OPINION:
From the Boy Scouts to the Knights of Columbus, it’s open season on anything that doesn’t fit the cracked new world of socialism and sexual anarchy that “progressives” are fashioning for us all.
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and California Sen. Kamala Harris are in the running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. They are writing off a significant portion of the Catholic vote even before their campaigns get underway.
That was evident in September, when they joined other Democrats in attacking U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a devout Catholic. The now-notorious Senate hearings were marked by shrieking protesters who echoed the Democrats’ unsubstantiated allegations of sexual assault. Cory “Spartacus” Booker and Kamala Harris were in the thick of it.
Now, they’re railing against a nominee for the federal bench who committed the crime of being a member of the Knights of Columbus.
In October, President Trump named Omaha-based lawyer Brian Buescher to sit on the U.S. District Court in Nebraska. The main point of contention is his membership in the Knights.
A men’s social club founded in 1882 to aid newly arrived European immigrants to America, the Knights donate $200 million annually to charities from their 15,000 chapters in 12 countries. With 2 million members worldwide, the Knights have chapters all over the United States and are a fixture in public events such as Independence Day parades. They epitomize the charitable spirit that offers hope to so many.
Yesterday’s Democrats, like Knights of Columbus member John F. Kennedy, embraced the group. Today’s progressive Democrats apparently hate the Knights, and I can think of three reasons.
First, the group is named in honor of Christopher Columbus, who progressives teach was a genocidal monster.
Second, the Knights are unabashedly pro-life, as is nominee Buescher, who ran as an “avidly pro-life” candidate for Nebraska attorney general in 2014. Noting that background, Mr. Booker asked, “why should a litigant in your courtroom expect to get a fair hearing from an impartial judge in a case involving abortion rights?”
You see, only people who are avidly pro-abortion can be impartial.
Third, the Knights support man-woman marriage as God created it. “The Knights of Columbus has taken a number of extreme positions,” Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono, one of the ringleaders in the Kavanaugh circus, said in the committee’s questionnaire. “For example,” she noted, the Knights were “reportedly one of the top contributors to California’s Proposition 8 campaign to ban same-sex marriage.”
The Hawaii senator’s statement implies that anyone who backed natural marriage in 2008, including a majority of California voters, is “extreme” and unfit for public office. This mirrors the position of the Democrat-dominated California Supreme Court, which in 2015 banned any state court judges who had ties to the Boy Scouts back when the Scouts were still “morally straight” and won all their court cases.
Speaking of the Scouts, they have cratered since progressively caving to the LGBTQ lobby. The BSA, which now welcomes homosexual boys and men, boys who identify as girls, and girls who identify as girls, has retained a law firm specializing in bankruptcy. They are about to lose up to a quarter of their ranks as the Mormons pull away and establish their own youth groups.
Membership is already down and the BSA faces as many as 250 lawsuits from Scouts and former Scouts who say they are sexual abuse victims. For years, the Scouts have tried to put a lid on cases of homosexual abuse. Then they inexplicably allowed corporate liberals on their board to open up their ranks to males attracted to males. They have betrayed the Scouts’ founding values, but it is the boys who won’t get to experience traditional Scouting who are paying the price.
Many Scout troops are still going about their business, trying to ignore the idiocy from the top. And, there is now a first-class alternative, Trail Life USA, which has all of Scouting’s best features without political correctness, just as American Heritage Girls retain the best of Girl Scouting without the radical feminism.
But it would be better still if, like the Knights of Columbus, the original groups did not surrender to people who hate what they stand for.
As 2019 dawns, we can expect to see an uptick in cultural battles, many of which center on whether anyone will be allowed to disagree with progressive mantras on abortion, gay activism and the left’s extremely constricted idea of religious liberty.
Absent a religious revival, America’s only hope for preserving freedom lies in more people getting fed up.
• Robert Knight is a contributor to The Washington Times. His latest book is “A Nation Worth Fighting For: 10 Steps to Restore Freedom” (djkm.org/nation, 2018).
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