Jack Kerwick over at beliefnet wrote an outstanding response to some of the repeated unfair criticisms of Trump bandied about by the neoconservatives. Sadly many conservative Catholics have been fooled by them over the past year Mr. Kerwick’s piece was in response to George Weigel (pictured above) and Robert George’s National Review piece which condescendingly lectured all Catholics that voting for Trump is immoral. In reality, voting for any non-establishment candidate is immoral to these men since they make a living off of establishment funding.
The piece deserves a full read at the link below, but here are some highlights:
The authors essentially make the same bipartisan Everything-and-the Kitchen sink argument against Trump that the hard and moderate left in the Democrat/Republican axis have been making against him for months. The only difference here is that this ad hoc hodgepodge line of reasoning, this GOP Establishment boosting, is decorated with the veneer of religiosity…
For starters, Trump has most decidedly not made “appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice,” as the authors insist. He has noted, indisputably, that a not insignificant number of Mexican immigrants to the United States have been criminals. Not only is this documentable; those masses of working-class Americans whose persons and communities have suffered first-hand from the ravages of unrelenting immigration and who George and Weigel condescendingly suppose are animated by raw, irrational prejudice recognize Trump’s claim for the self-evident truth that it is.
As for Trump’s call to temporarily halt immigration from Islamic countries until we can insure that we aren’t importing jihadists who want to slaughter Americans, this too is something that sounds eminently sensible to countless numbers of everyday Americans—however politically incorrect and professionally dangerous it sounds to Princeton academics and Beltway journalists.
George’s and Weigel’s charge of racial demagoguery fails. In leveling it, though, they “strain out the gnat while letting in the camel”:
Castigating Trump for allegedly stoking racial and ethnic division in advocating a position designed to spare injury to Muslim and non-Muslim alike out of one side of their mouths, they endorse Republican politicians who favor—and who have executed—the invasion of Third World lands of people of color. Consequently, well over 100,000 lives have been ended, families decimated and displaced, ancient Christian communities destroyed, and many more lives severely injured.
Trump opposed and remains strenuously opposed to the war in Iraq. He is the only presidential candidate who has not spoken belligerently about Putin or the heads of any other states. On the other hand, George’s and Weigel’s “serviceable” party and its “reformist” candidates continue to stand by the incalculable blood that’s been shed for most of this century as the price necessary for the sake of exporting “liberal democracy” to the Middle East…
The authors think that Trump will not serve the victims of “the culture of death”…
This point is especially puzzling. What exactly do they expect for the President of the United States to do for, say, abortion? Roe v. Wade has been the law of the land for over 40 years. Republicans have not only made no attempts to overturn this Supreme Court decision; they repeatedly assure their opponents that they will make no such attempts.
It’s true that Republicans continue to espouse their commitment to “life.” Trump does the same. As far as action is concerned, however, he can’t possibly be any worse in this regard than those of his fellow GOPers who have spent decades in Congress funding Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.
George served on the President’s Council on Bioethics under Bush II, who also awarded him the Presidential Citizens Medal. But Bush II is the first president to have authorized federal funding for embryonic stem cell research—a move that certainly didn’t advance those concerns at the heart of “Catholic social concern.”…
If the GOP is “serviceable” for us Catholics, then Trump may be all that much more serviceable.
In truth, however, George and Weigel are trying to make Catholics “serviceable” to the GOP.
Read the full article here: