By DEACON MIKE MANNO
It’s nice to be back after a few weeks battling COVID. Unfortunately, from Thanksgiving through Christmas I’ve been home, away from my writing, and worst of all, away from my post at the Church. It wasn’t a fun experience, but I knew as soon as my wife said to me, “Go get it yourself,” that it was over.
So now I’m back — well, mostly back — thinking again about things that keep me up at night and praying that it’s God’s will that things go back to normal; like maybe 1960 normal! Anyway, as we enter the New Year, it might be a fitting time to mourn the losses that have shattered our trust. Let me take just a few examples:
The Judiciary. It’s going to be tough to continue our trust in a judiciary that has continued to let the country down. Oh I know, the courts have been particularly successful in adjudicating civil matters, especially in the areas of civil and religious freedoms, and have struck big blows for individual rights and First Amendment freedoms.
But remember the big things they’ve missed. When in the midst of what can only be described as the biggest election fraud in history, in which the presidential election hung in the balance, the Supreme Court punted. To its everlasting shame it refused to even hear a case in which the facts and evidence could be presented for all to see. And much of that involved matters brought to it before the election that it also refused to hear.
Chief Justice John Roberts proved himself a true swamp creature by trying to protect the reputation of the court rather than delivering justice; first he prevented the court from hearing the pre-election Pennsylvania case then led the court to reject the post-election case filed by Texas and other states. The result: Without a full, fair, and impartial hearing, too many of our fellow citizens will continue to believe that the election was stolen while officials who could investigate looked the other way.
And, of course, the role of the judiciary wasn’t painted any brighter when a judge and sister of Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat and voting rights advocate who was heavily involved in the presidential election, refused to recuse herself from a case challenging election procedures. The matter was a clear conflict of interest for U.S. District Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, an Obama appointee, who has shown herself unfit to provide unbiased service.
It’s not my intention to pick on individual judges for their decisions but to indicate that the federal judiciary should be considered every much as swampy as the rest of Washington, D.C. Just one tidbit showing the same comes not from any election dispute but from the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court, established to oversee surveillance against citizens alleged to be acting on behalf of foreign governments.
We know now that warrants approved by the court to “spy” on President Trump and members of his staff were based on false narratives provided by the Hillary Clinton campaign, and that the Obama Justice Department was fully aware of its falsity. Yet to this day no FISA judge has stepped forward to discipline or hold in contempt any FBI or Justice Department official who perpetrated the fraud. Every federal judge has that inherent authority to investigate such acts. To date none have done so.
Unfortunately it appears to me that the judiciary, especially that part based in Washington, D.C., is part of the deep state swamp.
The Media & Big Tech. If stealing the presidential election, or at least giving that impression wasn’t bad enough, along come the media and big tech to hide the facts from the American people. It seems like every news broadcast carried the same mantra: “There is no evidence of any voter fraud.” Not true and just because John Roberts didn’t want to examine the evidence doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The bottom line is they lie to you for their own political purposes.
Of course nothing says you’re putting your thumb on the scale then not reporting the Hunter Biden story before the election. And for those who had the gumption to try to publish the truth, they soon found out that they were only spitting in the wind; they lost their platform, were ostracized, and, as we’ve seen before, canceled.
If you want to consider the depth of this problem just remember this: In the 1950s we had Walter Cronkite; today we have Don Lemon.
Listen if you want but understand there are no journalistic ethics in today’s media. All you will get is prepackaged liberal pabulum. The truth is there and it’s free but you’ll have to seek it out for yourself.
The Political Parties. It’s tough to talk about them without singling one out, but both need to be condemned here. On one side the Democrats have shown that they are only interested in pure power. The plot to steal the presidential election was an elaborate effort to use the COVID pandemic to arbitrarily and illegally change laws to loosen restrictions on signature verifications and mail-in ballots — the most easily tampered with ballots — to flood the system with thousands of rigged ballots, enough to swing the election in critical states.
I’ve written about this before. But it hit home during the summer when the Democratic Party started distributing yard signs urging folks to get ready for mail-in voting. As they say, don’t let a good crisis go to waste, and the Dems worked overtime to ensure that “mail-in” became the word — and tool — of the day.
But the Republicans are not without fault. During much of the election they complained but did little to try to stop the blatant and obvious fraud being devised. And when they did the courts were too quick to look the other way on the illegalities taking place.
And naturally, as soon as the “election” was over GOP swamp people were jumping off the wagon to solidify their positions in the pecking order of the D.C. swamp. All done at the cost of our freedoms and to pave the way for the liberal socialist takeover of the United States.
The Church. I don’t want to sound too alarmist, but it seems that many of our bishops only realized the Church will have a problem with an apostate Catholic in the White House after the election. Unfortunately, too many seemed to want to ride the tiger rather than issuing a warning about Mr. Biden’s anti-Catholic policies. Of course now they realize he is not only the most pro-abortion president in history, but his cabinet appointees demonstrate how radical he is on the issue.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra — who also calls himself a Catholic — chosen to be HHS secretary in the Biden Administration is an avowed proponent of abortion on demand.
Becerra collaborated with Planned Parenthood to force crisis pregnancy centers to advertise where free abortions could be obtained, and tried to force employers to cover abortion in their employee health-care plans. He also carried on his predecessor’s policy of persecuting David Daleiden for exposing Planned Parenthood’s illegal business of selling aborted baby parts.
His predecessor, Kamala Harris, one of the most anti-Catholic politicians in the nation, is Mr. Biden’s choice to succeed him, if necessary, as vice president. If confirmed, Becerra will be in a position to reinstate the abortion and contraception mandate that was part of the original Obamacare. Nice!
One by one as Mr. Biden announced his picks, it became clear that each one is as radical on the issue of abortion (and religious liberty) as the new left Democratic Party is. And as we wait to see how this melodrama plays out, our newest cardinal, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., Wilton Gregory, offered Mr. Biden an olive branch. He’ll be happy to allow the new president to receive Holy Communion and hopes to “dialogue” with him about issues of mutual agreement. Translation: that means all prudential issues will be decided according to leftist reasoning. Of course the non-negotiables will be off the table lest the dialogue not be beneficial.
Obviously there are plenty of other candidates for shattered faith — academia, the CDC — but only a few can be mentioned here. The bottom line is 2020 has left us in almost total distrust of the institutions that should be the most resilient and the most dependable in protecting our rights. Unfortunately, for too many that distrust will run deep. If we think the last four years were characterized by division, we haven’t seen anything yet.
(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him on Faith On Trial every Thursday at 10 a.m. Central on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)
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