The escalating pro-abortion protests, rhetoric, and threats against people of faith hinge on hatred for the fundamental Christian respect for dignity and life that the United States was founded upon, CatholicVote President Brian Burch said Wednesday.
Burch weighed in on a memo revealing that the Department of Homeland Security is investigating threats to murder Supreme Court justices, burn down or storm the Supreme Court, and attacks on houses of worship and abortion clinics. The memo references threats that are “likely to persist” or increase as the court prepares to issue a major abortion ruling.
“We have already entered a new era of extreme religious bigotry and anti-Catholicism in the United States, perhaps worse than anything we’ve seen in the history of this country,” Burch said during an interview with The Daily Wire.
“The left is proposing a whole new understanding of America grounded in identity, race and sexuality,” he continued, warning that this new understanding of America “is intended to displace an understanding of America shaped by religious belief and moral and religious truth about the human person.”
The Daily Wire’s on-the-ground coverage of a pro-abortion rights rally in Washington, D.C. shows that many attending these demonstrations express fevered, anti-Catholic or anti-religious sentiments. “F*** your God,” they scream at pro-life protestors. “F*** your religion.” Ruth Sent Us, a leftist pro-abortion group, called for demonstrations in Catholic Churches on Mother’s Day and went so far as to publicly state its intention to burn the Eucharist.
“This is a dramatic escalation in political rhetoric that’s now fueling both the protests and threats of violence,” he said.
The CatholicVote president expressed deep concerns at the Biden administration’s attitude towards these “escalating” leftist behaviors, especially considering the White House’s insistence that the president is a “devout Catholic.” The Biden administration has said that it discourages violence at the homes of justices but hasn’t weighed in on calls to protest in churches.
“The administration has been woefully silent on a pattern that’s emerged over the last several years of targeting an entire class of Americans, namely religious believers, and specifically Catholics,” Burch said, referring to more than 100 attacks on Catholic Churches documented by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “We have to understand what’s going on here. This is not merely a new set of extremism on the left that is being characterized as a corollary to incidents of extremism on the right.”
These threats of violence and “unprecedented” attacks represent a new era of leftist tactics aimed at institutions and a whole class of Americans who Burch said are “not directly involved in any political or judicial decision making.”
“The decision over Roe v .Wade is not being made inside that church, or the decision of how to regulate or to curb the incidences of abortion are not being made by Catholic priests or bishops or worshipers praying in church on Sunday,” Burch explained. “Yet these are the targets of the Left. And there’s nothing of its kind on the right that even compares.”
Nationwide protests and demonstrations follow the news of Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion, an “unflinching repudiation” of Roe v. Wade. The document, which is not final, says Roe v. Wade was egregiously wrong.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito wrote. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Following the leak, conservative activists and legal experts quickly called for the Supreme Court to release a final decision on Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
On May 3, Chief Justice John Roberts released a statement confirming that the draft document is real, but emphasizing that it did not represent the Supreme Court’s final decision.
“We at the Court are blessed to have a workforce — permanent employees and law clerks alike — intensely loyal to the institution and dedicated to the rule of law,” the chief justice said.
“This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here,” he added, noting that he has “directed the Marshal of the Court to launch an investigation into the source of the leak.”
Many on the right have speculated that the draft opinion was most likely leaked by a progressive Supreme Court clerk in an effort to intimidate the court and change its decision — and as protests over the news continue, conservative activists and legal experts call for the Supreme Court to promptly release its decision.