By DEXTER DUGGAN
National Democrats and their allies grew increasingly incredible in attacking President Trump’s Catholic Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh because, at the heart of their animosity, they feared his being pro-life. Strange but true that their virulent attachment to abortion arose in a political party with Catholic sympathies not so far in the past.
However, various Catholic Church bureaucrats and bishops let those ties grow dim in recent decades even while the secular radicals who call the party’s tune today asserted themselves ever more forcefully within Democrat structures.
Kavanaugh emerged intact from his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings in early September despite pro-abortion troops’ babbling efforts to damage him. Only after the time for presenting the evidence on Kavanaugh had passed did mystery allegations start exploding, supposedly from decades ago, that significantly delayed the committee’s vote to send the nomination to the full Senate.
People suddenly were told he’d been an attempted teenage rapist who threatened a female teenager, he was a drunken young sexual assailant, he was involved with a rape gang. Somehow none of this had been uncovered before, not even by FBI investigations as an older Kavanaugh ascended to a job at the White House then a federal judgeship.
When Democrats tried to stop conservative Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the High Court in 1991, when they were in the Senate majority, they went no further than accusations of sexual harassment. After they helped degrade the culture in subsequent years, harassment no longer seemed a sufficiently strong accusation to them against Kavanaugh.
It was only on the eve of Kavanaugh potentially becoming the historic fifth pro-life vote on the High Court, which could undo the unconstitutional Roe v. Wade, that this hysteria went full throttle, after earlier opposition fell short.
On September 26 CNN reported there now were five different sexual allegations against Kavanaugh. A Senate hearing was scheduled for the following day, September 27, when this hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press, to take testimony from Christine Blasey Ford, the first accuser named after Kavanaugh’s original hearings concluded.
Liberal Democrat Ford and her activist attorneys had delayed her appearance in what Kavanaugh’s supporters saw as part of a strategy to forestall his confirmation, in hopes that potential Democrat victories in the November elections would bring an end to his nomination.
Events including the September 27 hearing will appear in next week’s hardcopy Wanderer.
Expressing its own editorial opinion on September 21, the Washington Examiner easily identified the real reason for the furor over Kavanaugh. The Supreme Court has too much power over Americans’ lives, and liberals see Kavanaugh successfully being confirmed as tipping the balance against their imposing their personal political preferences on U.S. society.
“A healthy republic wouldn’t have this problem,” the Examiner said, “because a healthy republic wouldn’t have nine judges acting as absolute oligarchs. The courts have become legislators and dictators of social policy. What freedoms you have are determined not by elected officials responsible to voters, but by unelected lawyers serving in lifetime appointments.
“. . . Outrageous rulings like Roe v. Wade that find no grounding in the Constitution but merely in the policy preferences of activist judges have poisoned the well,” the Examiner added.
And under the headline, “It’s Not Kavanaugh. It’s Roe,” writer Jennifer Hartline posted at The Stream site on September 20, “They don’t hate Brett Kavanaugh because of anything he may have done over 30 years ago. Any transgression can be forgiven if fervent devotion to abortion is manifest.”
Opposition to permissive abortion not only had been basic American law but also historic fundamental Catholic doctrine, recognizing a defenseless innocent life was threatened. After pro-abortion radicals began pushing into the culture beginning in the 1960s, many responsible Church officials subsequently failed to affirm the importance of what was at stake.
A key instance of this was Catholic politicians’ reception of the Eucharist, which was the summit of a Catholic’s daily or weekly life, physically uniting the recipient to the very Body and Blood of Christ, the Son of God. Canon law clearly taught that those “who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”
An egregious instance of this would be a Catholic politician routinely defending or promoting the heinous crime of permissive destruction of preborn infants. Yet episcopal reluctance grew against applying this rule, much less enforcing it strongly. This seemed to be another example of the effect of cultural leftism that was reborn in the 1960s.
So the U.S. Catholic Church moved from a point where personal moral obligations widely were taken seriously to where defying and scorning them became the norm for Democrat officials and their allies still calling themselves “Catholic.”
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on September 24 that “the failures of the Church to hold accountable radical elements of the Democrat Party, who often campaigned as Catholics, is not unique to the Church, but is nevertheless its responsibility. Silence in the face of immorality encourages and breeds greater immorality.”
Querard said that although he’s not Catholic, “we continue to attend a Catholic church and all three of my kids went to school there.”
He told The Wanderer that “I continue to have fairly strong opinions on the failure of the Catholic Church (and others) to provide moral leadership on a host of issues, including abortion, marriage, illegal immigration, abusive priests, etc. It doesn’t appear that they are unrelated but rather there is a domino effect that leads from one to the next.
“Too often the primary concern appears to be the collection plate instead of being the one place where the moral compass points True North regardless of the pressures or fashions of the day or year,” Querard continued.
“God is great, but the Church is led by mortal men with all of the usual failings that mortal men possess.
“That doesn’t excuse those in charge from punishing those responsible and removing them from positions of authority (or from the clergy altogether), but it does leave a great deal of doubt in one’s mind that the Church will ever get right with its own declared positions,” Querard said. “A rather depressing thought.”
Rob Haney, a Catholic and retired chairman of the Phoenix-based Maricopa County Republican Party, told The Wanderer on September 26 that political “progressivism” has a way of diluting an organization’s principles.
“It seems axiomatic to me that the farther a ‘progressive ideology’ penetrates an established organization, the less the organization adheres to its founding principles,” Haney said. “It follows then that it is less likely for the hierarchical leadership to have the discipline required to enforce their founding doctrine.
“And so it is that since the bishops and bureaucracy of the Catholic Church absorb and promote many of the Democrat Party platform planks, the doctrine of the Eucharist takes second place,” he said. “The bishops lack the discipline to deny the Eucharist and thereby call attention to unrepentant pro-abortion politicians. Ah, but they keep the largess big government sends their way to advance the progressive agenda.”
Haney also noted that while Church bureaucrats take liberal political positions, they didn’t come to the defense of fellow Catholic Kavanaugh.
“As another example,” he said, “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Vatican, populated by leftists in clerical garb, loudly promote the global warming hoax, illegal immigration, the homosexual agenda, the Islamic Caliphate, no death penalty, and the minimum wage.
“But have you noticed how quickly they lost their tongues when it came to defending a devout, pro-life, strict constitutional constructionist, Catholic nominee to the Supreme Court? Judge Kavanaugh deserves a forceful defense from the bishops against these insidious, fabricated attacks by progressive Democrats, many of them purporting to be Catholic,” he said.
“I rhetorically ask,” Haney said, “any guesses as to why the bishops are holding their collective tongues?”
Regurgitating Allegations
National radio talkmeister Rush Limbaugh told his listeners on September 26 that he was revising his earlier opinion that if Kavanaugh failed to be confirmed, Republicans will lose congressional control in November’s elections.
That opinion was predicated on the belief GOP leaders would cave in, allowing Kavanaugh to lose and thereby angering Republican voters, Limbaugh said. But if the judge is defeated because of the appalling tactics used against him, the voter blowback will be against Democrats.
Under the headline “Study: TV News Is Rigged Against Brett Kavanaugh,” the conservative Media Research Center’s “NewsBusters” reported on September 26 that over a 12-day period, ABC, CBS, and NBC television morning and evening news spent nearly six hours “regurgitating various unproved allegations against the Supreme Court nominee.”
While most coverage advanced the narrative against the judge, NewsBusters said, only eight percent of it “has been devoted to Kavanaugh’s denials and the lack of corroboration for his accusers’ accounts.”
The Washington Examiner posted a warning on September 26, recalling where the left-wing’s ferocity against a conservative Republican judicial nominee led in the past.
President George W. Bush had nominated Miguel Estrada to the D.C. Circuit Court, the Examiner said, but Democrats managed to defeat him with pretexts although their real, racist reason was to prevent a Latino from succeeding as a Republican.
The attack was quarterbacked by Dem Senators Charles Schumer, of New York, and Harry Reid, of Nevada.
The Examiner cited The New Yorker magazine on the result: “During the confirmation struggle, Estrada’s wife miscarried; in November 2004, she died, of an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills. The death was ruled accidental by the medical examiner. (Karl) Rove said that Mrs. Estrada had been traumatized by the nastiness of the process.”
Beware, said the Examiner: “Politics today look toxic. If Democrats defeat Kavanaugh simply by lobbing uncorroborated accusations, Washington politics will become hell.”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress