Are You (Hiss! Boo!) a Catholic?
There was a time when the worst thing you could ask a politician was whether he was or ever had been a Communist.
There was a time when the worst thing you could ask a politician was whether he was or ever had been a communist. Now, judging by the grilling that Democrats Dianne Feinstein (Jewish) and Dick Durbin (Catholic) of the Senate Judiciary Committee gave Appeals Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, apparently it is open season on Catholics. But only if they’re the sort of Catholics who take the Church’s prohibition on abortions seriously and might personally object to the federal funding of Planned Parenthood.
That’s why Sen. Feinstein made reference to dogma when she had Barrett on the hot seat and why Sen, Durbin questioned why Barrett would refer to orthodox Catholicism, a form of Catholicism that Durbin obviously finds objectionable, and well he should, considering how essential he seems to find the world’s largest abortion franchise.
Can you even for a second imagine either of these two political hacks daring to question a Muslim about his take on Sharia law or asking him to defend female genitalia mutilation?
What’s bizarre about this attack on Catholicism is that five members of the Supreme Court (Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito and Sotomayor) are Catholic. Gorsuch was raised and educated as a Catholic, but opted to join the Episcopalians.
Also, 24 members of the Senate are Catholics. So far, I haven’t heard any of them call out their liberal colleagues for engaging in religious baiting, which is not only unseemly, but unconstitutional.
Democrats, who were up in arms when Rowan County (KY) clerk Kim Davis refused to issue a marriage license to a homosexual couple because the law, after all, is the law, don’t appear to be the least bit perturbed by the large number of left-wing mayors and governors who have decided to flout federal law when it comes to dealing with illegal aliens.
Consistency doesn’t seem too much to ask of our so-called public servants. I, after all, object to same-sex marriages because I believe it is a silly notion that opens America up to justifiable mockery and scorn, but I nevertheless thought and wrote that Kim Davis should have resigned if her religious principles prevented her from obeying the law.
Today, I believe that every mayor and governor who promotes sanctuary status for his city or state should either resign or be arrested by federal marshals, and I don’t know why the members of Congress don’t feel the same way. After all, they’re the ones who passed those laws.
It occurs to me that we live in topsy-turvy times. Consider, if you will, that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate group, claims to have the authority to label and call out hate groups; Antifa, a gang of fascist agitators, claims to oppose fascism; and Black Lives Matter, clearly a mob of black racists, claims to oppose racism.
Your calendar will tell you it’s 2017, but current conditions should convince you that it’s George Orwell’s 1984, when right is wrong, peace is war and up is down.
It is difficult for me to fathom the widespread opposition to Christianity both here and in Europe. It seems that every time that those on the Left refer to Christianity it’s to insult those who follow the faith, whether it’s Obama’s dismissing “those who cling to their guns and their religion,” Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” or Durbin and Feinstein suggesting that a person who takes her Catholicism straight can’t be trusted to make honest, constitutionally based decisions from the bench.
I realize that Christianity has a checkered past if you go back far enough in history, which is something I notice that liberals are wont to do whenever anyone points out that Islam is not the peace-loving religion that George W. Bush kept insisting it is, even as its demented followers were killing our troops, beheading non-believers and bringing down our skyscrapers.
The fact that liberals never seemed able to grasp is that it’s not quite cricket to compare 13th century Christianity with 21st century Islam.
It seems particularly unfair when it was essentially a group of Christians who created this nation based on their belief in Judeo-Christian values, and where it was devout Christians, often ministers, who made it their sacred mission to abolish slavery in America.
Their opposition to the cursed practice wasn’t based on economic factors, but based, instead, on their God-inspired understanding that slavery was morally reprehensible. It was evil, something that liberals are reluctant to say about anything or anybody, except, possibly, white male heterosexuals; preferring to claim that blood-thirsty mobs, for instance, aren’t really evil but simply acting out of rage based on economic deprivation.
Before you fall, hook, line and sinker, for polls that claim that Donald Trump couldn’t even count on getting Melania’s vote if he were running for president this November, I will share a Time magazine poll taken in March 1982.
As reported in the Fort Myers News-Press, 52% of those polled said they hoped Reagan would not seek a second term, with only 37% hoping he would. A whopping 61% said it would be impossible for him to both cut taxes and increase Pentagon spending. No doubt, the mass media gloated over those numbers, as no doubt the editors at the NY Times are gloating over Trump’s current poll numbers.
I doubt very much whether Time mentioned the poll two years later when Reagan not only won re-election but garnered 59% of the popular vote, along with 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale’s 13.
Three years ahead of the 2020 election, I will go where wise men fear to tread and predict that if Trump gets his tax cuts through Congress, and the economy soars as it would inevitably do, he will win re-election in a cakewalk.
I have always said that the greatest modern invention anyone has managed to come up with is air conditioning. Having recently lived through multiple blackouts here in the San Fernando Valley when the temperature was hovering between 104 and 111, I am willing to state that nothing else even comes close.
But in times gone by, I would have assumed that before baths and showers came along, it was only perfume that made daily life bearable. That’s why whenever I see movies set in the distant past, I don’t care how melodic the music, how majestic the language, how beautiful the costumes and scenery, I’m sitting there thinking how those people must have reeked.
I recently stated that I considered those who looted during natural disasters to be the scum of the earth. One of my more religious subscribers let me know “That in the last days, perilous times shall come. And Ye shall know them by their fruit.”
Not being a biblical scholar, I let him know that I would recognize them by their loot, but I would prefer to recognize them by their bullet-riddled carcasses.
