Kamala Harris, Knights of Columbus, Threats to Democracy

Senator Kamala Harris implies that membership in the Knights of Columbus renders a judge unfit to uphold democracy while anarchists riot unchecked in the streets.For the first time in my adult life, I am afraid for America. And not only for America. I fear for all of Western Culture as well. I feel little beyond dismal foreboding for the slide toward democratic socialism into which our democracy is in rapid descent. There is no irony or subtlety at all in what I am about to write. Our only hope is to halt this course and reclaim it.This may seem a peculiar point of view from someone for whom democracy and its assurance of justice remains a dismal failure. The imprisoned place from where I write enjoys no distractions of the world in which you read these pages. I cannot escape into Netflix or some local bar to medicate my anxiety. I cannot escape at all. Just using that word in a sentence is risky.My view of the outside world is limited to raw and sometimes hopeless coverage presented in the 24-hour news cycles. There is no place else to go. You may have heard similar words recently from Maximo Alvarez, a Cuban-American who fled to the United States forty years ago. He fled socialist Cuba for America because his father convinced him that there was no place else to go.I may be the only person I know who sat through news coverage of both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. I did so for the same reason that Maximo Alvarez articulated with such courage and clarity at the latter - because we are both afraid for America. We both know that there is no place else to go. I have not been so afraid for my country and culture since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when I was nine years old at the brink of nuclear war.When Russia embraced socialism following a cultural revolution, it became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It malignantly spread its tentacles in a quest for global dominance. That included the establishment of a socialist state in Cuba followed in 1962 by the construction of a battery of nuclear missiles aimed at the United States. For anyone who listened to Maximo Alvarez at the RNC, his revulsion and fear of the growing socialism in America was gripping.Imagine how he felt when Senator Bernie Sanders referred to Fidel Castro as a humanitarian. Imagine the chill in his spine when Senator Tim Scott warned of the forces in America seeking an American cultural revolution and the establishment of the United Socialist States of America. Senator Scott was not referring to anarchists on the margins of American culture. He was referring to the presidential and vice presidential nominees on the Democratic ballot. He had the political courage to call their political party what it is fast becoming.ARE THE KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY?Believe it or not, I am not writing a political post. As a lifelong Democrat, now an Independent, I do not oppose any political party. But my conscience requires me to oppose an ideology that is not only a threat to Democracy, but a threat to religious freedom and my fundamental right to practice and adhere to my faith.In late 2018, as Senator Kamala Harris was preparing a presidential run, she sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee where she screened federal judicial nominees put forward by the President. Senator Harris asked a nominee about his Catholic faith, noting that he had been a member of the Knights of Columbus for over two decades. Her questions alluded to the K of C being some sort of politically suspect group. She demanded to know if his membership in such an “all male anti-choice organization” would cloud his judicial decisions. She referred to the Knights as an “extremist” group.“Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?” Senator Harris asked. The judicial nominee, Brian Buescher, was blindsided. It only got worse. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii picked up on the line of questioning. “Do you intend to end your membership in this organization to avoid any appearance of bias?” The appearance of bias was already front and center, but it wasn’t on the part of the judicial nominee who was eventually confirmed. On January 5, 2019, I wrote this response to the story posted at The Wall Street Journal:

  • “The big question here is not what judicial nominee Brian Buescher believes, but whether Senators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono believe in anything at all that is worthy of belief. And the bigger question is whether such overt anti-Catholic suspicions render them unfit for public office. At best, they both need a refresher course in remedial Constitutional law. Their disregard of the Constitutional provision against any religious test for judicial confirmation is a serious flaw in their readiness to represent their constituents...

What made this biased grilling of a Catholic nominee by Kamala Harris far more reprehensible was its déjà vu factor. Just six months earlier, the Judiciary Chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein, became the subject of public ridicule for openly applying the same unconstitutional religious test to President Trump’s nominee, Notre Dame Law Professor Amy Coney Barrett. Looking over her work as a law professor at a Catholic university, Senator Feinstein referred to her faith as a “cult” and said, “the dogma speaks loudly in you.” There was hell to pay.But not so when Senators Harris and Hirona repeated the tactic just six months later. With the exception of Bill Donohue’s vigilant voice at the Catholic League, little was said to call attention to the newest anti-Catholic bias of Kamala Harris. Now that it has finally come up, defenders have been quick to point out that she cannot be anti-Catholic because she is teamed with Joe Biden “who carries a rosary everyplace he goes.” True. He carried it while promoting abortion without restrictions at every stage of development. He carried it while withdrawing his forty years of support for the Hyde Amendment that restricted taxpayer funds for the coverage of abortions.I hope he wasn’t carrying it when he vowed from his campaign headquarters to roll back religious exemptions in contraception coverage extended by the Supreme Court to the Little Sisters of the Poor. Mr. Biden responded to the recent Supreme Court decisions in favor of protecting religious liberty for the nuns and other conscientious objectors by vowing to restore the mandate that they objected to. This would hit the Sisters with ruinous fines and a deeply felt conflict of conscience. The rosary in his pocket notwithstanding, Joe Biden’s threats to religious liberty are evidence of how much he is led by the left wing of his Party.In just the six months between the anti-Catholic questioning of Notre Dame’s Amy Coney Barrett and that of judicial nominee Brian Buescher, a lot had changed. One distinctive change was the Senate Democrats’ assault on the character of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a devout Catholic.Senator Kamala Harris reprised her role as a career prosecutor by grilling Brett Kavanaugh mercilessly on entirely uncorroborated rumors of drunkenness and sexual escapades in his high school years - rumors that not a single person could confirm. I wrote of this shameful page in partisan politics in “Justice Brett Kavanaugh Is Guilty for Being Accused.”It has also been lost in most of the news media coverage that before becoming the nominee for vice president on the Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris went on record to state that she also believes the sexual allegations against Joe Biden brought forward by Tara Reade. This is among the tough questions that most in our now partisan news media will not ask. Apparently, belief in anything is insufficient to alter one’s course in life.ANESTHESIA FOR THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCEAfter publication of a recent controversial post, “Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life,” a priest whom I have known for some years “unsubscribed” to These Stone Walls. His presumed reasoning was that any criticism of Joe Biden on moral grounds amounts to a tacit endorsement of President Trump. I do not endorse President Trump. What I endorse - and so should we all - is the lawful election that put him in office in 2016. I am among the many Americans who resent the notion that this “Basket of Deplorables” who cast their votes were too ignorant to be entrusted with the finer points of democracy.From the moment the election results were announced in November, 2016, a relentless campaign was launched to nullify this lawful election. Most shameful of all for democracy, much of the news media abandoned its mission to take up that partisan cause. One result of that betrayal of democracy was just seen at The New York Times when young, liberal reporters in the news room revolted and brought out the resignation of a respected editor because he allowed “the opposition” to write an editorial. “The opposition” in that case was a highly regarded Republican Senator.When New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan praised President Trump’s emphasis on religious liberty in a FOX News interview, two groups of Catholic nuns sent letters of protest to the Cardinal asking him to retract his remarks. They cited Mr. Trump’s positions on climate change and capital punishment as evidence that he cannot be considered “pro-life.” The National Catholic Reporter published an editorial using the same reasoning.In the Catholic conscience, some real moral gymnastics are required to measure a candidate’s concept of the value of life solely by a position on the death penalty. It entirely overlooks the moral apocalypse that resulted in the execution of 73 million human lives terminated in the womb at every level of development right up to birth. The awakening of the Catholic conscience to this is evident in my post, “March for Life: A New Great Awakening.”I am in sympathy with “Black Lives Matter” but there is much hypocrisy. African Americans constitute 12.5 percent of the U.S. population, but 30 percent of U.S. abortions. That is by design and not merely a quirk of sociology. Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger for the purpose of controlling the growth of the African American population. That fact is finally exposed in the public square. As monuments to historical figures are toppled across the land, no one has yet demanded that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi surrender their Margaret Sanger awards for their support of “reproductive rights.”Whatever Joe Biden and Kamala Harris believe about the morality of unlimited abortion on demand, they are falling lockstep in line with the platform of their party. Kristin Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, reports that a third of Democrats consider themselves to be pro-life, but “top Democrats have gone out of their way to make it clear that we are no longer welcome in the party.” The Democratic National Convention ignored the groups request to testify before its platform committee. A major percentage of these pro-life Democrats are people of faith, Ms Day says, “but the much-hyped group, ‘Believers for Biden’ is a flop. It had only 26 followers on Facebook a week after being created.”As Joe Biden vowed to bankrupt the Little Sisters of the Poor with never ending legislation and litigation, Kamala Harris did the same during her tenure as California Attorney General. In 2014, the Catholic Daughters of Charity Health System had six hospitals that were operating at an annual loss that could not be sustained. Prime Healthcare made a bid to assume their $300 million liability for worker pensions, but the United Healthcare Workers’ union opposed the deal.Kamala Harris attached dozens of previously unheard of conditions to the deal such as requiring the Catholic hospitals to provide 24-hour nursing, surgery, anesthesia, radiology and pharmaceutical services for five years. This crippled the deal.Prime Health sued Kamala Harris for violating its due process rights. The Catholic Daughters executives said that Ms. Harris blocked the deal at the behest of the union with “financially crippling conditions.” The lawsuit alleged that in return the union pledged $25 million in political financial support for Ms. Harris. The lawsuit ended in 2017 when a federal judge ruled that as Attorney General, Ms. Harris had “qualified immunity” from lawsuits. It is ironic that in recent months, Kamala Harris introduced a resolution in the Senate to abolish qualified immunity for police officers.What are American Catholics left with? This vice-presidential nominee is more likely than any nominee in history to assume the Office of President of the United States at some future point, and yet she dropped out of the Democratic process with only a pitiful percentage of votes in the primaries. She has declared the two million members of the Knights of Columbus to be a subversive organization and has joined the new Democratic party in its march toward socialism and its inevitable suppression of religious liberty.But another voice, that of Representative Tulsi Gabbard, caught onto all this duplicity early on. Before ending her own bid for the White House, Ms. Gabbard courageously unloaded her views on the suitability of Kamala Harris for the highest public office in the land. Kamala Harris dropped out of the primaries after receiving only two percent of the Democrats’ votes. I’m giving the last word to Tulsi Gabbard:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4fjA0K2EeE

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