Catholic
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somewhat belated
NO MERRI
SEE POPE LEO USA CHIC
PRIMARY 1219 on barr fedsoc opus dei
SEE WORKER A ON MIRE PROGRESSIVE
paleoconservatives are converts TO?
see paleo-catholic eg church militant
green pope francis but alsopaleo-catholics
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AN 9 26
MAGA rages at Catholic bishop who condemned Republican's racist post
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trump ai pix as pope
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opus dei university
The far-right religious cult INFILTRATING American universities NO ONE is talking about - YouTube
Premiered Jun 20, 2026 UNITED STATES
This particular branch of the rabbit hole goes quite deep and extends across the entire United States. I think I just barely scratched the surface with this. Another heartfelt thank you to Jennifer and Samantha for sharing your experiences with me. If you enjoy my work and have found it educational, entertaining, or transformational and would like to support me monetarily, you can buy me a coffee for $5 (thank you to everyone who has thoughtfully supported my work thus far): https://buymeacoffee.com/thedeepdivep... SOURCE DOCUMENT: https://drive.proton.me/urls/VC3FS0QZ...TRANSCRIPT: https://drive.proton.me/urls/W9SC7B1N...CHAPTERS:
- Intr
- Disclaimers and advisor
- How it all bega
- Samantha's stor
- Jennifer's stor
- The devil's in the (financial) detail
- The Becket Fun
- University Catholic Cente
- The Zephyr Institut
- The Thomistic Institut
- Closing thought
- Outro RELEVANT NEXT WATCHES:
- Misinformation, lies, and abuse - is a CULT after your kids?
• Misinformation, Lies, and Abuse - Is a CUL...
- Opus Dei: the CULT of dark money w/Gareth Gore: [
• Opus Dei: the CULT of dark money - a conve...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d7d2hyEWbo)
-Exposing Opus Dei's FASCIST plan w/Shannon vavich: 
• EXPOSING Opus Dei's fascist plan for theoc...-The ATTACK on the church-state separation: 
• The ATTACK on the CHURCH-STATE separation ...
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AN 7 26
A popular MAGA-oriented Catholic Bishop sent a letter threatening legal action against one of his critics that revealed he shares more with President Donald Trump than politics. Like the Commander in Chief he supports, Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota is obsessed with crowd size.
This is according to Christopher Hale, who writes the popular Letters from Theo blog where he provides commentary on the latest news regarding the Pope and Catholicism. On Friday, Hale explained, “Earlier this week, a letter from the Washington law firm Cooper & Kirk arrived in my inbox. The firm represents Word on Fire, Bishop Robert Barron’s media company, and the subject line announced a ‘NOTICE OF LEGAL ACTION.’ The letter itself is something slightly less than the subject line advertises: a threat of one. The lawyers ask for a correction of a July 8 post of mine, which said that Barron’s YouTube views had ‘been on a nosedive during the past year of his MAGA conversion.’”
“In the letter,” Hale elaborated, “David H. Thompson of Cooper & Kirk writes that Word on Fire’s internal figures show the channel’s viewership more than doubling over the past year, with subscriber growth up 85 percent, and warns of ‘potential legal action’ if I decline to correct the record. For legal authority, the letter leans on the Covington Catholic teenager’s defamation suit against the New York Times — a suit the teenager lost.”
According to Hale, what’s really interesting is what isn’t in the letter. As he wrote, “At no point does the letter ask me to retract the charge that gave my post its sting: that Bishop Barron has gone full MAGA. His lawyers dispute my arithmetic. The thesis of more than a year of reporting in this community — that America’s most famous bishop has converted to Trumpism — apparently stands uncontested.”
Barron, said Hale, has “spent the summer falling deeper and deeper into the MAGA abyss,” recently giving a softball interview to Vice President JD Vance. The Bishop was appointed to the White House Religious Liberty Commission, and recently called for breaking the separation between church and state.
Hale also suggested that there is something revealing about the Bishop’s priorities, writing, “Trump’s April attack on Pope Leo earned from Barron a single statement of protest and then months of accommodation. An incorrect tweet about YouTube analytics, by contrast, summoned a Washington law firm.”
Trump’s relationship with Catholics has been fraught in recent months due to his feud with the Pope earlier in the year. This and other “blasphemous” behavior on his part has prompted some of the MAGA faithful to suggest Trump may be the “antichrist.”
The president also has a famous crowd size fixation that dates back to his first inauguration. This obsession was most recently on display during his 250th celebrations, when he reportedly “freaked out” over poor attendance.
an 4 26
Pentagon denies Trump official threatened war against the Pope - Alternet.org
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an 4 26
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Pope Leo XIV chronicler Christopher Hale says he has confirmed that Trump’s Pentagon threatened to declare war on the Vatican.
“In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture,” said Hale.
“America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world,” Colby and his associates informed the cardinal. “The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
As the room temperature grew, Hale said he confirmed that one U.S. official “reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.”
Hale said the report confirms that the Vatican had reason to decline the Trump-Vance White House’s invitation to host Pope Leo XIV for America’s 250th anniversary in 2026 two weeks after the confrontation.
Citing a Free Press report, a writer obtained accounts from Vatican and U.S. officials briefed on the Pentagon meeting. According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at President Donald Trump. Hale said what “enraged them most” was Leo’s declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”
“The Pentagon read that sentence as a frontal challenge to the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’ — Trump’s update of Monroe, asserting unchallenged American dominion over the Western Hemisphere,” said Hale.
Hale said the cardinal sat through the lecture in silence, but added that “The Holy See has not, since that day, given an inch.”
The Trump administration's contentious relationship with the Catholic Church represents a significant departure from traditional Republican-Church alliances. While Trump secured substantial Catholic voter support in 2016 and 2024 by championing conservative social issues like abortion restrictions, his foreign policy approach and rhetoric have increasingly alienated Church leadership.
Pope Leo XIV has positioned himself as a moral counterweight to Trump's geopolitical aggression, consistently advocating for dialogue-based diplomacy over military intervention. This philosophical clash intensified during Trump's second term, particularly as his administration pursued more hawkish positions on Iran, trade relations, and immigration — issues where Church teaching emphasizes compassion, dialogue, and respect for human dignity.
The Vatican's traditionally neutral stance on secular governance has been tested by Trump's unilateral foreign policy decisions and inflammatory rhetoric. Church leaders have publicly questioned whether American military interventions align with Catholic doctrine on just war theory and the sanctity of human life. Additionally, Trump's administration's hardline immigration policies directly contradict papal messaging that emphasizes welcoming migrants and refugees.
The Pentagon's January confrontation with Cardinal Pierre signals an unprecedented willingness by Trump officials to pressure religious institutions into alignment with administration goals. This represents a potential inflection point: where diplomatic courtesy once governed state-Church relations, coercion may now be replacing negotiation. The Vatican's refusal to participate in the 250th anniversary celebration underscores that even America's most prominent religious institution will not compromise its moral authority for political expediency.
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AN 11 25
Catholic bishops linked to Trump admin accuse him of violating 'religious liberty'
'Use Trump as a messenger': How 'fringy' Catholic women are bringing MAGA to the masses
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AN 7 25
The Trump Justice Department recently threw its weight behind Washington’s Catholic bishops, filing a legal motion to invalidate SB 5375, siding with clergy arguing the law unconstitutionally targets religious practice.
U.S. District Chief Judge David G. Estudillo issued a preliminary injunction Friday, preventing Washington state from enforcing SB 5375’s mandatory reporting rule “as to the Sacrament of Confession” in the dioceses of Seattle, Yakima, and Spokane — just days before the law’s July 27 effective date.
Last month, the Department of Justice (DOJ), led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, officially intervened in the lawsuit Etienne v. Ferguson, backing the Archdiocese of Seattle, Yakima, and Spokane. In its filing, the DOJ labeled Washington’s new child-abuse reporting statute — Senate Bill 5375, which requires clergy to report all suspected child abuse, even if disclosed during confession — as “anti‑Catholic” and likely in violation of First Amendment protections.
READ MORE:'Like an open fire hose': Trump ripped as cracks show in MAGA media
Estudillo emphasized that the law, unlike similar statutes in around 25 other states, included no exceptions for confession, and held that the plaintiffs had demonstrated a strong likelihood of success on First Amendment grounds.
The judge's ruling comes amid the controversy related to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and allegations of a coverup.
A Rolling Stone article by journalist Alex Ashley published Sunday highlighted the administration's efforts to defend organized religion.
Under the new state law — SB 5375—all clergy, regardless of faith, are required to report suspected child abuse to authorities within 48 hours, even if the information is obtained during confession. They are not required to testify in court, hand over notes, or breach attorney‑client privilege. The obligation is narrow but significant, the author noted.
The article noted that that lone obligation effectively closes a confessional loophole that remains open in most states. While all 50 states (and D.C., Guam) list clergy as mandatory reporters, 33 states exempt what’s disclosed in confession, making SB 5375 a bold exception.
READ MORE:Why Republicans worship Trump as their sick and twisted role model
The law places Washington in the minority — alongside only six other states (New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, West Virginia) — that have eliminated confessional exemptions entirely. Yet enforcement remains problematic: 36 states have religious‑freedom protections (RFRAs or constitutional), making prosecution for confession‑based reporting virtually impossible. Washington has no state RFRA but does apply strict scrutiny to religious‑freedom cases.
The Catholic Church argues the confessional seal isn’t just private counseling — it’s a sacrament essential to faith.
Ashley argued that this marks one of the most forceful federal efforts to defend organized religion against a state law in recent memory — DOJ isn’t asking for a narrow carve‑out, but pushing to overturn the law entirely and remind courts of the centrality of religious liberty.
According to the author, the "Trump-era DOJ and the Catholic Church have found common cause in attacking Washington state, even if they don’t agree on where the line should be drawn, forming a rare alliance against one of the first laws in decades to strip away clergy’s confessional shield in child abuse cases."
He added: "It has turned into a national flashpoint, a constitutional test case watched across the country, poised to redefine the boundary between church and state."
"Together, the two lawsuits, along with the DOJ’s involvement, have made Washington’s law a high-stakes legal test. Whether its promise of ending clergy secrecy in abuse reporting holds, or collapses under constitutional challenge, now rests with the courts," the piece said.
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AN 7 25
Delegates at the United Church of Christ’s (UCC) 35th General Synod overwhelmingly passed an emergency resolution this week, condemning the ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids as “domestic terrorism” and accusing President Donald Trump's administration of “weaponizing the Constitution.”
Religious News Service reported Tuesday that the resolution targets immigration enforcement operations “carried out by ICE agents working without uniforms, wearing masks or refusing to identify themselves,” condemning these tactics as threatening and abusive.
Titled “Responding to the federal government’s attack on immigrants, migrants, and refugees,” the resolution urges the church to divest from for-profit private detention firms, specifically naming CoreCivic, GEO Group, and Management and Training Corp.— while allowing congregations to go further if they choose, according to the report.
READ MORE:Devastating CNN poll shows just how much Trump has fallen — even among his biggest supporters
Presented as an emergency motion by the Rev. Clara Sims of First Congregational UCC in Albuquerque on behalf of the Southwest Conference, the move reflects the church’s urgent response to escalated immigration enforcement under the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, First Congregational UCC has opened housing and provided food and aid to immigrants arriving from the border, actions its minister says stem from the denomination’s theological commitment to protect the vulnerable.
“Our faith has always called us into spaces of risk on behalf of the vulnerable,” said Sims, “especially when people are being made vulnerable by really corrupt systems of power.”
The Southwest Conference fast-tracked the resolution after national church leaders and regional partners voiced deep concerns about human rights violations in detention facilities, per the report.
READ MORE:Trump 'very irritated' with GOP senator whose reelection bid could decide Senate control
Last month, Bishop Alberto Rojas of the Diocese of San Bernardino, California, released a letter addressing recent reports that ICE agents had entered Catholic churches.
As head of the sixth-largest Catholic diocese in the U.S., Bishop Rojas strongly criticized the escalation of ICE operations.
In his communication to Catholics, he highlighted that “authorities are now seizing brothers and sisters indiscriminately, without respect for their right to due process and their dignity as children of God.”
He conveyed his solidarity with immigrants “who are bearing the trauma and injustice of these tactics,” and assured them that “we join you in carrying this very difficult cross.”
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In Targeting Catholic Charities, Republicans Amplify Right-Wing Catholic Fringe
WASHINGTON (RNS) — On Capitol Hill, a handful of Republican lawmakers are threatening to reduce or eliminate funding for Catholic Charities and other faith-based groups who offer aid to immigrants at the Southern border.
The members of Congress, who are echoing the campaigns of deeply conservative Catholic groups that vow to “#defund the bishops,” have already succeeded in inserting their agenda into legislation passed by the House earlier this year. Another attempt to zero-out appropriations for a key Department of Homeland Security program supporting faith-based border efforts is awaiting a vote in Congress.
[Migrants reach through a border wall for clothing handed out by volunteers, as they wait between two border walls to apply for asylum, Friday, May 12, 2023, in San Diego. Hundreds of migrants remain waiting between the two walls, many for days. The U.S. entered a new immigration enforcement era Friday, ending a three-year-old asylum restriction and enacting a set of strict new rules that the Biden administration hopes will stabilize the U.S.-Mexico border and push migrants to apply for protections where they are, skipping the dangerous journey north. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
In December, Republican Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas, who serves on the House Judiciary Committee, penned a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. In the letter, co-signed by Reps. Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin and Jake Ellzey of Texas, the lawmakers complained that the Biden administration was “allowing non-governmental organizations … the freedom to aid and abet illegal aliens.” In addition, lawmakers also sent letters to Catholic Charities, Jewish Family Service and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service demanding they preserve documents “related to any expenditures submitted for reimbursement from the federal government related to migrants encountered at the southern border.”
Contacted by Religion News Service at the time, Anthony Granado, vice president of government relations at Catholic Charities USA, said, “We have not seen such a level of direct … attack against Catholic Charities USA.”
In May, when Gooden penned another letter to Mayorkas, this time with Rep. Tom McClintock of California and Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, they accused the NGOs that use federal funds to aid immigrants of creating an “incentive” for illegal immigration and demanded access to a broad swath of records about DHS funding practices.
Days later, Gooden published an open letter to House colleagues that accused NGOs, including faith-based groups, of abusing their tax-exempt status by “play(ing) a disturbing role in the inflow and spread of illegal immigration throughout the country.”
Gooden, who worships at a Church of Christ congregation, expressed particular frustration with FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program — which is transitioning to an effort titled the Shelter and Services Program — that reimburses NGOs and local governments for offering certain aid to migrants. He singled out a number of faith-based groups in his solo letter, such as Jewish Family Services and LIRS, but criticized Catholic Charities at length.
For his part, Tiffany recently called for Catholic Charities USA to testify before the Judiciary Committee to explain “what they’re doing down on the border to facilitate this illegal immigration,” according to Bloomberg Government.
In a phone interview last week, Lee Williams, chief programs officer for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, called the lawmakers’ allegations “preposterous” and “dangerous.” He also pointed out that LIRS aids immigrants after they are processed and released from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, work that is funded by private money.
Catholic Charities, for its part, receives ample government funds annually and operates as a network of local charities. In addition to anti-poverty programs, Catholic Charities also works with immigrants — including efforts to offer humanitarian aid to migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border.
It’s work that, not long ago, Republicans in Congress nearly uniformly praised. In 2014, amid a spike in border crossings by unaccompanied minors and mothers traveling with children, a delegation of Republican lawmakers led by talk-show host Glenn Beck visited a Catholic Charities respite center based in a church in McAllen, Texas. Sen. Ted Cruz, East Texas Rep. Randy Weber and then-Rep. Louie Gohmert, among others, toured the center and, in Beck’s case, donated toys to children.
“I want to thank Catholic Charities that are working to care for these children and care for these families,” Cruz told reporters at the time.
Weber was similarly effusive, quoting Scripture while describing the center’s work as a fulfillment of “the church’s role.”
Mistrust of faith groups that work with immigrants, but in particular Catholic Charities, has been growing in right-wing circles since at least February 2022, when CatholicVote, a conservative political group, sued the Biden administration in an effort to acquire copies of “all communications between the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol” and various Catholic bishops and Catholic Charities entities — including the respite center in McAllen.
The antipathy for Catholic Charities came up again last summer, when Michael Voris, founder of the conservative Catholic website Church Militant, interviewed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a self-described Christian nationalist and former Catholic who converted to evangelicalism. Voris, whose organization has referred to Catholic Charities as an “enemy of the people,” complained to Greene about the American bishops supporting immigrant aid through religious agencies such as Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities. Greene responded by framing the work as “Satan controlling the church.”
Most recently, in Washington on Thursday (July 20), members of the Deposit of Faith Coalition, a group of activists who object to the direction the U.S. Catholic bishops are taking and accuse them of “standing with Marxists,” called on Congress — and particularly appropriations committees — to stop granting contracts to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities.
Addressing the crowd from a podium at the National Press Club that read “#DefundtheBishops,” Sheena Rodriguez, head of Alliance for a Safe Texas, insisted that Catholic Charities was one constellation of groups “incentiviz(ing) mass illegal migration worldwide” and “creating a modern-day slavery scheme.”
The gathering attracted only a small crowd, but their ideas have gained a footing on Capitol Hill. In April, Rodriguez was invited to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on border security, arguing that unaccompanied minors at the border were being mistreated under the Biden administration.
After her testimony, Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat,
that Rodriguez was among the crowd that surrounded the U.S. Capitol when rioters attacked the building on Jan. 6, 2021, although there is no evidence Rodriguez entered the building that day. She had also taken part in the Christian nationalism-themed Jericho March at the Capitol the day before.
The movement to defund Catholic agencies also found its way into the GOP’s signature border security bill passed in May, known as the Secure the Border Act. It included a provision that would cut all funding to the Shelter Services Program.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposed the Secure the Border Act for multiple reasons, including how it treats DHS funding streams to NGOs. The bishops sent a letter to lawmakers urging them to vote against it. Sister Donna Markham, a Catholic nun who oversees Catholic Charities USA, also wrote a letter to congressional leadership at the time decrying the proposed cuts, saying they would “dismantle the public-private infrastructure currently in place to manage the humanitarian crisis at the southern border and its impact throughout the country.”
The bill passed the House largely along party lines, with Gooden, Tiffany and Weber all voting in favor.
The bill has little chance of passing the U.S. Senate, where Democrats enjoy a majority, but Gooden’s movement persists: Last month the House Appropriations Committee unveiled a DHS appropriations bill, which, like the border bill, eliminates funding for the Shelter and Services Program.
Markham said in a statement to RNS that the work of respite centers along the U.S.-Mexico border should be uncontroversial and invited members of Congress to tour their facilities.
“This work is humanitarian and motivated by the teachings of the gospels; it is not political, and it should not be controversial,” Markham’s statement read.
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/christian-nationalism-2657874677/
spike rosary sales xian nat'l
congress
ref no twt
http://churchandstate.org.uk/2019/03/opus-deis-influence-on-the-u-s-judiciary/
"leonard Leo can take credit for installing four Supreme Court justices” – John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. “As executive vice president of the Federalist Society, Leo has been the quiet architect of a pivotal shift to the right throughout the federal judiciary” including “dozens of lower court federal judges across the country.”
It was Leo who prepared Trump’s “list of judges and the people that he’s put on the bench.”
Leo is on the board of directors of Opus Dei’s Catholic Information Center located at 15th and K Street, two blocks from the White House. The Center is “a rallying point for ultra-conservative Catholics eager for a voice in the secular halls of government power” and “advances a hard-right political agenda,” according to Church and State, Americans United for Separation of Church and State’s magazine.
Other members of the Catholic Information Center’s Board of Directors include:
- Pat Cipollone – Trump’s White House counsel, the president’s principal legal adviser. Cipollone is a partner in Stein Mitchell Cipollone Beato and Missner LLP.
- Gerry Mitchell – another partner inStein Mitchell Cipollone Beato and Missner. Their attorneys have “unparalleled expertise” in the federal courts and “before the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice” according to the firm’s website.
- Brian Svoboda – partner inPerkins Coie. The firm’s “Areas of Focus” include “Political Parties, Campaigns and Committees; Corporate Political Activity and Campaign Finance Compliance.” Its attorneys are admitted to the “Bar and Court” of the “District of Columbia, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.”
- Thomas Yannucci – partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP, Brett Kavanaugh’s former law firm. Yannuci “has acted as trial and appellate counsel” in suits involving “the DOJ, FDA, EPA, FTC, SEC, ITC, FEC, CIA, NLRB” and RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act).
- Cindy Searcy – another vice president of the Federalist Society. The Federalist Society is a “hugely powerful, nationwide organization of conservative lawyers” instrumental in developing candidates for federal judicial roles.
Opus Dei
Opus Dei is a secret society and an official arm of the Catholic Church. Its roots are in fascist Spain.
In 1982, Pope John Paul II designated the group as a “personal prelature,” that is, they are under the sole jurisdiction of the pope and no other prelate. Its website states, “Opus Dei’s mission is to spread the Christian message that every person is called to holiness and that every honest work can be sanctified.” As of 2017 there are 92,892 lay members and 2,212 priests worldwide.
Non-Catholics are welcomed as “cooperators” who “assist the educational and social undertakings promoted by the Prelature.” Priests not ordained into Opus Dei can be a member of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, “intrinsically united to the Prelature.”
Only the identities of Opus Dei priests are public. Members of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross and all lay members’ and cooperators’ names are secret unless self-disclosed, such as being openly affiliated with the Catholic Information Center.
At the top:
“Opus Dei is an efficient machine run to achieve worldly power,” wrote investigative reporter Penny Lernoux in her book, People of God.
“Opus Dei pursues the Vatican’s agenda through the presence of its members in secular governments and institutions and through a vast array of academic, medical, and grassroots pursuits. Its constant effort [is] to increase its presence in civil institutions of power. [T]heir work in the public sphere breaches the church-state division that is fundamental to modern democracy,” noted Gordon Urquhart, author of The Pope’s Armada: Unlocking the Secrets of Mysterious and Powerful New Sects in the Church(1995).
“Opus Dei uses the Catholic Church for its own ends which are money and power …. Its members form a transnational elite. They seek to colonize the summits of power. They work with stealth – ‘holy discretion’ – and practice ‘divine deception,’” declared Robert Hutchison in the introduction to his book, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei.
“Opus Dei is mostly middle- and upper-class businessmen, professionals, military personnel and government officials. Its members control a large number of banks and financial institutions,” according to Martin A. Lee, author and activist who has written books and articles on far-right movements.
For example, Opus Dei also operates the Leonine Forum, “Cultivating Catholic Professionals for Lives of Virtuous Leadership.”
Among the 2017-2018 New York City Fellows are those employed in Wall Street brokerages, law firms, leading publications, universities, medicine, industry and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of N.Y.
The 2017-2018 Washington D.C. Fellows include those employed in the federal government: White House, State Department, the House of Representatives, U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Dept. of Justice, Federal Communications Commission, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, prestigious law firms, conservative think tanks, higher education and medicine.
As an example of “military personnel,” veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh “claimed that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Vice Admiral William McRaven and others in the JSOC were members of the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei.” JSOC is “the elite Special Ops force” who killed Osama bin Laden. “We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals … This is not an atypical attitude among some military — it’s a crusade, literally,” Hersh reported. “He added that members of these societies have developed a secret set of insignias that represent ‘the whole notion that this is a culture war’ between religions.”
In government, Larry Kudlow is Trump’s director of the National Economic Council. Plutocracy is “just what America needs,” Kudlow wrote in December 2016. “Putting the incredibly wealthy in charge of the U.S. government” is described as Kudlow’s great idea.
Kudlow is one of Fr. John McCloskey’s notable converts to Catholicism. McCloskey was director of Catholic Information Center from 1998-2002.
Another McCloskey convert is former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, now Trump’s Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.
Mick Mulvaney will serve as Trump’s acting White House Chief of Staff, beginning in 2019. He remains as director of Trump’s White House Office of Management and Budget and interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mulvaney “has reportedly met with a long list of lobbyists, corporate executives and wealthy people with business interests before the government.” His meeting with Opus Dei’s Jeff Bell, architect of Reaganomics, covered “religious and political matters.”
Trump appointed C-Fam (formerly known as the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute), the “intensely anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ group” headed by Opus Dei’s Austin Ruse, to the U.S. delegation to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
As to members who “control a large number of banks and financial institutions,” Pope Francis has appointed many of them to the Vatican.
Secrecy prevents certainty
Due to Opus Dei’s secrecy, we can only guess about non-disclosed membership. Some have done so anyway.
“It’s widely known that Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas belong to Opus Dei – and that Chief Justice John Roberts may also be a member,”stated Matthew Fox, a former priest, progressive theologian and author of more than 23 books.
Others have also identified Scalia as a member, perhaps because his wife attended Catholic Information Center events and his son has spoken there.
Scalia’s influence, however, is not in doubt. The Federal Society “really grew up as a organization that promoted Antonin Scalia’s conservative judicial philosophy.” On Nov. 10, Trump awarded Scalia the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the U.S., for his “especially meritorious contribution” to this country.
Alito has been also been described as to close to Opus Dei by Church and State Magazine.
Some are linked by association. “Leo has been a longtime friend and champion of Justice :{Clarence Th:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}:omas.”
When John Roberts was nominated for the Court, Opus Dei’s Austin Ruse said his fellow conservative Catholics could “breathe easy” and Leonard Leo “also assured conservative Catholics that Roberts will not follow the same path as Anthony Kennedy.”
“Leo, perhaps the most integral private individual in the selection of Kavanaugh” was present at the White House ceremony when Trump announced Kavanaugh’s nomination. Kavanaugh’s legal thinking is “shaped by Scalia.”
Gorsuch, was raised Catholic, went to the same elite Catholic prep school as Kavanaugh, but is now Episcopalian. He did his doctoral study on “natural law,” a theory asserting that certain rights are inherent by virtue of human nature that can be understood universally through human reason, first taught by the Catholic monk, St. Thomas Aquinas. On Oct. 19, Gorsuch spoke “at a conference of Catholic legal scholars seeking to expand Christian influence on public policy” which was closed to the public.
During his time at the U.S. Court of Appeals Tenth Circuit, Gorsuch took a “strong stance” for “religious freedom” in the Little Sisters of the Poor case. He also concurred in the Hobby Lobby case in favor of the Green family.
Pope Francis met with the Little Sisters of the Poor while in the U.S. in support of their lawsuit. The year before, the pope granted a private audience to Hobby Lobby’s Green family, asking them “how their Supreme Court fight against President Obama’s contraception mandate was progressing.” They won.
The nuns’ lawsuit was against the Obamacare provision that those seeking the same religious exemption to providing contraceptive health care coverage to their employees as “houses of worship” must fill out a two-page form explaining why. The nuns’ argued that filling out the forms “makes them complicit in providing women with contraception.”
This became a cause célèbre for conservative Catholics and may well have tipped the Electoral College total in favor of Trump.
In September 2016, Trump promised that “If I am elected president, [t]he Little Sisters of the Poor, or any religious order for that matter, will always have their ‘religious liberty’ protected on my watch and will not have to face bullying from the government because of their religious beliefs.”
In October, Trump sent a letter to the Catholic Leadership Conference: “I will make absolutely certain religious orders like the Little Sisters of Poor are not bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs.”
In the final days of the campaign, Trump gave an interview on the Catholic EWTN, “the largest religious media networkin the world.” Trump again sympathized with the Little Sisters of the Poor. “Religious liberty” was in “tremendous trouble” and “the biggest issue right now is the Supreme Court judges,” he said.
Trump won all the rural and Southern Evangelical-majority states, as expected. But, “his victory in the Electoral College came down to a razor-thin edge of only 77,744 votes across three states: Pennsylvania (44,292 votes), Wisconsin (22,748 votes), and Michigan (10,704 votes). These votes represent a Trump margin of 0.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 0.7 percentage points in Wisconsin, and 0.2 percentage points in Michigan.”
There are more Catholics than Evangelicals in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. While there are more Evangelicals in Michigan than Catholics (25% v 18%), the Evangelical vote alone wasn’t sufficient to give Trump a win.
Trump won60% of white Catholics while receiving only 46% of the national popular vote. As public opinion seesawed during 2016 campaign, every poll that included the respondent’s religion showed Catholics choosing Trump at percentages higher than the general electorate. (See also here, here and here.)
“Both white and Latino Catholics cast more ballots for Trump than for Romney in 2012.” Evangelicals “went overwhelmingly for Trump, but that was also true in 2012 when they weren’t even sure Romney was Christian. They aren’t the swing voters. Catholics, on the other hand, were plus-2 for Obama in 2012 and plus-7 for Trump.”
Now the Justice Department, too
Last week, Trump nominated William Barr as Attorney General. Described as a “committed Catholic,” Barr was “highly recommended” for the position by Leonard Leo. As a former U.S. attorney general, Barr “will enter the Justice Department with an awful lot of credibility and respect for the role he previously played,” Leo said.
Trump’s choice of Barr has been widely criticized.
Barr has publicly defended Trump on several of his pet issues. He endorsed the firing of James Comey, called for investigation of the Clinton Foundation, impugned the neutrality of Robert Mueller’s investigators, and defended Trump’s practice of demanding investigations of his enemies. Barr has a record as one of the members of the Republican legal Establishment most indulgent of Trump’s conspiratorial mafia ethos.
But a new report in the Wall Street Journal suggests more complete answer. Earlier this year, Barr wrote a lengthy memo excoriating Mueller’s investigation of Trump for obstruction of justice. Mueller’s investigation was “grossly irresponsible,” had “potentially disastrous implications,” and other choice descriptions spread over 20 pages culled from public reports. This memo was completely unsolicited.
It was reported on Oct. 18 that for the first time ever, the U.S. Department of Justiceopened an investigation into clerical sex abuse of minors. Seven of the eight Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania received subpoenas and the U.S. attorney in Buffalo, NY, also served the diocese there. Until now, only state officials have conducted such probes. Washington D.C. and 19 states have also begun new investigations.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia “issued subpoenas that seek years of internal records, including any evidence of Church personnel taking children across state lines for purposes of sexual abuse, any evidence of personnel sending sexual material about children electronically and any evidence that Church officials reassigned suspected predators or used Church resources to further or conceal such conduct. Any of these could be the underlying crimes for RICO,” the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act originally designed to target the Mafia.
As journalist Patricia Miller noted, any federal investigation “could be impeded by higher-ups in the Justice Department.”
So with five Supreme Court justices, the Attorney General, and who knows how many other officials installed by Leonard Leo, we have much to worry about.
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Betty Clermont is author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America (Clarity Press, 2009).
===
The interview is just jaw-dropping start to finish, and is an incredible artifact of a completely different era. Ginni’s theory on what happened with Anita Hill was that she was infatuated with Clarence, upset by getting the brush-off, and made up the accusations wholesale as revenge. As Ginni put it:
“My case was also different from Hill’s because what she did was so obviously political, as opposed to trying to resolve the problem. And what’s scary about her allegations is that they remind me of the movie Fatal Attraction or, in her case, what I call the fatal assistant. In my heart, I always believed she was probably someone in love with my husband and never got what she wanted.”
Jesus Christ. It gets worse:
“As for Anita Hill’s charges, I have my theories, but I don’t have evidence. I believe the charges were politically motivated. You can tell because of the timing. We were hit with all these charges, but they didn’t get him...What hurts most in all this is that there are people out there who still might believe Anita Hill. My only prayer is that the truth comes out as fast as possible. I think Anita Hill was used in the sense that she never wanted her story to be public. She wanted to be one of the shadow people.”
Ginni also explained how she was once sexually harassed at work but reported it right away like a Good Believable Woman would do, and how she appreciated the support her husband got from the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee [note to self - look up who the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee was in 1991, he really ended up on the wrong side of this one and I’m sure he’s out of politics forever now, might be fun to include in essay?]. There was also a lot of insight into her faith life in this piece: she and her husband prayed regularly together and with their friends to get through this ordeal, and devout Catholic Clarence viewed the confirmation hearings as “spiritual warfare. Good versus evil. We were fighting something we didn’t understand, and we needed prayerful people in our lives. We needed God”.Ginni was not Catholic at this point - that wouldn’t happen until 2002, with some encouragement from the Scalia family as well as her husband - but I can certainly understand how a woman who believes her husband is being smeared on a national stage would grow closer to him, and grow in her faith with him, and eventually convert to his faith. At the end of the interview, Ginni expressed her hope that “we have set a new low, that Americans in their outrage can say, “No, there is a level at which it is disgusting, horrible and wrong.” Based on the last Supreme Court confirmation hearing I saw, we hadn’t set a new low in 1991 after all, but it was sure nice to think that we had.
I’m going to write one of the sentences from the People interview again and put it in bold type because of how completely insane it is:“What hurts most in all this is that there are people out there who still might believe Anita Hill.” Reading it in 2020 is mind-blowing, but I suppose 1991, a year which I can literally remember from my childhood, was a different era in how we treated women. As it turns out, 2010 was also a different era, because in their coverage of Ginni’s infamous voicemail followup to Anita Hill, the Postincluded this lede: “It is one of Washington's enduring mysteries. Nearly two decades after Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his fractious Supreme Court confirmation hearing, it remains unclear who was lying.” And as bonkers as that would be to write in 2010, and then it somehow got topped in 2016 by the National Catholic Register, writing a profile of Thomas in which the author took issue with the fact that everyone seemed to end up on Anita Hill’s side, even the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture, which, in the Register’s opinion, didn’t do enough to highlight Thomas’ trailblazing history as an African-American justice working hard to undo civil rights protections, and did too much to highlight that whiny law professor:
“Thomas would describe the attack on his reputation as a “high-tech lynching.” And while Hill failed to convince the Senate of the veracity of her claims, the allegations have continued to cast a shadow over Thomas’ legacy. Exhibit A is the Smithsonian museum’s depiction of Anita Hill as a trailblazer for women who encountered sexual harassment in the workplace. And earlier this year, HBO released Confirmation, a film that also took Hill’s side.”
Look, the Register is owned by EWTN, which is the right-wing Catholic media conglomerate where the higher-ups show up to cheerlead at Trump rallies (they’re currently pushing hydroxycholoroquine!). I would absolutely expect them to be fans of a conservative, Catholic, anti-abortion justice like Thomas, I would expect them not to believe Anita Hill, I just hope their profile of Clarence Thomas didn’t go way overboard in terms of fulsome praise oh come the fuck on:
As you’d expect, the Registerprofile focuses on Clarence Thomas’ faith life, including his upbringing with his Catholic grandfather, his brief time in seminary, and the clear influence of Catholicism on his jurisprudence. But it also touches upon the growth in his and Ginni’s faith life during the confirmation hearings, and how Ginni was always ride-or-die from day one, as ““We knew before we went in that the left would galvanize and throw everything at him,” Ginni Thomas, the justice’s wife, told the Register, as she recalled the devastating impact of the accusations andthe time she and her husband spent seeking solace in prayer and scriptural reading.”
Being ride-or-die from day one is something I can understand, but why the fuck was she ride-or-die on day six thousand, nine hundred thirty-five? Why did she call Anita Hill, umprompted, nineteen fucking years after the hearings ended to complain to her? Well, there was a lot of speculation about this when it actually happened, because it really did come out of nowhere. The Daily Beastcalled out that “The Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American journalist Karen Hunter, appearing on MSNBC, theorized that Ginni was in an Ambien stupor. Gawker[RIP] wondered if she was drunk. Even members of Ginni’s family appear to be somewhat perturbed that she chose to raise her husband’s turbulent 1991 confirmation hearing again.”
Obviously, I had to look up the Gawker piece, and here are some highlights:
“Virginia Thomas, who, besides being the wife of the biggest jerkoff on the Supreme Court, is a Tea Party activist, must have been having a weird Saturday morning on October 9!...Hill (who, full disclosure, was totally fucking right) was pilloried by the right-wing and treated terribly by, among others, Senator Arlen Specter, at that point a Republican; Thomas was confirmed 52-48, and now it is One Of Those Things We Don't Talk About At The Dinner Table, like Religion and Money and Aunt Nicole's Accident...Hill, who is a law professor at Brandeis, mulled over the weird message for a week and turned the phone over to the campus police.”
Good for Hill. Thomas, for her part, maintained that she was phoning with nothing but good intentions, saying in a statement that “I did place a call to Ms. Hill at her office extending an olive branch to her after all these years, in hopes that we could ultimately get past what happened so long ago. That offer still stands. I would be very happy to meet and talk with her if she would be willing to do the same. Certainly no offense was ever intended.” The content of the voicemail, in which she accuses Hill of smearing her husband and directly asks for an apology, kind of undercuts this statement and makes it sound like Thomas was just being an asshole for no reason. Unless, as the Daily Beast suggested, she might have actually had a reason:
“The timing of the phone call did seem strange to some. The morning Ginni “reached across the airwaves,” the Times ran an article about her growing public role at Liberty Central, where she works to oppose the leftist “tyranny” of Obama and leftist Democrats in congress. It raised issues about where “large, unidentified contributions” were coming from and pointed out that it could lead to recusal issues for her husband on the Supreme Court. Was Ginni orchestrating a publicity campaign and using Hill as a ruse to galvanize her own base, some wondered.”
Some wondered. We should probably talk about Liberty Central....
goths substack
https://theconversation.com/caring-for-the-environment-has-a-long-catholic-lineage-hundreds-of-years-before-pope-francis-168698
https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/denied-communion/
NM dem
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/catholic-church/
#1 covid PPP$? 3b$?
no accident given paleo-c working for trump, biden acb:
1020 fake newspapers mostly delaware:
....Franklin Archer, a fictitious name for Iowa-incorporated DirecTech LLC, “brings coverage to underreported areas of American life,” according to its website. It has two networks: the “Metro Business Daily Network” and the “Local News Network.” As reported by*:{The Guardian:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;list-style:none"):}:*, the CEO of Franklin Archer is Timpone’s brother, Michael Timpone. On the corporate front, the relationship between Metric Media LLC and Franklin Archer remains unclear, but they appear to share not only technology resources and authors, but also the publications themselves. To wit, as can be seen below in Figure 4: at the time of writing, the Arizona Business Daily is owned by Franklin Archer, according to Facebook, and the Michigan Business Daily by Metric Media LLC. The New Jersey Business Daily has no confirmed page owner.
[pix]
2020, a third network was added to the Franklin Archer portfolio, although it is not mentioned on its website: the American Catholic Tribune Media Network, which includes five state-specific publications (in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Florida, and Arizona) and one national one (the American Catholic Tribune). These sites relay information about parishes and churches, including updates on how various churches intend to conduct Mass every week. Earlier this year, the sites mentioned they are “a product of Franklin Archer,” but that disclaimer no longer exists. Their Facebook pages, however, state they are owned by Franklin Archer.
These sites follow the exact same model as all the other sites in the extended network: rewrite original reporting from existing sources, including diocesan newspapers, repurpose announcements (including Mass timings and homilies) published by various churches under the guise of “press release submissions,” and sprinkle on some original reporting.
:{Yet another new product of Franklin Archer is the Freedom Media Network, which hosts podcasts and a YouTube channel with just under a thousand subscribers. The channel is described as “your source for positive news and content aimed at helping you become more purposeful, productive, and prosperous.” One of the podcasts, Freedom Mindset Radio, is rife with anti-science positions,}
:{the suggestion that getting a diagnosis is dangerous, as “they’re labeling a bag of symptoms.” The YouTube videos started being uploaded in January, and the website went live in March. ...}:
Meet the Press hosted NBC News contributor and right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt this morning. Host Chuck Todd did not disclose that Hewitt has a financial tie to President Donald Trump: Last month, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee rented Hewitt's newsletter to raise money twice last month.
Hewitt is a pro-Trump hack who recently tweeted that “every Catholic, indeed every person of any faith, has to realize the left despises them and that the Democrats shelter this virulent bigotry and pretend it’s something else” (Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is Catholic). Hewitt also regularly turns over his radio program to guest host and unhinged bigot Kurt Schlichter.
an 920
Bishop John Stowe, the Kentucky Catholic and blistering Trump critic who called the president 'anti-life'
beware anec but sorta renta-tom ~ biden faith?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-loving-catholic-priest-goes-ballistic-after-biden-harris-news-ranting-about-bloodshed-and-new-terrorists/
very pro-Trump Catholic priest went ballistic after the first joint public appearance of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Wednesday afternoon, attacking Americans showing support for a Biden-Harris landslide.
“Those tweeting #BidenHarris2020Landslide with a desire for it are seeking a landslide of – bloodshed of #unborn babies – persecution of the church – economic debt – criminals in our neighborhoods – new terrorists in the world – taxes,” wrote Father Frank Pavone. “And they don’t have the integrity to face it.”...
same crowd as the "Hillary landslide" folks of 2016? Are these also the same people running the killing centers across America, dismembering children, and ushering the violent criminals across the border?....
see knights of col and malta
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/archives-on-controversial-war-time-pope-pius-xii-set-to-open/
OMG
gee, i was just wondering about paleo-cath
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-seeds-of-theocratic-authoritarianism-are-being-planted/
no lnx
The seeds of Theocratic Authoritarianism are being planted
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly December 31, 2019
Since it became obvious that Attorney General William Barr manipulated the release of the Mueller report in an attempt to exonerate Donald Trump, people have been asking the questions posed recently by Katherine Stewart and Caroline Fredrickson.
Why would a seemingly respectable, semiretired lion of the Washington establishment undermine the institutions he is sworn to uphold, incinerate his own reputation, and appear to willfully misrepresent the reports of special prosecutors and inspectors general, all to defend one of the most lawless and corrupt presidents in American history? And why has this particular attorney general appeared at this pivotal moment in our Republic?
Initially we heard a lot about Barr being part of a group of Republicans who are dedicated to the concept of a “unitary executive.” That was affirmed by the attorney general’s recent speech to the Federalist Society. It was, however, Barr’s speech at Notre Dame that led many of us to look at little deeper into what motivates this attorney general. He blamed “secularists” for moral chaos and posited that “free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.” Stewart and Fredrickson point out that these views are foundational for Barr.
This form of “religious liberty” is not a mere side issue for Mr. Barr, or for the other religious nationalists who have come to dominate the Republican Party. Mr. Barr has made this clear. All the problems of modernity — “the wreckage of the family,” “record levels of depression and mental illness,” “drug addiction” and “senseless violence” — stem from the loss of a strict interpretation of the Christian religion.
As Joan Walsh recently pointed out, a look atBarr’s history demonstrates that he has been “neck-deep in extremist Catholic institutions.” One of the more interesting is the Catholic Information Center.
As recently as 2017, he was on the board of directors of the DC-based Catholic Information Center, led by the ultraright and secretive group Opus Dei. He’s not alone in being tied to that center. Its board includes the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone is a former board member.“The small center—its members and its leaders—continue to have an outsize impact on policy and politics,” The Washington Post wrote this year.
Larry Kudlow is another fan of the center. Its longtime president, Father John McCloskey, converted Kudlow from Judaism when he was struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. “I’d like to unleash him on Capitol Hill,” Kudlow told The Washington Times in 2001. “A few doses of Father McCloskey, and we’ll turn this country around. In some ways, the Catholic Church has fallen short in its evangelizing mission, and I think Father John is awakening that.” McCloskey also baptized modern ultraright stalwarts like former Kansas senator Sam Brownback and über–GOP fixer Newt Gingrich, whose wife is now the ambassador to the Vatican. (I kid you not.)
McCloskey left the center in 2003 after two credible allegations of abusing women who went to him for pastoral advice, and the center settled at least one of the complaints for almost a million dollars.
Reading the Washington Post article Walsh linked to about the Catholic Information Center, it became clear that this group appears to be the Catholic version of the Protestant group Jeff Sharlet wrote about in his book, “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” It is especially worth noting that the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo serves on the board of the Catholic Information Center. He is the person featured in a Washington Post report by Robert O’Harrow and Shawn Boberg titled “A conservative activist’s behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation’s courts.” All of those extremist judges being nominated by Trump and rushed through confirmation by McConnell are being fed into the system by Leonard Leo, who joins Barr in being affiliated with an extremist Catholic organization.
All of this is why Stewart and Fredrickson point out that Barr’s interpretation of executive power is an “effect, rather than a cause, of his ideological commitments.”
Mr. Barr’s constitutional interpretation is simply window dressing on his commitment to religious authoritarianism….America’s conservative movement, having morphed into a religious nationalist movement, is on a collision course with the American constitutional system. Though conservatives have long claimed to be the true champions of the Constitution…the movement that now controls the Republican Party is committed to a suite of ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the Republic that the founders created under its auspices…
Mr. Barr did not emerge in order to serve this one particular leader. On the contrary, Mr. Trump serves a movement that will cynically praise the Constitution in order to destroy it, and of which Mr. Barr has made himself a hero.
With adherents like Attorney General William Barr, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, this movement is more than simply theoretical. For example:
[T]he President has a growing number of supporters who understand opposition to abortion and immigration as intertwined—as means of preserving a white, Christian America. And the Trump Administration is taking concrete steps to encourage this ideational fusion.
Consider the events of last week. The Trump Administration dispatched officials to the International Conference on Family Policy. There, Trump officials laudedHungary’s “procreation, not immigration” policies, which oppose refugees and immigration and instead subsidize traditional, nuclear Hungarian families to have more children. These policies coincided with a new Hungarian constitution, which protects fetal life from the moment of conception.
Joe Grogan, an assistant to the president and director of the Domestic Policy Council, praised Hungary for the “courage and creativity” of these policies and said the Trump Administration was “inspired” and came “in support and solidarity.” He took the occasion of celebrating Hungary’s fertility-boosting programs to affirm the Administration’s opposition to abortion.
Hungary’s “procreation, not immigration” policies have their roots in “replacement theory.” This doctrine holds that white women are not producing enough babies and Christian, western civilizations will be “replaced” through the twin forces of falling birth rates and increasing immigration.
Back in March, Trump’s HHS provided $5.1 million Title X family-planning funds to an organization called Obria, which aims to be a pro-life alternative to Planned Parenthood.
In 2015, Obria’s founder and current chief executive explained, “When [Europe’s] nations accepted contraception and abortion, they stopped replacing their population. Christianity began to die out. And, with Europeans having no children, immigrant Muslims came in to replace them, and now the culture of Europe is changing.” She warned that America is “on the same track as Europe” and that “[i]n only two of the past 40 years have we replaced our population.” WHITE GENOCIDE
Anyone familiar with Margret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale understands that this is what happens when democracy is replaced bytheocratic authoritarianism. It is a marriage of white nationalism, Christian nationalism, and misogyny. That is where the current conservative movement is headed in this country.
Nancy LeTourneau is a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly. Follow her on Twitter @Smartypants60.
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good
EarthBeat, the National Catholic Reporter’s new solutions-focused e-publication, is asking readers for brief accounts of how they began changing their lives and their communities in response to climate and environmental problems. There are already nine of these “Small Earth Stories,” on the site, from a Massachusetts community working to zero out single-use plastics, to local food advocates producing “The Farm Fresh Atlas of Northern Wisconsin.”
It may not sound like much in the face of the Trump administration’s focus on fundamentally dismantling environmental protections. But there’s an argument to be made that what’s needed in response, at least as much as a 2020 rejection of Trump and his Congressional allies at the voting booth, is to work for sustained and sustainable community-level changes that can then percolate upwards.
Dr. Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, makes that argument in a recent New York Times essay that includes real-world examples. “Just amassing resources [to shift national opinion or express resistance], in other words, is no better than flipping a coin,” Han writes. “Instead, people’s power depends not on what they have, but how they use what they have. To build power, outrage needs organization.”
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cooch jesuit HS called out by ex maryland gov 1119
Martin O’Malley talks confronting Trump official on immigration: Silence is ‘irresponsible’ Martin O’Malley — the former Maryland governor and presidential candidate who… |
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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/06/27/anti-abortion-ad-aired-democratic-debate-was-fueled-right-wing-media-talking-points/224077
no lnx
Anti-abortion ad aired before Democratic debate was fueled by right-wing media talking points
Blog ››› June 27, 2019 5:12 PM EDT ››› JULIE TULBERT
507
Melissa Joskow / Media Matters
MSNBC aired an ad from the anti-choice group March for Life Action before the first Democratic presidential debate that repeated inaccurate right-wing media talking points about abortion, alleging Democratic candidates are “extreme” for supporting abortion access. In reality, the ad cited polling data that was not only commissioned by an anti-abortion group, but that has also been soundly criticized by other polling experts as misleading.
March for Life Action, the political arm of the anti-abortion group March for Life, ran a “six-figure ad-buy” starting on June 26 to promote a common right-wing media talking point that “the American pro-life consensus, and even the pro-life consensus among Democrats, contrasts sharply with the official position of every Democratic candidate involved in the debate.” In the ad, March for Life Action relied on February polling from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion commissioned by the anti-abortion group Knights of Columbus to claim that “8 in 10 Americans agree abortion should have” legal restrictions and that “6 in 10 pro-choice Americans support limiting [abortion] to at most the first trimester.”
These anti-abortion talking points match the messaging strategy being deployed by right-wing media and prominent conservatives ahead of the 2020 election to paint Democrats and those who support abortion rights as “extreme” and out of touch with voters -- despite considerable evidence showing support for affirmative abortion polices. Right-wing media and other outlets have cited polling commissioned by Knights of Columbus in the past to criticize or draw attention to the Democratic Party’s stance on abortion. The March for Life Action ad also received substantial right-wing media attention, with Fox News host Laura Ingraham airing excerpts from the ad and interviewing March for Life President Jeanne Mancini during a segment with this chyron:
Knights of Columbus has previously faced significant pushback on the claims made by their abortion-related polling due to the explicit anti-choice stance of the organization -- something that is often reflected in the framing of their polling questions. In particular, the February poll garnered criticism from pollsters and data analysts who pointed to the ideological bent of the Knights of Columbus, the relative stability of voters’ views on abortion, and the fact that the findings of the February poll in particular seemed to be an outlier when compared to similar assessments.
Despite general attitudes about abortion legality remaining relatively stable from poll to poll, critics have argued that the results of abortion-related polling are highly dependent on the language used in framing or asking the questions. For example, polling firm PerryUndem replicated a question asked in the February Knights of Columbus poll to demonstrate the impact that question framing can have on results. When initially using the Knights of Columbus language, PerryUndem’s results showed a similar level of support for abortion restrictions. However, when “asked a follow up to clarify” if “voters want lawmakers to pass new laws that reflect their responses” on the legality of abortion, the firm found that “a majority of voters (68%) think it’s better if lawmakers stay out of the issue” -- contradicting the Knights of Columbus results and the explanations of the data's meaning by right-wing media.
It’s not surprising that March for Life Action would run an anti-abortion ad, or that the group would want to target Democratic debate viewers. But those viewers should know that the data behind this poll -- and the widespread deployment of its findings by right-wing media -- are part of a larger effort by abortion opponents to inaccurately suggest that support for abortion access is “extreme” when there is substantial evidence to the contrary.
Posted In
Justice & Civil Liberties, Reproductive Rights
Network/Outlet
Fox News
Person
Laura Ingraham
Show/Publication
The Ingraham Angle
Stories/Interests
Abortion, 2020 Election, Polling
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/noam-chomsky-democrats-may-have-handed-trump-the-2020-election/
As Attorney General William Barr releases Robert Mueller’s long-anticipated report into Russian interference in the 2016 election, we speak with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky about what he sees as the political perils of “Russiagate.”
AMY GOODMAN: Can you share your analysis of President Trump? You have lived through so many presidents. Explain President Trump to us and assess the massive response to him.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, Trump is—you know, I think there are a number of illusions about Trump. If you take a look at the Trump phenomenon, it’s not very surprising. Think back for the last 10 or 15 years over Republican Party primaries, and remember what happened during the primaries. Each primary, when some candidate rose from the base, they were so outlandish that the Republican establishment tried to crush them and succeeded in doing it—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum. Anyone who was coming out of the base was totally unacceptable to the establishment. The change in 2016 is they couldn’t crush him.
But the interesting question is: Why was this happening?Why, in election after election, was the voting base producing a candidate utterly intolerable to the establishment? And the answer to that is—if you think about that, the answer is not very hard to discover. During the—since the 1970s, during this neoliberal period, both of the political parties have shifted to the right. The Democrats, by the 1970s, had pretty much abandoned the working class. I mean, the last gasp of more or less progressive Democratic Party legislative proposals was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978, which Carter watered down so that it had no teeth, just became voluntary. But the Democrats had pretty much abandoned the working class.They became pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. Meanwhile, the Republicans shifted so far to the right that they went completely off the spectrum. Two of the leading political analysts of the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann, Norman Ornstein, about five or 10 years ago, described the Republican Party as what they called a “radical insurgency” that has abandoned parliamentary politics.
Well, why did that happen? It happened because the Republicans face a difficult problem. They have a primary constituency, a real constituency: extreme wealth and corporate power. That’s who they have to serve. That’s their constituency. You can’t get votes that way, so you have to do something else to get votes. What do you do to get votes? This was begun by Richard Nixon with the Southern strategy: try to pick up racists in the South. The mid-1970s, Paul Weyrich, one of the Republican strategists, hit on a brilliant idea. Northern _{Catholics }_voted Democratic, tended to vote Democratic, a lot of them working-class. The Republicans could pick up that vote by pretending—crucially, “pretending”—to be opposed to abortion. By the same pretense, they could pick up the evangelical vote. Those are big votes—evangelicals, northern Catholics. Notice the word “pretense.” It’s crucial. You go back to the 1960s, every leading Republican figure was strongly, what we call now, pro-choice. The Republican Party position was—that’s Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, all the leadership—their position was: Abortion is not the government’s business; it’s private business—government has nothing to say about it. They turned almost on a dime in order to try to pick up a voting base on what are called cultural issues. Same with gun rights. Gun rights become a matter of holy writ because you can pick up part of the population that way. In fact, what they’ve done is put together a coalition of voters based on issues that are basically, you know, tolerable to the establishment, but they don’t like it. OK? And they’ve got to hold that, those two constituencies, together. The real constituency of wealth and corporate power, they’re taken care of by the actual legislation.
So, if you look at the legislation under Trump, it’s just lavish gifts to the wealth and the corporate sector—the tax bill, the deregulation, you know, every case in point. That’s kind of the job of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, those guys. They serve the real constituency.Meanwhile, Trump has to maintain the voting constituency, with one outrageous position after another that appeals to some sector of the voting base. And he’s doing it very skillfully. As just as a political manipulation, it’s skillful. Work for the rich and the powerful, shaft everybody else, but get their votes—that’s not an easy trick. And he’s carrying it off.
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David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement
Prominent Michigan attorney Michael Bogren on Tuesday withdrew his nomination to become a District Judge on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan.
Bannon v. Pope Francis: Here’s how the Trump ally and former Breitbart exec is trying to push the Catholic Church to the far right
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 82-year-old Buenos Aires native best known as Pope Francis, has been the most liberal pope in the history of the Catholic Church. There are some areas…
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/white-kentucky-teens-surround-and-harass-native-american-veteran-during-dc-indigenous-peoples-march/
A now-viral video is shining light on repulsive actions by the next generation of MAGA supporters. Students from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Kentucky were apparently in Washington D. C. to take part in the anti-choice “March for Life.” That’s where they came across Omaha Nation elder and American military veteran Nathan Philips. And that’s when these very Christian high school students decided that the best thing they could learn in the nation’s capital was how to express bigotry and hate.
Philips was present to take part in the Washington version of the Indigenous Peoples March, which was organized by the Indigenous Peoples Movement. Other events for January 18th were taking place around the world, from Asia to South America and Oceania to Africa. To accommodate two groups protesting in Washington on the same day, the Indigenous Peoples March moved the location of their rally at the last moment.
However, that didn’t stop Philips from coming to the attention of the Covington students. As the Indigenous Peoples March was drawing to an end, the group of 50-70 uniformly white students, wearing Trump-brand MAGA hats and wielding cellphone cameras, came into the area, and surrounded Philips, effectively blocking his march progress as they mocked his chant and drumming, and taunted him over an extended period. Witnesses describe them as standing inches away from Philips and others, screaming insults, bumping into people, singing over chants, and laughing in people’s faces.
It’s even worse when you see the full mob effect. pic.twitter.com/Oe7Zn5srOB
— Lulu Says (@lulu_says2) January 19, 2019
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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/22/i_was_absolutely_afraid_indigenous_elder
also whiskey rebellion: catholic school enroll 2x // segregation academy mid 50's
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rww
Tradition, Family and Property, the right-wing Catholic group whose red-caped activists are regularly a very visible presence at Religious Right gatherings, includes in its Crusade Magazine an interviewwith the author of a TFP-published book, “Islam and the Suicide of the West: The Origin, Doctrine, and Goals of Islam.”
The author, Luiz Solimeo, argues that the West is committing suicide by admitting “masses of Muslim immigrants and ‘refugees.’” Unlike 19th and 20th Century immigrants to the U.S., who sought to assimilate and contribute to the local culture, Solimeo says, current Muslim immigrants in Europe “want to destroy this civilization and impose their own doctrine and sharia law on the world.”
In a commentary posted on TFP’s website the same day as the Solimeo interview, John Horvat, the head of the U.S. arm of TFP, decries “the postmodern mania for diversity.” Horvat argues that the phrase inscribed on American money—e pluribus unum, or “out of many, one”—is in jeopardy because there’s not enough of an “unum” to hold us together.
The solution is a return to the ideas of human dignity as expressed in “Christian civilization”:
The American order only makes sense if it rests upon the many solid principles and ideas inherited from Western Christian civilization. Defense of human dignity is only possible by resorting to a rich treasury of many Christian traditions, morals and standards that buttress true dignity. American culture can only be called culture when it is based on a unified canon of many works and literature that helps America define itself. …
What is needed now is a powerful new unumaround which a pluribusmight form. And that unummust involve a return to the well-spring of Christian civilization. A return to an order governed by God’s Providence is the only thing powerful enough to make America e pluribus unumagain.
Horvat’s book “Return to Order” expressed nostalgia for the Catholic feudalism of medieval Europe and called for a return to an “organic Christian society.”
TFP actively opposes the advance of LGBTQ rights and marriage equality. In 2013, it linked tornadoes in Illinois to the state’s approval of a marriage equality bill. A few years ago it railed against the presence of gay Republican group GOProud at the Conservative Political Action Conference, saying “How can GOProud consider itself conservative when it directly opposes the work of social conservative activists and contributes to America’s moral ruin, through the weakening of the family – the first and fundamental building block of society?”
Tags: John Horvat Anti-Islam Christian NationImmigrationTradition Family and Property
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"We've Made History': Ireland Joins France, Germany and Bulgaria in Banning Fracking
https://www.ecowatch.com/ireland-fossil-fuels-divestment-2621293680.html
no lnx
Ireland to Become World's First Country to Divest From Fossil Fuels
Ireland's landmark Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill passed the Seanad, or upper house, on Thursday, putting the Emerald Isle on track to become the first country in the world to divest from fossil fuel-related funds.
The bill—which requires the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund to sell off about €318 million ($361 million) investments in coal, oil, gas and peat assets over a five year period—now heads to President Michael D. Higgins for signature, where it will likely become law by the end of the year, according to the Irish Times.
Alice-Mary Higgins, an Independent Senator and the president's daughter, was jubilant about the bill's "swift passage" in the Seanad.
President Higgins told Green News in July that Ireland has a role in tackling climate change. He said the bill, first introduced by independent Donegal Deputy Thomas Pringle in 2016, was "greatly" needed and a "testament to cross-party cooperation and support."
"While we are a small nation, we have a huge impact on the most vulnerable citizens in the world. It's morally imperative that we urgently respond to climate change as it's those most vulnerable who cannot afford to wait for us to act accordingly," he added.
The bill's passage is a major step for Ireland, which ranks last among European Union countries in the 2018 Climate Change Performance Index.
Green Party Senator Grace O'Sullivan welcomed the final passage of the bill.
"Ireland can finally hold its head up high on an issue of climate policy, as the first country in the world to put a national divestment strategy into place," O'Sullivan said in a press release. "This bill will help protect us from climate change, will allow us to stand as an example to the world and protect Irish tax payers from massive losses as the world moves to a post-carbon future."
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By Cody Fenwick, AlterNet
This one has to be devastating to see. READ MORE»
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see corkery, leo bunch of catholic orgs/front?:
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-anti-catholic-playbook/ no lnx
CAMPAIGNS AND ELECTIONS
CORRUPTIONPODCASTS OPP-ART: DISPATCHES FROM THE RESISTANCE
The Nation
SUPREME COURT The ‘Anti-Catholic’ Playbook
SUPREME COURTRELIGIONBRETT KAVANAUGH
The ‘Anti-Catholic’ Playbook
Does Brett Kavanaugh think abortion should be illegal? A secret network of right-wing activists has spent millions attacking such questions as anti-religious bigotry.
By Sarah PosnerTwitter SEPTEMBER 5, 2018
Confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, began yesterday with a sustained uproar from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who protested Republican efforts to barrel through the process. From the opening moments, Democrats prevailed on committee chair Charles Grassley to postpone the hearings—or entertain their motion to adjourn—because so many of Kavanaugh’s records as associate White House counsel, and all of his records as staff secretary to President George W. Bush, have yet to be released.
This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, where Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow. Additional research by Eli Clifton, Richard Salame and Maia Hibbett.
Committee Republicans, undaunted by this breach of transparency, turned to laying the groundwork for the questioning of Kavanaugh, set to begin this morning, by sowing fear in the Republican base about what Democrats would do if he were not confirmed and they gained more control of the confirmation process after the midterms. Senator Ted Cruz reminded the public of litigation brought by religious groups, including Catholic nuns, against the Obama administration, claiming that employer-provided contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act violated their religious freedom. Democrats, Cruz charged, “want justices who will further that assault on religious liberty.”
The hearings were fast-tracked by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who is pressing the Senate to confirm Kavanaugh by October 1. The rushed timeline is just the latest maneuver in an aggressive Republican campaign to make sweeping, long-lasting changes to the federal judiciary by packing it with judges hostile to civil rights, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ equality, and church-state separation—while at the same time taking extreme measures to block Democratic nominees. If he is confirmed, the 53-year-old Kavanaugh could tip the balance of the high court for decades, potentially overturning the right to an abortion and dramatically expanding religious exemptions to civil-rights laws and reproductive-health services. He could play a pivotal role in matters that could decide the future of the Trump presidency, from the scope of executive power, which Kavanaugh has argued is vast, to whether or not a sitting president may be subpoenaed or charged with a crime. On a wide range of issues with a profound impact on the daily lives of Americans, a Justice Kavanaugh could prove the decisive vote that cements conservative gains, while wiping out past civil-rights advances.
In the coming days, the 21 senators on the judiciary committee will have an opportunity to ask Kavanaugh tough questions about his legal philosophy on abortion, LGBTQ rights, executive power, and, as the point person on government faith-based initiatives while in the White House counsel’s office of George W. Bush, the proper role of government in the face of faith-based discrimination. Civil-rights advocates say these are precisely the questions that must be posed, given the stakes in choosing a successor to Anthony Kennedy, long the Court’s crucial swing vote on many of these issues. But if a tight-knit network of conservative activists has its way, these senators will instead pull their punches, fearing ferocious, well-funded attacks that deliberately misrepresent such scrutiny as signs of anti-religious bias.
Conservatives, including Kavanaugh himself, have long awaited and carefully prepared for this moment. In the wake of the crushing defeat of conservative legal hero Robert Bork, nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, and deep disappointment that subsequent, more-moderate Republican appointees Kennedy and David Souter failed to adjudicate as conservative ideologues, right-wing political operatives began building a new strategy for the courts. The Federalist Society continued to build a pipeline of conservative nominees, but strategists bruised from the Bork fight knew they also would need a hard-hitting public-relations campaign to press for their confirmation. They would have to successfully portray rigid ideologues as mainstream, while intimidating lawmakers from grilling them on their more extreme views.
A key tactic would be to shut down questioning on how the nominee would approach cases on abortion or LGBTQ rights by accusing Democratic senators probing these issues of being anti-religious—even anti-Catholic—bigots.
That campaign, honed over more than a decade, has been fueled by tens of millions of dollars in dark-money donations, designed by conservative political consultants and PR firms, disseminated byadvocacy groups such as the Catholic League and the Judicial Crisis Network, and validated by GOP senators such as Orrin Hatch,who in past confirmation battles has accused “the left” of “trying to enforce an anti-religious litmus test.” The network also includes Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo, who famously delivered a list of judicial nominees to then-candidate Trump, and has continued to closely advise him on his picks as president.
In his East Room speech accepting Trump’s nomination in July, Kavanaugh spoke often about his faith. He recalled his Jesuit education at Georgetown Preparatory School, in the suburbs of Washington, DC, which taught him the motto “men for others,” a creed Kavanaugh said had inspired a lifelong dedication to public service. He highlighted his standing in “the vibrant Catholic community” in Washington, noting that “the members of that community disagree about many things, but we are united by a commitment to serve.” He hit the same notes yesterday in his opening remarks, referencing his Jesuit education and his volunteer work with Catholic Charities.
In emphasizing his Catholic faith, Kavanaugh had perfectly teed up conservative activists to launch a preemptive attack on anyone who might question his views on abortion, LGBTQ issues, and religious liberty.Within hours of his nomination, one conservative Catholic advocacy organization, Catholic Vote, which claims nearly half a million lay Catholics as members, declared Catholic voters to be “thrilled” with the pick, but warned that they would be vigilant for “any whiff of anti-Catholic bigotry” in the confirmation process. “The experience of past judicial confirmation battles suggest attacks on a nominee’s personal religious views are inevitable,” the group’s president, Brian Burch, said. Op-eds warned of “another explosion of public anti-Catholicism” and predicted the “ugly insinuation” of “the same ‘dual loyalties’ chestnut that bigots have smeared Catholic candidates for public office for going on 200 years in this country.”
Kavanaugh’s nomination was not even a day old, yet Burch was already issuing a warning: “CatholicVote.org is prepared to defend Judge Kavanaugh from any such personal smear campaign by anti-Catholic zealots. We intend to hold every Senator, of both parties, accountable. Any whiff of anti-Catholic bigotry must be met with universal condemnation by every senator. This is especially true for those senators seeking re-election in states won by President Trump.” These senators include North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin—all Democrats in close races. All three are Catholic, and all three have been targeted with ads over the Kavanaugh nomination by Catholic Vote and the Judicial Crisis Network.
It’s unlikely that anyone on the Senate Judiciary Committee missed Burch’s meaning. The network had bludgeoned Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s ranking Democrat, for a year over a single sentence she uttered during confirmation hearings last September for Amy Coney Barrett,a Notre Dame Law School professor and conservative Catholic whom Trump had nominated to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. After Barrett insisted that as a judge she would follow Supreme Court precedent, Feinstein asked how Barrett would resolve conflicts between her religious beliefs and the law as a judge. “Dogma and law are two different things,” Feinstein told Barrett. “I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you. And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country.”
The clip caused an immediate uproar among conservatives. Catholic Vote published a piece on its website, “Dear Anti-Catholic Left: Bigotry Lives Loudly Within You.” The Judicial Crisis Network, the dark-money group at the center of the conservative march to stack the courts, leapt to Barrett’s defense with an inflammatory, six-figure ad campaign, titled “Catholics Need Not Apply.” It accused Feinstein and fellow Judiciary Committee Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois, himself a Catholic, of having “mocked” Barrett’s faith. “Their hypocrisy knows no limits,” the ad charged. “They attack a woman for her Catholic faith, make it a religious test, while they are afraid to call radical Islam, radical Islam.”
The Senate confirmed Barrett, who became an instant celebrity to Trump’s Christian-right base, a standing that soon landed her on Trump’s short list for the Supreme Court. Meanwhile a variation on Feinstein’s phrase—“the dogma lives loudly within me”—became a right-wing meme, appearing on T-shirts and coffee mugs sold on conservative websites, and her quote continues to provide fodder for right-wing pundits.
But while conservative Catholic activists have succeeded in claiming loudly that they have been oppressed, many liberal Catholic leaders argue that their views don’t represent all Catholics. “The religious right, including ultraconservative Catholic special-interest groups, are the squeaky wheel in American politics,” said Jon O’Brien, President of Catholics for Choice. “They get heard and privileged above the majority of Americans of faith or no faith. We are incredibly concerned that Kavanaugh and the special interests he is backed by will radically redefine religious freedom in America to mean religious privilege for a few at the expense of everyone else, including women and LGBT individuals.”
Indeed, yesterday, as Kavanaugh’s hearings got underway, 1,550 Catholic nuns, priests, deacons, and other leaders wrote to the Senate raising concerns about Kavanaugh’s views on health care, immigration, workers’ rights, voting rights, and the death penalty. “As Catholics,” they wrote, “we believe that any government official—including a Supreme Court Justice—must be concerned with the needs of people who are marginalized, not just the rich and powerful or a member of one’s own political party.”
Kavanaugh, it turns out, is deeply familiar with this playbook built around allegations of bias, as it dates back to his days as a top adviser in the George W. Bush White House during the religion wars over Bush’s judicial nominees, some of whom had out-of-the-mainstream views on abortion, gender, and LGBTQ rights.
From 2001 through the middle of 2003, Kavanaugh served as associate White House counsel, helping Bush shepherd his judicial nominations through the Senate. In mid-2003, Bush named Kavanaugh his special adviser and staff secretary; shortly afterward, he nominated Kavanaugh to be a judge on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Throughout this period, Bush’s judicial nominees—many of whom, like Trump’s nominees, had been cultivated and vetted by the Federalist Society—provoked pitched confrontations in a narrowly divided Senate.
In 2003, while Kavanaugh was still in the White House counsel’s office, conservatives accused Democrats of anti-Catholic bias during confirmation hearings for James Leon Holmes, whom Bush had nominated to be a federal trial judge in Arkansas. Holmes had a history of misogynist writing in which he had argued, with his wife, that “the woman is to place herself under the authority of the man” and insisted that an abortion ban would not violate the rights of women who had been sexually assaulted. “Concern for rape victims is a red herring,” he wrote in a letter to a local newspaper, “because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami.”
The “controversy around Leon Holmes,” according to an account by conservative Catholic political operative Deal Hudson, provided a “perfect opening” for Republicans to accuse Democrats of being anti-Catholic. According to documents related to Kavanaugh’s White House tenure released by the George W. Bush Presidential Library, Manuel Miranda, at the time counsel to Senate majority leader Bill Frist, circulated an e-mail blast to White House staff, including Kavanaugh, from the arch-conservative Catholic League. “catholicism on trial: religious test applied to judicial nominee,” it read, going on to describe Holmes as “a man of deep religious conviction” and accuse Democrats of having “unfairly tagged him a misogynist, misunderstanding what the pope, the U.S. bishops and Holmes have said regarding this matter.”
“It does not get better than this,” Miranda enthused in his cover note. Miranda later left his post over a scandal in which he was implicated in secretly accessing and leaking Democratic computer files about judicial nominations. Holmes was confirmed.
The religion wars only intensified when Bush nominated William Pryor to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.Because he was up for an appellate seat, Pryor generated more adamant Democratic opposition than had Holmes. Senators probed his hard-line beliefs on abortion, church-state separation, and LGBTQ rights, including questioning him about his rescheduling of a family vacation to Disney World because it coincided with “Gay Day,”and an amicus brief he authored as Alabama attorney general in the landmark Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, in which he argued that gay sex should remain criminalized because the Court had “never recognized a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy.” Pryor supporters, again, portrayed legitimate questions about a nominee’s position on abortion—a constitutional right that enjoys majority support among not only Americans as a whole but also among Catholics—as a de facto litmus test against Catholics.
“Their intention is smearing senators as anti-religious for asking questions,” said Peter Montgomery, senior fellow at People for the American Way, which has been in the thick of judicial nominations for decades. “In doing that they’re hoping to intimidate the senator somehow. They raise these questions when senators are asking the nominees about important issues like Roe v. Wade.”
Throughout this entire period, Kavanaugh was specifically enlisted by the Bush White House to engage the Catholic community, including about judges. He was asked, along with Karl Rove, to address supporters of the Catholic magazine Crisis. He also spoke about judicial nominations to a Pro-Life Pilgrimage from Legatus, a conservative Catholic network created by Domino’s Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan, for Catholic business leaders who have “committed themselves to study, live and spread the Catholic faith in their business and personal lives.” And he volunteered to be the office’s specialist on faith-based initiatives, “given my general interest and my previous religious liberty work in my pre-WH days.” Kavanaugh had served on the Religious Liberty Practice Group at the Federalist Society; in private practice he authored an amicus brief in a school-prayer case, arguing that student-delivered prayers at football games were constitutional (the Supreme Court held that they were not).
It was during the Pryor nomination fight that conservative advocacy groups first aggressively advanced the claim that Catholics were being excluded from the bench by the left. The Committee for Justice, led by former George H.W. Bush White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, and the Ave Maria List, a political-action committee funded by Monaghan, ran newspaper ads in support of Pryor that targeted moderate and swing-state Democratic senators. The ads featured a picture of a closed courtroom door with a sign over it reading, “Catholics Need Not Apply”—the first of the phrase’s many appearances in confirmation campaigns.
Senate Republicans helped press the charge that Democrats were anti-religion. Hatch, then the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters, “It appears that nominees who openly adhere to Catholic and Baptist doctrines, as a matter of personal faith, are unqualified for the federal bench in the eyes of the liberal Washington interest groups. Period.”
But the Committee for Justice ads drew condemnation from other quarters, including from the Anti-Defamation League, which protested that they were “misleading and inflammatory.” A Washington Post editorial described them as “beyond the pale.” Senate Democrats mounted a filibuster, consigning Pryor to a recess appointment, but he was eventually confirmed in 2005 in a bipartisan deal.
The political battle, however, turned out to be far more damaging to the senators who had opposed Pryor’s confirmation.As the 2004 election season got underway, it became clear that an attack machine sounding the alarm about anti-Catholic bias was perfectly comfortable with harsh assaults on Catholic Democrats. Then–Senate minority leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, both Catholics themselves, had denounced the Committee for Justice ads on the Senate floor. Daschle, declaring himself “proud of my Catholic faith,” said, “I know about the bias against immigrants and against Catholics. That was real discrimination. What is being spread this week is a falsehood uttered for partisan political purposes.”
Despite his public declaration of pride in his Catholic faith, Daschle would become a target of conservatives—including conservative Catholics—who sought to oust him from the Senate in order to pave a clear path for confirmation of Bush’s judicial picks. The 2004 elections, with John Kerry, another liberal Catholic at the top of the presidential ticket, featured brutal attacks on both men’s faith.
The Republican National Committee attacked Kerry’s Catholicism, launching a website, KerryWrongforCatholics.com, critical of his positions on abortion, same-sex marriage, and judicial nominations, noting that as senator he had pledged to “filibuster any Supreme Court nominee who would turn back the clock on the right to choose, on civil rights and individual liberties, on the laws protecting workers and the environment.” Kerry was also being Swift Boated, a campaign conceived in part by a PR firm, Creative Response Concepts, that would go on to become a player in the Catholic judicial-nominations network. The Committee for Justice launched a website and ad campaign called “Kerry’s Scary” to attack his views on abortion, same-sex marriage and the pope, as well as his judicial philosophy, calling the latter issue urgent because “Court watchers believe as many as four Justices might retire in the next four years.”
Conservatives also raised questions about Daschle’s Catholicism during his 2004 reelection bid, attacking him in ads over his stance on the judiciary, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. The stakes were high for those who dreamed of a conservative takeover of the courts: If Democrats reversed Republicans’ razor-thin margin in the Senate, they would control the chamber, giving them the ability to block Bush’s nominees, including for anticipated Supreme Court vacancies, or push through those nominated by a potential president Kerry.
Even before the campaign got underway, conservative magazines spread stories that Daschle’s bishop was denying him communion because he was divorced. Then the ads started. The Ave Maria List PAC spent $100,000 running ads accusing Daschle of misinforming South Dakota voters that he was against abortion. One ad said Daschle had once called abortion “an abhorrent practice,” but had later supported pro-choice groups as senator. “Tom Daschle tries to claim he’s pro-life even though his voting record and actions in Washington prove he’s not,” the ad charged. “Tom Daschle has changed and it’s time for South Dakota voters to make a change of their own.”
Another anti-Daschle ad campaign, titled “You’re Fired”—modeled on Trump’s reality-television show The Apprentice—was produced by the You’re Fired PAC and funded by Robin P.Arkley II, a California real-estate magnate. Arkley donated over half a million dollars to the effort.
“The people of South Dakota want to protect traditional marriage,” an affiliated website declared. “You’re Fired Inc. believes the Federal Marriage Amendment is the only way to prevent liberal, activist judges from imposing same sex marriage as they have in Massachusetts—on the rest of American society.” The site depicted a boardroom meeting, during which an executive concluded, “We have one too many Democrats around here and that’s not a good thing,” punctuating his statement with the trademark “You’re fired.” Another Arkley ad charged that Daschle “refused to protect marriage” and “would let liberal, activist judges redefine it.”
Daschle lost his reelection bid, the Republicans retained control of the Senate, and Bush beat Kerry, winning reelection to a second term during which he put John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court.
With the White House and Senate in Republican hands, and with the GOP riding high on passing same-sex marriage bans at the ballot box in 11 states, conservative activists set to work on getting Bush’s conservative judicial nominees confirmed. After the 2004 election, one of Arkley’s top aides, Ann Corkery, who had directed philanthropy at his loan-servicing firm, founded the Judicial Confirmation Network. The group blandly described itself as “an organization of citizens joined together to support the confirmation of highly qualified individuals to the Supreme Court of the United States.” Yet Corkery and her husband Neil would soon become pivotal figures in a broadening coalition of conservatives as they prepared for the confirmation battles ahead.
That coalition, according to a 2006 account in Crisis magazine, was directed by a “war room” of activists “acquainted with each other through Catholic and conservative public causes.” Among them were major players from the Bush reelection campaign, including Gary Marx, who had led the campaign’s outreach to social conservatives, and Greg Mueller, described by Crisis as “the group’s public-relations maestro,” whose public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, had advised Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Today, CRC represents the Judicial Crisis Network as well as the Catholic Association, another advocacy group the Corkerys helped launch in 2007, to influence policy-makers on issues concerning “the family, Catholic institutions, religious liberty, and cultural values.” CRC did not respond to repeated requests to interview representatives of JCN and the Catholic Association.
According to Crisis, “Mueller, Leo, and their colleagues would provide the main talking points, media training, rapid response to any attacks on the nominees, assistance with ad buys, and ongoing legal analysis.”
“Our most important goals were to support the idea of judicial restraint, to define the character of the nominee within the first 24 hours, and to continue to provide support as the process wended its way,” Leo told Crisis, reflecting on the war room’s role in the successful confirmation of both Roberts and Alito. “To accomplish this, we engaged in a variety of approaches—an aggressive paid media effort, rapid response activity, and positive messages.”
Mueller described the war room in far more political terms. “We tried to take the approach of corporate crisis management, along with the daily political communications that go on in a political campaign.” It fell to Marx, fresh off the Bush-Cheney campaign and newly appointed as JCN’s first executive director, as Crisis wrote, to develop “a state-based strategy that would target the political pressure points—an organization that would make Democratic senators in Republican states feel the political heat.”
During Bush’s second term—as Kavanaugh’s nomination to the DC Circuit was held up over a period of years, with Democrats arguing that his role in drafting the Starr Report and in the investigation of the suicide of Clinton aide Vince Foster had marked him as too partisan to warrant his confirmation as a judge—the war room kicked in. JCN openly threatened Democratic senators with the Daschle treatment. If lawmakers filibuster Kavanaugh, JCN warned in 2006, a midterm-election year, “Americans in key states will react just as they did when former Senate Democrat leader Tom Daschle did the same thing. Americans care about judges and the role of the courts in our society.” The Senate confirmed Kavanaugh two weeks later, by a vote of 57-36.
Today, thepresident of JCN is not a public figure like Marx but a player so behind-the-scenes as to barely leave a public trace. But Daniel Casey, a public-relations, political, and “crisis” consultant, is a veteran of the Bork confirmation battle—a fight that conservatives painfully lost, triggering the scorched-earth organizing JCN spearheads today.
Then the executive director of the American Conservative Union, Casey was “a crucial player” in the Bork fight, said Patrick McGuigan, who worked then for the Free Congress Foundation, a political advocacy group founded by religious-right architect Paul Weyrich that helped push the GOP to the right. The dust jacket of Ninth Justice, a book McGuigan wrote with Weyrich’s daughter Dawn, detailing each move and countermove in the Bork fight, describes McGuigan and Casey as “intensely Republican, devout Catholics, ardent admirers of the nominee—who understood from the first moment of the battle that they were involved in the most significant political confrontation of their lives.”
McGuigan, who now works as a journalist in Oklahoma, described his relationship with Casey as “co-captains” in the Bork battle, in which conservatives were heavily outspent and outmaneuvered by the liberal opposition. He said that at the time, there was “insufficient organization of ideas and messaging on the conservative side of things compared to the left side.” Casey’s forte, said McGuigan, was “neighborhood by neighborhood, precinct by precinct, household by household organization patterned after the labor unions, but on the conservative end of the spectrum instead. I think that’s what Dan was good at.” (Casey declined to be interviewed for this article, referring interview requests to Peter Robbio at CRC, who did not respond.) In the years after the failure of the Bork nomination, conservatives saw the appointment of Kennedy, and then of Bill Clinton’s nominees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Although Kennedy was nominated by a Republican, he proved a bitter disappointment to conservatives, particularly for his majority opinion in Lawrence in 2003, ruling anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional—a ruling that led, 12 years later, to the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide.
During the Bork hearings, Casey argued that “the American people should be outraged that the liberals are spending millions of dollars to try to buy a Supreme Court seat.” Three decades later, Casey is the president of the moneyed advocacy organizations JCN and the related Judicial Education Project, as well as of Catholic Voices. He is also treasurer and director of the Catholic Association Foundation and the Catholic Association. Together, they are part of a multimillion-dollar dark-money campaign backing a relentless drive by Trump and his Republican allies in the Senate to reshape the federal judiciary for generations, from federal trial courts all the way to the Supreme Court, and to shape public opinion about Catholicism and religious liberty.
JCN does not disclose the identity of its donors. But the group has said it anticipates spending at least $10 million advocating for Kavanaugh’s nomination. While many of the early ads focused on promoting Kavanaugh as a mainstream, impartial jurist admired by former clerks of all political stripes, the most recent ads touted him a “grand slam for conservatives” and warned Democrats against succumbing to “pressure from East Coast liberals.”
After 2008, the Judicial Confirmation Network changed tacks, from battering the opponents of Bush’s court nominees to blocking President Barack Obama’s. JCN, now renamed theJudicial Crisis Network, was the first conservative organization to blast Obama’s selection of Sonia Sotomayor—a Catholic—as “a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written.” Although JCN had repeatedly claimed that liberal Democrats had unfairly attacked conservative Catholics, it again did not hesitate to attack a liberal Catholic.
John Gehring, Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a liberal group that advocates for progressive expressions of faith in politics, said that for conservative Catholics, Obama’s presidency “was very formative to the idea that Catholic identity was under siege by an administration that had elitist contempt for what the church believes.” The University of Notre Dame’s invitation to the pro-choice Obama to deliver a commencement speech in 2009, said Gehring, triggered “a huge divide” and “an earthquake in Catholic political conversation.” The Obama administration’s policies, particularly the contraception benefit written into the Affordable Care Act, which became the core target of conservatives’ legal strategy on religious freedom, further inflamed the world of conservative Catholicism.
But Gehring argues that this “well-funded, deep network” has “had disproportionate influence on what Catholic identity is in the public square and in politics.” He said the network has helped to create the distorted impression that Catholic priorities are limited to opposing abortion and LGBTQ rights, when traditional Catholic social-justice teaching includes a range of issues such as immigration, poverty, and the environment. Gehring pointed out, as an example, that conservative Catholics ignore the 1891 papal encyclical, “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor,” written in support of workers rights, including the right to unionize.
What’s more, the conservative network’s position on abortion doesn’t represent the majority of Catholics. According to the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of Catholics say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. O’Brien, of Catholics for Choice, also points out that “Catholic women have abortions at the same rate as women of other faiths or no faith.” Kavanaugh’s decisions as an appellate judge on reproductive rights and the role of religion in politics, O’Brien added, “underscore just how out of touch he is with the majority of Catholics who are pro-choice and who support a healthy separation between church and state.”
During the Obama era, the dark money ramped up. The Wellspring Committee, a nonprofit formed in 2008 where both Corkerys have served as president, became the chief funder of JCN, bankrolling its campaigns to block Merrick Garland’s confirmation, and, under Trump, to support the nomination of Neil Gorsuch and other nominees to federal courts. According to an investigation last year by the Center for Responsive Politics, “most of Wellspring’s funds, in turn, came from a single mysterious donor who gave the organization almost $28.5 million—nearly 90 percent of its $32.2 million in revenues” in 2016. According to this report, Wellspring gave more than $23 million to JCN in 2016, quadrupling its 2015 donation to the group of $5.8 million.
Wellspringalso donated money to the Catholic Association, another nonprofit the Corkerys helped found, this one to advocate on behalf of “religious liberty,” and to the Federalist Society. In yet another sign of the intimacy of this network, the association paid Leo, known as Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer, $120,000 for “management consulting.” (Leo also earned $435,000 from the Federalist Society that year, according to its tax return.) Neither Leo nor the Corkerys responded to requests for comment.
Another mysterious Corkery-linked company, BH Group LLC, created in 2016, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Not much is known about what BH Group does, or who its principals are, but in 2016, the Corkerys’ Wellspring Committee paid BH Group $750,000 for “public relations,” according to its tax return, and JCN paid the firm $947,000 for “consulting services.” And Leo later identified BH Group as his employer in an FEC filing.
In early May 2017, about a month after Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court, Leo was awarded the prestigious Canterbury Medal from the Becket Fundfor Religious Liberty, billed by the organization as “religious liberty’s highest honor.” A major Christian-right legal firm, the Becket Fund is best known for its victory in 2014’s landmark Hobby Lobby case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act’s requirement of contraceptive coverage violated the company’s religious freedom. In his acceptance speech at a gala held at The Pierre, a New York luxury hotel overlooking Central Park, Leo, in white tie, could barely conceal his elation that Trump had beaten the odds to win the White House. Looking back on the campaign, Leo recalled the “fear that permeated every day in that countdown to November 8” and rejoiced at the “amazing turn of events, thanks to our 45th president.”
With Trump as president, Leo is, for all practical purposes, on the inside, as a handsomely compensated guide to judicial nominees who will satisfy religious conservatives. JCN runs the outside game,spending its mounds of dark money to promote the president’s—or rather, Leo’s—judicial nominees.
But even as the Trump administration was already well on its way to stacking the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, with judges inclined to expand the reach of Hobby Lobby, Leo had not quite let go of the urgency of the Obama years—or what he’d seen as the threat of a potential Hillary Clinton presidency suppressing religious freedom. “As government policy becomes more grudging toward religious freedom, that attitude spreads in the broader culture. A hostile stance in Washington creates space for groups with kindred ideological designs,” Leo said, going on to warn of even more dire consequences. “A government that suffocates something so elemental as freedom of religion is not likely to be respectful of any other right.”
At one point, he released the tension with a joke at Clinton’s expense. “Of course everyone thought they knew how the election was going to go,” Leo said. “The Democratic nominee looked so confident, so relaxed, so content. With just days remaining, what could possibly go wrong?” And then, “Well, not everyone had access to Rebekah Mercer’s crystal ball.”
At the time Leo spoke, Mercer’s family’s data-analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, was not yet under federal investigation for harvesting private Facebook data and potentially violating US election laws. But even so, it was striking that he referenced the Mercer family—whose political giving is led by Rebekah and her father Robert, the reclusive, Trump-supporting, Republican financier—at a celebration of religious freedom, given that one of the family’s pet projects, Breitbart News, has long been a hotbed of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. It turns out that Mercer had also long been a generous funder of an array of organizations in Leo’s orbit—the conservative legal and Christian organizations that claim to represent ordinary citizens fed up with Democrat-appointed “judicial activists” and Democratic “gridlock” in holding up Republican nominees.
Charity filings show that between 2013 and 2016, the Mercer Family Foundation gave a million dollars to the Becket Fund, on whose board Leo has served since 2014. Between 2013 and 2015, the foundation donated nearly $6 million to the Federalist Society. In fact, Rebekah Mercer’s ties with Leo go even deeper.
In 2014, Leo joined the board of a new group called Reclaim New York, led by Mercer and Steve Bannon, then ensconced at Breitbart. The group claims to provide citizen trainings to “empower citizens to engage their state and local government,” but critics call it an astroturf organization dedicated instead to sowing distrust in state and local government and laying the groundwork for far-right Republican candidates to win elections. In 2015, Reclaim New York shared office space with Cambridge Analytica in midtown Manhattan and paid the firm for data-analytic services. (Reclaim New York did not respond to a request for comment about Leo’s role.) In 2016, Leo, along with Mercer and Kellyanne Conway, now a top adviser to President Trump, incorporated a related lobbying organization, the Reclaim New York Initiative.
A core element of Leo’s strategy, throughout the Bush and Obama years, was to portray religious freedom, a treasured American virtue, as under siege by supposed government overreach and disdainful, elite liberal culture. In another May 2017 speech, this one before the ActonInstitute, a conservative think tank, Leo placed the blame on the left for making confirmation battles “so intense.” Liberals, he said, want to invest the Supreme Court with “something close to absolute power,” including the“creation of rights found nowhere in the text or structure of the Constitution,” citing Griswold v. Connecticut, from 1965, which struck down laws criminalizing the sale of contraception; Roe v. Wade, from 1973, which legalized abortion; and Obergefell v. Hodges, from 2015, which legalized same-sex marriage.
But now, he said, thanks to Trump, liberals were finally losing control of the courts. “For constitutionalists,” Leo told the Acton Institute, “our improbable 45th president has turned out to be, to borrow a phrase from his predecessor, the change we’ve been waiting for.”
Sarah PosnerTWITTERSarah Posner is a Reporting Fellow with the Investigative Fund and expert on the intersection of religion and politics.
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ref note src
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2006/the-war-room-what-we-have-learned-about-confirming-good-judges
very long
...While Frist lobbied for a resolution to filibuster obstructionism, Federalist Society members took time off from work to articulate the founding principles of the organization— writing articles, meeting with editorial boards in targeted states, and joining talk radio hosts. In 2005, the society’s media program briefed and trained 49 experts on the relevant issues. Participants learned to boil down the concepts, distilling complicated legal ideas in a way that people could understand. A communications apparatus followed them around the country, assisting with media contacts.
Though the Federalist Society does not engage inpolitical advocacy, says Leo, its members are committed to educating the public on the importance of judicial restraint, as opposed to judicial activism. Hip, attractive attorneys appeared on television news shows to reinforce the central message: “Every judge deserves an up-or-downvote. Judges deserved fairness, too. Judges should not make the law; they should interpret the law.” Along the way, the public was reminded of some deeply unpopular decisions that seemed to smack of judicial activism. “The media desperately wanted conservatives to talk about the courts and the Constitution. That is what the Federalist Society members talked about—without endorsing nominees,” explained Leo.
In the first months of 2005, the war room turned to other critical business. They developed a state-based strategythat would target the political pressure points—an organization that would make Democratic senators in Republican states feel the political heat. Gary Marx, executive director of the Judicial Confirmation Network and a Republican organizer who had previously worked on the Bush—Cheney reelection campaign, directed this strategy. Marx sought to generate grassroots and “grasstops” energy to make sure the key senators in battleground states understood their constituents’ views on the courts.
Wendy Long, the legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network who took time off from her work as a partner in a New York law firm, helped to develop a plan that would counter the powerful but often “invisible”—influence of liberal interests groups like People for the American Way, the Alliance for Justice, and Planned Parenthood. “It’s amazing how much power these groups had in blocking nominees. But a lot of their work was going on below the radar in the Senate,” says Long, a charismatic messenger on judicial restraint who made regular television appearances during the confirmation process.
Marx and Long traveled to key states—Nebraska, Maine, Arkansas, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—to meet with local coalition leaders and exchange ideas. Grassroots groups would write letters to the editor and call in to talk radio. In Arkansas, a coalition organizer formed a roundtable of 20 pastors to meet withSenator Mark Pryor(D-Arkansas). They wanted him to know they supported Roberts. “That strategy would work in Arkansas, but not in Maine,” Marx notes. “There we worked with top legislators and top political leaders—a one-on-one approach versus a grassroots mass appeal. I learned in the Bush—Cheney campaign that every state was different and needed a specific strategy. In Arkansas, Christian evangelicals—black and white pastors—were important. We did radio spots for black pastors that got wide coverage. We tried to make it a partnership with grassroots leaders and Washington strategists. When we did phone campaigns we’d always have a local leader to do the voice over.”
Conservative activists wanted Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska and other vulnerable Democrats to confront thethreat of defeat, and thus rethink their support for the judicial filibuster. The Democrats were still reeling from thefall of Senator Tom Daschle in the 2004 elections. The powerful Democratic Whip and “architect of judicial obstructionism,” Daschle lost, in part, because conservatives convinced his constituents that the South Dakotan senator had misrepresented his views back home. During Daschle’s closely fought reelection battle, conservatives exposed the disparity between his moderate image in his home state and his liberal voting record in the Senate. “We wanted the Democrats to look at Daschle’s defeat, and think, ‘He lost because he didn’t support Bush’s judges.’ We wanted them to worry that the same thing would happen to them.” Ad buys in key states would continue throughout both confirmation battles. Typical messages suggested that “the people who oppose Judge Alito are the same people who are telling you that your child can’t draw a picture of Jesus in school.”
By May 2005, the filibuster threat appeared to be neutralized. The Senate’s “Gang of 14″—seven Democrats and seven Republicans—agreed that three key nominees for the Federal Court of Appeals would be given an up-or-down vote in the Senate, and that all nominees, including those considered for the Supreme Court, would be filibustered only under “extraordinary circumstances.” The Republican signers agreed to deny Frist the votes he needed to carry out his threat of the nuclear option to suppress the judicial filibusters by changing Senate rules. But the Republicans would be released from the deal if the Democratic signers reneged on their end.
Senator Lindsey O. Graham, one of the Republican signers and a member of the Judiciary Committee, noted during an interview on Fox News—a key media outlet during the confirmation battles—that the deal allowed the confirmation of three Bush appellate court nominees whom Democrats had successfully filibustered for years: Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla R. Owen, and William H. Pryor Jr. Since Democrats accepted these conservative judges under the deal, Graham argued that philosophical issues would not justify a filibuster. “Based on what we’ve done in the past with Brown, Pryor, and Owen,” Graham said, the “extraordinary circumstances” would “have to be a character problem, an ethics problem, some allegation about the qualifications of the person, not an ideological bent.” Nelson, a leader of the seven Democratic signers and up for reelection in red- state Nebraska, accepted Graham’s judgment.
Once President Bush announced Roberts as his choice to replace O’Connor, the war room struggled to be the firstto define the nominee in the public square. They knew that Senate Democrats and liberal groups would offer a dark picture of Roberts’s record—repeating the pattern established by Kennedy, who took the Senate floor within anhour of Bork’s nomination to vehemently attack him as an extremist who would “turn the clock back” on civil rights. Recalling the reason he gave that speech, Kennedy told the Boston Globe:“That statement had to be stark and direct so as to sound the alarm and hold people in their places until we could get material together.” The object was to prevent moderate senators from announcing their intention to vote for Bork until a more concerted campaign could be organized against the nominee.
Roberts had been on the short list of Supreme Court choices for over a year, and both sides had talking pointsprepared for his nomination. But what surprised conservative activists was how predictable their opponents’ arguments were. “They used the same issues that they used against Bork,” observes one activist. “They prepare the public to live in a state of paranoia.” The predictability helped the war room establish their offense well in advance of Bush’s announcement. “We told the public that ‘far left extremists want to impose their own views not through legislation but through the courts.'”
In the final weeks before both Senate hearings commenced, the war room helped publicize the testimony of “third-party validators” who testified on Roberts’s and then Alito’s behalf—former clerks, classmates from law school, leading legal scholars, and members of prestigious law firms. The public heard the same message from each of them: The nominee was an extremely well-qualified jurist. One organizer recalls: “Clerks played a key role for both Roberts and Alito.” In the wake of any negative characterization of the nominee, the former clerk with impeccable liberal credentials would go public, saying, “I know this man, and that is not this man.”
The second test for Roberts’s supporters came quickly. Within weeks of Bush’s announcement, NARAL Pro-Choice America released a 30-second television advertisement linking the nominee to abortion clinic violence. Thead began with the announcer proclaiming the grim news: “Seven years ago, a bomb destroyed a woman’s health clinic in Birmingham, Alabama.” Then the ad showed Emily Lyons, the injured survivor of the clinic bombing, who tells the audience: “When a bomb ripped through my clinic I almost lost my life. I will never be the same.”
The announcer intervenes: “Supreme Court nominee John Roberts filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber.” Then Lyons returns to say: “I’m determined to stop this violence so I’m speaking out.” The announcer concludes: “Call your senators. Tell them to oppose John Roberts. America can’t afford a justice whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans.”
...
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Berrigan bros anti war
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/5/17/the_catonsville_nine_50_years_later
https://www.alternet.org/environment/how-group-nuns-taking-lead-climate-action
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http://www.alternet.org/belief/vatican-fires-shot-us-religious-right-calls-out-religious-liberty-industry-and-evangelical
An article being described as “explosive,” written by two allies of Pope Francis in a Vatican-reviewed publication, is taking on the “spurious alliance between politics and religious fundamentalism” in the United States.
Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa call out the dominionist groups“composed mainly of whites from the deep American South” for their rejection of the “global ecological crisis” and their Armageddon-infused rhetoric, pointedly drawing parallels to Islamic fundamentalism.
They accuse these evangelical fundamentalists of seeking “influence in the political and parliamentary sphere and in the juridical and educational areas so that public norms can be subjected to religious morals.”
And, they name names:
This is the doctrine that feeds political organizations and networks such as the Council for National Policy and the thoughts of their exponents such as Steve Bannon, currently chief strategist at the White House and supporter of an apocalyptic geopolitics.
But it’s not just evangelical fundamentalists who desire “religious influence in the public sphere”:
Appealing to the values of fundamentalism, a strange form of surprising ecumenism is developing between Evangelical fundamentalists and Catholic Integralists. . . . Some who profess themselves to be Catholic express themselves in ways that until recently were unknown in their tradition and using tones much closer to Evangelicals. They are defined as value voters as far as attracting electoral mass support is concerned. . . . This meeting over shared objectives happens around such themes as abortion, same-sex marriage, religious education in schools and other matters generally considered moral or tied to values.
More than 15 years after the Catholic bishops helped get George W. Bush elected president and nearly eight after the signing of the Manhattan Declaration, the Vatican has discovered what had become the defining feature of the Christian Right in America: the conservative evangelical-Catholic convergence.
And while Spadaro and Figueroa are critical of the sublimation of gospel values to the goal of right-wing political domination, it’s worth noting that the two issues that drove this convergence in the first place—abortion and same-sex marriage—haven’t exactly been abandoned by Pope Francis.
As for the “glue” that holds this altogether—and formed the underpinning of the Manhattan Declaration coalition—Francis has been a proponent of the idea that the “religious liberty” of Catholics is under attackin western democracies such as the United States, even as Spadaro and Figueroa criticize its use for political ends:
The erosion of religious liberty is clearly a grave threat within a spreading secularism. But we must avoid its defense coming in the fundamentalist terms of a “religion in total freedom,” perceived as a direct virtual challenge to the secularity of the state.
While much of their criticism is justified, Spadaro and Figueroa are silent about the role that Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict played in the creation of the “evangelical Catholics” they complain about and about the role that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops played in driving conservative Catholics into the arms of the Republican Party, and, eventually, Trump.
Nonetheless, they correctly call-out the “shocking rhetoric” of the Church Militant and other pro-Trump organizations that are “openly in favor of a political ultraconservatism and uses Christian symbols to impose itself”
. . . it has created a close analogy between Donald Trump and Emperor Constantine, and between Hilary Clinton and Diocletian. The American elections in this perspective were seen as a “spiritual war” . . . Church Militant asks if Trump’s victory can be attributed to the prayers of Americans. The response suggested is affirmative. The indirect missioning for President Trump is clear: he has to follow through on the consequences. This is a very direct message that then wants to condition the presidency by framing it as a divine election. For conservatives, however, this is not political warfare cloaked as spiritual warfare, but a logical and necessary outcome of attacks on the traditional church. Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput The cooperation of Catholics and evangelicals was quite rare when I was a young priest. Their current mutual aid, the ecumenism that seems to worry La Civilta Cattolica, is a function of shared concerns and principles, not ambition for political power. . . . Dismissing today’s attacks on religious liberty as a “narrative of fear”—as the La Civiltà Cattolica author curiously describes it—might have made sense 25 years ago. Now it sounds willfully ignorant. It also ignores the fact that America’s culture wars weren’t wanted, and weren’t started, by people faithful to constant Christian belief.
But Spadaro and Figueroa call this a false ecumenism, “an ecumenism of conflict that unites them in the nostalgic dream of a theocratic type of state” and that “wants walls and purifying deportations.” By contrast, they say, Francis’ ecumenism “moves under the urge of inclusion, peace, encounter and bridges.”
Regardless of whose brand of ecumenism you subscribe to, one thing is for sure. Francis, they say, “wants to break the organic link between culture, politics, institution and Church.” But this link underpins much of the conservative religious understanding in the United States today. And breaking it may take more than just words.
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bannon
he words could serve as a mission statement for Mr. Vorsi’s ChurchMilitant.com. A television producer who renounced his earlier life as a gay man, Mr. Voris, 55, has developed a media operation from ChurchMilitant.com’s studio in suburban Detroit that produces books, online articles, YouTube videos, podcasts and a daily talk show. These cumulatively attract about 1.5 million views a month, he said.
In an earlier iteration, ChurchMilitant.com operated as Real Catholic TV, until the Archdiocese of Detroit forced it to stop using the name because it had no permission. While some of the core issues for ChurchMilitant.com are staples of traditionalist Catholics — advocating the Latin Mass, for instance — others map neatly onto the secular political landscape. And they do so in a highly strident way.
ChurchMilitant.com, for example, has dismissed climate change as a hoax. It likened the Black Lives Matter movement to “the new fascism.” Hillary Clinton, whom it routinely calls “Killary,” was “Satan’s mop for wiping up the last remaining resistance to him in America.” Mr. Voris has described social-welfare programs as a system in which “half the people of America” pay no taxes and “get things handed to them.”
...
Contrary to the Second Vatican Council’s endorsement of interreligious dialogue, Mr. Voris views Islam as “entirely different” from Christianity and portrays Judaism in outdated terminology that experts in Catholic-Jewish relations consider anti-Semitic. (The Trump campaign was accused at times of indulging in and even disseminating anti-Jewish rhetoric and imagery.)
In a statement that echoed one made by Mr. Bannon when he was still with Breitbart, Mr. Voris maintained that American Catholic bishops supported immigration solely to “shore up flagging numbers of Catholics” and rebuild a “shrinking, shriveling church” with both legal and illegal arrivals from Mexico.
More broadly, Mr. Voris blames Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago who died in 1996, for his “seamless garment” theology, which united such stances as opposition to abortion, euthanasia, nuclear arms and the death penalty under a “consistent ethic of life.” To Mr. Voris, that formulation is “a total whitewash of Catholic social teaching.”
Not all of Mr. Voris’s criticisms are aimed at Catholics. He has also singled out the liberal philanthropist George Soros and the deceased community organizer Saul Alinsky, familiar targets for conservative activists like Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck. Mr. Voris, though, goes a significant step further by prominently identifying both Mr. Soros and Mr. Alinsky as Jewish.
Why is their religion relevant, particularly as neither man was observant? Mr. Voris responded, “The fuel, as it were, for the Democratic Party has come from a liberal Jewish mind-set.”
Such a comment might not sound so offensive were it not for Mr. Voris’s overarching views of Jews, which contravene Catholic policy since the Second Vatican Council. In a 2010 episode of ChurchMilitant.com’s webcast “The Vortex,” he contended that the Roman destruction of the Second Temple ended God’s covenant with the Jews. Subsequent Judaism, he said, is merely a “man-made religion.”
Asked about the statements, Mr. Voris said: “I’m not anti-Semitic at all. I’m just speaking on theological grounds.”
The explanation did not impress Mark Weitzman, an expert in hate groups for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who has studied ChurchMilitant.com. “What he says about Jews is classical supersessionist anti-Semitism,” Mr. Weitzman said, “and if he doesn’t repudiate it, that’s a problem.”
Repudiation does not appear likely for any of ChurchMilitant.com’s extremist positions, especially now that kindred spirits are about to take control of the executive branch of the American government.
“The Trump election gave permission to a lot of people who would never say certain things publicly to say them,” said the Rev. Mark S. Massa, a professor of church history at Boston College. “And for those who have been saying them all along, the repercussions will be minimal.”
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Timothy Dolan
New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan criticized [37] Trump’s nativist rhetoric in 2015, but more recently has praised Trump’s positions on abortion [38] and “religious liberty” and has said since the election he looks forward to the appointment of Supreme Court justices “who will reform the injustice and travesty of Roe v. Wade.”
Dolan hosted the meetings [39] at which the 2009 Manhattan Declaration was created, and he was among its original signers. The declaration is a manifesto for Christian conservatives who declare that when it comes to opposition to abortion and marriage equality, “no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.” Regarding marriage specifically it says, “No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a marriage.” And it vows civil disobedience, saying:
Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.
When Dolan was chosen to be president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2010, The New York Times described it [39] as a “surprise move that reaffirmed the conservative direction of the Roman Catholic Church in America.” In 2011, Dolan wrote to President Obama both privately and publicly [40] complaining that the administration’s decision not to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act would “escalate the threat to marriage and imperil the religious freedom of those who promote and defend marriage.”
In a joint statement with Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone in response [41] to the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision overturning part of the Defense of Marriage Act , Dolan called the ruling “a tragic day for marriage and our nation.” During an interview that year Dolan said gays and lesbians are “entitled to friendship” with each other but not “sexual love.”
When U.S. Religious Right groups gathered at the UN this year to partner with a group of the world’s most repressive regimes to resist international recognition for the human rights of LGBT people and their families, Bishop John O’Hara of the Archdiocese of New York assured the gathering that they had Dolan’s “enthusiastic support.”
Documents released in 2013 showed [42] that Dolan, when archbishop of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee in 2007, had asked for and received permission from the Vatican to, as The New York Times reported, “move nearly $57 million into a cemetery trust fund to protect the assets from victims of clergy sexual abuse who were demanding compensation.”
Peter Montgomery is a senior fellow at People For the American Way Foundation.
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/meet-trumps-peculiar-collection-relgious-leaders-he-picked-speak-his-inauguration
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Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch recently made headlines by pledging nearly $900 million to help elect candidates who support their libertarian strain of economic conservatism, but the industrialists are also nearly doubling their investment in the business school of Catholic University of America, which is overseen by the U.S. bishops.
That’s despite the fact that many Catholics — including Pope Francis — say the kind of unregulated capitalism that the Kochs promote runs counter to church teaching.
The $1.75 million dollar grant from the Charles Koch Foundation, one of several nonprofits with ties to the industrialist brothers, is part of a $3 million pledge to CUA announced in January that includes $500,000 from the Busch Family Foundation and $250,000 each from three business leaders.
The donation to the Washington-based university comes just over a year after the Koch Foundation gave an initial $1 million grant that allowed CUA to launch its own School of Business and Economics. The school is run by Andrew Abela and it is dedicated to promoting what it calls “principled entrepreneurship.”
The grant fits with the Kochs’ strategy of funding business and other programs at universities around the country. (They are also generous underwriters of numerous cultural institutions.) But from the moment the first CUA donation was announced in the fall of 2013, many Catholic theologians and others raised questions about why the only pontifical university in the country would take so much money from the Kochs.
Dozens of theologians and academics wrote to CUA president John Garvey and Abela expressing concern that “by accepting such a donation you send a confusing message to Catholic students and other faithful Catholics that the Koch brothers’ anti-government, Tea Party ideology has the blessing of a university sanctioned by Catholic bishops.”
They renewed that criticism last February, saying the Kochs’ libertarian-leaning positions “are in direct conflict with traditional Catholic values.”
A few months later, at a conference sponsored by Catholic University’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies, the Honduran cardinal who is one of Francis’ top advisers blasted today’s free market system as “a new idol” that is increasing inequality and excluding the poor.
Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga was joined at the conference, and in his critique, by Bishop Blase Cupich, who in September was personally tapped by Francis to be the new archbishop of Chicago, the pontiff’s most important U.S. appointment to date.
Francis himself has focused on economic inequality in the nearly two years since he has been pope, repeatedly denouncing the current capitalist system and in particular the “trickle down” economics favored by many Republicans and libertarians.
Those statements have generated a great deal of friction and unusually direct and sharp criticism of Francis from Catholic conservatives, especially in the U.S. Some conservatives have responded by arguing that Francis is not talking about capitalism as it is practiced in the U.S., or that he simply doesn’t understand economics.
In a Jan. 22 statement announcing the new gift, Abela said that the donation will help the school create “a cadre of faculty dedicated to research exploring how we can make business and economics more humane.” As if anticipating criticism, he added that is also “a moral imperative that Pope Francis has been championing with great passion.”
That same day, Tim Busch, co-founder of the Busch Foundation and a Koch ally, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing that “the principles behind this initiative and the principled entrepreneurship program are consistent with Catholic teaching.”
Critics said Busch was exaggerating that overlap and glossing over the real goals of libertarian free-market advocates, which they say are in no way compatible with church teachings.
While Busch is a practicing Catholic, the Kochs are not, and in fact David Koch supports gay marriage and abortion rights.
Critics of the CUA gift say it is ironic that the school would seek such massive support from a social liberal when Catholic charities are not allowed to take any money from any person or group that supports abortion rights or gay rights.
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Controversial, Capitalist Koch Brothers Pledge Millions To Catholic University Business School
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Catholic :{University's:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Donation From Charles :{Koch:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Protested By ...:{:(style="margin:auto;padding:0px 1em;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;transition:opacity 0.3s ease-in-out 0s;border-radius:1em;visibility:hidden;opacity:0;display:inline-block;position:absolute;background-color:rgba(138, 138, 138, 0.901961);height:2em;z-index:200;bottom:2.5em;left:-0.95em"):}:
(RNS) Dozens of Catholic leaders are protesting the decision by the Catholic University of America to accept a large donation from the foundation of ...
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Dirty Money: From Rockefeller to :{Koch:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: - The Atlantic:{:(style="margin:auto;padding:0px 1em;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;transition:opacity 0.3s ease-in-out 0s;border-radius:1em;visibility:hidden;opacity:0;display:inline-block;position:absolute;background-color:rgba(138, 138, 138, 0.901961);height:2em;z-index:200;bottom:2.5em;left:-0.95em"):}:
Dirty Money: From Rockefeller to Koch. Catholic University's decision to accept $1 million from the Charles Koch Foundation to support the study of "principled ...
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Controversial :{Koch:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: brothers give big (again) to Catholic ...:{:(style="margin:auto;padding:0px 1em;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;transition:opacity 0.3s ease-in-out 0s;border-radius:1em;visibility:hidden;opacity:0;display:inline-block;position:absolute;background-color:rgba(138, 138, 138, 0.901961);height:2em;z-index:200;bottom:2.5em;left:-0.95em"):}:
Controversial Koch brothers give big (again) to Catholic University By David Gibson | January 30, 2015. Share Tweet Email Print More. More on Beliefs; Subscribe to ...
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](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=koch%20caltholic%20university+site:religionnews.com&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain religionnews.com"):{religionnews.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/2015/01/30/controversial-koch-brothers-gi...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:
Controversial :{Koch:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: brothers give big (again) to Catholic ...:{:(style="margin:auto;padding:0px 1em;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;transition:opacity 0.3s ease-in-out 0s;border-radius:1em;visibility:hidden;opacity:0;display:inline-block;position:absolute;background-color:rgba(138, 138, 138, 0.901961);height:2em;z-index:200;bottom:2.5em;left:-0.95em"):}:
(RESEND) Controversial Koch brothers give big ... at a conference sponsored by Catholic University's Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies, ...
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](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=koch%20caltholic%20university+site:www.washingtonpost.com&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain www.washingtonpost.com"):{washingtonpost.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/national/religion/resend-controversial-ko...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:
Should a Catholic :{University:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: take :{Koch:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Funding? | Commonweal ...:{:(style="margin:auto;padding:0px 1em;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:middle;transition:opacity 0.3s ease-in-out 0s;border-radius:1em;visibility:hidden;opacity:0;display:inline-block;position:absolute;background-color:rgba(138, 138, 138, 0.901961);height:2em;z-index:200;bottom:2.5em;left:-0.95em"):}:
Can a Catholic university legitimately take money from the likes of the Koch Brothers? This is not a hypothetical question. Many Catholic universities are implicated.
[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=koch%20caltholic%20university+site:www.commonwealmagazine.org&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain www.commonwealmagazine.org"):{commonwealmagazine.org:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}::{/blog/should-catholic-university-take-koch...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;opacity:1;visibility:visible"):}:
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- Troy Newman: The president of Operation Rescue jumped aboard the Trump train this week. An anti-choice extremist, Newman even co-authored a book with a would-be domestic terrorist, Cheryl Sullenberger, who in 1988 was sentenced to three years in federal prison for conspiring to blow up an abortion clinic. In that 2003 book, Newman and Sullenberger argue, according to People for the American Way, “that the government has a responsibility to execute abortion providers.”
Time was when a presidential candidate who played footsie with segregationists and white supremacists would have banished to the fringes of the American political scene. But Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has changed all that.
Oh sure, there have been plenty of codes telegraphed to the anti-black base of the GOP’s southern flank: Ronald Reagan’s choice of Philadelphia, Mississippi, as the place to make a “states’ rights” speech in his 1980 presidential campaign; Richard Nixon’s southern strategy and “Silent Majority” framing. But after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, expressions of outright racism were frowned upon in presidential politics. And articulations of misogyny were generally doled out in the form of withering condescension.
I don’t need to recount for you Trump’s friendliness with the alt-right, the white nationalist movement that was given a platform at Breitbart News by Stephen K. Bannon, the man Trump hired as his campaign CEO. You don’t need to take my word for it; Bannon has boasted of this fact. And you surely know of Trump’s numerous retweets of posts and memes from white supremacist websites. And who can forget all of the lovely things he’s said about women, calling them fat pigs and demeaning them for having menstrual periods?
Just yesterday, Trump’s running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, declined for a second time to say that former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke was “deplorable,” stating that he isn’t “in the name-calling business.” Isn’t it enough, Pence asked, that he and Trump have disavowed Duke’s endorsement?
Trump yesterday won the endorsement of Operation Rescue president Troy Newman, an anti-choice extremist who co-authored a 2003 book, according to People for the American Way, that “argued that the government has a responsibility to execute abortion providers.” In 1988, Newman’s co-author, Cheryl Sullenberger, was sentenced to three years in federal prison for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic.
On Friday, Donald Trump appeared before evangelical Christians assembled at the Values Voter Summit, an annual confab convened by FRC Action, the political arm of the Family Research Council. The conference exhibit hall featured the booths of such co-sponsors as Tradition, Family and Property, a paleo-Catholic cult whose founder described the Spanish Inquisition as the church’s most glorious moment,
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/anti-lgbt-march-supreme-court-dominated-group-celebrates-spanish-inquisition
and the conspiracy-theorist and segregationist John Birch Society, which William F. Buckley thought he had managed to purge from the conservative movement in 1962. This was the first time the JBS appeared in the Values Voter hall of sponsors. It could be said that the Trump candidacy helped pave the way, what with his embrace of the conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones, and his numerous winks to white nationalist extremists.
The following day, FRC President Tony Perkins, who has endorsed Trump, defended the alt-right when I asked him about the movement at a press conference. Its existence, he seemed to say, was the fault of President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for having “snuffed out” the voices of people who disagree with the administration’s policies.
To lay all of this at Trump’s feet would be to give him too much credit. As I’ve argued before, the misogynist, racist, nativist, anti-LGBT right wing that took over the GOP in 1980—of which Perkins himself is evidence—has much to answer for, not least of all, the rise of Donald Trump as the party’s standard-bearer. Trump may not have been the first choice of right-wing leaders, but they created the conditions that cleared his path to the nomination, and most have lined up behind him since he won it.
But mainstream media are also complicit in this normalization of hatred, allowing it to masquerade in the guise political positions. For decades, when reporting on the Christian right, for example, media have treated it as a religious movement, barely mentioning—if at all—the roots of movement positions in the segregationist backlash of the South. Instead, media executives allowed themselves to be cowed by the right wing’s outrage machine, every time it cranked up its conveyor belt of allegations of the anti-religion bent of reporters.
Today, the same tendency is evident in the false-equivalence reporting prevalent in the degrees to which media cover different stories. Questions about Clinton’s emails demand teams of reporters toiling for months; scandals involving Trump are too often written as one-off reports—so fearful are mainstream editors of fielding an accusation of liberal bias.
In the meantime, a monster has been allowed to grow in our midst. Bannon take an obscure fringe of the right and elevates it to a platform that garners tens of millions of pageviews per month. Trump hires Bannon. Media say, hey, that’s interesting, do one story, and say, “Next?”
Covering the Values Voter Summit this September 9 and 10 was downright depressing. Trump addressed the conference on Friday, and Pence on Saturday—meaning that the conference attendees represent a legitimized constituency of the GOP, as they have for 30 years. The founders of the religious right are passing onto their just rewards. Organizers Paul Weyrich and Howard Phillips died in 2008 and 2013, respectively; Phyllis Schlafly died on September 5 (but not before she took the opportunity to endorse Trump). The movement they founded, however, continues to wreak the havoc of hate on the American political landscape, and the media dare not call it by its name.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/normalization-evil-american-politics
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/anti-lgbt-march-**supreme-court-dominated-group-celebrates-spanish-inquisition**
Amid the the array of pro- and anti-LGBT forces outside the Supreme Court today, as the Court heard oral arguments in a case about marriage equality in California, one stood out: Tradition, Family & Property, a far-right Catholic organization whose founder cited the Spanish Inquisition as "a glorious moment" for the church. The Inquisition burned more than 1,000 Jews at the stake, confiscated the property of tens of thousands, and ultimately led to the expulsion of all Jews from Spain in 1492.
The medieval and just post-medieval eras play a key role in TFP's ideology and conduct. As I reported in 2010:
TFP is an all-male organization that finds its recruits among adolescent boys, whom it trains in the use of the combat regalia of the Middle Ages -- maces, crossbows, and the like -- according to the late Penny Lernoux's 1989 book, People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism. The medieval games in which the boys partake are so brutal, Lernoux reported, that one recruit told her his arm had been broken three times in the exercises.
The medieval games continue today. Last July, TFP sponsored a 10-day "Call to Chivalry" camp in rural Louisiana, where, according to the group's Web site, boys and young men took part:
Some new skills were learned such as medieval spear throwing and archery. Mock sword battles with padded weapons were a great success as were paintball wars in the thick tropical-looking forest surrounding the property. An exhausting hike in the Tunica Hills Park taught a poignant lesson of endurance.
In South America, TFP is known for backing authoritarian regimes;it was involved in the 1964 military coup in Brazil, according to researcher Richard Bartholomew, who also notes that after the coup against Allende in Chile, "[t]he editor of TFP's Chilean magazine, Jaime Guzmán, became chief ideologist for General Pinochet's regime."
As for the Supreme Court of the United States, TFP has a once-removed relationship: It was one of the sponsors of the short-lived Liberty Central Web site founded by Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.
Outside the court today, as pro-LGBT groups lined the street in front of the court, TFP's red standards, adorned by a medieval griffin, and its marching band of young men in business suits accessorized with red sashes, set the tone for the march led by the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage.
Oil giant ExxonMobilmoved to reject a shareholder proposal calling for the company to assert moral leadership on climate change and pledge to work toward limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less.
In a letter to securities regulators, the company said the resolution filed by a faith-based organization is "vague and indefinite." Exxon also said it’s unnecessary for shareholders to consider the proposal at the annual stockholders meeting on May 25 because the company has already taken steps to tamp down global warming. The resolution was filed by the New Jersey-based Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment.
While social responsibility groups have been demanding action on climate change from Exxon for decades, the Tri-State resolution is the first to call on the company to acknowledge moral responsibility. Over the past 25 years, shareholders have submitted 62 climate change-related proposals to Exxon, according to an InsideClimate News review of shareholder resolutions. Of those, 22 were either withdrawn or blocked by the company. None of the remaining 40 got enough votes to pass.
Management often urges the Securities and Exchange Commission to bar shareholder proposals from the proxy statements they publish for annual investor meetings.
Sister Patricia Daly of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, N.J., one of the sponsors of the resolution, called Exxon’s move "arrogant and dangerous."
"This challenge demonstrates that ExxonMobil plans to continue to cling to an unsustainable paradigm that severely harms our planet, without reflecting on the moral dimensions of a ‘business as usual’ scenario," she said. "I wonder what management fears will be revealed if they allow this resolution to go to a vote.
"They don’t see the moral imperative," she said. "They are dodging the 2 degrees."
The resolution declares, “We believe that ExxonMobil should assert moral leadership with respect to climate change.” It also calls on Exxon to adopt policies consistent with limiting the average global temperature increase to 2 degrees since the beginning of the Industrial Age and to acknowledge urgency in meeting that goal. The Tri-State Coalition represents nearly 40 Roman Catholic groups with pension funds that hold shares of Exxon.
A spokesman for Exxon declined to comment.The Tri-State proposal was among the **first of seven 2016 shareholder resolutions**to be filed with Exxon addressing climate change.
Exxon asked the SEC to allow the company to dismiss the resolution because it does not spell out exactly what actions Exxon would have to take to comply.
"The Proposal’s request that the company commit to ‘support the goal’ of limiting warming to less than ‘2° C’ is vague and misleading," according to Exxon’s letter to the SEC.
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Fr. Sirico's pastoral ministry has included a chaplaincy to AIDS patients at the National Institute's of Health and the recent founding of a new community, St. Philip Neri House in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
The Acton Institute maintains a vigorous editorial outreach, especially through its president, Rev. Robert A. Sirico. This site maintains an archive of many of his essays and reviews.
PETER MONTGOMERY
NOTE: This article is a sidebar to Peter Montgomery’s 2015 article in The Public Eye magazine, Biblical Economics: The Divine Laissez-Faire Mandate. Read that full article here.
It’s not only Christian Reconstructionists and conservative evangelicals working to give right-wing economic policies a religious grounding. Catholic writer Michael Novak, formerly ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism back in 1982. Thirty years later, Rep. Paul Ryan defended the massive social spending cuts in his proposed budget in 20121 as a reflection of Catholic principles—a claim vigorously challenged by Sister Simone Campbell, Executive Director of the national Catholic social justice lobby group NETWORK,2 who continues to oppose Ryan’s approach to poverty and his interpretation of Catholic social justice teachings.
Writing for Political Research Associates in 2008, Frank L. Cocozzelli challenged neoconservative Catholic “proponents of a buccaneer capitalism that exploits the poorest people of God—an idea profoundly at odds with Catholic social teaching for more than a century.”3 Cocozzelli said Novak’s books “present a highly tortured version of the Roman Catholic concept of social justice.” Catholic neocons, he wrote, are more neocon than Catholic.
More recently, Catholic conservatives have wrung their hands over the language Pope Francis and some other bishops have used to critique the damaging and dehumanizing excesses of modern corporate capitalism.4 In April 2014, after the Pope famously tweeted,5 “Inequality is the root of social evil,” conservatives were distraught.6 David Gibson collected some of the reactions at Religion News Service.7
“Seriously, though, what was up with that tweet by @Pontifex? Has he traded the writings of Peter and Paul for [French economist Thomas] Piketty?” tweeted Joe Carter of the Acton Institute, a Catholic-run, libertarian think tank.8 “Hate and apathy are the roots of social evil,” he added as a counterpoint.9
“So, if we achieve maximum redistribution of resources, we will have eliminated ‘social evil,’ whatever that is?” wrote Rod Dreher in a rather snarky post at The American Conservative.10 “Yes, and that’s why the Soviet Union was the Garden of Eden.”
Others suggested that Francis didn’t know what was going into his Twitter feed, prompting Vatican officials to note that the message was “taken directly from Francis’ blockbuster exhortation from last year, The Joy of the Gospel.”11,12 Gibson suggested that “many Christian conservatives, especially non-Catholics, are not intimately familiar with Catholic social teaching, which is what Francis was expounding.”13
Last summer, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York got some help14 from CNBC’s Larry Kudlow putting together an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal trying to smooth things over, suggesting that Francis was talking about corrupt Third-World capitalism, but not the principled kind practiced by New York’s financial class.15 Dolan wrote that “the answer to problems with the free market is not to reject economic liberty in favor of government control,” adding, “The church has consistently rejected coercive systems of socialism and collectivism, because they violate inherent human rights to economic freedom and private property.”
Fr. Drew Christiansen, Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Human Development at Georgetown University, responded, “It wasn’t Argentinean populist economics, Eastern European crony capitalism, or African kleptocracy that threatened the world economy with the worst recession since the 1930s… It was no-holds-barred American capitalism that did that.”16 Christiansen continued:
“For generations, Catholic social teaching has understood and taught that improving the condition of the poor means holding inequality in check. Thanks be to God, that Pope Benedict and Pope Francis have underscored that teaching in the most emphatic ways.
Unfortunately, too many well-to-do Catholics prefer getting their economic ethics from the Acton Institute rather than the Vatican.”
The Acton Institute is a Michigan-based think tank dedicated, according to its website, to “Integrating Judeo-Christian Truths with Free Market Principles.” According to SourceWatch, Acton has received millions from organizations connected to the Koch brothers.17 While Acton calls itself ecumenical, it was co-founded and is led by Rev. Robert A. Sirico, a formerly liberal18 Catholic priest who in 2012 wrote Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy. Sirico and Acton promote libertarian economics19 and a conservative take on Catholic social justice teaching. In 2013, Acton’s research director, Samuel Gregg, published Tea Party Catholic: The Catholic Case for Limited Government, a Free Economy, and Human Flourishing.20
Along those lines, last fall conservative scholar Anthony Esolen published Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching: A Defense of the Church’s True Teachings on Marriage, Family, and the State,21 a book that promises to “[pull] back the curtain” on the “false philosophers” of Catholic social justice advocates.
Inside, Esolen argues, “Catholic social teaching condemns the statist usurpation of the family, whether that usurpation is openly hostile or is cloaked in beneficence.” Esolen says charity is an individual’s duty that cannot be passed off to others, that businesses should pay a fair wage, and workers should provide work of value, but that this will be a result of virtuous people, not “State control.” He denounces “the cancerous Metastate,” which he says damages families and the ability of people to govern themselves according to the Ten Commandments.
Some conservatives fear the loss of independence that comes with Catholic agencies taking government funds to carry out social justice work. In a March 2015 commentary, ChurchMilitant.TV host Michael Voris slammed “the abuse of the church’s beautiful social teaching to advance the political aims of the church’s enemies.”22 Voris denounced Catholic social welfare agencies for taking government funds to carry out their work. “The church in America is up to its miters in government entanglements owing to its having taken taxpayer money,” he said. Bishops “have crawled into bed with low-life, evil politicians to get their cash, so they can ostensibly go out and fulfill the church’s mission to help the poor.”
In November, Catholic libertarians and philanthropists John and Carol Saeman wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post entitled “Pope Francis, the Kochs, and How the Wealthy Can Help the Poor.”23 The Saemans, contributors to the Kochs’ political networks,24 repeated the claim that limited-government, free-market policies align with Catholic teachings about the common good. Meanwhile, the Koch brothers are continuing to invest in Catholic institutions. In January, the Charles Koch Foundation announced a grant of $1.75 million to the Catholic University of America,25 which came a year after a controversial $1 million Koch grant for CUA to launch a business school.26
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