A Sorry Spectacle: The End of the Democratic Party as We Knew It

Paul Adams

I have never been a member of either Democratic or Republican party and do not even have a vote.  But I was shocked four years ago by the political messianism in which good friends were caught up, as well as the talk of Obama by apparently sane and sober public figures that spoke of Obama in terms normally reserved for messiahs.  This phenomenon has been usefully tracked by a site that poses the question, "Is Barack Obama the Messiah?"

After four years of failure, unprecedented debt, new military adventures, and countless broken promises, the faith has become hard for all but the most deluded to sustain.  Few politicians are able to accomplish what they promise, of course.  They simply lack the control over economy or society, or the information, or wisdom.  And in Obama's case, the much ridiculed promises about healing the planet and stemming the rise of the oceans were bound to make actual achievements seem minuscule compared with the promises and hopes.

But few political leaders have amassed such a record of lies and hypocrisy in so short a time as President Obama.  Here is a sampling:



Peggy Noonan has an insightful assessment of the Democrats' convention.  Her most important point is about how the failures of the last four years have led the party, not to more modesty, let alone the once-promised spirit of bipartisan cooperation, but to an unusual extremism.

The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.

The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.

"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim?

What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.

And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.

Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.

It is not good for either party or the country that the Democrats have given up the big tent and become resolutely, brazenly, triumphally the party of death, narcissism, nihilism, and the disintegration of marriage and family.   As Robert George has pointed out, by the rhetoric of the party's new same-sex "marriage" orthodoxy, their own leader President Obama has been either a bigot or a liar for most of his presidency.  Pro-life liberals and Democrats like Robert Casey or political successors of the late Sargent Shriver seem to have become irretrievably homeless while the party, as Noonan says, builds its whole public persona around the likes of NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and the advocates of repressing religious freedom so that women will no longer have to buy their own contraceptive and abortifacient drugs.   What used to see itself as the party of concern for the poor, oppressed, the unemployed and homeless has subordinated everything to an absolute right of mothers to rip apart or poison their babies who are waiting to be born, in the name of a supposed right to reproductive health care that is anti-reproductive, anti-health (not least the health of one of the two patients involved in a pregnancy), and anything but caring.    Meanwhile hardly a word or thought for our children and children's children who are being loaded down with crippling debt exceeding all previous public debt combined by many times over as their educational, spiritual, and moral needs go ever more neglected.

Obama's Propaganda War on Women

“Tell President Obama to respect a woman’s choice to practice her beliefs…not his.”

Pray for the Mandate?

Predictably, I suppose, the Obama administration has perverted the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships by turning it into a community organizing and lobbying arm...of the Obama administration.  In violation of legal ethics, they are organizing faith-based organizations to demonstrate outside the Supreme Court as it hears oral arguments about a case to which the federal government is a party.  Yuval Levin has a nice comment at NRO:

Pray for the Mandate By Yuval Levin March 9, 2012 12:31 P.M.

As the date for Supreme Court oral arguments in the Obamacare case draws near, the White House is working to orchestrate demonstrations in support of the law. The New York Times today reports:

On Wednesday, White House officials summoned dozens of leaders of nonprofit organizations that strongly back the health law to help them coordinate plans for a prayer vigil, press conferences and other events outside the court when justices hear arguments for three days beginning March 26.

Looking over the constitutional arguments offered by the administration’s lawyers in defense of the individual mandate, it is perhaps not too difficult to see why the White House deemed itself in need of prayer. But the irony is pretty stunning nonetheless.

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Get compliant faith-based groups to pray for an egregious attack on religion!  As Levin goes on to say:

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The Obama administration has just put into force a new regulation under Obamacare that amounts to the most far-reaching instance of governmental religious intolerance since the Blaine Amendments. There is no other word but intolerance to describe what the rule aims to do: It doesn’t say that people should have the freedom to use contraceptive or abortive drugs—which of course they do have in our country. It doesn’t even say that the government should facilitate people’s access to these drugs—which of course it does today and has for many years, at great public expense.

It says, rather, that the Catholic Church and others who have religious objections to the use of such drugs should facilitate people’s access to them. It says that we will not tolerate an institution in our society that, for religious reasons, is not willing to actively put into effect the views of those in power regarding contraception, abortion, and sterilization——that we won’t just let it be and find other ways to put those views into effect but will compel the dissenting institution itself to participate in the facilitation of access to these things on behalf of the people it employs, or else we will levy a heavy fine against it. We cannot abide even passive disagreement.

That is a refusal to exercise even a moderate portion of toleration toward religious believers and institutions. It says, in effect, that the substance of religious convictions merits no regard from the state. And yet it seems that the forms of religious practice can be marshaled in the service of political objectives. The prayer vigil as PR stunt is expected to coexist with rank intolerance as public policy, and the White House itself is encouraging the stunt. READ the whole post here.

As the first post in the combox notes,

The president and attorney general are both attorneys. It is improper for attorneys to lobby judges or justices who have jurisdiction over a case in which they are representing a client, ie. the U.S. government. 

The White House coordinating the lobbying of the Supreme Court on a case before it is unethical.

Must Catholics Withdraw from Public life?

Political Withdrawal?

By James V. Schall, S.J.

TUESDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2012

Recently, a Catholic healthcare official, when asked about the new Obama plans, remarked that we are now preparing to withdraw altogether from this business as incompatible with our faith.

This assessment of what these plans entail recalled two things in political philosophy. The Epicureans held that the good man had to withdraw from turbulent politics to live a quiet life. Epicurus saw the polity as an impediment to human perfection, not its natural context as in Aristotle.

Secondly, in Herbert Deane’s 1956 book on Augustine, we read: “Nowhere in the Gospels or in the Apostolic teachings is it ever suggested that Christians have any obligation to participate in the operation of the political system or that the activities of the state have any real relevance to the conduct of members of the Church or to their overriding concern – salvation and participation in the kingdom of God.” Such a passage seems shocking to generations of Catholics exhorted to “participate” in politics, as if that is their main task in this or future life.

Augustine considers the same problem: What to do with his promising political career? As a teacher preparing students for rhetoric and law, he trained them for such worthless projects as public affairs, which were dangerous to man in almost every way. 

In the famous scene in Book 8 of the Confessions, Augustine encounters theLife of Anthony, the African monk. Augustine sees that he must withdraw from involvement in public life. He cites Ponticianus who, in the city of Treves, on reading this Life of Anthon, asked himself:  “What do we hope to gain by all the efforts we make? What are we looking for? What is our purpose in serving the State? Can we hope for anything better at Court than to be the Emperor’s friends?” 

Saint Antony of the Desert (251-356)

This “being friends of the Emperor” looms mightily in the reasoning of contemporary Catholics who accept Obama’s thinking about the scope of state power. Suddenly, in the light of a state that now demands of its employees the price of their conscience and reason, such classic withdrawal questions again become pertinent to the well being of our souls. 

In Saint Francis of Assisi, Chesterton recalled this same Anthony and the monks of the Egyptian desert. The culture of the late Roman Empire was so distorted and corrupt, Chesterton thought, that one could no longer involve himself in it. The only alternative was to withdraw. In the following centuries, the Christian soul of man would be purified so that it could again see nature and man as God intended.

Various Catholic politicians, clerics, academics, and critics have tried to justify the substance of the Obama move to control the whole public order. It makes sense that withdrawal from politics may be in order. If doctors and nurses must, at the price of professional recognition, participate in abortions and all that goes with it, not to enter such professions at the risk one’s soul becomes rational. If Obama is reelected, such issues will immediately confront most good people, not just Catholics, but primarily them as they are the ones most clearly targeted.

The president apparently thinks that all wealth is produced by the state. The wealth of the citizens, thus, should pass through state hands to be redistributed to the citizens as a benefaction of the state. The state defines “the good” of the citizen in education, welfare, health, and well-being. 

The First Amendment no longer functions as a restriction to the state. Religion contributes to the state only in so far as it assists in carrying out state policies. If it claims exemption, it is imposing its values on the freedom of the state to define the good. 

No higher law exists by which we define what the state is. In the Catholic view, the current issues of health care, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia, fetal experimentation, and gay marriage are not primarily religious questions. The basic arguments about what these practices imply are from reason. 

Catholicism gets into the controversies as one of the last major voices of reason in the public order. Christian revelation is addressed to a reason that is itself intelligible. It does not tell reason what it is, though it does insist that reason be reasonable. 

The president seeks to define what constitutes religion. Those Catholics and other religious people who agree with him have implicitly accepted what this state demands of them. Their support basically entails a rejection of that natural reason found in the order of things. 

In this context, the victory of the Obama approach to public life means that reasonable and believing Catholics and other citizens will have little choice but to withdraw from the public life of a country that enforces these policies. Such choices, no more and no less, are what is at stake in these controversies.

James V. Schall, S.J., a professor at Georgetown University, is one of the most prolific Catholic writers in America. His most recent book is The Mind That Is Catholic.

© 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org

Retrieved February 21, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

The Debate We Need to Engage

Santorum vs. Obama: The Debate America Needs By David G. Bonagura, Jr.    SUNDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2012 On January 19, Pope Benedict XVI described both the core of the American experiment and the turmoil of the current political moment: At the heart of every culture, whether perceived or not, is a consensus about the nature of reality and the moral good, and thus about the conditions for human flourishing. In America, that consensus, as enshrined in your nation’s founding documents, was grounded in a worldview shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles deriving from nature and nature’s God. Today that consensus has eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents which are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such. The new cultural currents hostile to Christianity, present for decades in various forms, have coalesced these last few weeks around the Oval Office, the point of origin for one of recent memory’s most heinous attacks on religious liberty in general and Christian religious practice in particular.  President Obama’s deliberate challenge to the constitutional guarantee of the free exercise of religion joins his abortion and marriage policies as his latest attempt to coerce the Judeo-Christian tradition back into its houses of worship, permanently concealed from public view, and isolated from public policy. Jobs and economic recovery are very important, but ultimately Obama’s presidency will be defined by his use of executive power to push a sweeping social agenda contrary to the long held American consensus on the ethical principles that derive from nature and nature’s God. At stake in the 2012 election is nothing less than America’s vision of reality and the moral good. Discussing this vision is neither a prospect that political consultants advise nor one that excites an electorate. Social issues, we are told, are divisive, indeed lead to culture war. And in the end many appeal to the relativism card – what’s true for you is not true for me – which usually seems easier than having a knockout fight with colleagues or neighbors.  But it is the social issues – what our kids learn in schools, what we allow in discourse and entertainment, how we treat one another, how we worship – that shape America, the ideals she holds, and the way we live together. With so much at stake in this sphere in the coming election, the American people need a frank discussion about what America is all about. Rick Santorum and his daughter Bella Of the four remaining Republican presidential candidates, Rick Santorum possesses the greatest ability to steer this discussion back to the consensus of America’s founding. In the political arena, he has fought valiantly for pro-life causes. And at home he has heroically sacrificed himself and his family so that even the most sickly and vulnerable human beings may have their God-given right to life.  He is a religious man who rightly sees his faith and the Judeo-Christian moral tradition as the source of his political actions, not the antithesis of them. He has consistently defended the family and traditional marriage, even when barraged by those who refuse to engage in a rational debate. President Obama’s anti-religious social agenda must be confronted – and Santorum can stop it in its tracks. Santorum, unlike the other GOP candidates, has not just talked the talk on these core issues surrounding American life and liberty: he has walked the walk. The minions of the president’s social agenda in the media know this intuitively. Their hysterical reaction to Santorum proves his status as Obama’s most formidable challenger in this arena. The intelligentsia’s furious attacks on Santorum coupled with is coddling of the Occupy Movement are just two indications that contemporary America may not be civil enough to discuss her identity and future. But President Obama has forced this conversation upon the nation by his callous mandate requiring Catholic employers to subsidize behaviors contrary to the Church’s creed.  He wants more than universal contraceptive coverage: he wants the Church out of the health care business entirely so that government can take over. If he is given a second term, he may well try to remove all churches’ authority to witness marriages so that only the government can officiate, with the genders of the couples no longer withstanding. Santorum’s life and political career remind America of what George Washington, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Benedict XVI each have expressed so clearly: the character and decency of America – and with them her greatness as a nation – depend on her citizens’ religiosity and commitment to Judeo-Christian morality.  By extension, President Obama’s dismissal of religious freedom is an affront to America and her foundational ideals. Simply by being the GOP candidate, Santorum directs the campaign back to these ideals that matter most for our future. This election will not solely be decided by social issues, and Santorum’s positions on the economy, government, and foreign affairs also have electoral appeal. Witness the way the media are always “surprised” by his primary wins. Yet the social issues remain the president’s greatest weakness – to Santorum’s greatest strength.  Santorum need not waver on his past assertions, as he awkwardly did when recently discussing a passage from his book about “radical feminists.” Contrary to the New York Times and MSNBC, it is the president – not Santorum – whose policies and practices place him outside the American mainstream and the American tradition. The Obama presidency has charted a course for America that departs from our foundational principles. A Santorum candidacy directly challenges this course – and presents a legitimate hope that the ethical principles deriving from nature and nature’s God may remain among us for future generations. David G. Bonagura, Jr. is an adjunct professor of theology at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception, Huntington, NY. © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org Retrieved February 19, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

Electoral consequences of the HHS mandate

The electoral damage done to Obama by his "war on religion" is, of course, not the point.  Even if Catholics were a small, deeply unpopular minority - like those Jehovah's Witnesses who, in the midst of WWII, refused to salute the flag - the First Amendment would still protect their right to religious liberty.  As the Supreme Court said in its Barnette ruling, issued on Flag Day, 1943, "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion."  The issue is not how popular the Church's teaching on contraception and sterilization is, even among Catholics.  It is whether the Federal government has the right to impose its view on religious organizations, so as to force them to act against their consciences and to commit or collude in what they consider to be gravely immoral acts.


Still, it is good that the Obama administration will pay a price for its totalitarian statist leanings, its rejection of institutional pluralism--reducing 'conscience' to the relation of atomized individual to hypertrophied state.  May it cost him the election and serve as a warning for future politicians who are tempted to seek to trample the religious freedom on which the United States was founded.



At the Catholic Thing, George J. Marlin discusses the political cost Obama may have to pay for his secularist, anti-religious overreach:

Our president and his cadre of managers of the nation’s collective life caused a political firestorm in late January. They ignored conscience objections of religious leaders and ordered Catholic schools, hospitals, and charities to amend by August 30, 2013 their healthcare plans to include birth-control services (among them abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization procedures) or be subject to millions of dollars in fines and penalties. This may lead to civil strife for the nation and political disaster in several key battleground states for Mr. Obama. Prominent Catholics from all points on the political spectrum were aghast. Cardinal-elect Timothy Dolan, President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, said, “In effect, the President is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our own consciences. . . . Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.” The nationally syndicated columnist, E.J. Dionne, a baptized Catholic and relentless supporter of the president, denounced Obama for throwing “his progressive Catholic allies under the bus.” Sean Michael Winter, writing in the dissident National Catholic Reporter, accused the president of “dishonoring your own vision by this shameful action” and vowed not to vote for him this fall. Obama’s assumption appears to have been that Catholics who ignore the Church’s teaching on contraception would not be offended – or at least that such offense as they might take will not matter politically. But that calculation appears to be profoundly mistaken. Reports from dioceses all over the nation indicate that most Catholics are appalled that the federal government is attempting to circumvent the First Amendment and restrict freedom of conscience.  I myself witnessed that anger at a Catholic dinner in Manhattan on February 2. Bishop Nicholas DeMarzio, the Ordinary of the Brooklyn Diocese, received a rousing standing ovation from the 750 attendees after he denounced the federal edict. This political blunder will have a price. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has introduced legislation to repeal the order, summed it up best when he said, “This is going to hurt [Obama] not only among Catholics and religious voters . . . because it reflects a pattern of overreach.”  In my judgment, it could cost Obama the election. That’s because key-swing states that will determine the 2012 winner – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida – have large populations of older church-going Catholics who are not happy with Obama’s ideologically driven directive.

READ MORE HERE

Obama Defies Congress, Attacks Marriage - USCCB Statement

In instructing the Justice Department not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed by majorities of both parties in both chambers of Congress, President Obama has joined the attack on our most pro-child institution.

It is good to see that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, often perceived as pro-Democratic and especially pro-Obama, has on this issue at least taken a firm stand. Here is USCCB's news release:


Archbishop Dolan Calls Refusal to Defend Defense of Marriage Act an ‘Alarming and Grave Injustice’

WASHINGTON (March 3, 2011)— “Our nation and government have the duty to recognize and protect marriage, not tamper with and redefine it, nor to caricature the deeply held beliefs of so many citizens as ‘discrimination,’” said Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). His statement followed the February 23 announcement that President Obama has instructed the Department of Justice to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a move Archbishop Dolan called an “alarming and grave injustice.”

Archbishop Dolan’s full statement follows:

The announcement on February 23 that the President has instructed the Department of Justice to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is an alarming and grave injustice. Marriage, the union of one man and one woman as husband and wife, is a singular and irreplaceable institution. Only a man and a woman are capable of the “two-in-one-flesh” union of husband and wife. Only a man and a woman have the ability to bring children into the world. Along with that ability comes responsibility, which society historically reinforces with laws that bind mothers and fathers to each other and their children. This family unit represents the most basic and vital cell of any society, protecting the right of children to know and be known by, to love and be loved by, their mother and father. Thus, marriage represents the bedrock of the common good of society, its very foundation and future.

Contrary to the Attorney General’s statement, DOMA does not single out people based on sexual “orientation” or inclination. Every person deserves to be treated with justice, compassion, and respect, a proposition of natural law and American law that we as Catholics vigorously promote. Unjust discrimination against any person is always wrong. But DOMA is not “unjust discrimination”; rather, it merely affirms and protects the time-tested and unalterable meaning of marriage. The suggestion that this definition amounts to “discrimination” is grossly false and represents an affront to millions of citizens in this country.

The decision also does not stand the test of common sense. It is hardly “discrimination” to say that a husband and a wife have a unique and singular relationship that two persons of the same sex—or any unmarried persons—simply do not and cannot have. Nor is it “discrimination” to believe that the union of husband and wife has a distinctive and exclusive significance worthy of promotion and protection by the state. It is not “discrimination” to say that having both a mother and a father matters to and benefits a child. Nor is it “discrimination” to say that the state has more than zero interest in ensuring that children will be intimately connected with and raised by their mother and father.

Protecting the definition of marriage is not merely permissible, but actually necessary as a matter of justice. Having laws that affirm the vital importance of mothers and fathers—laws that reinforce, rather than undermine, the ideal that children should be raised by their own mother and father—is essential for any just society. Those laws serve not only the good of the spouses and their children, but the common good. Those laws are now under relentless attack. If we forget the meaning of marriage, we forget what it means to be a human person, what it means to be a man or a woman. Have we wandered away so far in our society as to forget why men and women matter, and eroded the most central institution for our children and for our future?

The Administration’s current position is not only a grave threat to marriage, but to religious liberty and the integrity of our democracy as well. Our nation and government have the duty to recognize and protect marriage, not tamper with and redefine it, nor to caricature the deeply held beliefs of so many citizens as “discrimination.” On behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, I express my deep disappointment over the Administration’s recent decision. I have written of these concerns to the President in separate correspondence, and I pray that he and the Department of Justice may yet make the right choice to carry out their constitutional responsibility, defending the irreplaceable institution of marriage, and in so doing protect the future generations of our children.
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Retrieved March 3, 2011 from http://www.usccb.org/comm/archives/2011/11-043.shtml