Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

“ Do I have a right to make prudential judgments? Yes, I do that ” -- Rosa DeLauro US Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s faith, Catholicism, is brought to center stage in today’s Hartford Courant front page story , “Rosa’s Faith.” Some Catholics may quarrel with some points in the story. Their quarrel may begin with its title, “Rosa’s Faith.” In so far as Rosa’s faith differs from the faith of her church on matters of Christian doctrine, it is not, and cannot be, Catholic faith. Prudence, valued by DeLauro, and conscience do not always march together hand in hand. Catholics must take care to conform themselves to their faith; it cannot be the other way around. The Catholic struggle is to understand the faith and to conform one’s conscience, in one’s daily life, to Catholic teaching. When one trims the faith to make it fit one’s comfortable notions, one has stepped outside the Catholic universe. This temptation is one that Catholic politician are especially prone to. It must be an informed conscience...

U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro began her epistle in the New York Post with the following howler: “As both a committed Catholic and a strong advocate of women’s health, I want to applaud the recently released guidelines for preventive health coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” The guidelines Mrs. DeLauro approved have since been redrafted. Mrs. DeLauro approves birth control, she said, because “We know that improved access to birth control is directly linked to declines in maternal and infant mortality and helps to reduce unintended pregnancies.” No kidding. The kind of “birth control” commended by Mrs. DeLauro and Planned Parenthood would, of course, include contraceptives, abortion and other means of fetal destruction in the Planned Parenthood medicine cabinet. Birth preventatives prevent births, and the decline in birth rates leads to reductions in “unintended pregnancies’ and “infant mortality.” If you employ means that cause pre-birth mortality, yo...

Pelosi and DeLauro The Catholic Church throughout the world is the body of the faithful led by a faithful clergy. The satanic priests who sexually corrupted young people, it should be noted, were not by any stretch of the imagination faithful Catholics. The words “faithful” and “led” in the above definition are necessary and decisive, for not everyone baptized a Catholic is faithful to the teachings of the Church. A masterful politician, Cardinal Richelieu of France was also a faithful servant of the French court. When the Cardinal died, Pope Urban VIII was asked for his assessment of Richelieu. He said, “If there is no God, Richelieu will have lived a good life. And if there is a God, he will have much to answer for.” Richelieu, known during his day as “The Red Eminence”, was consecrated as a bishop in 1607 and appointed Foreign Secretary in 1616. He became a Cardinal in 1622 and Chief Minister to King Louis XIII of France in 1624, retaining office until his death in 1642. Riche...

In a commentary over at Connecticut Local Politics , a popular liberal blog site, Ghengis Conn remarks, “Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-3rd District) is trying to find middle ground on what has been the stickiest and most controversial issue in American politics for a generation: abortion. Her approach, which she is undertaking with pro-life Democrat Tim Ryan of Ohio, is to reduce the need for abortions.” “Got a problem with that?” DeLauroites are now asking. DeLauro is a liberal Catholic who, like virtually every other Catholic US congressperson in Connecticut, disagrees with her church and her Pope on the matter of abortion. So, there’s a tiny red flag flapping wildly in the stormy debate. Then too, in discussing “needs,” we should bear in mind George Will’s priceless definition of a need: To the modern sensibility, a need is “a want that is more than 24 hours old.” Some non-ideologues in the great pro-life, pro-choice debate have supposed that if a woman’s life were in danger during her preg...

Lincoln quoting Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!'’ During his long political career, which spans four decades, Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has been storming moral mounts and shaking his fists at the gods. At some point, the gods of Western morality may respond.

DeLauro That didn’t take long. CTMirror reports , “One of U.S. Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro’s first acts after winning election as the Appropriations Committee chair will be to convene an informational hearing next week on the Hyde Amendment, the ban on Medicaid spending for abortion regularly renewed by Congress since passage in 1976.” DeLauro added, ““I believe it is discriminatory policy, and it’s a longstanding issue of racial injustice,” DeLauro said in an interview Friday. “It’s routinely considered every year, but I think we are in a moment.” DeLauro did not pause to explain in what sense an amendment applicable to everyone that prohibits the federal government from financing abortions may be discriminatory. The Hyde amendment is universal in its application, and discrimination always implies the partial application of the law. If the Hyde amendment were to prohibit the financing of abortion only for low income African Americans and allow the federal financing of abortions to mill...

The New Haven Register reports that 3 rd District U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, up for re-election this year, has begun her campaign against hunger in Connecticut: “Rosa DeLauro took aim Monday at the recently passed $3.6 trillion House Republican budget that would impose sweeping cuts in domestic programs, including food stamps, but block new taxes on millionaires. “’The budget that was passed last week... would decimate food stamps and the rest of our federal anti-hunger programs,’ DeLauro said at a press conference in the CFB warehouse, ‘while preserving oil company subsidies and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans...’” Mrs. DeLauro is a millionaire and one of the richest legislators in the Congress, where she has plied her trade since 1991. Mrs. DeLauro, who purports to be a Roman Catholic, is perhaps best known for her fulsome support of abortion and her resistance to any measure designed to regulate it . The New Haven Register report is accompanied b...

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice” --  A Defense of Humilities, The Defendant, 1901,  G.K. Chesterton Small “o” orthodox Christians of a certain age will be familiar with the cardinal virtues. They are: prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice – all under attack by a secular culture that, judging by Hollywood or Washington DC standards, appears to have won the battle. But, never fear, the four cardinal virtues form the breastplate of a church against which, its founder once proclaimed, the gates of Hell shall not prevail. The Cardinal virtues, St. Augustine tells us, better enable us to pursue the good life: “To live well is nothing other than to love God with all one's heart, with all one's soul and with all one's efforts; from this,  it comes about that love is kept whole and uncorrupted (through temperance). No misfortune can disturb it (and this is fortitude). It obeys only [God] (a...

Blumenthal   A shrewd observer of the American scene once said that Americans never solve their most pressing problems. Instead, “they amicably bid them goodbye.” The abortion problem, growing more fractious by the year, has not been so easily dismissed. There are reasons for this, some of them explored in a lengthy essay that first appeared in Bloomberg News. The Hartford Courant, grown timorous in the matter of opinion, editorial or op-ed, printed the Bloomberg piece, written by Ramesh Ponnurru, on April 2 under the caption “Case for fetal-personhood thesis,” The piece is long, not fit for consumption by folk who have been nourishing themselves for years on the brambles and thistles found in Twitter. The Courant has put up a pay wall, but the Ponnurru piece, well worth reading may be found in full here . The abortion problem always has been a “to be or not to be” question that has prompted deep dives into metaphysics and legal theory. One legal theory holds that the fetus...

Blumenthal, abortion According to the Letter of Barnabas, A.D. 74, “Thou shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shalt thou destroy it after it is born.” The position of Governor Ned Lamont and Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly on abortion is much the same as that of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood: Abortion should be available to pregnant women at any state of the birth process; all regulations on abortion should be stoutly resisted or repealed. According to this view, uncommon only a few decades ago, abortion is simply another mode of birth control. What, the reader may ask, is the problem with birth control? Well, there are problems, not all of them related directly to abortion. We all remember The Population Bomb , a 1968 book co-authored by former Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich and former Stanford senior researcher in conservation biology Anne H. Ehrlich. The book, intentionally alarmist and fore...

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, the unofficial poet laureate of the John. F. Kennedy administration, used to say, rightly, that anti-Catholicism is the oldest prejudice in the United States. It was brought to these shores in the Mayflower and has persisted underground ever since. Not only is it an old and moss grown prejudice -- shelved, some wrongly think, by Kennedy’s election to the presidency – it is insidiously wrong-headed. One wonders if Assistant Principal Jeremy Boland of Cos Cob Elementary School, as toney and modish as Greenwich, but less elite, presents such lessons to his students. Wonder no more. A Washington D.C. based investigative reporter for Project Veritas has upturned the rock. Cos Cob students might know that the notorious  Klu Klux Klan  was every bit as anti-Catholic as it was anti-Black if only its school personnel, hired or not by Boland, were less -- shall we say it? – anti-Catholic. The interview with pro-woke Boland is brought to us courtesy...

John Bailey and Jack Kennedy Democrat Party political boss John Bailey dominated Connecticut politics from 1950 until his death in 1975. He coordinated his party’s politics in Connecticut and oversaw election campaigns in the state’s General Assembly, which is a polite way of saying he pulled most of the political strings in what used to be a rock-ribbed Republican state. When he had finished bossing Democrats, his party had become a bastion of highly electable Jewish and Catholic politicians such as Governor Abraham Ribicoff, U.S. Senator Thomas Dodd, Governor John Dempsey, and Governor Ella T. Grasso.    The reformed postmodern Democrat Party of today is considerably less disciplined, and political candidates have long discovered that the two major parties are little more than flags under which Democrats and Republicans gather to sport the wares of individual savior politicians, all of whom are responsible for raising their own campaign funds. Nearly every ...

The separation of church and state – an expression first found in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to Baptists in Danbury and not in the U.S. Constitution – is one of those secular pieties rigidly observed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and others, except when it is not religiously observed. The Rev. LeRoy Bailey, who had opened First Cathedral church in Bloomfield to students graduating from High Schools within reasonable distance of the cathedral, was set upon by the ever vigilant – except when it is not being vigilant – ACLU, which persuaded a court that the reverend had overstepped putative constitutional strictures. The court shut down the operation, apparently because it felt that students gathering in a church building to celebrate a secular event in the absence of masses and ministers would somehow infect the assembled students with impermissible religious doctrines. One political observer, myself, speculated that the court perhaps believed in homeopathic ma...

Blumenthal and Sanders It has been said of U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal that there is no more dangerous place in Connecticut than the space between him and a television camera. On the day after Judge Amy Barrett’s first appearance before the U.S. Senate, Blumenthal’s picture appeared twice in a Hartford paper. He was prominently featured in both an AP story, “ Barrett makes case as next justice on the Supreme Court ,” and a separate Connecticut story, “ Blumenthal says fate of Obamacare is on the line .” Blumenthal is used to receiving in his home state gushingly favorable press. So, no surprise there. The first day of Barrett’s testimony was not devoted to the questioning of the nominee by senators. Barrett briefly addressed the assembled senators, after which the senators addressed Barrett, sitting mutely before them, looking somewhat like a masked pillar of salt. The interrogatories occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday. What is the real purpose, some may wonder, of this awkward pre...

Trump leading the lamb to the slaughter Anyone who did not turn off the first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden should be prosecuted for masochism. It was a bit like watching two 80 year-old codgers bickering about property lines over a backyard fence. The first thing to notice about so called presidential “debates” is that they are not debates at all but, most often, poorly conducted press conferences run amok. People whose memories are not impaired will have noticed that public manners have eroded considerably since the Nixon-Kennedy debates, and the Lincoln Douglas debates are little more than a mystic memory. Trump never was a very good debater, but in the past he was able to put in some rational order his contempt charges. On this occasion, he was brutal rather than orderly. Biden responded in kind. Hunter Biden’s father doesn’t fear contempt. He fears laughter. In his confrontation with Trump, Biden did not live up to the...

This is no joke. US Sen. Chris Dodd announced his bid for the White House, according to a report in the Hartford Courant , “on the Don Imus radio show.” Dodd's Connecticut campaign will feature the ubiquitous Attorney General Richard Blumenthal as his state chairman, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, once Dodd’s Chief of Staff, will serve as the senator’s national co-chairman – further proof, if any were necessary, that incumbent politicians now have become petite political parties. Is it not possible to recruit the state Democrat Party chairman to serve in the role assigned to Blumenthal, who certainly is not in need of further press coverage? Dodd, who has about $5 million in his campaign kitty, is on the campaign road to Iowa and South Carolina. One way to win political support in such important campaign states is to purchase it, and $5 million will come in handy for this purpose. The Journal Inquirer of Manchester earlier reported that Dodd has spread his largess around in local races bo...