Greg Daly
It’s hard to imagine a more inflammatory title for a blogpost than ‘Catholic pro-lifers at the Women’s March? Get used to it’, but American blogger Simcha Fisher has never been one to pussyfoot around.
Writing at simchafisher.com, she starts with a bang. “Were you surprised, even shocked, to see Catholics and other pro-lifers joining in at the Women’s March — the march that was funded and organised by pro-choicers, and which backed out of partnering with pro-life groups?”
Plenty of good and well-meaning Catholics were. As Simcha puts it: “Numerous Catholics told me it was a scandal that they were there.”
“Well,” she says, “get used to it. The pro-life establishment abandoned women and children when they threw in their lot with Trump. Get used to seeing pro-lifers strike out on their own, welcome or not.”
Asserting that by backing Trump, the Republican establishment told the world that Donald Trump is what a pro-life leader looks like, she says by this definition a pro-life leader is a serial adulterer who responded to an unplanned pregnancy by asking his mistress what she intended to “do about it”, and who tells the world a woman isn’t qualified to lead if we don’t enjoy looking at her face.
Torture
He’s a man who’s enthusiastic about torture, is glad to turn his back on refugees, and has promised repeatedly to repeal a law that gave millions of women basic healthcare for the first time.
A pro-life leader, we are now effectively told, would appoint “ludicrously unqualified cabinet members whose only asset is their promises to cut funding for food and housing, programmes which disproportionately support women and children”, and has chosen as his education secretary someone who thinks children with special needs have no right to an education.
And so much more…
“You elected Trump and told the world that we had to vote for him, because he is pro-life,” she continues, linking to a story about an Arizona priest as she goes on. “You even said that it was a mortal sin not to vote for him. And then you told women that they weren’t real Catholics because they marched against him. Tell me again that it’s shameful and disgraceful when women go tell the world that this man does not represent us. They’re the disgrace. Not him. Tell me again. Tell me again that Catholic women who marched on Saturday aren’t real Catholics.”
Highlighting how huffingtonpost.com had reported on pro-lifers joining the march in Washington, one saying, “we’re all in favour of women’s rights – we just think they start earlier than some other people do”, with other left-leaning websites doing likewise, she dares people to tell her it’s a scandal that the phrase “pro-life feminist” is now a reality.
“God bless you, Destiny Herndon De La Rosa, Abby Johnson, Aimee Murphy, Students for Life and all the strong, smart women who had the courage to face not only the abuse of pro-choicers but the abuse of your fellow Catholics,” she says. “God bless you for telling the world that abortion hurts women, that pro-life is pro-women. God bless you for turning over your lives to the pro-life cause, when even other pro-lifers refused to help.”
Praising them for walking the pro-life walk, not just talking the talk, she says, “You are the ones who are changing hearts; and that is how abortion is defeated. Not by signing bills, not by babbling catchphrases when it’s politically expedient and shrugging them off when it’s not. Not by yanking help away from the needy.”
Maintaining that pro-lifers who do respect women will shun the party of Donald Trump, she says, “If Trump is the leader of the Republican party, then the Republican party is no longer the home for people who value family, who cherish children, who respect women. Pro-life Americans are now politically homeless; and so, like so many of the homeless, they took to the streets.”
Read it, and ponder it.