Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?

I originally published this piece “Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?” on my paritzer.com blog on 11 October 2012. One of the things that prompted me to republish it was a recent short, whispered, pre-Mass conversation I had with a lovely daily-mass-attending woman in her early seventies who shocked me with her conviction that the Democratic Party did not support abortion. In the ten years that have passed since I first published the piece, the Democratic Party has only provided more reasons for Catholics to ask and answer that titular question, especially before they vote. Beyond what is contained below, Catholics must now consider activities of the Democratic Party since, including though not limited to the Democrat’s shutting down of churches while leaving pot dispensaries and strip joints open during the Wuhan flu pandemic; Democratic support for abuse and mutilation of children through the transexual movement documented in Tucker Carlson’s Transgressive: The Cult of Confusion; the Biden Department of Justice declaring parents domestic terrorists for attending school board meetings to speak out against things like boys in girls locker rooms, the sexualizing of young children with everything from pornographic materials to drag queen shows, and the general supplanting of parents’ rights and responsibilities; insupportable mask and vaccine mandates that damaged health and violated basic human rights; open borders that facilitate the large-scale trafficking of human beings, including children, and drugs; a long history of election malfeasance; irresponsible foreign policy rooted in long-term Biden international corruption that threatens to lead to nuclear war; weaponizing law enforcement against political opposition as in the raid on the home of a former president and show trials and the jailing without trial of peaceful protesters; refusal to enforce law and order; and the attempt to eliminate no less than the distinction between males and females, the one distinction witnessed to in God’s creation of human beings by Sacred Scripture itself. Some thirty years ago or so, I met Reverend Monsignor Christopher Huntington. He gave me an account of his conversion story that was copied from a chapter in a book. I cannot find it now, but my imperfect memory informs me that while he was in Germany during Hitler’s reign, he attended, if I remember correctly, an Anglican, a Lutheran, and a Catholic church. As I remember, the Anglican church, as a national church of a different nation, preached little of the Hitler regime. The Lutheran church under persecution preached about the right of freedom of religion. The Catholic church preached that Hitler, Goebbels, and Goring were wrong because Christ was right. Huntington, an Episcopalian, eventually converted to the Catholic Church and later became a priest and monsignor and the godfather of Avery Dulles. One might wonder how different the United States would be today if the Catholic Church would preach that Biden, Pelosi, Harris, et al., are wrong because Christ is right. 11 October 2012At this opportune time of renewal, with the commencement of the Year of Faith followed by the 2012 general election, it seems a fitting time to ask:Can a Catholic be a Democrat? That is, a member of the Democratic Party in the United States of America?Honestly, I don’t see how.Consider the Obama Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate that Catholic employers–along with any other private employer with a moral and/or religious objection to providing such coverage–will now be required to provide coverage for contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilizations. This injunction steps up the Democratic Party’s attack against the most fundamental and deeply held convictions of faithful Catholics concerning those unalienable rights enumerated in the founding of this nation: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. And it does so in a direct and arrogant violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, the introduction and anchor of the Bill of Rights. It is, therefore, an attack not only on Catholics and other people of conscience, but upon the very fabric of the United States of America, and thus on all Americans. And it is just one manifestation of the tyrannical contradiction to the Constitution and to Christianity that is Obamacare.It is instructive to remember that this recent contraception debate was inaugurated by a shameless display of the collusion we have come to expect between the Old Establishment Media (OEM) and the Democratic Party. Just thirteen days before Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced the HHS mandate, on 7 January 2012 at a debate of Republicans vying to be their party’s nominee for the presidency, George Stephanopoulos, of ABC News, proved himself a useful tool of the Obama Administration and the Democrats by blindsiding Governor Mitt Romney with a question from way out in left field. “Governor Romney,” he asked, “do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception, or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?”The ever-nimble Romney, after shaking his head in bewilderment, responded, “George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising, but . . . states have a right to ban contraception?” Then he entered into an oft-times amusing back and forth with Stephanopoulos and added, “The idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do, that no state wants to do, and asking me whether they can do it or not is kind of a silly thing, I think.” But Stephanopoulus bore the laughter and the calls to move on–taking his arrows for the cause–and pressed the question, because it served the political purpose of the Obama Administration and the progressive agenda by introducing the question of contraception availability.It is, therefore, an attack not only on Catholics and other people of conscience, but upon the very fabric of the United States of America, and thus on all Americans.The Democrats followed up the Stephanopoulos question and the Sebelius announcement with the bizarre testimony of Sandra Fluke at a Nancy Pelosi “congressional panel,” or “unofficial congressional committee,” as it has been called. Ms. Fluke testified before this panel after she was added too late by the Democrats to the roster of those who would testify at the hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, entitled “Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?” Ms. Fluke–a “reproductive justice” activist (no kidding) and thirty-year-old, third-year law student at Georgetown University, who could expect to earn $160,000-a-year starting salary upon graduation–then testified about how she and others have “suffered” “burdens” due to “lack of contraceptive coverage” at the “Jesuit” and “Catholic” Georgetown. Suffered? Suffered? Perhaps Ms. Fluke could gain a better understanding of the meaning of the word were she to depart the ivory tower and spend some time working with Mother Teresa’s nuns in Calcutta. By doing so, she might gain an understanding of a good many other things that her privileged education has apparently failed to equip her to understand.And I have to confess feeling a profound sadness as I watched Ms. Fluke, after turning a girlish smile back upon the other members of her Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice (LSRJ), looking more fifteen than thirty years old, argue, in her introduction to momentary celebrity, for the “right” to make others pay for the means to make herself a sexual plaything to be used, if not preyed upon, by opportunistic men. It brings to mind how often it is that intellectuals rush to subject themselves to tyranny and drag the rest of us with them. Was it Solzhenitsyn who wrote how prisoners condemned to the gulag by Stalin wept in sorrow at his death?Regardless, all of this was designed to support the attack on the Catholic Church and other conscientious organizations in the form of the HHS mandate and Obamacare in general. And it should have been expected, given the Democratic Party’s commitment to abortion and all that goes with it. Abortion remains the litmus test for the Democratic Party in choosing candidates for federal office, especially for life-long judicial appointments.Abortion is not some new liberating right for women but an ancient barbaric practice perpetrated against women to keep them in subjugation to men, often enough a desperate attempt to undo a man’s fornication, adultery, rape, or incest by callously and brutally erasing the life of his own child with little or no regard for the life of the mother. As long as a man could obliterate the evidence of his misuse, an innocent human life, he could do as he wished with a woman. It should