Tim Kaine: Enemy of Religious Freedom
Tim Kaine is a menace to religious liberty and his actions ought to disqualify him from office. Ironically (or by design), he and his media sycophants constantly use his Catholic resume as a political credential and shield.
Now, as we enter the last two weeks of the campaign, right on cue, the WaPo is trying to again neutralize Kaine’s extreme Leftist views like they did during the 2005 Virginia governor campaign.
Kaine often says that his year in Honduras as a Jesuit missionary aid was formative – and it was. However, it was not to spread the gospel or exhort us away from sin and toward righteous living; instead it was to justify government, taxes, regulations, and utopia illusions under the rubric or so called social justice. He is guilty of encouraging people to turn away from God and the spiritual and to turn toward the government and temporal.
The issues with Tim Kaine are constitutionality and credibility:
- He will not defend all of our First Amendment rights.
- He presumes to dictate how people should pray in public.
- He uses his Catholic faith as a political credential and then arbitrarily ignores Church’s teaching on non-negotiable tenets of faith.
- He over-rationalizes his government policy positions with religious sentiment.
Failing to Defend the First Amendment
Kaine has turned his back on the very Catholic Church that he seeks of identify with in her time of need. And he has an even higher duty to speak out because he has been a vocal defender of Obamacare and Barack Obama.
When the Obama Administration announced their HHS mandates, Tim Kaine’s response to this unconstitutional act was to feign one day of angst when instead he should have unequivocally condemned the President’s outrageous decision. Then Kaine went even further after the Catholic Church announced its lawsuit. He said on WFIR that the Church was wrong and further defended contraception because it “brings down healthcare costs.”
However, when it came to Muslims, Kaine had no problem using the Constitution to defend the Ground Zero mosque saying that “if a synagogue or church I don’t think there would be any controversy” (which implied that those who opposed building on that specific site were bigots.)
Dictating How We Pray
Tim Kaine arrogantly presumes to tell Christians how to pray in public, which is both insulting and infringing on the free exercise clause. This is unacceptable for anyone to do, especially a former government official or candidate for office.
When we pray in public we are praying to a holy God as our conscience dictates. We are not making a speech or reframing our convictions to satisfy Tim Kaine’s comfort zone. Religion challenges, and yes, it may also offend the culture and government. How does Tim Kaine know that a particular prayer isn’t what needs to be said? Or is a public prayer to him just theater?
(1) As governor, Tim Kaine implemented and defended a new policy requiring non-sectarian prayers by chaplains who worked on a voluntary basis with the Virginia State Police. Rather than comply, the six Christian chaplains (Daniels in our midst) resigned. Bob McDonnell rescinded King Nebuchadnezzar’s edict. Video.
(2) While on the campaign trail during a PBS event on Religion and Ethics, Kaine complained about overtly Christian prayers:
“We shouldn’t pray loudly in front of the temple, there is some Scriptural wisdom about being not too, put it out front and I think that causes some people some concerns” 8:20
“I’ve had the experience in Virginia of going to too many events where it’s a public event and there is a prayer at the start that is explicitly Christian that alienates Jewish folks, or other folks of other faiths.” 9:20
Then, after this chiding, he ended with “we should be very free to be who we are.”
If you do not care for the way someone else prays, then simply exercise your superior tolerance and give the person the benefit of the doubt or just ignore it. Problem solved. But perhaps your discomfort evidences some inconvenient truth. At any rate, no prayer can be uttered that is more offensive and dangerous than a government official who dares to prescribe what a prayer should sound like. Tim Kaine owes these chaplains an apology.
Cafeteria Catholic-Cafeteria Constitution
The Catholic Church has a set of well-established non-negotiables that include abortion, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty. Kaine had no problem opposing 20-25 expansionist death penalty amendments, even the so called triggerman rule which sought to clarify a loophole after the Beltway Snipers. He vetoed all legislation related to the death penalty. However, he did authorize most executions that came before him except for the Jens Soering episode where Kaine sought to circumvent the law.
On the other hand, Tim Kaine makes no such legal resistance to abortion. He can’t even bring himself to verbally condemn abortion as intrinsically evil. In fact, he no longer makes any pretense regarding abortion at all and is actively supported by Planned Parenthood who held a mega-fundraiser for him in New York City this summer.
As governor, he terminated abstinence funding as governor and he even complained about signing off on the Choose Life license plate. And during the Senate campaign, he has condemned every recent Virginia law which sought to legally discourage abortions. Furthermore, he has been Barack Obama’s chief enabler and defender, the most extreme abortion President in history. When you think about it, Kaine is going out of his way to construct a campaign based on opposing the Church by using his “War on Women” campaign theme.
And just to touch on same-sex marriage, Kaine endorses and celebrates it. That’s not surprising since he also opposed Virginia’s constitutional marriage amendment.
Conflating Religion and Public Policy
Government can’t create morality and it can’t exist without it. Tim Kaine rejects that notion by perverting the proper roles of Church and State. And as a side note, when you politicize religion you also politicize and cheapen morality and you end up with an immoral culture. Sound familiar?
Take for example man-made global warming. Referring again to the PBS Religion and Ethics event Kaine said that man-made global warming is our “biggest issue” and that “lightening our impact is the challenge of the age.” Then he goes on to say that we are causing storms and chaos that unnecessarily impact underdeveloped countries. The green agenda is a massive use of resources; but more importantly, after the ruling on CO2, it institutes tremendous control over the individual and private property, like Obamacare.
If Tim Kaine wants to be an Al Gore style global warming alarmist, then so be it. But please keep your arguments to matters of fact and dispense with emotional quasi-religious appeals. Kaine is quick to accuse others of being anti-science; but then he violates the tenet of science which is to question everything, and to test hypotheses with all available objective data and to dispassionately answer criticism with verifiable evidence and logic. “Settled science” is an oxymoron.
DNC Convention
The Democratic Party removed God and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel from its platform. Then it was reversed due to public pressure while Democrats effectively booed God during the voting process. That’s their prerogative. But as the former DNC Chairman, didn’t the same Tim Kaine who says we should bring faith and comity into politics have some obligation to speak out not to mention after the vitriol heaped upon Cardinal Dolan by his party?
Conclusion
So what are we to do with Catholic politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Tim Kaine? They wrap themselves in the Church when justifying public policy; but then they brazenly throw off her teachings, including how Catholic lawmakers should respond to unjust laws.
If you make a sacred commitment to the Church and then arbitrarily pick and choose what you like about its core doctrines, then you will inevitably violate your oath to uphold the Constitution thereby further eroding the rule of law. And we have seen quite enough of that under Barack Obama.
The bottom line is that we don’t need another false prophet-politician wielding the levers of government in the name of compassion. In case you haven’t noticed, state sponsored compassion is destroying us. America needs a new birth of religious freedom, not a cradle of socialism.
Catholic Church, you and all American faiths have a lot to answer for. Our streets are filled with cultural sewage – proof that religious leaders in America have lost their moral authority. Every day, America becomes like secular Europe because of this unholy alliance between Church and State. An alliance based on obtaining tax payer money for charity in return for the blessing and imprimatur on an evil Leftist/Progressive agenda.
Virginia, you were once the birthplace of religious freedom in America. Embrace that cause again and reject Tim Kaine in November, if for no other reason than his violations to our Constitution and our in alienable right to religious freedom. If you vote for Tim Kaine, you dishonor the Constitution.
P.S. Michael, who is one of the main tweeters for the Tim Kaine campaign, furnished another example today. Luke is talking about Jesus is calling people to spread the gospel and save souls, not to elect Tim Kaine or to get along in Congress – just another example of how Kaine uses religion for political ends.
Cross-posted on DefeatTimKaine.com
2 Responses to “Tim Kaine: Enemy of Religious Freedom”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OH, MY GOD !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tim Kaine is a great political leader and fellow-Catholic………i have been proud to write letters on behalf of his candidacy and will be voting for him next Tuesday…..
Comments are closed.