The Democrats’ 2020 national platform reads like a litany of positions diametrically opposed to Catholic teaching and belief, a prominent Catholic news service warned Wednesday.
The Catholic News Agency (CNA) ran a 1,000-word article enumerating seven key policies Joe Biden will be running on in the upcoming presidential election, all of which run counter to Catholic teaching except one: his opposition to the death penalty.
On the issue of religious liberty, the Democrats insist that religious freedom cannot be used “as a cover for discrimination,” meaning that it must bow to gay adoption, same-sex marriage, and abortion.
The Democrat-sponsored “Do No Harm Act” would curtail all expressions of religious freedom that they deem discriminatory, the article states, such as “objections to the contraceptive mandate, health care workers declining to participate in abortions, and religious adoption agencies placing children only with married opposite-sex couples.”
Regarding conscientious objection, the Democrats’ draft 2020 platform “supports reinstating policies such as the Obama administration’s transgender mandate,” which prohibited doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies from refusing to take part in transgender surgery for reasons of conscience.
As a case in point, the article notes that a federal judge stopped implementation of the Trump administration’s rule that protected doctors with a conscientious objection from providing gender-transition surgery or abortion.
The Trump administration has granted religious and moral exemptions Obama’s contraceptive mandate, including for the Little Sisters of the Poor, but Mr. Biden “has said that he would undo the religious and moral exemptions to the mandate,” the article adds.
On the matter of LGBTQ advocacy, the platform calls for the appointment of senior leaders to push for LGBTQ rights abroad as a matter of U.S. foreign policy, it notes.
The Democrats roundly oppose school choice, insisting that private school vouchers “divert taxpayer-funded resources away from the public school system,” it states.
On same-sex marriage, in 2012 Biden said he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage, prompting President Barack Obama to announce his own support for gay marriage. “As Vice President, Biden himself officiated at a same-sex wedding ceremony for two White House staffers in 2016,” the article observes.
The article devotes significant ink to describing Mr. Biden’s evolving stance regarding abortion rights, which have become more and more radical with each passing year.
The Democrats’ platform declares that “every woman” should have access to “safe and legal abortion” and that abortion, as part of comprehensive health care, is “vital to the empowerment of women and girls,” the article states.
At one time Biden opposed federal funding of Planned Parenthood and taxpayer-funded abortion abroad, but now supports the repeal of the Hyde and Helms Amendments as well as the Mexico City Policy, which protect taxpayers from funding abortions.
“The platform does include a commitment to oppose capital punishment, and pledges the party to ‘continue to support abolishing the death penalty,’” the article declares.
The CNA assessment of Mr. Biden’s positions joins a series of red flags recently raised in Catholic and Christian media.
Last weekend, the National Catholic Register warned that Mr. Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as running mate may hurt his appeal with religious voters due to her “aggressive pro-abortion and anti-religious freedom record.”
In her August 15 essay, Lauretta Brown noted that Harris’s stance on a number of issues directly collides with Catholic teaching and thus could “spell trouble for his efforts to appeal to religious voters.”
Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich — a convert to Catholicism — said last Friday that Sen. Kamala Harris is “the most openly anti-Catholic bigot to be on a national ticket in modern times.”
Citing Harris’s public record of anti-Catholic activism, Gingrich wrote that her bigotry against Catholics is “a perfect example of the modern radical left’s ideology of ‘intolerant tolerance.’”
Catholic League President Bill Donohue warned last week that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has a “Catholic problem,” insisting that Biden’s running mate will have a hard time winning over Catholic voters due to her “positions on an array of moral issues.”
As a radical supporter of abortion rights, Harris has alienated pro-life voters, but she has gone further still, tainting herself “with the brush of anti-Catholicism,” Dr. Donohue stated.
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