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Enter Joe Biden, Stage Left




1. Abortion is a fundamental human right.


3. Same-sex marriage is a fundamental human right.


5. Non-liberal whites are almost always racists.





Lest anybody think that the above is an invidious description of the Democratic belief system given by a person who is a lifelong Democrat-hater, let me assure the reader that I once possessed very strong Democratic credentials.  I think I first thought of myself as a Democrat on that day when I was about eight-years-old and my father explained to me, “The Republicans are the party of rich people.  The Democrats are the party of poor people, like us.”

Later in life I became a politician in my home state of Rhode Island.  I served twelve years (1981-93) as a Democrat in the R.I. Senate, two of those as majority leader.  In 1992, I was the (losing) Democratic candidate in my district for the U.S. House of Representatives.

By that date, it was clear that my party had become a pro-abortion party.  Yet I, a pro-life Democrat, still hoped that the party’s anti-Christian momentum could be reversed.  That, as it turned out, was quite foolish.

[Photo/Michael Dwyer, AP]
Increasingly, cultural enemies of Christianity have gained ideological dominance in the party.  From abortion they moved on to homosexuality and same-sex marriage; more recently they have advanced to transgenderism; and, in the future, they will almost certainly move on to assisted suicide: first to voluntary euthanasia, later to involuntary.


Some people may object to what I’ve said. They may point out that today’s Democratic Party still contains many Christians and is far from being a party made up solely of atheists.  True . . . and beside the point.

Many persons who identify as both Christians and Democrats are simple souls who imagine that their party, because it has the same name it had in the good old days of FDR and JFK, is the same party it has always been. They don’t understand, or they won’t allow themselves to understand, how radically their party has changed.

But those people are followers, not leaders. The ideological leadership of the party is in the hands of persons who may be called Secular Progressives.  These people are atheists and near-atheists. By “near-atheists” I mean agnostics, religiously indifferent people, and liberal Protestants (in contrast to Evangelical Protestants).

If liberal Protestants are Christians, it is in a Pickwickian sense of that word only.  For more than a century now, liberal Protestantism, in an attempt to “save” Christianity for persons with a modern mentality, has been shedding one element after another of Christian belief.

Having shed almost all Nicene doctrines, they have more recently, under the impact of the sexual revolution, dropped all traditional Christian sexual morality plus the ancient Christian taboo against abortion.  Nowadays liberal Protestantism, while not quite full-fledged atheism, is far closer to atheism than it is to traditional Christianity.

Liberal Catholicism, while drifting in the same direction, got its start later than liberal Protestantism, and so has not yet traveled quite so far down the road to atheism as has its elder brother.  Its main project at the moment is to persuade the Church to remove its age-old condemnation of homosexuality.  To all appearances, it has had considerable success with this project, not just among tolerant laypersons, but even among many priests and some bishops.

When Joe Biden tries to exploit the “fact” that he’s a Catholic, it will be interesting to see how many Catholic bishops will denounce his spurious appropriation of the faith.  If the denunciation is nearly universal, it will be a sign that the Church in America is recovering its health.  If not, it will be sign that we are still sliding downhill.

As for myself, I’m not optimistic.

David Carlin

David Carlin
