The Gospel According to Nancy: No Borders, Kill Babies

Tucker Carlson pointed out a few days ago how the already insufferable leader of the Congressional Democrats has recently been "ordained….an archbishop in the church of progressive sanctimony." For a while now, Nancy Pelosi's been the country's expert on morality (e.g., border wall: immoral; abortion on demand: moral). She's now taken to telling the country how much she prays, and she's urging others to do it, too – at least that old sinner, Donald Trump. After last Thursday's televised squabble in the Oval Office, Pelosi shared with reporters how she told Trump she was praying for him and urged the president (whom she also called a "skunk" while ridiculing his manhood) to accept the Democrats' budget proposal with no funding for a border wall. "In fact," she said with stomach-turning piety, "I asked him to pray over it." When a smug person ends an argument by telling you to "pray over it," she's really saying, "Ask God. He knows I'm right!"

Summarizing her and Chuck Schumer's meeting with Trump, she told the media, "I myself thought we should open the meeting with a prayer, which I did. I told him about King Solomon, when he was to become king of the Jews, he prayed to God, he said: 'I need you to give me great understanding and wisdom, Lord.'" King Solomon is Pelosi's favorite Bible character, especially because he proposed solving a problem by cutting a baby in half. Now Sister Nancy's praying for Trump to keep the government open so federal employees can finish their Christmas shopping. It's an axiom that if a conservative says his faith informs his political decisions, he'll be condemned for establishing a state religion, while liberals get to veer back and forth over the church-state centerline as freely as those motorists who love to text while driving. Right now the liberal media are applauding the way Pelosi "schooled President Donald Trump about the Bible," but it's not clear why. It's not as if they're suddenly in favor of anyone being schooled in the Bible, especially anyone in a public classroom. Pelosi never bats an eye without a political motive. This Saint Nancy act might be her attempt to occupy the spiritual high ground that, obviously, Donald Trump has shown no interest in occupying himself. Pelosi wouldn't dare try this with a president like George W. Bush, who, while he didn't boast about his piety on TV, was recognized as genuine in his Christian faith – prompting the left's usual reaction: Ross Douthat wrote in 2006 that "the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era." Theology was less of an issue for liberals during the Obama years; he was their messiah, and they just worshiped him. Meantime, Obama conspicuously dissed orthodox Christians with everything from calculated snubs and criticism to gratuitously tormenting the Little Sisters of the Poor, all the while devotedly celebrating the unblemished virtues of Islam. In 2015, Hillary bluntly stated that "[d]eep-seated ... religious beliefs ... have to be changed" to accommodate the unlimited abortion license. Then, last year, Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez said it is "not negotiable" that "[e]very Democrat" support abortion. Pelosi tried to mitigate Perez's remarks by saying "of course" there's room for pro-lifers in the Democratic Party, but try to find one who's not actually voting Perez-style. This year, Pelosi watched the Democrats lurch wildly to the extreme left. For decades before that, they were trusted allies in the left's war on conventional morality and religion (except Islam!) for being repressive, patriarchal, and counterrevolutionary. It may be that, alarmed that the Democrat brand has become too materialistic, amoral, and atheist, she thinks she can give it religion. Maybe she can draw an unfavorable comparison between the reprobate and undisciplined Donald Trump and herself: the "ardent, practicing Catholic," who exhorts the President to beg for "the great understanding and wisdom" that she (and Chuck Schumer?) have already been granted by God. Haven't Republicans marched under the banner of morality and Christian values long enough? Now that they've elected the unholy Trump, why can't the Democrats seize that banner for themselves? For one thing, because no evangelical or conservative Catholic would ever buy it. Sure, the Democratic Party is crowded with Catholics, but the serious ones left years ago. The leading unserious Catholic is Pelosi herself, who professes her devotion to the faith but does it while living in open, willful defiance of the Church's crystal-clear teaching against abortion: "It is the teaching of the Catholic Church from the very beginning that the killing of an unborn child is always intrinsically evil and can never be justified." When her duplicity threatened to become an issue in 2004, Pelosi pretended that, moved by her "ardent" devotion to the Church, she had been studying the Church's teaching on the beginning of life "a long time," and she stated falsely to Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press that the Church has never defined it. Asked when human life begins, she replied, "We don't know," and that "[t]he point is, that it shouldn't have an impact on the woman's right to choose" – the "it" being when a human life begins, which shouldn't have an impact on the decision to get an abortion. Easy mistake to make when your catechism is Roe v. Wade. Later, when a reporter mentioned the Gosnell infanticides and challenged her own support for partial-birth abortion, an agitated Pelosi snarled back that "[a]s a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this[.] ... This shouldn't have anything to do with politics." But as a politician, she never stops talking about it, and the sacred ground she was talking about wasn't human life, but the exercise of a mother's "free will" to terminate her child. In response, New York's Cardinal Egan said, "Anyone who dares to defend that [the unborn] may be legitimately killed because another human being 'chooses' to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name." Her own bishop reluctantly corrected her misstatements in a public letter, necessitated by "the widespread consternation among Catholics" of her deliberate distortions of Catholic doctrine. Pope Benedict counseled her, in person, on the Church's express teaching, "which enjoins all Catholics, and especially legislators," to protect "human life at all stages of its development." Pelosi, " the respectful Catholic" who presumed to tell Trump to pray for wisdom, emerged from that meeting no wiser for it, obtusely extolling the "Church's leadership in fighting poverty, hunger and global warming." Jesus warned against hypocrites who make a public display of praying "that they may be seen by men." The way Pelosi pretends to exemplify "prayerful" politics, and the way she told Trump "in private" that she's praying for him – and immediately announced it in a televised press conference – is pure Pelosi: cynical, addlebrained, phony. If it might hurt Trump, she'll pontificate how every MS-13 killer retains a "spark of divinity," then goes right back to her life's work snuffing out that spark from 60 million innocents and counting. The Bible never says it's intrinsically evil to build a wall or protect a border, but it's still got that commandment against murder. Let the Democrats canonize this Pharisee if they need a patron saint. Her feast day can fall on January 22. T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com. Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.