MEXICO CITY — Imagine an American Secretary of State one morning
praying at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall and the next evening
accepting a eugenics award named for Dr. Josef Mengele.
That is an apt analogy to the repugnant juxtaposition of gestures
by Hillary Clinton during and following her brief visit to Mexico
last week.
Color photographs and loud captions atop page one of the daily
El Universal captured the Mexican public’s sense of
outraged bewilderment at Mrs. Clinton’s visit March 26 to the
Basilica of Guadalupe, Catholicism’s second most visited shrine
after St. Peter’s in Rome. The Basilica rector, Monsignor Diego
Monroy, stands with Mrs. Clinton and shows her the
mestiza Madonna whose story is known to every Catholic
schoolchild, an image believed to have been imposed miraculously
on an Indian’s cloak five centuries ago.
HILLARY CLINTON: Who painted it?
MONSIGNOR MONROY: God.
La Guadalupana is the archetypal icon of Latin American
Catholicism. Catholics in the United States as well as in the
Latin countries today invoke the Virgin of Guadalupe as the
special patron of the pro-life movement.
Was Hillary’s public diplomacy fiasco a calculated insult
addressed to something she regards as a superstition, or simply
the unrehearsed utterance of a person so soulless that she cannot
fathom believers’ sense of mystery?
A clue to the answer came in the traveling diplomat’s next stop
after Mexico, Houston, where she accepted the Margaret Sanger
Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation.
In Houston, Hillary lauded the very evils that pilgrims to
Guadalupe pray to overcome: liberalized abortion laws and making
United States taxpayers pay for abortions and abortion propaganda
in “developing” countries.
The comparison of Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Josef Mengele
(1911-1979) is not overdrawn. Even a cursory examination of her
life’s work and pronouncements shows Sanger, the founder of
Planned Parenthood, as one of the most strident and inhumane
racists of the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In April
1932, for example, she wrote an article urging “a stern and rigid
policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of
population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such
that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”
Eugenics was a fashionable social policy panacea at that time not
only in Hitler’s Germany, but also among powerful elites in the
United States and other Western democracies.
Hillary Clinton provides the latest manifestation of what Arthur
Schlesinger Sr. called “the deepest bias in the history of the
American people” and “the only remaining acceptable prejudice” —
anti-Catholicism.
Secretary Clinton’s words and actions in Mexico and Houston are
elaborations of the disconcerting words of President Obama’s
Inaugural Address, his pledge to “restore science to its rightful
place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s
quality and lower its costs” and his gratuitous, unspecific slam
against “worn out dogmas.”
Nothing is more clear-cut than the chasm separating the
Obama-Clinton ideology and programs from Christian faith and
tradition and what Pope John Paul II, whose towering bronze image
stands beside the Basilica here, called the Culture of Life.
(Mr. Duggan is writing and lecturing in Mexico City
this spring.)
