Democrat mailers bash Christian clergy
A furor erupted in Catholic circles 2 days ago over a campaign postcard the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party mailed this week. Click all images to enlarge…
On its face the postcard appears to accuse Catholic priests of ignoring the poor, a charge even politically unsavvy people would find weird, I think.
A politically savvy person would surmise DFL is attacking the Catholic Church for opposing Obamacare, although politically savvy people also know it did so because Obamacare allows taxpayer funded abortions.
My Catholic friends immediately accused DFL of Catholic bashing. On October 26 Donald McFarland, communications director for DFL, issued a statement of denial:
The ad is part of a two-piece mailing that highlights and criticizes the policy views of Dan Hall, a preacher who is the Republican candidate for the MN Senate. I enclose both sides of both pieces. I understand that some Republican bloggers have taken one image from the first piece, and claimed that the mail is somehow anti-Catholic. But the text explicitly criticizes Preacher Hall for distancing himself from policy views that have been taken by the Catholic Archdiocese, by the Lutheran Synod, and other leaders in MN’s faith community. Dan Hall is willing to enlist God and religion in his campaign when it helps him – but in fact, his views hurt the poorest and sickest among us, and this mailing holds him accountable for those views.
Then I saw the back of the postcard last night, and it was my turn as a Protestant to get mad…
What purpose does all the “Preacher Dan Hall” references serve other than to try to pigeonhole Republican state senate candidate Dan Hall as a religious zealot as well as strongly imply religious leaders have no place in politics?
It turns out Hall is a state senate volunteer chaplain who attends the Assemblies of God affiliated River Valley Church in Apple Valley.
DFL ignorance about the Protestant faith is glaring. Evangelical pastors don’t wear a collar; only pastors from liturgical Protestant faiths do. And in my entire life I’ve never heard anyone entitle their pastor “Preacher” anything. That’s a hick term.
Of course DFL is ignorant of the Catholic faith, too. Here’s another of its mailers opposing Dan Hall that is quite the religious mash-up…
And yet another offensive mailer…
Bottom line: It is ridiculous for an organization that supports murdering preborn children to accuse anyone of ignoring the poor, but particularly leaders of the Christian faith. Since our inception 2,000 years ago they have spearheaded care for the poor. Furthermore, it is well-known that conservatives are more generous givers than liberals.
I wish someone would create a big fat anti-DFL postcard with a glaring photo of an aborted baby on the front wearing a button “<s>Ignore</s>Kill the Poor.”
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Even though this fellow is protestant, the image is meant to evoke feelings of anti-catholicism and to subconsciously remind people of the sex scandal and pro-life ‘zealots’ amongst other things and to align this man with the same.
I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck yesterday.
YES, many faiths wear the collar, including the preachers at places called things like 17th Street Apostolic Church of Fire and Soup Kitchen.
THAT does not mean that a Roman collar does not IMMEDIATELY call to mind a Roman Catholic.
This mailer is weapons-grade stupid. The Catholic Church is the LARGEST charitable organization on Planet Earth – has been for quite some time. Ignore the Poor? Please. Other Christian denominations are also heroically supportive of the world’s poor.
One need look no further than missions in Haiti and Africa. Sure, everyone LOVES to be down there helping right after a disaster – that’s when the media is there.
But the other 364 days of the year, it’s Christian missionaries, not Matt Damon, who are building wells, schools, hospitals, etc.
They see voting against things like socialized medicine and Head Start as being “anti-poor.” Voting against things like the BAIPA, which would have protected infants who survive abortions from being left in dirty closets to die is not just anti-poor. It’s hard to fathom a human being who thinks that treating an infant gasping for air after being ripped her mother is a bad idea, and it isn’t pro anything except evil.
They can come back and preach to me about morality when they reconcile the fact that Barack Obama voted AGAINST the Born Alive Infants Protection Act.
(Unlikely suspects like Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy voted FOR it, and NARAL and PP were even on board with it, if memory serves. Obama, however, thought babies dying in dirty closets was perfectly acceptable.)
I don’t think St. Anthony would want his picture on a democrat postcard.
That is St. Anthony, right?
And, hey, it appears I have something in common with them – apparently, we’re both fans of the beatitudes.
I am particularly fond of remembering “Blessed are you when they persecute you and utter every kind of falsehood against you because of Me…” when they call me things like “Christofascist, “anti-poor”, “Bible thumper”, “Jesus freak”, “ignorant”, “superstitious”, “having my rosaries on their ovaries”, “pedophile supporter”, etc.
Carder, yeah it is.
Someone commented somewhere that they’d better start a novena to him to help them find their common sense.
Ironic they’d choose St. Anthony, whose patronage includes poor people, pregnant women, oppressed people, and barren women.
I’m Catholic and I live in Minnesota. It seems like we have a visiting priest in church every few weeks asking us to donate money for schools in Guatemala or camp for urban kids or starving children in India. What a utterly dumb thing to claim.
“It seems like we have a visiting priest in church every few weeks asking us to donate money for schools in Guatemala or camp for urban kids or starving children in India.”
No you didn’t. Didn’t you read the postcard? The Catholic Church ignores the poor! You must have been hallucinating.
DFL must really be struggling to come up with something as dumb as this…
I don’t know what my family would have done without Catholic Charities of MN!! We had no insurance with our fourth and they were WONDERFUL!!
Or did I hallucinate the maternity care and water birth??
“Or did I hallucinate the maternity care and water birth??”
Yes. The only logical conclusion.
I’m not Catholic, I’m Protestant (Pentecostal), but I was born in Saint Anthony Hospital :) *just my contribution to the conversation-LOL*
Using a photo of a Catholic altar (note the rosary dangling from the statue of St. Anthony) certainly IS Catholic bashing. It is very interesting to watch the pro-abortionists’ masks falling away. As we have gained a lot of ground in the pro-life movement, the anti-lifers are getting more insulting, vicious, and obvious.
So what is their message with these heinous mailings? The only way to care for the poor is to kill their children? That’s what I’m hearing. Do they think we’re idiots? Well obviously. Have they ever heard of a thing called backlash? Cuz they’re gonna be feeling it! Abortions days are numbered, and the clock is ticking. We may still have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but we’ve got the abortionists on the defense. Press on!
Ninek, I agree that only Christ would be depicted in the center of a real Catholic altar and certainly not in most Protestant churches where saint’s statues are not found.
It is quite ironic that DFL chose to put a statue of St. Anthony holding the Christ Child on the altar because Anthony of Padua is one of the most popular saints in the Catholic Church a great example to all as Cathy mentioned.
(From New Word Encyclopedia) He was born into a wealthy family who wanted him to live the life of a nobleman, but he rejected that, instead choosing to become a Franciscan friar. He became a gifted preacher and a fervent converter of heretics. He undertook to reform the morality of the time, especially the vices of luxury, avarice and tyranny. He received the title “Hammer of the Heretics” and was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Anthony_of_Padua
my comment is lost or held up. Mods?
Should be good now, ehh?
Bobby,
Yep, it is . Thanks!
Imagine if Judaism or Islam had been portrayed this way. The left would be calling it hate speech.
yup because this is EXACTLY what Mother Theresa of Calcutta a CATHOLIC nun did – ignore the poor. :(
tony tony come around….oh wait, I don’t think he wants to help find the democrats brains….
These ads are going too far. Who serves the poor more than Christians?
This is hate speech against Christians.
The Dems reward the U.S. Catholic bishops for their support these years.
They don’t go to the back of the bus like the republicans, they go UNDER the bus.
I love the Catholic bashing/Christian bashing by these evil people. I truly do.
Why do they attack us like this? Because they FEAR us like no other. They fear us because of our bold witness to the truth, they fear us because of our size, structure and numbers. God help the Catholic Church should the day ever come that we are deemed not worthy of ridicule. That would mean that our salt has lost its flavor.
We should remember what Jesus said “Blessed are you when men curse you and speak all manner of evil against you for my namesake.”
The same for my Protestant brothers and sisters on “the religious right”. Our common cause for life has done more to heal 500 years of estrangement from the Reformation than anything else, and this scares the evil one more than anything. God’s children reuniting around their great common human dignity, around their status as siblings, children of of the Most High King.
So bring on the ridicule. We’re alive and very well. Very, very well. And now science is validating every prediction made by our Popes, by the great Protestant Evangelists. The more ferocious the onslaught, the greater the indication that the enemy is terrified.
We’re winning.
“The Dems reward the U.S. Catholic bishops for their support these years.”
The timing of this is exquisite with the CCHD collection coming up in a few weeks. I hope all my Catholic brothers and sisters will watch 15:45 – 30:00 of the video here if you aren’t familiar with Saul Alinsky’s ties to the CCHD. For decades the left has fed at the CCHD trough and now they smear the Roman collar? Thank you, DFL, for confirming me in my decision to boycott the collection again this year.
This shows just how much they fear the truth. Especially from the mouth of a Catholic…