In the summer of 2004 the Democratic National Committee announced they had hired The Rev. Brenda Bartella-Peterson as their first ever senior advisor on religious outreach. Her appointment lasted for just about two weeks.
Soon after she was hired William Donahue and the far-right Catholic League launched a vicious public attack on Bartella-Peterson, who had served as the executive director of the Clergy Leadership Network (CLN), a group of clergy opposed to the Bush Administration's policies. She was charged with being anti-patriotic because of a legal brief she had signed with other clergy concerning the Pledge of Allegiance and a tax-and-spend liberal. The Catholic League wrote at the time:
"In the CLN's `Debate' section of its website, it says a lot about separation of church and state, but virtually nothing about religious liberty (e.g., it is against faith-based initiatives). Regarding tax policies, it would be an understatement to say it likes taxes: `Taxes provide a way to look out for our neighbors....Slashing taxes denies that!' It then says that slashing taxes is `inevitably an appeal to our greed, not to our generosity or compassion.' In other words, the greedy want to keep the money they've earned; those who want to take it from us are the altruists. No wonder Rev. Peterson says, `The federal budget is a moral document.'
But those were not the only crimes the Catholic League charged her with.
"The (CLN) website even provides a link to an anti-Catholic site, Chuck Currie (see his piece, `When Catholic Girls Go Wild').
The post they mentioned was a critique of a statement written by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Not only was my post not anti-Catholic in tone but it in fact quoted from American Catholic leaders upset at how Rome interacts with women. Had Donahue and his crew read my site further they would have found several positive posts on work done by Catholic leaders around the world. But it was politically beneficial for them simply to label me an anti-Catholic.
Their attack worked. The DNC caved and Bartella-Peterson was shown the door.
Now the Catholic League is back with attacks against Senator John Edwards and two bloggers hired to serve on his staff. Instead of working to address the fundamental issues of our time the Catholic League works often in unison with far-right political operatives to smear progressive political leaders all the while lifting up the banner of the conservative cause. It was no surprise to see Donahue, who has in past declared that Hollywood is controlled by Jews opposed to Christianity, take such an active role in the last few years supporting the most conservative of President Bush's judicial nominees.
I don't like the rhetoric employed by the bloggers the Edwards campaign hired. We need more civil discourse than that.
But Donahue is nothing more than another right-wing political activist trying to highjack the Christian faith for his own political gain. Make no mistake about that.
