God and Hillary Clinton (28 page)

Reilly wrote to Marymount Manhattan College president Judson Shaver, urging him to cancel Hillary's appearance “in order to restore fidelity to the college's Catholic mission, obedience to your bishop and public trust in your commitment to not lead astray the college's students, your employees and the general public.” He likewise mailed a letter to New York's Edward Cardinal Egan seeking “immediate action to prevent scandal in the Archdiocese of New York.” In that letter, Reilly spoke for those in the church who were fed up with the leftward drift of many Catholic colleges, some of which had moved
so far from their moral and doctrinal underpinnings that it was difficult to call them Catholic. “After decades of scandal…the bishops drew a line in the sand,” Reilly said. “No college that deliberately crosses that line deserves the label ‘Catholic' or the support of the faithful—most especially monetary support.”
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This was nothing new for the Catholic college founded by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary in Tarrytown, New York; the previous year's commencement speaker was New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, another strong proponent of abortion rights. “Last year Spitzer, this year Hillary Clinton,” Reilly remarked. “Can anyone trust this college's claim to a Catholic mission? They seem to have tried their hardest to honor the church's opponents in the fight against abortion, and now they publicly brush aside the bishops' clear expectations. We trust there will be consequences from the bishops, but lay Catholics also need to stand up and confront this scandal.”
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What was worse for Reilly and others was that Marymount Manhattan boasted about its pro-choice commencement speaker the same month that Pope John Paul II had died: “Pope John Paul II has been laid to rest, but his legacy continues to be desecrated by heretics and public dissenters in ‘religious studies' departments…and college officials who fail to uphold their colleges' Catholic mission,” Reilly said.
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Joseph Starrs, director of the American Life League's Crusade for the Defense of Our Catholic Church, also affirmed that the invitation was “a clear violation of the stated policies of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.” Starrs maintained, “By giving Senator Clinton an honorary degree, the college is thumbing its nose at the bishops and willfully disregarding a very clear mandate.”
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Whether liberal Catholics liked it or not, Starrs and Reilly were accurate: The bishops had drawn a line, and the college in Manhattan was ignoring it. Senator Clinton was now in the middle of the crossfire. The college president clearly was unconcerned with that
line, saying that he and the college were “honored and thrilled” that Senator Clinton would be addressing “the Marymount Manhattan community.” “Sen. Clinton has worked diligently on behalf of New Yorkers and the nation, and with her record of service,” wrote Shaver, “I have no doubt that her message will inspire our graduates and their guests.”
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The negative press that Mrs. Clinton received was significant: That May, the Cardinal Newman Center monitored commencement speakers and honorees at all 220 Catholic colleges and universities in the United States, and created a list of those that were ignoring their charter and the wishes of the bishops. That list was widely published by Catholic Web sites and diocesan and national newspapers, including the front page of the
National Catholic Register
. Mrs. Clinton's name was the one most prominently featured at the top of those lists. Rather than succeeding in reaching out to what she rightly perceived as a crucial religious constituency, Mrs. Clinton had become a poster girl for Catholics outraged at Christian politicians who were unabashedly pro-choice.

Each of these occasions generated large volumes of unwanted press for Hillary on Web sites and in newspapers where she had badly wanted to make advances, and where it was pointed out repeatedly that while Hillary was a self-described Christian, she was also unacceptably “pro-abortion,” as these sources labeled her—a term Mrs. Clinton detests.
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Sure, the mainstream press tried to ignore these controversies that consumed pro-life Catholics, but that was not the case, however, with those constituencies that Mrs. Clinton hoped to bring along.

Just then, she handed them another issue for outrage: She opposed a Republican bill that would make it illegal for anyone to help an underage girl go out of state to have an abortion without her parents' consent.
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Then, three months later, in August 2005, Senator Clinton ripped the nation's top health official—Health and Human Services
Secretary Michael Leavitt—for a “breach of faith” over the FDA's failure to decide whether to let women buy emergency contraceptive pills without prescriptions.
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In all, Marymount, and Canisius before it, was a wake-up call, demonstrating to Mrs. Clinton that language alone would not placate the Catholic constituents she was trying to win. The only way to win, it seemed, was to change.

The Supreme Court Opens

Those pro-life Catholics whose skepticism over Hillary resulted in the furors at Marymount and Canisius soon found vindication in her attempts to block two pro-life Catholic U.S. Supreme Court nominees who could begin turning the tide against
Roe v. Wade
.

The debate over the role that abortion would play in Supreme Court vacancies was nothing new, and in fact this had been a decisive issue in her 2000 Senate campaign. In a debate with Rick Lazio, when asked about the kind of U.S. Supreme Court nominee she would support, Mrs. Clinton had made clear that the justice's position on abortion would be the single most important factor, insisting on a so-called litmus test. “I think the fate of the Supreme Court hangs in the balance,” she said. “If we take Governor Bush at his word, his two favorite justices are [Antonin] Scalia and [Clarence] Thomas, both of whom are committed to overturning
Roe v. Wade
, ending a woman's right to choose. I could not go along with that.” In the next sentence, she issued her code language for abortion rights in the years ahead as each pro-life pick by President Bush was nominated for the high court: “In the Senate, I will be looking very carefully at the constitutional views as to what that nominee believes about basic, fundamental, constitutional rights.”
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Standing by this language, she used similar words to oppose the appointment of John Roberts to the court and in her statement on
the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In her September 5, 2005, statement on Rehnquist's passing, she urged he be replaced by a judge who places “fairness and justice before ideology.” She repeated these words two weeks later in a September 22 press release rejecting Bush's promotion of Roberts to fill Rehnquist's seat; the vast majority of the two-page press release dealt with
Roe v. Wade
.

Only a month later came the next opening on the high court, and on October 31, 2005, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement saying that Bush's pick of Judge Samuel Alito “raises serious questions about whether he will be steadfast in protecting our most fundamental rights,” meaning abortion rights. As with Roberts, she said she wanted to examine Alito's record carefully to ensure that he places “fairness and justice”—additional code words for abortion rights—“before ideology.”

In a statement from her office on January 27, 2006, Senator Clinton said that confirming Alito would halt “American progress” and “the ever-expanding circle of freedom and opportunity.” Judge Alito, said the senator, “would narrow that circle.” This statement on Alito was indicative of how her conciliatory language was more linguistic flourish than evidence of a genuine shift on abortion policy.

Indeed, if 2005 saw her extend a figurative olive branch to the right and middle, 2006 saw her seemingly retract it, as she went back out on the campaign trail and back into the churches. On January 16, Mrs. Clinton delivered a speech to an African American congregation at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem. It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a time of national remembrance and reconciliation on the divisive, hurtful history of race relations. Yet what Mrs. Clinton had to say that day was blistering. The junior senator from New York told the black audience that Republican congressional leaders had been running the U.S. House of Representatives “like a plantation.” She added, in a slap that was tame by comparison, that the Bush administration would go down as “one of the worst” in U.S. history.
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Suddenly Hillary was back to her rabble-rousing self, yelling at the crowd as a host of other white New York Democrats up for reelection sat nearby and watched: “When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about!”
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Understandably, the congressional leaders at the receiving end of these remarks were offended. “I've never run a plantation before,” said the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who, by Mrs. Clinton's implication, was the equivalent of a nineteenth-century Southern slave owner. “I'm not even sure of what kind of association she's trying to make…. I think that's unfortunate, but I'm not going to comment any further.”
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One of Hastert's colleagues, liberal Republican Peter King (R-N.Y.), a close friend of both Clintons, who had defended Bill in the impeachment proceedings, for which he was trashed by many in his own party, said of Mrs. Clinton's remarks: “It's definitely using the race card. It definitely has racist connotations. She knows it. She knew the audience. She knew what she was trying to say, and it was wrong. And she should be ashamed.”
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She had defenders, including the host of the event, racial activist Reverend Al Sharpton. “I absolutely defend her saying it,” said Sharpton, adding that Senator Clinton was merely reiterating what he himself had said. Likewise, Mrs. Clinton's spokesman defended the remarks, saying she was simply trying to underscore the point that the GOP House leadership stifled substantive debate—a point, it seems, that could have been made in a different way, on a different day, and in a different place.
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If the former first lady was looking to win middle-of-the-road voters, this was not the way to do it. Either she had spoken emotionally and loosely, or, worse, she had deliberately employed very divisive tactics—in a house of God, no less, and on Martin Luther King Jr. Day—merely to rile up a political base that she needed in the fall.

More rancorous statements followed from Mrs. Clinton through
out 2006, belying her strategy of a new tone aimed at moderate voters, and instead suggesting that her campaign felt a need to feed red meat to the hard-left base.

In March 2006, the senator employed the Bible to slap Republicans who backed a new immigration bill that she claimed was not only un-American but un-Christian as well. “It is certainly not in keeping with my understanding of the Scriptures,” Clinton judged. “This bill would literally criminalize the Good Samaritan—and probably even Jesus himself.”
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Mrs. Clinton must have known that George W. Bush considers the story of the Good Samaritan one of his favorite parables, and she was striking at the core of what religiously motivates the current Republican president.
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Here again, she clashed with her good friend Representative Peter King (R-N.Y.), who cosponsored the bill. “I don't think Jesus would have defended alien-smuggling gangs,” King fired back at the junior senator from New York. “I don't think Jesus would favor hundreds of immigrants dying in the desert.”
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Notably, the Catholic Church was sympathetic, fearing, as did Mrs. Clinton, that the immigration measure would turn a priest who counsels an illegal alien into a criminal. At last she had found an area of agreement with Rome.

One of the more surprising of these remarks came during a May 2006 assertion that right-wing “ideologues” were to blame for abortion. According to Mrs. Clinton, by denying women access to contraceptives—here she must have had in mind Catholics in particular—these right-wingers left women with no choice but to end their unwanted pregnancies with abortions. This movement to withhold contraceptives, said the senator, in strong language, “was started by a small group of extreme ideologues who claim the right to impose their personal beliefs on the overwhelming majority of the American people.” She added: “They're waging this silent war on contraception by using the power of the White House and their right-wing allies in Congress”—“and so far, they're getting away with it.”

Mrs. Clinton seemed to be identifying a new right-wing conspiracy, this time against contraception. Her assertion harked back to the 2004 NARAL address, which, her speeches in 2005 had implied, was a thing of the past. Now, however, she was again granting extraordinary powers to nefarious, conspiratorial “anti-choice” forces who, she suggested, had somehow in silence been able to impose their views on contraception upon the majority of America—a country in which contraception had long been legalized and was under no threat of illegalization. After all, most devout Protestants, and even millions of Catholics, use contraception.

She turned the matter, as she had before, into a class issue, saying that “low-income women, denied access to contraception, are having more unwanted pregnancies—four times as many as those for higher income women. And almost half of all unwanted pregnancies end in abortion.”
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This may have been a clever tactic for dealing with pro-lifers like Alveda King, niece of the late Martin Luther King Jr., who have been adamant in blaming pro-choicers for unintended “genocide” against unborn babies from low-income African-American communities through legalized abortion, an argument Mrs. Clinton has heard. In fact, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Hillary's old prayer partner, used to level this charge back when he was pro-life, before he began pursuing the Democratic presidential nomination. In essence, Mrs. Clinton was reversing the argument onto pro-lifers, or, at least, onto “right-wingers,” by contending that they are in large part to blame for any resulting deaths by denying contraception to low-income women.