As if Election 2016 — a bonfire of personal attacks and political posturing — needed more fuel, the WikiLeaks emails have doused it in lighter fluid.
The now-public inbox of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, confirms Team Clinton’s cozy relationship with the media and long-reaching tentacles in Washington, among other disturbing details.
But perhaps most striking is the concerted effort by the Clinton campaign — and the Left writ large — to manipulate the Catholic Church into promoting the Democratic political agenda. The goal of Clinton, Podesta and other committed leftists is to bring Catholic teachings in line with the Democratic platform and persuade more Catholic voters to pull the Democrat lever on Election Day.
The evidence is damning. One email from John Halpin, a senior fellow at the left-wing Center for American Progress, to Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, communications director at Hillary for America, accused conservative Catholics of “bastardizing … the faith.” Palmieri then claimed that Catholics stick with church doctrine because “it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion” — not because, say, they genuinely believe that the church was founded by Jesus Christ.
The coup de grace comes in an email chain between Sandy Newman, the founder and president of Voices for Progress, and Podesta himself. Newman writes: “This whole controversy with the bishops opposing contraceptive coverage even though 98 percent of Catholic women (and their conjugal partners) have used contraception has me thinking. … There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church.”
He adds that part of the problem is the way the Catholic Church wields “economic power it can bring to bear against nuns and priests who count on it for their maintenance.”
Added to the outright fallacy — the 98 percent figure is widely disputed — and secularist sensationalism from Newman is the raw political guile of Podesta’s response. “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this,” the Clinton aide writes. “But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United.” That’s right, Podesta openly acknowledges that the left propped up not one but two astroturf nonprofits to masquerade as associations of grassroots Catholics.
A closer look at Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good reveals that Alfred Rotondaro, the group’s board chairman, is a senior fellow at Center for American Progress — the nonprofit outfit founded by Podesta and currently run by Neera Tanden, a former Obama and Clinton operative. Another Catholics in Alliance board member, Dr. James Zogby, is a member of the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee, while its executive director, Christopher Hale, served on President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
Catholics United, the group’s 501(c)(4) sister organization, is more of the same. A consistent contributor to Democratic campaigns, the group’s director is James Salt, who “oversaw the Kansas Democratic Party’s faith outreach efforts” and did “messaging work” for then-Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. (Yes, the same Kathleen Sebelius who was in charge of Obamacare’s disastrous rollout, including its cold-blooded targeting of religious charities like the Little Sisters of the Poor through the law’s contraception mandate.)
Together, Catholics in Alliance and Catholics United are perpetuating a top-down political campaign to dilute Catholic teachings with Democratic dogma. This coincides with left-wing mega-donor George Soros’ slate of donations to the PICO Network and Faith in Public Life, two more deceptively named, anti-Christian nonprofits.
The takeaways are endless. On the one hand, the left’s war on religion proves that Democrats and their legion of closely aligned interest groups are not satisfied with their base of liberal supporters; they use dishonest appeals to erode the center-right coalition that opposes them. And, on the other hand, these subversive efforts confirm the increasingly blurry line between the campaign against religion and the campaign to elect Hillary Clinton.
Now we have it in writing.
