THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D.
The
Democrats’ 2020 national platform reads like a litany of positions
diametrically opposed to Catholic teaching and belief, a prominent Catholic
news service warned Wednesday.
The Catholic
News Agency (CNA) ran a 1,000-word article enumerating
seven key policies Joe Biden will be running on in the upcoming presidential
election, all of which run counter to Catholic teaching except one: his
opposition to the death penalty.
On the issue
of religious liberty ,
the Democrats insist that religious freedom cannot be used “as a cover for
discrimination,” meaning that it must bow to gay adoption, same-sex marriage,
and abortion.
The Democrat-sponsored “Do No
Harm Act” would curtail all expressions of religious freedom that they deem
discriminatory, the article states, such as “objections to the contraceptive
mandate, health care workers declining to participate in abortions, and
religious adoption agencies placing children only with married opposite-sex
couples.”
Regarding conscientious objection , the
Democrats’ draft 2020 platform “supports reinstating policies such as the Obama
administration’s transgender mandate,” which prohibited doctors, hospitals, and
insurance companies from refusing to take part in transgender surgery for
reasons of conscience.
As a case in point, the article
notes that a federal judge stopped implementation of the Trump administration’s
rule that protected doctors with a conscientious objection from providing
gender-transition surgery or abortion.
The Trump administration has
granted religious and moral exemptions Obama’s contraceptive mandate, including
for the Little Sisters of the Poor, but Mr. Biden “has said that he would undo
the religious and moral exemptions to the mandate,” the article adds.
On the
matter of LGBTQ advocacy ,
the platform calls for the appointment of senior leaders to push for LGBTQ
rights abroad as a matter of U.S. foreign policy, it notes.
The
Democrats roundly oppose school
choice , insisting that private school vouchers “divert
taxpayer-funded resources away from the public school system,” it states.
On same-sex marriage , in 2012
Biden said he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage, prompting
President Barack Obama to announce his own support for gay marriage. “As Vice
President, Biden himself officiated at a same-sex wedding ceremony for two
White House staffers in 2016,” the article observes.
The article
devotes significant ink to describing Mr. Biden’s evolving stance regarding abortion rights , which have
become more and more radical with each passing year.
The Democrats’ platform
declares that “every woman” should have access to “safe and legal abortion” and
that abortion, as part of comprehensive health care, is “vital to the
empowerment of women and girls,” the article states.
At one time Biden opposed
federal funding of Planned Parenthood and taxpayer-funded abortion abroad, but
now supports the repeal of the Hyde and Helms Amendments as well as the Mexico
City Policy, which protect taxpayers from funding abortions.
“The platform does include a
commitment to oppose capital punishment, and pledges the party to ‘continue to
support abolishing the death penalty,’” the article declares.
The CNA assessment of Mr.
Biden’s positions joins a series of red flags recently raised in Catholic and
Christian media.
Last
weekend, the National Catholic Register warned
that Mr. Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as running mate may hurt his appeal
with religious voters due to her “aggressive pro-abortion and anti-religious
freedom record.”
In her
August 15 essay ,
Lauretta Brown noted that Harris’s stance on a number of issues directly
collides with Catholic teaching and thus could “spell trouble for his efforts
to appeal to religious voters.”
Former speaker of the House
Newt Gingrich — a convert to Catholicism — said last Friday that Sen. Kamala
Harris is “the most openly anti-Catholic bigot to be on a national ticket in
modern times.”
Citing
Harris’s public record of anti-Catholic activism, Gingrich wrote that
her bigotry against Catholics is “a perfect example of the modern radical
left’s ideology of ‘intolerant tolerance.’”
Catholic League President Bill
Donohue warned last week that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has a “Catholic
problem,” insisting that Biden’s running mate will have a hard time winning
over Catholic voters due to her “positions on an array of moral issues.”
As a radical
supporter of abortion rights, Harris has alienated pro-life voters, but she has
gone further still, tainting herself “with the brush of anti-Catholicism,” Dr.
Donohue stated .
Catholic
League Highlights Kamala Harris’s ‘Catholic Problem’
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Catholic League President Bill Donohue warned of Sen. Kamala
Harris’s (D-CA) ‘Catholic problem’ in an essay this week, insisting that
Biden’s running mate will have a hard time winning over Catholic voters due to
her “positions on an array of moral issues.”
As a radical supporter of abortion rights, Harris has alienated
pro-life voters, but she has gone further still, tainting herself “with the
brush of anti-Catholicism,” Dr. Donohue states .
“In 2018, she sought to stop a Trump nominee for a seat on the
federal bench simply because he was Catholic,” Donohue notes. “In doing so, she
invoked a religious test for the bench, a patently unconstitutional act.”
As Michael Gerson echoes in an op-ed Friday in the Washington
Post , Harris posed a series of “inappropriate questions” to federal
district court nominee Brian Buescher, suggesting that “being a member of the
Knights of Columbus — a nearly 2 million-member Catholic social and charitable
organization — was disqualifying for the federal bench.”
“Harris was effectively treating membership in a distinctly
Catholic organization as if it were allegiance to a hate group,” Gerson writes.
As Donohue notes, Harris’s stated objection to the Knights of
Columbus stemmed from its unapologetic pro-life position. “In short, her real
target was the Catholic Church,” he states.
Harris also “bludgeoned” pro-life activist David Daleiden for
his undercover videos showing how abortion operatives harvest and sell aborted
fetal organs,” Donohue added, insisting that there should be no restrictions
whatsoever on abortion.
“She is so pro-abortion that in 2015, in her capacity as
California’s Attorney General, she sought to cripple crisis pregnancy centers
with draconian regulations,” Donohue writes. “She was sued and lost in the
Supreme Court three years later.”
Along with her rabid pro-abortion activism, Harris has also
worked hard to curb religious freedom, co-sponsoring “The Equality Act,” which
would effectively “gut Catholic hospitals,” he adds.
Harris is also a vocal supporter of same-sex marriage and
transgender rights, arguing that biological males who think they are girls
should be allowed to compete in sports against real girls, he states.
While Harris’s own stepchildren attended an elite private school
in Los Angeles, she has vigorously opposed school choice, which would give
underprivileged children the same opportunity.
Curiously, Harris said last year that she believed those who
accused Biden of sexual assault, which would lead not only Catholics but all
right thinking people to wonder why she has chosen to hitch her wagon to a man
she believes to be a sexual predator, Donohue quips.
Will California go pedo?
By Sally Zelikovsky
California state senator and radical gay activist from San
Francisco Scott
Wiener introduced a bill (SB
145 ) that would decriminalize men having sex with young boys and no one
blinked. If this passes, California parents will have no legal recourse against
men who rape, grope, molest, seduce, sexually assault, or proposition their
sons. No one is suggestion all gay men are predators as Wiener would have
you believe, but the fact is, any man of any sexual
proclivity who touches a young boy is a predator whose only place of residence
should be a penitentiary where he can never touch a young boy again.
Forever. The state is obligated to protect our children against this kind
of predatory sexual behavior -- not encourage or reward it -- whether the perps
are priests, teachers, straight or gay, male or female. And parents are
duty-bound to fight against this kind of asininity. In the meantime, if
you live in the Golden State, watch your sons like a hawk and plan to
move.
Perhaps not ironically, president of the Government
Accountability Institute Peter
Schweizer details in his book Profiles
in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite and
revealed on Tucker
Carlson , that Kamala Harris neglected to prosecute anyone in the church
sexual abuse scandal during her tenure both as San Francisco district attorney
from 2004-2011 and California attorney general from
2011-2017. Schweizer reported “[O]f the 50 largest cities in
America, all 50 of them prosecuted at least one case during that time period,
except for Kamala Harris.”
This shocking dereliction of duty occurred despite compelling
evidence handed over to Harris in 2004 from San Francisco’s outgoing district
attorney and Democrat Terence Hallinan, who had been aggressively investigating
claims and had copious incriminating documents against Catholic
priests. Instead of picking up that baton and pursuing justice,
Harris flushed the evidence down the memory hole and where it is nobody
knows.
What does this have to do with Scott Wiener? Both he
and Harris are part of a subculture in California that advocates what every
parent knows is criminal behavior endangering the mental and physical wellbeing
of our boys, all in the name of LGBTQ equality. Wiener and his fellow
travelers in the Bay Area have stifled any rational discussion about the bill
with preemptive accusations that it would be rank homophobia. Given
today’s cancel culture, people are afraid to speak out lest they be labeled
with a giant H for “homophobe,” descended upon by angry hordes, and lose their
jobs, maybe even their lives. But every caring parent knows this ain’t
woke; it’s broke. Maybe Kamala Harris would feel differently if she had
children. Maybe then she would know the constant worry parents face not
only for their daughters but now, their sons, too.
Once again, California is the canary in the coal mine:
what starts out as a fringe San Francisco subculture that makes any sane person
cringe, will soon be mainstreamed into California law and eventually end up on
Nancy Pelosi’s desk. With Harris’ mishandling of the church sex-abuse
scandal, we should not be surprised if she introduces California’s brand of
noxious and permissible sexual predation to the nation as a whole.
It’s up to Trump and Pence to hold her accountable for her
past sins of neglecting the victims of pedophilia, and they should put her on
the spot regarding Wiener’s bill: is she for the children who are the victims,
or the men who prey on them?
Image: Wikamedia
Kamala Harris Failed to
Prosecute Priest Sex Abuse Cases Despite Victims’ Pleas
AP
Photo/Eric Risberg
12
Aug 2020 13,637
6:31
Joe Biden announced
Tuesday he has chosen Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate, a person
the presumptive Democrat nominee described as
a “fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public
servants.”
During Harris’s tenure as San
Francisco’s chief prosecutor, however, she showed no signs of fighting for “the
little guy” when she failed to prosecute any of the sexual abuse claims brought
against Catholic priests in the city, despite outcries from victim groups.
In fact, as
Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer, president of the Government
Accountability Institute, observed in his book titled Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s
Progressive Elite , during her 13-year
tenure as district attorney and then attorney general, Harris failed to
prosecute even one case of priest sexual abuse, though during that same period
at least 50 major cities had brought charges against priests.
At the same time Harris failed
to pursue prosecution of cases of priest sexual abuse, her office “would
strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred,” Schweizer revealed.
The bombshell details show that
while Harris’s predecessor, former San Francisco District Attorney Terence
Hallinan, had launched an aggressive investigation into priests of the
Archdiocese of San Francisco accused of sexual abuse, Harris’s campaign to
unseat Hallinan showed an unusual influx of unparalleled donations from
high-level officials of the Catholic Church.
Schweizer wrote:
Harris had no particular ties
to the Catholic Church or Catholic organizations, but the money still came in
large, unprecedented sums. Lawyer Joseph Russoniello represented the church on
a wide variety of issues, including the handling of the church abuse scandal.
He served on the Catholic Church’s National Review Board (NRB) of the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops. The purpose of the NRB was to review Catholic
Church abuse cases. Russoniello was also a partner in the San Francisco law
firm Cooley Godward. Russoniello donated the maximum amount by law to her
campaign, $1,250, and his law firm added another $2,250. He also sat on
Harris’s advisory council when she was San Francisco district attorney. Another
law firm, Bingham McCutcheon, which handled legal matters for the archdiocese
concerning Catholic Charities, donated $2,825, the maximum allowed. Curiously,
Bingham McCutcheon had only donated to two other candidates running for office
in San Francisco before, for a total of $650. As with Russoniello, their
support was unusual.
In addition to campaign
donations from multiple law firms defending San Francisco priests against abuse
claims, Schweizer observed that “board members of San Francisco Catholic
archdiocese-related organizations and their family members donated another
$50,950 to Harris’s campaign.”
As Schweizer noted, Harris’s
ties to those working to block exposure of the archdiocese’s secret documents
containing information about priests accused of sexual abuse were extensive.
The author explained that
attorney Paul Renne of Cooley Godward was the husband of former San Francisco
city attorney Louise Renne, a mentor to Harris. Paul Renne worked with lawyer
Joseph Russoniello, who, as Schweizer wrote, “negotiated the agreement to bury
the abuse records from public view.”
Though Harris has touted her
early career as a sexual crimes prosecutor, after she won her run-off campaign
against Hallinan, her office actually worked to cover up the records of claims
of sexual abuse by priests of the San Francisco archdiocese.
According to Schweizer:
Hallinan’s office had used the
archdiocese files to guide its investigations and talked publicly about
releasing the documents after removing victims’ names and identifiers. Harris,
on the other hand, abruptly decided to bury the records. For some reason, she
did not want the documents released in any form. Harris’s office claimed that
the cover-up was about protecting the victims of abuse. “District Attorney
Harris focuses her efforts on putting child molesters in prison,” her office
claimed. “We’re not interested in selling out our victims to look good in the
paper.”
Victims’ groups, however, were
quite eager for the documents to be released.
“They were outraged by her
actions,” Schweizer noted. “Far from protecting victims, they argued, the
cover-up was actually protecting the abusers by keeping their alleged crimes
secret.”
“They’re full of shit,” Joey
Piscitelli, the northwest regional director of Survivors Network of Those
Abused by Priests (SNAP), said, reported Schweizer. “You can quote me on that.
They’re not protecting the victims.”
Similarly, attorney Rick
Simons, who represented victims of clergy sexual abuse, said Harris’s action of
covering up the documents “shows a pattern and practice and policy of ignoring
the rights of children by one of the largest institutions of the city and
county of San Francisco, and in the Bay Area.”
When Harris attempted to shift
the blame for hiding the records to Hallinan, her predecessor responded that
she engaged in “the kinds of deals that have allowed the church sex scandal to
go on as long as it has.”
As a result of Harris’s efforts
to cover up the documents, Schweizer wrote that psychologist James Jenkins, who
founded the archdiocese’s Independent Review Board – which oversaw the methods
to handle abuse claims – “abruptly resigned from the board”:
He accused the church of
“deception, manipulation and control” for blocking the release of the board’s
findings. Jenkins argued that Harris’s deal with the archdiocese not only
denied the rights of known victims, it also prevented other possible cases from
coming forward.
In April
2010, Schweizer reported Harris’s office denied a request from a San
Francisco Weekly journalist who sought the archdiocese’s abuse
records. Similarly, Schweizer wrote he requested the same documents in 2019,
through an attorney in California.
“The San Francisco district
attorney’s office responded they no longer had them in their possession,” he
noted.
“Were they destroyed? Were they
moved somewhere else?” Schweizer asked. “It remains a disturbing mystery.”
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