Religious War in GOP
By ignatius Posted in User Blogs — Comments (16) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I want to start with some quotes:
From http://www.insidebayarea.com/dailyreview/news/ci_3099094
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Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition, warned the White House against assuming that spreading word of Miers' strong Christian faith and long ties to an evangelical Dallas church would win over conservatives.
"The larger questions that must be addressed are where one stands on the Constitution, their judicial philosophy and their fundamental view of the law. At this point in time, we have no idea where Harriet Miers stands on any of those issues," Mahoney said. "To the supporters of Ms. Miers and the White House, please stop treating faith as a political commodity."
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From http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/weyrich/051007
Quote from Paul Weyrich
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Some Evangelical Leaders favor the Miers candidacy but this is based more upon the fact that Miers is the first Evangelical to be nominated to the High Court since 1931 rather than because they know how she would vote. Miers was raised Roman Catholic and "found Christ in the late 1970s" according to one Evangelical acquaintance. Since conservative Catholics are part of the Bush Coalition the White House would be ill-advised to discuss her conversion too loudly.
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Alan Keys from http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46709
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The White House apparently assumes that assurances about her church attendance should be sufficient to mollify the anger and sense of betrayal the nomination has aroused among moral conservatives throughout the country.
Even - indeed, especially - from a Christian perspective, this assumption is a gross miscalculation. The popular phrase meant to capture the essence of Christian moral guidance is "What would Jesus do?" not "Where would Jesus worship?" Even that popular catchphrase doesn't exactly convey the standard Jesus articulated when it comes to our knowledge of other people. He said "By their fruits ye shall know them."
By either of these measures, there is little or no visible evidence of Miers' fruitfulness in areas of public policy or discourse relevant to the challenges she will face on the Supreme Court. In fact, as many have pointed out, the record suggests that for many years her profession of faith in Christ did not affect her support for people whose views directly contradict what she reportedly acknowledges as the moral standards of her faith. This would be consistent with comments made by Texas Justice Hecht, cited in several media articles as a fellow church member and sometime social companion of Miss Miers.
"Yes, she goes to a pro-life church," Justice Hecht said, adding, "I know Harriet is, too." The two attended "two or three" anti-abortion fund-raising dinners in the early 1990s, he said, but added that she had not otherwise been active in the anti-abortion movement. "You can be just as pro-life as the day is long and can decide the Constitution requires Roe" to be upheld, he said." (New York Times, Oct. 5, 2005)
Though logically absurd, Justice Hecht's statement points to a fact about the conduct of many supposedly pro-life people in public life today. They profess "personal views" against abortion or homosexual conduct, while maintaining a strict separation of conscience and conclusion when it comes to law and public policy.
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from http://www.freedomunderground.org/view.php?v=3&t=3&aid=20469
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Patrick J. Buchanan - Miers' Qualifications Are 'non-Existent'
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From http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/archives-2005-triumph_of_protestan
tism.htm
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" `Yes, she goes to a pro-life church,' Justice Hecht said, adding, `I know Harriet is, too.' The two attended `two or three' anti-abortion fund-raising dinners in the early 1990's, he said, but added that she had not otherwise been active in the anti-abortion movement. `You can be just as pro-life as the day is long and can decide the Constitution requires Roe' to be upheld, he said."
Reassured now?
In truth, you see, Justice Hecht's view of the separation of one's "private views" from one's public duties is of the essence of Protestantism. Consider the following quote from Martin Luther, found in Father Denis Fahey's masterful The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World:
"Assuredly, a prince can be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he ought to govern. As a ruler, he is not called a Christian, but a prince. The man is a Christian, but his function does not concern his religion."
Martin Luther thus provided the blueprint for the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King as it was exercised in the Middle Ages by the Catholic Church and the rationale for the segregation of personal "beliefs" from one's public duties. A Catholic can never justify either of these two abiding errors, both of which have are common to Protestantism and Freemasonry.
Pope Leo XIII put it this way in his 1885 encyclical letter, Immortale Dei:
"Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue."
One of the great tragedies in the case of Harriet Miers, as is becoming evident from the press reporting on her life, is that she should have been familiar with the truths of the Catholic Faith. According to The New York Times, Miss Miers was "born" a Roman Catholic (yes, we know that no one is "born" a Catholic; one is born to the Faith in the baptismal font). Living in the midst of a pluralistic, religiously indifferentist nation, though, Miss Miers evidently had no grounding in the Faith. The Washington Post reported that she had attended Presbyterian and Episcopalian "churches" during her youth. There was an "emptiness" in her life as she approached the age of 40 or so that prompted Nathan Hecht to invite her to the Valley View Christian Church.
Miss Miers "conversion" to the heresies of evangelical Protestantism has resulted in a veritable hodgepodge of "views" that are mutually contradictory to each other. For example, the effort to portray her as a "sincere Christian" to "social conservatives" does not square with the fact that as late as 1999, as Joseph Farah reported on WorldNetDaily.com this week, she had prepared a report for the American Bar Association supporting the "right" of those steeped in unrepentant perversity to adopt children. Her support for women in combat and for the continuation of former President William Jefferson Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policies concerning perverts in the military demonstrate that there is no coherency at all to her thought processes, something that is quite typical of those steeped in all of the logical absurdities spawned by the Protestant Revolt, not the least of which is the fact that over 33,000 different so-called "Christian" denominations have arisen since the lustful Augustinian monk named Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the church door in Wittenberg in 1517.
Harriet Miers is every bit a victim of the Protestant Revolution's rejection of the visible, hierarchical church founded by Our Lord upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, and the social confusion engendered in one nation after another as its all-too-logical and inevitable result.
Some will protest, saying that Article VI of the United States Constitution forbids any "religious test" for the holding of public office. What difference does it make that Miss Miers has abandoned the true Faith? She is not required to be Catholic to serve on the United States Supreme Court, right?
Well, you see, Article VI of the United States Constitution is one of the principal problems with the Constitution as it enshrines religious indifferentism by its refusal to require that holders of public office confess the true Faith. Once again, some will say that Article VI was meant to enfranchise Catholics at a time when they were disenfranchised in some states. True enough. Article VI, however, was also meant to enfranchise deists such as Thomas Jefferson, thereby leading directly and inexorably to the enshrinement of Protestant-Masonic notion that men of divergent beliefs could pursue the common good while leaving aside their "denominational" differences.
Pope Leo XIII put the lie to this in Immortale Dei.
"To hold therefore that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points, cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God."
Attempts to portray Harriet Miers, an evidently well-meaning but terribly confused product of Americanism, as a friend of Our Lord are thus pathetically founded in the essential premises of the Protestant Revolt.
Furthermore, it really does matter that Miss Miers has abandoned the true Faith. While we pray for her return to the true Church, there is almost nothing that pleases the devil more than snatching a baptized Catholic out of the true Faith, thereby robbing that soul of contact with the sacraments and a willingness to subordinate everything in his or her life to the entirety of the Deposit of Faith entrusted by Our Lord solely to the Catholic Church.
It is bad enough that allegedly practicing Catholics support the prevailing evils of the day while maintaining their "good standing" within the Church. It is worse yet that a soul leaves the true Church and is considered thus fit for public service and/or civic leadership. No one-and I mean no one-who has abandoned the true Faith (or who dissents from the articles contained in the Deposit of Faith) is entitled to our support as a holder of public office, whether elected or appointed. No such person has anything to offer public debate as his or her "ideas" are not founded in an acceptance of the immutable Social Teaching of the Catholic Church and thus the product of the individualism and absurd contradictions that characterize contemporary social "thought" and political praxis. This applies not only to Miss Miers. This applies to those who have abandoned the Faith to embrace the false religion known as Mormonism, founded by a Masonic confidence man, Joseph Smith. This applies also to presidential aspirants of third parties who have placed their souls in the grip of the devil by abandoning the sacramental life of the true Church into which they were baptized.
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I could go on. My point is that Miers is WORSE than Breyer to many conservative Catholics. She is viewed by conservative Catholics as a fallen-away Catholic.
Her life story is offensive, and makes it difficult for Catholics to support her. I, for one, do not. No major Catholic leader does.
Bush's nomination of her is a poke-in-the-face. When we vote with the GOP for Judges and SHE is nominated, it is a real problem.
Now, that said, evangelicals are themselves split about her. However, the Catholic opposition is growing to the point where it may cause a permenent split in the Catholic-Protestant unity shown lately for politics and religion.
There is an unwritten rule in religion. You don't make an issue of people who switch from another religion to yours.
She must be withdrawn.
As an agnostic, I may not agree with his point, or how he makes it, but the fact is, that's how a lot of Catholics
By focusing on her denominational alignment instead of her substance to sell her to the base (which is failing), they may very well also alienate the people they've worked so hard to weld into their coalition (ie- the Catholics) by talking about how she was a Catholic, but then found God.
Frankly, were I a Catholic, I might find that a bit offensive.
Granted, a lot of things Catholics might say are offensive to evangelicals too, but that makes selling the substance instead of the alignment even more important.
If you want to read more about this divide from a Baptist perspective, you should read this on the passing of John Paul II.
The diary states:
"The White House apparently assumes that assurances about her church attendance should be sufficient to mollify the anger and sense of betrayal the nomination has aroused among moral conservatives throughout the country."
You include no statement by the White House selling her based on religious faith.
And you do not include the statements by By Bush and Miers at the announcement of the nomination in which both emphasized her career and originalist philosophy.
So the diary is disingenuous. There is no religious war in the gop. There may be one in your mind and you may want one, but there isn;t one as we speak.
Now, there are liberal voices that have said her faith disqualifies her and you find the constitutional ban on religious tests to be a problem.
So what are you up to?
Speaking as the local ultramontane, this is ridiculous.
William Brennan was a "devout" Catholic. He was a passionate supporter of Roe and its attendant silliness.
Roger Taney was Catholic. You can blame substantive due process on him, and that Dred Scott thing (all at once).
Scalia and Thomas are Catholic.
The question, in brute results terms, is whether abortion on demand remains the law of the land. The question, in more esoteric terms, is whether the Law as written remains the law. Catholics are equally susceptible to respecting Tradition and rejecting it when it stands in the way of their perception of justice.
This is just dumb and insulting.
Every word from
I could go on to She must be withdrawn is either sophistic, reflects cruddy political analysis (neither this conservative Catholic nor most Catholics are going to abandon natural allies over a Supreme Court nomination that those allies oppose), or is just downright insulting. I found the parting shot at the Mormons particularly insulting, no matter my many doctrinal problems with them.
This is a Republican site, not a Catholic one, and certainly not an insultingly stupid Catholic one.
Consider this your one warning.
religious affiliation means nothing to me, and it bothers me that it is used either as a pro or a con in defending the appointment.
The only thing that should matter, when it comes to SCOTUS is judicial philosophy, not whether she attends church every Sunday, is personally pro life, or was once a Catholic, but changed her religious affiliation to something else.
To use religion as a pro or con to me screams of a subtle religious test.
I would rather have an originalist atheist any day than a living breathing or somewhere in between evangelical on the SCOTUS.
To quote Glendon "It's a very strange doctrine that would silence only religiously grounded moral viewpoints."
Perhaps people are taking this out-of-context. However, Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Paul Weyrich, Patrick J. Buchanan, Alan Keys, and other Catholics opposed to Miers have been strong Republicans.
To Quote Paul Weyrich, who if I am banned from his cite from quoting -- I would like to be banned--
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Some Evangelical Leaders favor the Miers candidacy but this is based more upon the fact that Miers is the first Evangelical to be nominated to the High Court since 1931 rather than because they know how she would vote. Miers was raised Roman Catholic and "found Christ in the late 1970s" according to one Evangelical acquaintance. Since conservative Catholics are part of the Bush Coalition the White House would be ill-advised to discuss her conversion too loudly.
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To repeate part of the quote, "Since conservative Catholics are part of the Bush Coalition the White House would be ill-advised to discuss her conversion too loudly."
Look, my post simply says the obvious: You don't tell someone "Hey, this nominee is great, she left your religion, so we should trust her."
The pro-Miers group have no support that Miers is an originalist and only support her nomination by saying either:
-Look at her religion or
-Trust Bush
I am saying that "look at her religion" is a poke-in-the-face to Catholics.
To Quote Glendon
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I have to admit that, back in the 1970s, I was rather uncritical of such phrases. I remember asking the former dean of Boston College, a Jesuit priest, "Father, what do you think about this abortion issue?" He said, "Well you see, Mary Ann, it's very simple. According to Vatican II, abortion is `an unspeakable moral crime.' But in a pluralistic democracy, we can't impose our moral views on other people." "Oh," I said, "OK."
I know this story doesn't reflect any credit on me, but I mention it to show that many of us just didn't focus on the issue all that closely. I know now that I should have questioned the word "impose." But it took some time before growing numbers of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews stepped forward to point out that when people advance their moral viewpoints in the public square, they are not imposing anything on anyone. They are proposing. That's what citizens do in a democracy--we propose, we give reasons, we vote. It's a very strange doctrine that would silence only religiously grounded moral viewpoints. And it's very unhealthy for democracy when the courts--without clear constitutional warrant--deprive citizens of the opportunity to have a say in setting the conditions under which we live, work, and raise our children.
It was only after I started to look into how controversial issues like abortion and divorce were handled in other liberal democracies that I realized how my dean's slogan has been used not only to silence religiously grounded views, but to silence all opposition to abortion. I should have asked the dean why citizens should have to withhold their moral views on abortion but not on other issues where he did not hesitate to advance religiously grounded moral viewpoints--the Vietnam War, capital punishment, civil rights, and relief of poverty. Years later, I put a related question to the former dean of Harvard Law School. In the mid-1980s, after I had given a talk to the Harvard faculty comparing American abortion law unfavorably with the approaches taken in several other liberal democracies, Dean Al Sacks took me out for lunch and said, "You know, no one in that room agrees with you." Since he had put the point in a friendly, avuncular way, I asked him about something that had long puzzled me. "Why," I asked, "did you and so many other constitutional lawyers stop criticizing the Court's abortion decisions after most of you had been highly critical of Roe v. Wade?" He sighed and gave me a very candid answer that had the ring of truth. "I suppose," he said, "it was because we had been made to understand that the abortion issue was so important to the women in our lives, and it just did not seem that important to most of us."
What a great site...you threaten to ban those who do no always fully agree with you...even those who have gone door-to-door, donate money, and voted Republican.
Why do you threaten to do so? Because I quote several of the formost GOP leaders of the day ... on their views of Miers and point out that universal opposition they have to Miers, and QUOTE THEM in their opposition to the line "trust her....she left the Catholic Church to some other denomination...so she must be pro-life".
To repeate part of the quote, "Since conservative Catholics are part of the Bush Coalition the White House would be ill-advised to discuss her conversion too loudly."
My point of quoting others (who I do agree with generally) is that there is a little bit of a divide.
However, I am also seeing that Jewish leaders and Main-line Proestants are also not buying the "trust her she is evangelical line" to the same degree the the WH hoped.
Also, evangelicals, themselves, are not buying the line.
However, Catholics are actually offended by the line.
That is my point. My point is that the WH and Miers supporters should NOT use religion to support their candidate.
That leaves them with only "trust Bush"
I believed Ignatius has tipped his hand and revealed that he is a revenant of Chrysostom. He is the only other person on this site who has ever sung paeans to the rather obscure Ms. Glendon, known only to the public (if at all) through sporadic boilerplate piecse in First Things.
While I don't always agree on the issues with those in the tent who have strong religious beliefs, those of us in the middle have nothing but respect for those who hold great faith and have strong feelings about those views. Mostly it's a difference in degrees, not principles after all.
A war, I think not, honest disagreement of people who see the world slight different but in a respectful way, sure. That's why we are Republicans and not Jack A**es, whoops Donks.
Is slightly better known than that, I assure you.
And I hope that I am not. By your definitions, a truly devout Catholic cannot serve in a nation of laws such as ours, for if their oath of office compels them to enforce a law contrary to their faith--and it will--they are obliged to follow their faith, not the law.
Strict obedience to this standard would render any such person unfit for public office. This is clearly not the case for countless principled, devoted Catholics.
I thinks a number of Catholics uphold their faith by upholding the law. Pryor, Garza, Alito are a number of great example. Jeb Bush is another.
Catholic faith does not require one to go above the law, but to act according to it.
Now, if the law required me to perform an abortion, I would not. However, there is no moral duty to throw a person in jail without due process. Likewise, the Constitution requires judges to 1-follow the law, and 2- sets up a judiciary under the Supreme Court.
My point in those posts is simply that it is offensive to say that because of Mier's religious choices, she is a Anti-Roe vote. That offends some Catholics.
But I would support her.
Look, here is what I feel I have a right to demand: A qualified nominee.
I will be very said if the nominee is pro-choice.
I would have supported as far left a person as Gonzales. I don't agree with him about the war on terror or on parental notification. However, he is -- barely-- qualified. He has experience on a state supreme court and as AG.
Miers lacks that experience and lacks a known, proven reputation. She does not appear to have the judicial philiosphy of say a Luttig, Pryor, Brown, Alito, Garza, Jones, etc.
MIers does not have the same qualification level as a Breyer or a Roberts.
This has chrysotom all over it. He's just getting a tad better at disguising him/herself.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Keep that in mind when you attack a nominee for switching from Catholicism to Prodestantism as "abandoning the one true faith."
Also your smear about Miers and gay adoption were thorougly debunked so please go peddle this garbage elsewhere.