Catholic and Enjoying It!
When you declare that Trump’s behavior is the “textbook definition of racism” and “outrageous” but then don’t withdraw your support for him, you make clear that you and your party, in fact, support racism and that everything your critics have been saying about you and your party all these years is true.
The pretense that the racism which deems a judge unfit for office purely because of his ethnicity is something new in Trump’s campaign is rubbish and these guys know it. Michael Gerson does the autopsy:
But it is not materially more bigoted than the central premise of Trump’s campaign: that foreigners and outsiders are exploiting, infiltrating and adulterating the real America. How is attacking the impartiality of a judge worse than characterizing undocumented Mexicans as invading predators intent on raping American women? Or pledging to keep all Muslim migrants out of the country? Or citing the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II as positive precedent?
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Republican leaders, in other words, thought they were in a normal political moment—a time for pragmatism, give-and-take, holding your nose and eventually getting past an unpleasant chore.
But it is not a normal political moment. It is one of those rare times—like the repudiation of Joe McCarthy, or consideration of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Watergate crisis—when the spotlight of history stops on a single decision, and a whole political career is remembered in a single pose. The test here: Can you support, for pragmatic reasons, a presidential candidate who purposely and consistently appeals to racism?
When the choice came, only a handful of Republicans at the national level answered with a firm “no.” A handful. It was not shocking to me that the plurality of an angry Republican primary electorate—grown distrustful of establishment leaders—might choose a populist who appeals to racial prejudice. It is shocking to me—and depressing and infuriating—that almost no elected Republicans of national standing would stand up to it.
By this standard, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska is the moral leader of the GOP. But given the thinness of his company, many of us will never be able to think about the Republican Party in quite the same way again. It still carries many of the ideological convictions I share. Collectively, however, it has failed one of the most basic tests of public justice: Don’t support racists—or candidates who appeal to racism—for public office. If this commitment is not a primary, non-negotiable element of Republican identity, then the party of Lincoln is dead.
George Will also does yeoman work dissecting the multiple ways in which Trump, the Assyrian rod of judgment sent by God to smash this cynical Party of deadly hypocrisy to pieces, has reduced men like Ryan and other Prolife Conservative Catholic Folk Heroes to whoredom in an essay that begins: “The Caligulan malice with which Donald Trump administered Paul Ryan’s degradation is an object lesson in the price of abject capitulation to power” just gets better from there.
But nobody is more grotesquely compromised than “prolife” leaders like Fr. Peter West, Fr. Frank Pavone, Priests for Life, the Susan B. Anthony List and the growing number of others who are, with cringeworthy reliability, instructing the faithful to Vote Trump or the Baby Get It and appealing to abortion and the other “non-negotiables” as the only things that matter in this election.
For, of course, as Trump makes clear every day, he does not care one iota about abortion. What he cares about is racism, the lawless use of power, and Donald Trump. And so prolife leaders, including Paul Ryan and Fr. Peter West and their followers who flood St. Blog’s comboxes, spend their energy, not defending the unborn, but defending their choice to support a racist (among the many evils he openly advocates). And in addition to the doublethink deployed by Ryan, they actually use excuses like “Racism is a negotiable issue. Who even really can define racism anyway? And besides it’s not as serious a sin as abortion.” And so, once again, the unborn become human shields for GOP Culture of Death priorities, the prolife movement takes its place as a subculture devoted to defending those priorities and fighting the Church on their behalf, and God’s Name is blasphemed among the Gentiles.
Solution: Stop. Fighting. the. Church. Listen to the Magisterium. Stop the failed brain-dead strategy of pitting the unborn against all the rest of the Church’s teaching. Decouple from the thoroughly prostituted embrace of the GOP and its racist leader and the Frankenstein base that adores him. Be *more* prolife, not less, by listening to the *whole* teaching of the Church which condemns racism as well as abortion, and stop using the unborn as human shields for every filthy thing Trump says and does. For the truth is that as long as you support him, all your energy will go, not to defending the unborn, but to defending the filthy things he says and does.
And when he is done with the prolife movement, it will be such a tarted-up whore for him that its credibility will be gone forever and Christians who backed him will have set back the evangelistic mission of the Church for decades. “Prolife” will–permanently–be code for “racist” in most minds, for the very good reason that it tried to move heaven and earth, not to defend the unborn, but to defend the racist Donald Trump.
“To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return—that is what really gladdens our Father’s heart.” – Uncle Screwtape
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