, was quite revealing.

When Warren asked each of the candidates, for instance, "at what point does a baby get human rights?" McCain's response was unequivocally, "from the moment of conception." The conservative Christian audience applauded wildly. Obama's response was peppered with hesitation, as though he was walking through land mines. He concluded with the final point that such decisions about when life begins are "above my pay grade."

Obama is still struggling with the concept of "moral absolutes." It's an indication of his youth and immaturity. I remember a time when I believed that there was no such thing as "objective truth" or "moral absolutes."

Then I came across a philosophical conversation between a student and a theology professor. The student made the statement "there are no moral absolutes!" The professor said, "Isn't that statement a moral absolute?"

In other words, what the student was actually saying was "there are no moral absolutes except this one." Is that possible? Can such a statement be true if it contradicts itself? If there are no moral absolutes, then we are reduced to anarchy, where Mother Theresa's morals are equal to Charles Manson's morals. When we carry this idea to its extreme logical conclusion, we can see how incoherent it is.

Nowhere is the question of moral absolutes more relevant than on the issue of abortion. Democrats have tried to frame this as a battle about privacy, claiming that the law has no business in the realm of private behavior. This is just ludicrous.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no such constitutional "right to privacy" as pro-choice advocates claim. Roe vs Wade took the fourth amendment, the right to be free from unwarranted search and seizure, and renamed it the "right to privacy," hence creating out of thin air, a right to abortion.

Using that logic, no crimes could be committed in our homes, because of the so-called "privacy" clause. There would be no such crime as child abuse, unless it were committed on public property.

This is why even pro-choice constitutional lawyers acknowledge that Roe vs. Wade is ultimately doomed. It's just bad law. Washington state legalized abortion before Roe vs. Wade, which makes the case for abortion as a "state's rights" issue, just like slavery was before abolition. The logic for defending abortion has striking similarities to defending slavery. Sorry if you don't like that analogy, but it does meet the logic test.

The untold truth is that democrats are the extremists on this issue. They continue to maintain that late term abortions should be legal, including the procedure where a living baby is delivered after six months in the womb and killed by stabbing the base of the skull. They decry the conservative Supreme Court judges that ruled in favor of banning this procedure to be extremists.

Barack Obama, as an Illinois state senator, voted against another law, the "Infants Born Alive Protection Act." This legislation was written after documented testimonies of nurses reported finding infants who had survived abortion procedures, but were forbidden from offering comfort to them in their dying hours, quite literally, in a hospital garbage can.

Obama cannot risk declaring such discarded infants as worthy of receiving human rights, not because he is such a "deep thinker," but because he has no real convictions about the meaning of human life. He has not accepted that there are moral absolutes. Instead, he tries to equivocate abortion as no different than war or capital punishment. These equivocations do not meet the logic test.

Under certain conditions, war is a justice issue, attempting to stand down evil (as in WWII against Hitler). In some cases it is just and therefore a moral option. Capital punishment is prescribed in the Old Testament as a just response to unjust behavior and is often necessary to protect society. Abortion is the deliberate taking of innocent life and is never a just or moral option. Sometimes, in very rare circumstances, it is a consequence of trying to save a mother's life, but it is a consequence, not the intent.

These distinctions get lost when we fail to acknowledge moral absolutes.

All distinctions aside, democrats are the extremists on abortion. Included in their official platform is the demand to return government funding to abortion providers (previously banned in 1976) and the removal of the "conscience clause" which allows doctors and medical students to refuse to perform abortions on religious or moral grounds.

Obama needs to grow up a little and step up to a higher "pay grade" if he wants to be worthy of the highest office in the land.