Clinton Campaign’s Unsurprising Anti-Christian Views
By
Frank V. Vernuccio, Jr., J.D.
Frank V. Vernuccio, Jr., J.D., the editor-in-chief of the New York Analysis of Policy & Government, brings his 30 years of experience in government and professional writing and broadcast journalism to your audience. Vernuccio provides insights that captivate listeners.
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Wikileaks’s recent exposure of anti-Catholic statements by Clinton campaign officials should be understood as part of the Left’s drive to reduce the influence of most faith-based organizations.
Emails from Clinton campaign director Jennifer Palmieri to campaign chair John Podesta discussed their views of Catholics as being “backwards” and, most disturbingly, included a desire for inducing change in the religion. Voices for Progress President Sandy Newman also emailed Podesta, speculating that the opposition of Catholic bishops to mandatory insurance for contraceptives could be used to spark a revolution within the Church.
It is chilling that political figures would consider interfering in the internal workings of a religion.
A Lifesite news article quotes New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who stated that the comments were “extraordinarily patronizing and insulting to Catholics.”
Statements from Democrat leaders demonstrate their disdain for Christian religious denominations, as noted in the September 26 edition of the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. These comments have become fairly standard.
It’s not just words; their biases are clearly reflected in policy. The Gatestone Institute previously reported that “The Obama administration has taken in 5,435 Muslim refugees, but only 28 Christians — even though Christians are approximately 10 percent of Syria’s population and are classified as experiencing a genocide there.” More Syrians have since been admitted, but the near total exclusion of Christians remains. Gatestone also stressed that “the ‘Caliph’ of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ridiculed by Charlie Hebdo, triggered self-censorship because of ‘hate speech,’ while the work of Chris Ofili ‘The Holy Virgin Mary,’ in which the mother of Jesus is covered with feces and images of genitalia, was defended by the New York Times as ‘free speech.’ Does this now mean that some religions are more equal than others?”
It follows a long pattern of denigrating statements and actions from Democrat leaders concerning religion. Obama deprecated those who practice religion as bitter people clinging to their bibles and guns, and Obamacare supporters refused to accept that religious principles prevented some nonprofits from accepting certain mandates in the health care legislation. In 2014, Houston’s Democrat mayor Annise Parker attempted to subpoena sermons of conservative pastors.
While the latest Clinton-related comments were targeted at Catholics, the reality is Christian groups in general have frequently been in the crosshairs of leftist Democrats and many of their media allies.
The media has long ignored the left’s open bias. American Thinker’s Stephen Kokx wrote in 2012 described, in 2012, a lawsuit by 43 Catholic organizations to protect their rights from the intrusions of Obamacare mandates, and the media’s lack of coverage for that action. “Similar to the media’s decision to not report on the half-million or so protesters who attended the March for Life rally this past January, outlets like ABC, NBC, and CBS — all of whom spent hours on end drooling over comments made by a 30-year-old law student [Sandra Fluke, who, notes WND, was the “the feminist attorney who in 2012 claimed she couldn’t afford the $9 monthly cost of birth control pills and has said taxpayers should pay for it , but managed to loan her own legislative campaign a hefty sum of $100,000.]– have largely ignored what has become the largest legal defense of religious liberty in American history…Evidence of big media’s bias against religion is beyond dispute,” writes Cal Thomas, a Catholic commentator. Noting the countless number of attacks on Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, Thomas concludes that ‘any faith attached to a conservative agenda is to be ridiculed, stereotyped and misrepresented [by the media]. Islam is a notable exception… Not long ago, ABC decided to air a program originally entitled Good Christian Bitches. Though the show changed its name and was canceled due to low ratings, it proved Cal Thomas’s point about the media’s double standard when it comes to religion. Could you imagine a sitcom entitled Angry Muslim Clerics…?”
The Catholic League reacted sharply to the Wikileaks revelation of anti-Catholic bias within the Clinton campaign:
“There was a time, not too long ago, when Catholics on the left could be expected to at least feign outrage over anti-Catholicism. But no more. Some find excuses for it, while others cheer it on. Few are principled in their discourse, so thoroughly politicized have they become… Sandy Newman, the left-winger who wants Podesta’s advice on how to ‘plant the seeds of the revolution’ within the Catholic Church…told Podesta he needed some coaching in this area—it was a little out of his league—and Hillary’s top aide said he was happy to oblige… The apologists also try to divert attention from the bigotry by saying that the guilty were ‘just talking.’ [Clinton’s running mate] Sen. Kaine wrote it off by saying the email exchanges amounted to nothing more than ‘opinions and mouthing off a little bit here and there… the conversations centered on sabotage. That’s what it means when political agents discuss how to ‘plant the seeds of a revolution’ within an institution… Their objective, which is right out of the playbook of Saul Alinsky (Hillary’s hero), is to sow the seeds of division within the Catholic Church. There is nothing noble about their campaign, and there is nothing meritorious about defending them.”
Speaking at a bishops symposium, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput at the University of Notre Dame stated: “America’s cultural and political elites talk a lot about equality, opportunity and justice. But they behave like a privileged class with an authority based on their connections and skills. And supported by sympathetic media, they’re remaking the country into something very different from anything most of us remember or the Founders imagined. The WikiLeaks email release last week from the Clinton entourage says a lot about how the merit-class elite views people like those in this room. It’s not friendly.”
The revelation that several key Clinton campaign figures engaged in bigoted anti-Catholic statements should not come as a surprise.
The fact of anti-Christian bias in the Clinton-Obama wing of the Democrat Party is an established fact. The remaining question is why. In the case of the Catholics, the enmity of the left is particularly confusing. Other than the issue of abortion (admittedly a key issue for some) the current Catholic hierarchy, particularly under the leadership of Pope Francis, shares many of the same inclinations as the progressive-left.
The Clinton-Obama wing of the Democrat party strongly believes in the necessity of a powerful and large government with the broad ability to force their goals on the citizenry, often through means not envisioned in either the Constitution or traditional American practice. Non-governmental institutions that have gained sufficient trust to legitimately question those goals or even the means used to achieve them represent a threat to the left’s view of overarching government supremacy.
The more well established those institutions are, the greater the left sees them as a threat. Consider that is has been the Obama-appointed Attorney General Loretta Lynch who openly speculated on criminally prosecuting those who merely disagreed with his climate change policy, a concept which was given actual teeth when a number of leftist state attorneys general slapped nuisance subpoenas on independent think tanks for issuing research papers questioning much of Obama’s climate change views.
There is historical precedence for this in strong-arm and dictatorial governments. The Soviet Union mercilessly suppressed religion. Both Jews as a whole, dissenting Christian pastors, and even Free Masons who opposed the Nazi vision were dispatched to death camps. In today’s China, the tiny Christian minority is oppressed, along with practitioners of Falun Gong, a group with no political aspirations.
The Los Angeles Daily News describes Falun Gong: “Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa) arose out of the so-called ‘qigong boom’ of the late ‘80s. Qigong is an umbrella term for a number of practices involving meditation, slow-moving exercises and regulated breathing. Qigong groups exploded during this time, attracting tens of millions of mostly urban and elderly Chinese. At one point, more than 2,000 different groups existed. Falun Gong differed from most qigong groups in that it combined exercises with moral and spiritual teachings. Adherents aim to cultivate ‘truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance’ and refine their ‘xining,’ or moral character.”
The group has no hierarchical structure, no established centers, and no administrators—hardly a credible threat to the state. But the very existence of a philosophy that wasn’t controlled by the government was beyond what the government was willing to tolerate.
The commonality in all these historical and current examples of anti-religious oppression is this: Advocates of an all-powerful government will not tolerate any countervailing centers of influence. Religions, with their established moral codes, are seen as potential sources for thoughts that question the actions or morality of Big Government actions, even in the absence of any present significant policy differences.