The Democrats Zoomed an entirely predictable political kabuki last night. Catholics for Biden, they called it, where the game was not to mention the unborn child. Only one of them did, the Nun from the Bus, Sister Simone Campbell, whose grinning and mugging for the camera was supposed to come off cute but achieved mostly a kind of weirdness.
Campbell said we should care for the unborn by giving their moms proper nutrition and that care for the unborn was equally sacred to care for the Earth. Recall this is the same woman who told the Democratic National Convention last week that abortion was "above her paygrade." She told the small live-stream audience last night that reversing Roe v. Wade, which has led to millions of unborn deaths, has "never been our faith."
So, it is not surprising that not a single other speaker brought up the plight of the unborn baby marked for destruction. That would have been especially hard since dicey Catholic Joe Biden and his blood-thirsty running mate Kamala Harris support all abortions up to the moment of birth, and perhaps even beyond.
They argued that other issues outweigh a million deaths a year. This entirely predictable pitch was made by Catholics for Biden to a small audience of little more than 1,000 Thursday night.
It is remarkable that Catholics for Biden not only invited Senator Dick Durbin to speak, but he was introduced as "prophetic" by Josh Dickson, who is running the Biden faith outreach to Catholics. And what of Dick Durbin's prophecies? First, abortion radicalism. He, too, never met an abortion he did not like, including coercive abortions in China, something he voted for. But Durbin also comports with anti-Catholicism. Recall he questioned judicial candidate Amy Coney Barrett for her use of the term "orthodox Catholic" and that it may mean a strict acceptance of Church teaching on abortion.
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Besides ignoring the unborn child marked for dismemberment, last night's group, including Mark Shriver of the lesser Kennedys, were none-the-less haunted by it. They wanted us to know that other issues were proportionate enough for Catholics to ignore the squirming child in utero. They said Trump does not care for the poor, though prior to the COVID panic, he had given us the lowest unemployment for blacks, women, and Hispanics in our nation's history.
More than that, Trump has made us energy independent so that the urge to send poor boys to fight for nation-building in the Middle East has dramatically lessened. Recall that Trump did something Obama couldn't or wouldn't; he destroyed the physical caliphate of ISIS, and he did it in short order, too.
Catholics for Biden think they can make progress with Catholic voters on immigration, welcoming the stranger. It should be understood that under Trump, we still welcome more strangers than any country in the world, more than any in history, and this has not changed.
Though refugee admittances have declined under Trump, we have admitted 76,200 refugees in Trump's time in office. What's more, the number of Christian refugees has dramatically increased and demonstrates a reversal of Muslim preference under President Obama.
There was scant mention given to the environment even though such lefty Catholics hold as a matter of dogma that we must believe in catastrophic man-made climate change. Not even the Pope in his lengthy climate encyclical Laudato Si says Catholics must believe in this questionable scientific theory.
Most Catholics will say they care for the environment but would blanch at the rather extreme notions of Biden et al., that we must do away with fossil fuels; good-bye cars, electricity, air-conditioning, and so much more. Catholics can see what a Green New Deal has done to California. Shutting down fracking and using windmills has given millions of Californians a spring and summer of rolling blackouts, just like Venezuela. Catholics for Biden were likely also quiet because our use of C02 under Trump has actually dropped at the same time we rejected the Paris Climate Accord.
Whenever I get into a debate with a lefty Catholic about what Donald Trump has done and what Joe Biden would likely do, I am always curious whether these are genuinely faithful Catholics I am talking to. I generally ask if they accept the church's teachings in the more controversial areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and homosexuality. They generally hem and haw, shuck and jive, and it eventually becomes clear that they do not accept these teachings. What you find is whatever is prudential; they want to make dogmatic, and whatever is dogmatic has become prudential. Climate change, for instance, is entirely prudential, something that is left to us to decide. On the other hand, as Catholics, we must believe that every abortion is an injustice, and every abortion must be stopped. I suspect that at least some of these Catholic speakers for Biden would reject some or perhaps all of these fundamental teachings of the faith.
In 2004, Catholics were rightly nervous about having a dissident member of their faith about to occupy the White House for the first time. So John Kerry lost not only the faithful Catholics, those who actually practice the faith, but he lost the generic Catholics as well, those who tell pollsters they are Catholics but who haven't been to mass in 30 years.
Biden is just such a dissenting Catholic. He rejects Church teaching on the killing of innocent human life, and he rejects Church teaching on the meaning of marriage. He actually believes "gender ideology" is the "human rights issue of our time." That would mean boys in girls' showers and boys competing on girls' sports teams.
And Harris? She is deeply anti-Catholic. She is gung-ho on abortion, but she also believes that faithful Catholics may be barred from federal office.
In short, these two are the most radical pair ever to run on a major party ticket for president and vice-president.
Trump, on the other hand, has been the most pro-life president in our history. He has advanced the pro-life cause in granular ways, in ways that most people will never know. What's more, he has faithful Catholics and other Christians working for him all over the administration, something Harris would not allow. You can rest assured these faithful men and women go to work every day thinking of new and better ways to advance the issues we care about and that Catholics for Biden reject every single one of them.
Austin Ruse is president of a non-profit that works on life issues at the UN. He is the author of The Catholic Case for Trump, just published by Regnery Publishing. You can follow him on Twitter @austinruse.
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