Catholic Vote launched a $350,000 ad campaign against Democratic nominee Joe Biden this week in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Michigan because the former vice president continually betrays Catholics and his claim to the faith. “Joe Biden would force American Catholics to pay for abortions, sacrificing his Catholic values to kneel before the leftist mob,” the advertisement said. In one particularly egregious betrayal, Biden selected Sen. Kamala Harris to be his running mate, making this Democratic ticket radically pro-abortion and anti-Catholic.
Harris treats membership in Catholic organizations as disqualifying for public office and describes believing Catholics as national security threats. She targets Catholic journalists with political prosecutions. Along with the rest of the Democratic Party, she wants to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for abortion-causing drugs. Harris goes even beyond the rest of the party in her opposition to the Catholic faith.
Of course, that is only one way of seeing things. If Catholicism is nothing more than an unusually fusty and ritualistic way of affirming progressive pieties, Harris is its friend and champion. She is happy to embrace Catholics — including her running mate — as long as they ignore their church’s teachings and instead bend the knee to the latest notions of diversity, inclusion, and equality.
In 2019, Harris suggested that Brian Buescher, a nominee for a district court seat, was unfit for service because of his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization. As part of his Senate confirmation, she asked Buescher whether he knew that the Knights “opposed a woman’s right to choose” and “opposed marriage equality.”
Of course, the Catholic Church, like many other religious groups, opposes same-sex marriage and abortion. To treat membership in a Catholic organization as potentially disqualifying, precisely because that organization upholds Catholic beliefs, amounts to a religious test for public office.
If Catholics are faithful to Christian teaching, especially on abortion and sexuality, Harris believes they have no place in our politics. “Russia was able to influence our election,” she wrote in 2019, “because they figured out that racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and transphobia are America’s Achilles heel. These issues aren’t only civil rights — they’re also a matter of national security. We have to deal with that.”
With these words, Harris lumped believing Catholics in with antisemites. If you believe marriage is between a man and woman, if you think boys should not be allowed to compete in girls’ sports, Harris thinks you might be a tool of our nation’s enemies.
Catholics should take Harris at her word. She has a history of bringing criminal charges against her political enemies. As attorney general of California, she prosecuted David Daleiden, a young Catholic investigative journalist who had exposed certain dark practices of Planned Parenthood, such as the selling of baby body parts. As part of the prosecution, Harris raided Daleiden’s home, an unnecessary act designed to punish and intimidate. Daleiden said he relied on “the church, the faith of the church, the ancient ritual of the church” during his ordeal.
Biden’s collaboration with Harris is shameful but not surprising. He would not directly question whether a member of the Knights of Columbus could serve as a judge, but he has always gone along with the kind of people who do.
Just as Biden’s working-class background has not prevented him from shilling for credit card companies or supporting the outsourcing of American jobs, his Catholic identity has not inspired him to oppose the evil of abortion. In fact, Biden supports taxpayer funding of abortion and has said he would reject a Supreme Court ruling that protects nuns from violating their firmly held religious beliefs about birth control and abortifacients.
If one wants to understand just how self-defeating and misguided Catholic liberal politics has become, one needs only to consider that its most prominent representative invited the country’s leading anti-Catholic politician to be his running mate. Catholics who value their liberty will work to keep Biden and Harris — their betrayer and their persecutor — away from the White House.
