No, this is not a bit of scandal-mongering to help discredit an anti-war activist who had no qualms about embarassing herself in an effort to embarass the President. I don't know that Sheehan, a Catholic and ex-lay-minister, has anything to hide like, say, an affair with somebody else's husband, or with a monkey for that matter. And I wouldn't care if she did. What I find truly revealing is why she's threatening to run against the incumbent Dianne Feinstein for a seat in the U.S. Senate from California. Apparently Feinstein, who opposed even the partial-birth-abortion ban that passed the Senate in 1996 only to be vetoed by "safe-legal-and-rare" Bill Clinton, isn't pro-abortion enough.
That's right. For reasons known to herself—which probably have to do with the refreshingly prudent desire not to waste time and energy—Feinstein had decided not to filibuster the nomination of conservative Catholic Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court. Given how raw the abortion issue still is in American politics, the only possible reason for such a filibuster is the well-founded fear that Alito cannot be counted on to let Roe v Wade stand when push comes to shove. That fact about Alito has so enraged Sheehan, a self-described believer in Catholic social teaching, that she is willing to spend millions of other peoples' dollars for the publicity she'd get in the course of losing to the secular-minded liberal Dianne Feinstein in the Democratic primary. This dire threat has apparently put the fear of the Berkeley ultra-Left into Feinstein, who's now willing to reconsider joining those two paragons of principle and virtue, the junior and senior senators from Massachusetts, in trying to filibuster Alito to death.
Mind you, I couldn't care less about the nuts-and-bolts politics of this. Alito is going to take his seat on the bench and participate in the eventual, and inevitable, day of reckoning about Roe. What sets me to hurl is what this whole sorry episode tells us about the state of Catholicism in this country. I was going to say that one can't sink much lower than the Catholic senators from Massachusetts, whose very names I dislike typing; they are so enthusiastic about the right to kill the unborn as to be a disgrace to their Church, which has just as disgracefully refused to excommunicate them for their trouble. But it takes a Cindy Sheehan to show just how bad things have gotten on the Catholic Left. One must now positively fall on one's sword for the right to kill the unborn, even as one denounces George Bush as Hitleresque for the inevitable costs of freeing the Iraqi people from the butcher Saddam and giving them a chance to clean up the messes he created. In the prog catechism, it's just as mandatory to expose the most defenseless human beings to mass slaughter as it is to denounce as mass slaughter a war launched by the United States for the purpose of preventing it.
There's something I can only call diabolical about this. Which reminds me: see my brief article Refuting Satan over at Pontifications. I doubt Cindy would like it.
