By DEXTER DUGGAN
President Donald Trump’s scheduled keynote speech to a national pro-life organization’s gathering should encourage hard work to enlarge the pro-life majority in Congress, according to a priest-activist who helped boost pro-lifers’ support for Trump’s Republican presidential candidacy in 2016, when many still doubted the Manhattan developer.
Since moving into the White House in January 2017, Trump has made himself the most publicly dedicated pro-life GOP president since the U.S. Supreme Court unconstitutionally imposed permissive abortion throughout the United States in January 1973.
Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, told The Wanderer on May 16: “I am sure the president will emphasize what he has said before: We must work hard in this upcoming election to increase our pro-life majorities in Congress, so that the commitment of the president to sign pro-life bills that will, for instance, take our tax dollars away from Planned Parenthood, can in fact come to reality in the law.”
Trump is scheduled to speak May 22 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., to the eleventh annual Campaign for Life Gala of the nationally active pro-life Susan B. Anthony List (sba-list.org), known for its strong get-out-the-vote activities.
Pavone told The Wanderer that Trump’s presence at the dinner “is another sign of what we in the pro-life movement have now come to expect of the nation’s most pro-life president: He knows that government exists to protect the God-given rights of the people, and the first such right is life itself. He is present to the pro-life movement.
“As a member of his pro-life advisory council, I know that he and his team are listening and learning from this greatest civil-rights movement in our nation’s history,” Pavone said. “In particular, having the president with us…marks the importance of the mid-term elections. The Susan B. Anthony List and Priests for Life work closely together to make voters aware that the right to life is the most important issue, because it is the foundation of every issue.”
In a May 14 news release announcing Trump’s talk, SBA President Marjorie Dannenfelser said, “President Trump has diligently and successfully gone about fulfilling his promises to the pro-life voters who worked so hard to elect him, and it has been a privilege to stand with him to defend the innocent unborn.”
Dannenfelser, who had served as national chairwoman for the Trump campaign’s Pro-Life Coalition, added: “During the 2016 election cycle, SBA List canvassers visited more than 1.1 million voters at their homes in our largest-ever get-out-the-vote campaign. Going into the most important election for the pro-life movement since Roe v. Wade, the 2018 midterm elections, we have redoubled our efforts.”
However, it remains an unfortunate fact that during his still-young presidency, Trump repeatedly has signed massive government spending bills put together by a GOP-majority Congress that include hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for leading abortionist Planned Parenthood. Trump and Republican leaders must change their ways on this.
In the first part of 2016, many pro-lifers still were uncertain about presidential candidate Trump’s dedication to their movement. However, Pavone, who had observed Trump as a fellow metropolitan New Yorker, declared his confidence that the wealthy developer would be true to his word.
The Wanderer published my interview with Pavone that occupied about two-thirds of page 3 in the hardcopy issue dated for June 23, 2016. It was headlined, “Fr. Pavone Says Trump Speech ‘Crystal Clear’ Supporting Life, Religious Liberty.”
Trump had delivered a talk earlier that month in Washington, D.C., to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference of social and religious conservatives. Pavone, who attended that June 10 talk, subsequently told The Wanderer what most impressed him there:
“As some of the other religious leaders there also said, if we had written the talk ourselves, we would not have hit more of the key points that he needs to make with Christians than he did on his own — and the content of the speech was from him, personally. I particularly like two specific references he made — the freedom of the Church to speak on politics, and the problem with government mandates that violate religious freedom.”
I also reported in that June 23 article that The Wanderer asked “why some Catholics still unquestioningly follow the Democrats’ Party of Death. Pavone pointed to those Catholic Church leaders ‘so deeply tied into alliances with some…(Democratic Party) leaders that they don’t want to offend their friends by teaching with the clarity that will help the Catholics in the pews’.”
In a separate development, U.S. Catholic historian James Hitchcock was so vehemently opposed to Trump’s candidacy that Hitchcock wrote a book, first published in late 2016, that is peppered with errors and seriously misleading statements. Hitchcock’s inexplicable errors tried to make the case that Trump would bring an end to the pro-life movement.
Hitchcock falsely attacked The Wanderer and its writers including me for allegedly being untrue to the pro-life movement. The book title is Abortion, Religious Freedom, and Catholic Politics. Rather than ever apologize for this tendentious work, Hitchcock continues to try to sell it.
Unfortunately, the political circus can lead more aficionados than Hitchcock to go astray.
Currently in Arizona, the Republican “moderate” that the GOP political establishment hoped to put into the U.S. Senate seat being vacated this year by unpopular Jeff Flake is having problems.
She’s Republican Cong. Martha McSally, an open-borders anti-Trumpster from the more liberal Tucson area who decided she better show more love toward border security and Trump if she hopes to win the August 28 Arizona primary.
McSally’s major primary foes are former state GOP senator and physician Kelli Ward, and former Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio, both of whom have strong pro-security and pro-Trump records.
On May 12, the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic reported that McSally had dropped her support for a more-welcoming “immigration” bill in order to sign on to a tougher one.
A conservative campaign worker who’s not in McSally’s camp told The Wanderer on May 16: “There is no question that McSally is the candidate of the establishment and of the status quo. From Mitch McConnell’s endorsement to the legions of McCain/Flake supporters that make up her staff and volunteer base, she is the continuation of their legacy. She also has a ton of money, so everyone who wants to get well-paid is also signing up for her campaign.”
The local establishment’s recyclable claim asserts that McSally is the “electable” candidate instead of conservative Republicans.
A comprehensive Arizona daily political newsletter online, “MCRC Briefs: News & Updates,” reported a plea for funding by McSally’s campaign manager, Stephen Shadegg, on May 16. Shadegg wrote, “Yesterday marked the midpoint of the second quarter of the 2018 election cycle, and we are behind on our digital fundraising target. As of the sending of this email we are less than halfway to our minimum goal for the quarter.”
The newsletter noted that Shadegg had been John McCain’s deputy campaign manager for the senator’s 2016 re-election race and also is the son and grandson of Shadegg men in the Grand Canyon State’s GOP political establishment.
Another sign of establishment concern about how McSally’s campaign is progressing occurred when the Republic reported on May 10 that former Arizona GOP Gov. Jan Brewer endorsed McSally.
As Brewer’s time as governor wore on, she had hurt herself perceptibly with conservatives by ramming through Medicaid expansion with Democratic Party aid, then vetoing a religious-conscience bill at the behest of Big Business.
Brewer’s endorsement of McSally seemed plaintive when the former governor said she “hope(s) that they (voters) trust me with my endorsement of Martha McSally.” Brewer recently had wrapped herself around former state GOP Sen. Debbie Lesko, who won a special election for Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District but underperformed expectations. Perhaps Brewer’s help had hurt.
On May 16, moderate-liberal Republic columnist Laurie Roberts lamented McSally’s changing her stands to try to win the primary, writing: “Once upon a time, McSally seemed to be a moderate Republican unwilling to bend to the baser instincts of her party’s hard-right wing.”
Talking Tough To Win
However, it could be said McSally only was following the open-borders Republic’s own advice to her — talk tough on the border to win, then revert to open-borders ways, just as McCain and Flake had done.
In a remarkable statement signed by the newspaper’s own editorial board, the entire top half of the Republic’s broadsheet-size editorial page on March 25 offered this advice, beneath the headline, “In primary, McSally pulls a McCain.”
That meant McSally is falsely talking tough for victory, as McCain did.
The newspaper, indulgently recalling McCain’s famous 2010 commercial growling to “complete the danged fence,” said the senator simply “was outflanking a razor-sharp fanatic named J.D. Hayworth,” a former congressman, in the GOP primary.
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