Joe Biden said at October’s vice-presidential debate that he
would never “impose” his Catholic faith on fellow Americans,
describing it as “personally” important to him but publicly
irrelevant. This stance hasn’t stopped him in the finals days of
the campaign from imposing his self-serving version of the Catholic
faith on voters. In a recent campaign ad, complete with images of
the crucifix, a solemn Joe Biden presents himself as a “practicing
Catholic” who serves an administration that advances the “values”
of “Catholic social doctrine.”
“Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me,” says
Biden in the ad, quoting Jesus Christ in a summary of those values.
This would seem an ill-advised adage for an administration that
subsidizes the killing of the unborn. A politician who stretches
the category of the “least of these” to include Sandra Fluke but
not unborn babies might want to avoid scriptural quotations.
According to Biden, religion doesn’t belong in politics, but it
is okay to insert politics into religion. Equating the platform of
the Democratic Party with “Catholic social doctrine” and then
imposing that phony equation on Americans is fine by him. This
arrogant attitude comports perfectly with the Obama
administration’s view of the subordinate relationship between
religion and the state: the religious exist to serve the interests
of the state, but the moment they stop serving those interests the
state can eliminate them from public life.
Under the HHS mandate, a priest who objects to free
contraceptives can’t descend from his pulpit to participate in
public life; but a pro-abortion pol can ascend that same pulpit to
preach liberalism and pander for votes. In a speech delivered from
a pulpit at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Nashville,
Tennessee last June, Michelle Obama said that liberal political
issues belong at church: “To anyone who says that church is no
place to talk about these issues, you tell them there is no place
better, no place better.” Translation: liberals reserve the right
to harness the power of religion for their own purposes.
The German sociologist Max Weber used the term “caesaropapism”
to describe the “complete subordination of priests to secular
power.” Liberalism advances a kind of Obamaopapism, a system in
which religious organizations can only enter public life if they
first agree to serve as conduits for state fiats. Under
Obamaopapism, Biden can simultaneously reject Church teaching on
abortion and gay marriage while identifying Obamacare, food stamps,
and amnesty as the perfect expression of “Catholic social
doctrine.”
In the final stretch of the campaign, the Obama administration
is scrambling for the pious and impious vote. It is at once the
champion of supposed Catholic social doctrine and a loud proponent
of a comically entitled hook-up culture. One day it rolls out a Joe
Biden ad collaring Catholics; the next it airs an ad from Lena
Dunham crassly appealing to college students. Dunham is the star of
the HBO show “Girls,” which is Obama’s chief constituency it would
seem. Dunham likens her first-time voting for Obama to a
pre-marital deflowering, an analogy that she considers very
flattering: “Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You
want to do it with a great guy. It should be with a guy with
beautiful — someone who really cares about and understands women.”
This is as judgmental and discriminating as the hook-up culture
gets: a suitable hook-up partner is not “just anybody” but a man
who stands ready to pay for the used woman’s contraceptives and
abortions. Obama is that “great guy.”
From the suffragettes to Lena Dunham is an inglorious ascent,
culminating in a party that boasts Bill Clinton as its most popular
figure and abortion as its most defining issue. The Life of Julia
and the Life of Lena leave feminism in very sad shape. Yet Obama is
counting on these degraded and reductive visions of women’s issues
to propel him to victory and to propel America “forward.”
He still wouldn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby” and
apparently considers Sandra Fluke and Lena Dunham fitting role
models for them. The Democrats don’t even talk about “soccer moms”
anymore. Only the “reproductive issues” of “girls” matter now.
While Biden invokes the Golden Rule, Obama hails all the “progress”
that has come from violating it.
