Pelosi's split personality

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Aug 04, 2010

A pesky young pro-life journalist confronts Nancy Pelosi with a tough question. Jane McGrath of CNSNews.com reminds the Speaker that she had referred to Jesus as the “Word made Flesh.” When did that event occur, McGrath asked? That is, “when did the Word get the right to life?”

“Whenever it was,” said Pelosi, “we bow our heads when we talk about it in church, and that’s where I’d like to talk about that.”

You get the Speaker’s point. She’ll talk about the sanctity of human life when she’s in church, not when she’s out in the political world. As a Catholic she supports the right to life. As a politician she doesn't. It's not so much an inconsistency as a contraction; not so much a contradiction as a form of schizophrenia.

Here we have reached the final stop for a logical train that was has been chugging down the tracks since John F. Kennedy made his notorious “Houston speech” before the 1960 election. JFK promised that he would not allow Church teachings to influence his political decisions: his religion was to be a private matter, stripped of public consequences. The train gained momentum as Cuomo, Ferraro, Kerry and others took greater and greater precautions to isolate their professed religious beliefs from their actual political stands.

Still how could you possibly guarantee that religious doctrines will have absolutely no influence on those who profess them? Only by assuring the public that the professed believer doesn’t know what his faith teaches. Angels might hesitate to go there, but the Speaker rushes in. Pelosi informs us that once she’s outside the walls of church, she can’t even tell us what she believes when she’s inside. The bifurcation is complete: the political actor doesn’t even know what the religious believer believes.