By DEXTER DUGGAN
Earlier this year, Vice President Mike Pence drew some derision because of his practice of not eating alone with a woman other than his wife, to avoid any hint of impropriety. What laughable behavior by this puritanical evangelical, the criticism went. Why, this even damages women’s career opportunities.
“How Pence’s Dudely Dinners Hurt Women,” The Atlantic headlined on March 30, going on to say in the third paragraph by staff writer Olga Khazan, “Doesn’t that cut an entire gender off from a very powerful person at roughly 8 p.m.? To career-obsessed Washingtonians, that’s practically happy hour — which, apparently, is off-limits, too.”
By just before the Thanksgiving holiday, however, the fashionable perspective had shifted sharply, after a long-dammed-up avalanche began to roar down on a liberal establishment where it almost seemed that every celebrity and political powerbroker turned out to be a grabby sex abuser who longed to get women alone.
National conservative talk-radio host Laura Ingraham agreed that Pence had seemed to know what he was doing after all by being unfashionably cautious.
Meanwhile, in a different news development, some U.S. Catholic bishops seemed more extreme than ever in demanding blessings for tsunamis of “immigration.” But maybe someday their fever will break, too, as the one over powerhouse sex abuse suddenly just did. We’ll look at the bishops more later in this story.
As for sex abusers, on just the one day of November 20, the online front page of The Washington Post had three left-wing biggies in a row on the griddle over allegations, TV’s Charlie Rose (who soon was fired by CBS), The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush, and U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D., Minn.).
Of these three, the case was easiest to make against fool Franken, who actually had his leering face photographed while groping a sleeping woman on an airplane. However, he remained in the Senate even while Rose quickly was defenestrated from on high. In many cases, it was more a question of whom to believe over years-old accusations.
It was as if a fuse was lit in October after entertainment producer and Democratic Party heavy-hitter Harvey Weinstein began to face a bevy of allegations, with no end to where the crackle would go as weeks passed.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore insisted he’d remain in the race for the December 12 Alabama special-election vote because he was innocent of suddenly sprung assertions that he forced himself on teenaged females long ago. No photographs had been produced, and a supposed 1977 autograph in a yearbook seemed suspicious.
What man would scribble to his sweetie using his full name and an inaccurate job title, supposedly signing himself as the district attorney when he was only a deputy DA? Try imagining, say, an accountant signing a love note, “Robert Smith, CPA.” But ferocious left-wing feminist attorney Gloria Allred was among those in the hunt for Moore’s scalp, so who knows where this would lead.
Anyway, November was hardly a week old when Moore first faced the accusations — which seemed long years ago by the arrival of Thanksgiving eve, once a steady stream of accusations against left-wing biggies subsequently began raining down.
The idea that the presence of a victorious but guilty Moore would disgrace a Senate already peopled with the likes of leering Franken and boozers and hotheads seemed unlikely. If anything, more special elections seemed needed to clear out corruptocrats.
As for weakness to temptation, no particular political persuasion has the corner on committing sins. As Russian novelist and hero Alexander Solzhenitsyn said: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
It’s not as if all the bad people are over there, and all the good ones here with us. Lying, stealing, murder, sexual offenses are temptations that can creep into anyone’s soul.
However, it’d also be true that those who think they’re born to defy or disobey rules — which is more likely on the “progressive” side — also think they’re more exempt from self-discipline and public discipline.
Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen someone saying it makes perfect sense when a greater number of powerful liberal Democrats — whether in Washington, D.C., or Hollywood — are involved in sexual offenses. Planned Parenthood, after all, is one of their most sacred causes, and PP says you create your own morality to do as you please.
In fact, it seemed unlikely for quite a long time that the sexualized entertainment industry was run and staffed by chastity-minded maids of modesty.
“Poisoning Rhetoric”
A very different but familiar issue arose at the annual fall meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops in Baltimore in mid-November. It, too, included defiant lawbreaking and continuing attempts to normalize it. This sin that dare not speak its name in bishops’ mouths was massive illegal immigration.
Missing from their rhetorical fog as usual were, for instance, unwelcome facts about the pressing responsibilities for reform in immigrants’ own native lands, the potential immigrants’ need to help improve those lands, and ways that other nations can lend assistance without having to accept endless waves of unassimilated, law-violating newcomers into their own borders.
It’s just an episcopal dumbshow of racist, bigoted Americans nastily fighting against hard-working, friendly, but “unauthorized” newcomers.
News reports said some bishops even suggested moving away from the principle that “immigration reform” is a prudential issue to one where bishops would tell lay Catholics “they can’t push aside the need to care for immigrants.”
On November 15 LifeSiteNews.com reported a rambling comment by Sacramento Bishop Jaime Soto regarding “deportations” that “in the Scriptures (is) so strongly based that, you know, that to mistreat the stranger is a serious offense. So, in any case, I think there’s — there’s…to discard it just as a prudential judgment I think is not — doesn’t reflect our tradition, our moral tradition on how we are to respond to these cases.”
A November 15 story by Catholic News Service said: “The bishops were keenly aware that their defense of immigrants was not necessarily the view of the U.S. church at large. For example, Chicago Cardinal Blase J. Cupich spoke of dangers of Catholics falling prey to and believing ‘poisoning rhetoric’ about immigrants that demonizes them.”
CNS said Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski “said the bishops’ defense of immigrants, as brothers and sisters, not problems, is not only right for immigrants but ‘for our society as a whole’.”
The news service reported, “ ‘We can make America great, but you don’t make America great by making America mean,’ he added, referring to a slogan of President Donald Trump without naming him.”
The open-border bishops’ frightening disconnection from reality only looked worse in mid-November when a new report showed the degree of influence exercised by Mexican drug cartels in Texas, as well as two U.S. border agents reportedly being attacked by illegal aliens, with one of them dying.
The San Antonio Express-News’ website posted on November 15 that “Mexican cartels smuggle more drugs into the U.S. than any other criminal group, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration said in a new report,” with the cartels within Texas “affecting cities hundreds of miles from the state’s border with Mexico.
“San Antonio is the only city in the state with a drug trade controlled by the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, which deals mostly with methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, according to the DEA,” the story said, adding:
“The Gulf Cartel has a hold on cities in Texas’ tip and coastal bend. McAllen, Brownsville, Corpus Christi, Galveston, Houston, and Beaumont are impacted most by the Gulf Cartel, which mostly brings marijuana and cocaine into the area, according to the DEA. Drugs smuggled through the Gulf Cartel are mostly brought in through the area between the Rio Grande Valley and South Padre Island.”
No Answers
Meanwhile, the attack on two border agents was a reminder that not only gunfire is dangerous to victims.
NBC News cited a spokesman for the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) labor union saying that agents being injured by rocks is very common.
The office of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement November 20 saying, “Agent Rogelio Martinez died Sunday as a result of injuries sustained while on patrol in the Big Bend area. His partner, who was injured, remains in the hospital in serious condition.”
The Associated Press said NBPC spokesman Chris Cabrera said “the two agents appeared to have been struck in the head with a rock or rocks. Cabrera said agents who responded to the scene described it as ‘grisly’ and said Martinez and his partner had ‘extensive injuries’.”
Reymundo Torres, a third-generation American Catholic in the Phoenix area, told The Wanderer that U.S. bishops should be strengthening the Church by answering the intellectual search of young Catholics here, but the “solution the Church falls back on is to import additional uneducated . . . Catholics” with a superficial knowledge of the faith.
This resembles “the current trend in Western Europe, where churches are being left in droves, because the Church continues to have no answers, just as the Holy Father seems to have no answers for the dubia,” Torres said during a November 21 interview.
Last year four cardinals posed their dubia, or requests for clarification, to Pope Francis on his confusing apostolic letter Amoris Laetitia, but they received no reply.
The U.S. bishops’ light regard for border control during their recent national meeting is “more in line with liberation theology,” Torres said, which “tends to make the mind gravitate toward not respecting any laws or rules that conflict with the subjective assessment of an individual’s worldview.”
Their apparent belief that all who want to enter the U.S. are “good workers and inherently good people” is “not only insane but indicates anyone who holds those views should not be anywhere near a post or position in public life,” Torres said.
“The bishops would be far better served if they look after the community they already have” and feed their minds, instead of seeing them leave the Church feeling unfulfilled, then trying to replace them with other people, Torres said.
Democratic Dominance
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard warned that the bishops’ casual attitude toward border control threatens their own credibility, and the Church’s.
“It is important to note that they are promoting illegal immigration, not simply immigration,” Querard told The Wanderer on November 20.
“I think it is a pocketbook issue for the Church and that causes me concern because it could erode their moral credibility, and we need churches to speak loudly and clearly and to be listened to, on the great moral issues of our time.
“For that to happen, they must be credible, and that means they must be consistent and speak from positions of absolute truth. . . . Presenting the arguments as intrinsically moral so that those who oppose it are implicitly immoral is not right or fair,” he continued.
Querard recalled the damage the Church had done to both its reputation and financial status by covering up for predatory homosexual priests. Now, he asked, does the Church seek to improve its finances by encouraging other violations — where people “break the law, trespass, steal identities, and commit multiple crimes.
“Those crimes would improve the financial positions of members of the Church who could then help to rebuild the Church’s financial strength,” he said. “I think it’s a trap that will do even more damage to the Church, and I hope they are smart enough to recognize it, but they have not yet.”
Shortly after Democrats scored wins in the Virginia elections of November 7, pundit Ann Coulter noted how U.S. immigration policies are preparing the way for Democratic dominance.
“In 1970, only one out of every 100 Virginians was foreign-born. By 2012, one in nine Virginians was foreign-born,” she wrote on November 15. “The foreign-born vote overwhelmingly, by about 80 percent, for Democrats. They always have and they always will — especially now that our immigration policies aggressively discriminate in favor of the poorest, least-educated, most unskilled people on Earth. They arrive in need of a lot of government services.”
Democratic Party dominance has come to mean increased attacks on the Church and traditional morality, but perhaps some bishops have been so busy attacking their faithful as bigots that they didn’t notice.
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