To My Fellow Catholics,<\/p>\n
On March 7, our brethren in the faith, Robert P. George and George Weigel, published an open letter in National Review <\/em>addressed to the Catholic world.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s \u201cappeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice,\u201d they assure us, \u201care offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility [.]\u201d Nor is there anything \u201cin his campaign or his previous record that gives us grounds for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government.\u201d<\/p>\n The authors also add that Trump\u2019s position in favor of torturing terrorist suspects and killing their family members are not only condemned by the Church. Such policies \u201cwould bring shame on our country.\u201d<\/p>\n George and Weigel \u201curge our fellow Catholics and all our fellow citizens to reject\u201d Trump\u2019s \u201ccandidacy\u2026by supporting a genuinely reformist candidate.\u201d<\/p>\n And that candidate, of course, is one of the Republican candidates, for while the GOP is \u201cimperfect, like all human institutions,\u201d it is nevertheless a \u201cserviceable\u201d vehicle \u201cfor promoting causes\u201d\u2014like the \u201clegal protection for unborn children, the physically disabled and cognitively handicapped, the frail elderly, and other victims of what St. John Paul II branded \u2018the culture of death\u2019\u201d\u2014that are \u201cat the center of Catholic social concern in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n Where to begin?<\/p>\n The authors essentially make the same bipartisan Everything-and-the Kitchen sink argument against Trump that the hard and moderate left in the Democrat\/Republican axis have been making against him for months. The only difference here is that this ad hoc hodgepodge line of reasoning, this GOP Establishment boosting, is decorated with the veneer of religiosity.<\/p>\n Inasmuch as George and Weigel don\u2019t substantiate any of their assertions, theirs is, in effect, an extended ad hominem assault against the Republican presidential frontrunner.<\/p>\n For starters, Trump has most decidedly not<\/em> made \u201cappeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice,\u201d as the authors insist. He has noted, indisputably, that a not insignificant number of Mexican immigrants to the United States have been criminals. Not only is this documentable; those masses of working-class Americans whose persons and communities have suffered first-hand from the ravages of unrelenting immigration and who George and Weigel condescendingly suppose are animated by raw, irrational prejudice recognize Trump\u2019s claim for the self-evident truth that it is.<\/p>\n As for Trump\u2019s call to temporarily <\/em>halt immigration from Islamic countries until we can insure that we aren\u2019t importing jihadists who want to slaughter Americans, this too is something that sounds eminently sensible to countless numbers of everyday Americans\u2014however politically incorrect and professionally dangerous it sounds to Princeton academics and Beltway journalists.<\/p>\n George\u2019s and Weigel\u2019s charge of racial demagoguery fails. In leveling it, though, they \u201cstrain out the gnat while letting in the camel\u201d:<\/p>\n Castigating Trump for allegedly stoking racial and ethnic division in advocating a position designed to spare injury to Muslim and non-Muslim alike out of one side of their mouths, they endorse Republican politicians who favor\u2014and who have executed\u2014the invasion of Third World lands of people of color. Consequently, well over 100,000 lives have been ended, families decimated and displaced, ancient Christian <\/em>communities destroyed, and many more lives severely injured.<\/p>\n Trump opposed and remains strenuously opposed to the war in Iraq. He is the only presidential candidate who has not spoken belligerently about Putin or the heads of any other states. On the other hand, George\u2019s and Weigel\u2019s \u201cserviceable\u201d party and its \u201creformist\u201d candidates continue to stand by the incalculable blood that\u2019s been shed for most of this century as the price necessary for the sake of exporting \u201cliberal democracy\u201d to the Middle East.<\/p>\n Yet it is Trump who George and Weigel promise will bring \u201cshame upon our country.\u201d<\/p>\n The authors think that Trump will not serve the victims of \u201cthe culture of death\u201d\u2014but, presumably, Rubio, Kasich, and Cruz will.<\/p>\n This point is especially puzzling. What exactly do they expect for the President of the United States to do for, say, abortion? Roe v. Wade <\/em>has been the law of the land for over 40 years. Republicans have not only made<\/em> no attempts to overturn this Supreme Court decision; they repeatedly assure their opponents that they will make<\/em> no such attempts.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that Republicans continue to espouse their commitment to \u201clife.\u201d Trump does the same. As far as action is concerned, however, he can\u2019t possibly be any worse in this regard than those of his fellow GOPers who have spent decades in Congress funding Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.<\/p>\n George served on the President\u2019s Council on Bioethics under Bush II, who also awarded him the Presidential Citizens Medal. But Bush II is the first president to have authorized federal funding<\/em> for embryonic<\/em> stem cell research\u2014a move that certainly didn\u2019t advance those concerns at the heart of \u201cCatholic social concern.\u201d<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the author\u2019s contention that Catholics should vote for any other Republican but Trump because the latter is the one candidate who is not interested in \u201climited government.\u201d This is probably true of Trump. As should be obvious to anyone who\u2019s been alive for more than a handful of years, it\u2019s at least as <\/em>true of the other candidates and the GOP as a whole. But I will not elaborate upon the obvious here.<\/p>\n If the GOP is \u201cserviceable\u201d for us Catholics, then Trump may be all that much more<\/em> serviceable.<\/p>\n In truth, however, George and Weigel are trying to make Catholics \u201cserviceable\u201d to the GOP.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To My Fellow Catholics, On March 7, our brethren in the faith, Robert P. George and George Weigel, published an open letter in National Review addressed to the Catholic world. Trump\u2019s \u201cappeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice,\u201d they assure us, \u201care offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility [.]\u201d Nor is there anything \u201cin…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n