Clinton Campaign’s Anti-Catholic Agenda Sparks Pushback

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, October 21, 2016: 

Last week, The New American‘s William F. Jasper reported on the WikiLeaks’ release of e-mails that exposed the Hillary Clinton campaign’s anti-Catholic bigotry. Jasper noted that Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, immediately pushed back, demanding that the prime driver in the scheming to undermine Catholic teachings, John Podesta, be fired. Donohue added:

We have long known that George Soros is the single most influential donor to dissident and anti-Catholic organizations. Now we know from WikiLeaks what I have long suspected: John Podesta has been the most influential point man running [that anti-Catholic] offense for Soros.

Together, they have sought to manipulate public opinion against the Catholic Church.

That pushback continues and is gaining momentum. Eric Fehrnstrom, a Republican political analyst and former adviser to Governor Mitt Romney, wrote in the Boston Globe on Thursday that “there are few things more chilling that a person in possession of political power, whether a sovereign [king] or a candidate for president, believing [he or she] can rid society of religious beliefs they don’t like.”

Clinton blatantly and publicly provided evidence of such belief in a speech she gave at the Women in the World Summit in New York City in April 2015:

Far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth. All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced.

Rights have to exist in practice — not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed. [Emphases added.]

In this snippet of her speech, Clinton unabashedly acknowledges that she believes in using the power of government to force societal change. Since society is comprised of people, she is also saying that government can, and must, be used to change peoples’ belief systems by force or threat of force. And since she is running for president of the United States, she presumably also envisions herself as just the person to lead this revolutionary effort — an effort that undoubtedly would include advancing abortion “rights.” In fact, Clinton has repeatedly made clear her support for abortion, which is no “right” at all — notwithstanding what the U.S. Supreme Court declared in its infamous Roe v. Wade decision — since it is the killing of innocent human life in the mother’s womb.

Clinton’s pro-abortion stance has generated additional pushback from Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, who pointed to another kind of right — the right to vote:

We are in the midst of a critically important election cycle. Voting is not only a right, it is an obligation. It’s part of the responsibility that citizens have for the common good.

Then Pavone addressed the question many, including Catholics, have asked: how can a good person vote for a bad candidate, one as obviously flawed as Donald Trump:

We have to look beyond what might be immoral about their behavior and to what is immoral about their policies. [Each] candidate needs to answer the question of whether they believe the government has the authority to permit the killing of babies….

No other issue has the same gravity, the same pull on our conscience, as the legal killing of children. Any candidate, any party that stands for legal abortion, as Pope John Paul II has written, believes in “a tyrant state”. We cannot vote in a way that allows this practice to continue.

Further pushback appeared in newspaper ads funded by Priests for Life that recently quoted Mother Teresa. In a speech she gave to a National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. in 1994, she said:

I feel that the greatest destroyer of people today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.

And if we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?…

Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.