There was much about this week’s Democratic National Convention/Circus that made me itch.
Lots of it made me nervous.
Some of it made me queasy.
Of course, I did snicker quite a bit when Elizabeth Warren got all blubbery.
And I winced when Michelle Obama said that, “horrors of systemic racism shook our country,” implying that some such thing took place this year.
In general, though, I guess I just found most of it pretty silly, like when Bill Clinton compared Biden to George Washington for “voluntarily” giving up “political power” and lauding the lame duck for having “healed our sick.”
But a couple of items stood out. One I found very disappointing, the other downright nauseating.
No, the disappointing thing wasn’t the fact that I fell asleep before Joe on Monday night.
It was before that. In fact, it was right out of the starting gate, just after the convention had officially convened.
It was the totally lame invocation by Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago. And it wasn't just what he failed to say that irked me. It was the idea that he was lending his endorsement to the unholy circus in the first place.
He might've missed last month's piece in the Catholic Herald, that said of Joe Biden, "The second Catholic president in US history has the most aggressive anti-Catholic administration ever known."
And, as I think you probably know, just outside the United Center, Planned Parenthood had already stationed a mobile abortion clinic, where multiple procedures had been performed that day.
I can't imagine that His Eminence was unaware of it.
Anti-life activists were parading around the exterior of the convention center, dressed up as Mifepristone abortion pills.
Kamala Harris and the party she now leads have made what they like to refer to as "reproductive rights" the centerpiece of their campaign. I'd even go so far as to say that, were they forced to choose a single issue on which to run, access to abortion would be the clear winner.
And, as a prince of the Church, Cupich surely couldn't have been ignorant of the fact that the Democratic Party platform "requires that federal health plans provide coverage for gender confirmation surgery and hormone therapy."
Yeah, cuz, last time I checked, those two things —abortion and genital mutilation— ain't exactly kosher in the eyes of the Church.
All that said, after I got over my initial discomfort with the cardinal gracing the dems with his presence, I found myself encouraged by the beginning of his prayer.
"We praise you, O God of all creation. Quicken in us a resolve to protect your handiwork."
Hey, that sounded like a great start —protect your handiwork.
Nice job, Eminence. That's a perfect setup for a discussion about the sanctity of life and the Vatican's doctrine's declaring 'gender-affirming' surgery to be a “grave violation of human dignity.”
Suddenly, I was psyched. The sandbaggin' son-of-a-bitch had snuck his way behind enemy lines and now he was gonna open fire. This oughta be good!
Well, not so much.
He never quite got around to mentioning anything to do with the no-nos of aborting or mutilating God's "handiwork." It was just a pleasant intro.
The other thing he managed to forget was the name of Jesus. Yeah, you know, the Son of God; the Messiah; the Christ; the King of kings and Lord of lords; the Lamb of God, and the Bread of Life — all that stuff.
C'mon, Cardinal. You remember that guy from seminary, don't you?
Does Alpha and Omega maybe ring a bell?
Now, you might be saying that denominational clerics do that all the time. You know, just make it as inclusive as possible for all of God’s children. After all, not everyone in the audience was Catholic — or even Christian. So, yeah, I get it.
However, comma.
That didn't stop Milwaukee's Archbishop Jerome Listecki from mentioning his Lord and Savior, by name, to a similarly diverse crowd last month.
His Excellency delivered the invocation at the Republican convention in July, and while he might've waited until the end before uttering the J-word, his at-bat was much more productive from a Christian perspective.
Just 38 words into his prayer, invoking the spirit and intent of our Founding Fathers, Listecki told the Lord, "For 248 years, we have sustained this vision to guard the dignity of every life from conception to natural death…"
And he closed his prayer the way Christians are supposed to:
"Almighty God, keep the United States of America in your holy protection and incline the hearts of the citizens to a brotherly affection and love for one another, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen."
On Monday night, Cardinal Cupich balked at the occasion to mention anything specifically Christian, and I wasn't the only one who felt let down by his performance.
Illinois Right to Life President Mary Kate Zander said, “It is incredibly disheartening to see a local church leader who once aligned himself with our cause participate in such a deeply anti-life, anti-family event as the DNC.”
"Cardinal Cupich missed a clear opportunity last night to condemn their vile, murderous policies and, in effect, betrayed the vibrant pro-life community that he once aligned himself within our state,” she added.
In a post on X, Bishop Emeritus Joseph Strickland called the cardinal's appearance a "missed opportunity to call the Democratic Party back from the abyss."
So, the bottom line is that, no, Cardinal Cupich didn't exactly put on a Saint Stephen performance on Monday. But he’s human. He just fell short like, we all do. Call it a sin of omission.
Wednesday's evening session, on the other hand, included a five-minute speech by Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who —incidentally— serves as a deacon at Beargrass Christian Church in Louisville.
Given that fact, I found it remarkable that Beshear spent literally 80% of his allotted time talking about absolutely nothing other than abortion.
His presentation was, rather, a sin of commission.
And he actually had the cohones to invoke scripture in a perverted attempt to support his argument, somehow finding a way to equate loving your neighbor with aborting your child.
“My faith teaches me the golden rule; that I am to love my neighbor as myself, [and] the parable of the Good Samaritan says we are all each other's neighbors"
Yeah, Governor, but you left out a really important part.
Now it just so happens that yesterday's Catholic Gospel reading was from the first Biblical passage Beshear referenced, Matthew 22:36-39, where Jesus is asked, "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?"
(It’s actually posed as a trick question, intended to trip him up, but we can talk about that offline.)
Anyway, Jesus replies, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment."
He then goes on to add, "The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
The governor/deacon managed to skip over the greatest and the first commandment, in some depraved attempt to suggest that letting women abort their babies is what Jesus had in mind when he instructed the Pharisees to "love your neighbor."
Such is the debauched mindset of the pro-abortion left.
Beshear's speech followed right on the heels of a panel of three women who recounted their respective experiences about having or not having had access to abortion services.
One of them was Hadley Duvall, who shared her tragic and unthinkable story of having been raped and impregnated by her stepfather. It was a difficult testimony to hear, and even harder to imagine. Trust me when I say that —especially as a father of two daughters— it moved me.
Still, once Beshear started talking, I quickly realized that they'd just used Hadley as a prop.
"Donald Trump brags about tearing a constitutional right away from Hadley and every other woman and girl in our country," he fibbed to the crowd.
Of course, it wasn't Trump but the Supreme Court that decided the 2022 Dobbs case, overturning Roe v. Wade. Furthermore, the Constitution makes no mention or even vague allusion to any such right.
In deciding Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Court concluded that the Constitution neither enumerates nor implies any right to abortion and that, therefore, the issue should be regulated by the "people's elected representatives," and not by the Judiciary.
Beshear went to a really good law school so, unless he was sick the day they taught law, he knew he was slinging bullshit.
He then got himself tangled up in his own argument when he bragged, "We put reproductive freedom on the ballot last November and I beat Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell's handpicked candidate by more than 5%!"
Yeah, dummy, that's what the Court told you and the rest of the states to do. Remember?
He also conveniently left out the fact that the pro-abortion measure he was crowing about was rejected by Kentucky's voters.
Beshear claimed that "Trump's actions have resulted in extreme bans on abortion," leaving "12-year-old girls like Hadley with no options."
"That fails any test of humanity," he continued, "Any test of basic decency. Any test of whether you have any underlying empathy."
I guess empathy for the unborn child doesn't count, but I digress.
Instead, I'll move on to the "no-options" canard.
You see, that's what the pro-abortion psychos want us to believe; that there simply aren't any other safe options for women dealing with unplanned pregnancies. That the only sensible recourse is a simple and convenient trip to Planned Parenthood on a Friday morning.
They've devoted enormous effort and resources toward convincing them that's the only way to go.
But, despite their inexplicable disinformation campaign, there are, in fact, alternatives to abortion that the left wants to keep a secret.
They're called pregnancy resource centers or, more commonly, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), and they're all over the place.
There are more than 8,000 pro-life pregnancy centers in all 50 states compared to 585 Planned Parenthood facilities in just 48 states. That fact would remove the perceived convenience advantage of Planned Parenthood if more women were aware of it.
Just a quick web search in my neck of the woods yielded 18 CPCs on Long Island, nine of which are run by hospitals that are part of the Catholic Health network.
In 2023, pro-life pregnancy centers in the United States served over 1.9 million clients.
These centers offer a variety of services, including pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, counseling, and material support, aimed at assisting women and families facing unplanned pregnancies.
You may not have known that because you're not supposed to. The pro-abortion horde would rather keep women in crisis in the dark as they grease the coffers of Planned Parenthood and promote their abortion cult.
According to its 2022-23 annual report, Planned Parenthood received $699.3 million in taxpayer funding, which includes government grants, contracts, and Medicaid reimbursements. That amount accounted for 34% of its overall revenue.
The total federal handout between 2019 and 2021 was approximately $1.8 billion.
Its 2021 annual report shows that Planned Parenthood performed 41 abortions for every single prenatal service it provided, which makes it sound a lot more like a "pro-abortion" option than a "pro-choice" one.
Meanwhile, the propaganda, legal, legislative, and even public war against CPCs is a massive, often violent, many-headed hydra, intent on steering women in the direction of terminating their pregnancies and preventing those inclined to seek pro-life alternatives from exercising their right to choose.
The PBS website refers to the centers as "so-called crisis pregnancy centers," and "anti-abortion counseling centers."
The page discussing CPCs on the Planned Parenthood site (which, remember, is 34% funded by tax dollars) offers this helpful advice:
Crisis pregnancy centers (also called CPCs or "fake clinics") are clinics or mobile vans that look like real health centers, but they're run by anti-abortion activists who have a shady, harmful agenda: to scare, shame, or pressure you out of getting an abortion, and to tell lies about abortion, birth control, and sexual health.
Looking for a trustworthy abortion clinic or health center in your area? Call your local Planned Parenthood, or visit AbortionFinder.org.
Crisis pregnancy centers don’t provide abortion or offer a full range of health care, and they won’t give you honest facts about sexual health and your pregnancy options — their goal is to spread misinformation and propaganda.
As California's attorney general, Kamala Harris waged a personal war against pregnancy centers.
She co-sponsored the FACT (Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency) Act, which was passed in 2015 and required pro-life pregnancy centers to display notices informing clients about the availability of state-funded abortions and contraception. That included faith-based centers, such as those affiliated with Catholic and other Christian denominations, which, of course, had pro-life orientations.
The legislation was challenged in court, leading to a Supreme Court case, NIFLA v. Becerra, where the Court ruled in 2018 that the act violated the First Amendment rights of these centers by compelling them to deliver a message with which they fundamentally disagreed.
Taking a page out of Kamala's playbook, in June 2022, Elizabeth Warren authored a bill —along with now-convicted felon, Bob Menendez— called the Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act.
If Warren’s bill had passed, it would have empowered the Federal Trade Commission to prescribe rules prohibiting “misleading statements” related to abortion services.
What about all the misleading shit about CPCs on the Planned Parenthood site???
Fortunately, Warren’s awful bill never made it out of committee and was rendered dead by January 2023.
I’ve always been baffled by what motivates the pro-abortion mob, particularly those who advocate for no limits. Eight states have no defined limit. 18 allow abortions beyond 24 weeks. Think about that. That’s six months.
The results of the 2024 Knights of Columbus-Marist Poll, which were released in January, found that two-thirds of Americans support placing legal limits on abortions and nearly 6 in 10 support limiting abortions to the first three months of pregnancy.
The poll also found that 83% of Americans support pregnancy resource centers, so I’m left wondering why the hell miscreants like Harris, Warren, and their legions are out to destroy them.
Meanwhile, more than 1 million abortions took place in the U.S. last year, the highest number in more than a decade, and that’s post-Roe.
When nearly three-quarters of women who've chosen abortion say that the primary reason behind their decision was financial, why isn't our society's first inclination to eliminate their material concerns rather than their unborn children?
Why hasn’t there been any popular effort to educate, inform, and support these women and provide them with alternatives, like pregnancy centers and adoption services? Why is there, rather, a widespread and fanatical campaign to do just the opposite?
Brian O'Leary is a retired Marine Corps colonel, who served for 30 years, including combat deployments to Somalia and Iraq, and command of an infantry battalion in Afghanistan. Additionally, he has spent 25 years in the financial services industry. Brian earned his BA in English from Penn State University and his MA in National Security Studies from the US Army War College.
IG - @brian_oleary34 X - @brianoleary34
Thank you for your perspective