Elections

Evangelical, Catholic Leaders Enraged At Hillary Aides

David Krayden Ottawa Bureau Chief
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Evangelical and Catholic groups are enraged over a series of anti-Catholic and anti-evangelical emails that have emerged from Hillary Clinton’s inner circle.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue has called on Clinton to dismiss John Podesta — whose emails were leaked by WikiLeaks — as her campaign chair, given Podesta’s role in the email scandal.

“Absolutely he should be fired,” said Donohue. “He is fomenting revolution in the Catholic Church, creating mutiny and is totally unethical. He is the front man for George Soros to create a host of phony anti-Catholic groups. These are not just bad comments, as some have suggested. These words are orchestrated, calculated and designed to create fissures in the Catholic Church.”

The Podesta email in Donohue’s crosshairs promises to “plant the seeds of revolution” in the Church, as he imagines: “There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church.”

Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, also leveled scathing remarks at Catholics: “I imagine they think it [Catholicism] is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals,” she writes.

Palmieri was questioned about the e-mails on Tuesday but only said she “didn’t recognize them” after claiming that she couldn’t comment further because the “Russians did it.”

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, says the views expressed by Clinton’s inner circle definitely reflect her own. “Hillary was the one who spoke of a basket of deplorables. These remarks are not made in a vacuum; they come from the bigoted soil of her campaign.”

Perkins said Clinton and her staff have a basic prejudice against Christians who actually believe in Biblical truth. “These are people who think religion is just something you follow on the weekend; the rest of the week it’s something to be ignored.”

In addition to the above quotation from Palmieri, John Halpin — a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and close Clinton confidant– questioned media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s motivation for raising his children in the Catholic faith:

“…both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the W[all] S[treet] J[ournal], are raising their kids Catholic. Friggin’ Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus. Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the S[upreme] C[ourt] and think tanks to the media and social groups. It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.”

Donohue expressed disbelief that anti-Catholic sentiments like these have not been better reported: “This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America but the media has a lot of tolerance for intolerance against Christians.”

Despite his anger, Donohue has stopped short of endorsing Donald Trump for president. The Catholic League president said Trump at least “understands the anger out there and is not a stuffed-shirt like [Mitt] Romney.”

Perkins is supporting Trump. Although the New York billionaire was not his first choice, Perkins’s endorsement has survived the release last week of an 11-year-old but widely-viewed video of Trump using crude language.

“It has come down to two choices: Clinton or Trump,” Perkins said. “Under Trump, the Republicans have approved the most socially conservative platform in the party’s recent history while Clinton will continue Obama’s war on the American family.”

Perkins is convinced that the worst is yet to come under a Clinton presidency.

“She will continue the task of disassembling America’s freedoms,” he said. “We need to exercise our responsibility to vote.”