Greenwich Village, N.Y. — “It ain’t over yet” was a constant theme in my inbox this weekend. It is a striking contrast from what I experienced on the streets of New York.

As Colin Powell joined the coronation line on Meet the Press this past Sunday, there seemed to be an Obama-Biden sign everywhere I looked here. See, there’s another button on a well-dressed hipster. A 20-something blonde looking bored and hollow half-chants and half-cheers “Oh-bam-ah. Oh-Bam-ah” with about half the energy she could muster — really why expend more energy when it appears to be a done deal, the new inevitable. And here’s a sidewalk vendor selling just about everything emblazoned with stylized Obama images (fittingly, the style is Soviet Realism). There’s a college gal ranting about “conservative blowhards” outside Trader Joe’s — a constructive conversation no doubt. There’s a nurse’s attendant in a hospital room with an Obama button . . . at a Catholic hospital.

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Speaking of Catholics . . . Moving uptown, Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral offers little sanctuary. There’s one Obama pin. And another. I have to stop looking. My hope is prayer. My McCain-Palin lapel pin can only do so much to provide balance.

“Render Unto Caesar” is the gospel of the day. Surely this could provide some corrective clarity on the wisdom of pouring all your hopes into a political messiah. Not during this homily — at least not at the 1:00 Mass. Instead, the priest offered a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I was struck by the transcendentalist, not the transcendent, during the sermon this Sunday.

If I were a better Catholic, I would have resisted the temptation, but it was hard not to flash back to that image seared in my memory of Edward Cardinal Egan guffawing with Barack Obama at the Alfred E. Smith dinner the other night. Cardinal O’Connor wouldn’t welcome Bill Clinton to the dinner in 1996 when he vetoed the ban on partial-birth abortion. Barack Obama trumps Clinton in his audacity for embracing a culture of death — defending outright infanticide, not the procedure the late Democratic senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called “close to infanticide.” But Obama was welcome and even celebrated this year. And if you watched the evening or morning news on Thursday and Friday, it all looked perfectly appropriate. Maybe you even got warm, fuzzy, we-can-all-get-along feelings. Civility is good. But the abdication of moral leadership is bad.

With so much Letterman groveling, Saturday Night Live appearing, glad-handing dinners, and lame sermons, one would get the impression from both our political and religious leaders that we are not two weeks away from a critical election.

If we elect Barack Obama two weeks from now, I believe the laughter will have been a contributing factor. Too many — from the candidates to religious leaders to commentators to, I'm sure, some Joe Plumbers — are being seduced by rhetoric during this election cycle. They’re glossing over substantive differences and duties. They’re citing Emerson instead of doctrine.

After seeing Obama buttons take their places in St. Patrick’s pews, I prayed that the sermon might include something like:

When Jesus tells the Pharisees and Herodians in the Gospel of Matthew (22:21) to “render unto the Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s,’” he sets the framework for how we should think about religion and the state even today. Caesar does have rights. We owe civil authority our respect and appropriate obedience. But that obedience is limited by what belongs to God. Caesar is not God. Only God is God, and the state is subordinate and accountable to God for its treatment of human persons, all of whom were created by God. Our job as believers is to figure out what things belong to Caesar, and what things belong to God — and then to put those things in right order in our own lives, and in our relations with others.

Mercifully though, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver, a Church leader who has the courage to lead as a truly Catholic leader, did say it. And it got some exposure, thanks to another truthteller, Robert P. George, whose Witherspoon Institute (a conservative bastion at Princeton of all places) ran the remarks. (A few days earlier, George laid out the consequences for life of an Obama administration.)

Chaput also said that “Senator Obama, whatever his other talents, is the most committed ‘abortion-rights’ presidential candidate of either major party since the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in 1973.” He said, “it's important for Catholics to be people of faith who pursue politics to achieve justice; not people of politics who use and misuse faith to achieve power.” There’s nothing just about supporting the most pro-abortion-rights presidential candidate ever, as Patrick Lee discussed last week on National Review Online.

Speaking of Catholic Obama apologists, Archbishop Chaput continued:

They say that his economic and social policies would so diminish the demand for abortion that the overall number would actually go down — despite the federal subsidizing of abortion and the elimination of hundreds of pro-life laws. The way to save lots of unborn babies, they say, is to vote for the pro-abortion — oops! “pro-choice” — candidate. They tell us not to worry that Obama opposes the Hyde Amendment, the Mexico City Policy (against funding abortion abroad), parental-consent and -notification laws, conscience protections, and the funding of alternatives to embryo-destructive research. They ask us to look past his support for Roe v. Wade, the Freedom of Choice Act, partial-birth abortion, and human cloning and embryo-killing. An Obama presidency, they insist, means less killing of the unborn.

This is delusional.

This weekend, too, news broke that the Catholic Campaign for Human Development would stop giving money to ACORN, a corrupt liberal group much talked about on NRO by Stanley Kurtz and Andrew McCarthy today. For over a decade, conservatives, lead by the Capital Research Center, have been shining a spotlight on Catholic bishops collecting money from Catholic churchgoers for this Democratic racket. Only now, when embarrassed by the involvement, is Church bureaucracy stepping away from this plant it’s been watering for years. It’s another example of where a lack of leadership leads to a muddle — and, in this case, complicity in immoral politics that could work to usher in a deeper embrace of the culture of death. Freedom of Choice Act. Supreme Court justices. Federal funding. Who knew how big an ACORN American Catholics have been feeding? We may all be about to learn, after they get their community-organizer-in-chief elected — by any means necessary.

Within NBC studios, on the streets of Greenwich Village, and in the pews of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the election looks over due to complacency and delusion. But it’s not. There are two weeks yet and if everyone’s done laughing, maybe we can focus on the decision before us? It’s a good thing that Americans want to embrace the first black president — they want to make a statement that Barack Obama can be president — that race and an exotic name should not keep one from the presidency. That’s a great instinct. But what of human dignity? And isn’t it patronizing to hold Barack Obama up as a great civil-rights leader just because he is black? What about the children who will never be born because of legal abortion? What about the black children who are killed at even higher rates by this “medical procedure”? And we haven’t even talked about school choice yet, the civil-rights movement of our day, on which issue Barack Obama sides with the old guard opposing the freedom to choose.

My e-mailers who have not given up are right — this election is far from over and done yet. Consider the choices before us. Because about two weeks from now, it will be too late.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.