Catholic Assessment of Kamala Harris

Catholic League President Bill Donohue represents the largest religious freedom organization in the nation. Here he assesses presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

by William Donohue, Ph.D., President of the Catholic League

There are many ways to assess any public person. My interest here is to assess Kamala Harris from a Catholic perspective. issuing an abbreviated rendition of this article at the end of July, the last news release I wrote about Harris was in May.  It was occasioned by her foul mouth.  Everyone concedes that politicians of all stripes are known to curse, but they typically do so among themselves, or at private events.  Not her.

On May 13, with the cameras rolling, she spoke at an Asian American organization, saying, “We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open.  Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f**king door down.”  She then descended into her proverbial cackle.

Why the obscenity in a public forum?  She is the Vice President of the United States.  Nice role model for young minority girls.

Sometimes Harris says things that embarrasses her family.  Her father, who is from Jamaica, took umbrage at a comment she made suggesting that Jamaicans are all a bunch of potheads.

In 2019, Harris was asked on a radio talk show if she supported legalizing marijuana.  She responded, “Half my family’s from Jamaica.  Are you kidding me?”

Her father, Donald Harris, quickly rebuked her, saying his grandmothers and deceased parents “must be turning over in their graves right now to see their family name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in pursuit of identity politics.  Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”

Harris not only makes offensive comments, her feminist views are so extreme that she reflexively sides with women who accuse men of sexual harassment.

When Brett Kavanaugh was being considered for a seat on the Supreme Court, he was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers.  But under stiff questioning, her account fell apart.  In March 2024, the Washington Examiner ran a piece that said it all.  “Half a Decade Later, Christine Blasey Ford Still Has No Corroborating Witness.”

At the time, Harris sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee; it was charged with assessing Kavanaugh’s suitability to be on the Supreme Court.  Before he uttered one word at the hearing, Harris said of Ford, “I believe her.”  After Ford came off as a fraud, Harris stuck to her guns and tweeted that Kavanaugh “lied.”

At least she is consistent.  In 2019, when she was a senator, Biden was accused by women of touching them inappropriately.  At a presidential campaign event in Nevada, she said, “I believe them.”  She even wrote a piece for The Hill  that was titled, “Harris: ‘I Believe’ Biden accusers.”  Fortunately for her, the media never ask her to explain herself.

Of primary interest to Catholics is Harris’ position on social and cultural issues.  Let’s begin by assessing her definition of culture.  She spoke about this at the 2023 Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans.

“Culture is — it is a reflection of our moment and our time.  Right?  And present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment.  That is a reflection of joy.  Because, you know…it comes in the morning.”  She then broke out into a fit of laughter.  But she was not done.

“We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life.  And I think about it that way, too.”  No one knew what she was talking about.

Harris may be incoherent in her speeches, but her policy decisions, especially on social and cultural issues, are not in doubt.

On September 13, 2019, I wrote a news release titled, “Kamala Harris’ Lust For Abortion.”  Earlier in the year, I said, she defended abortion at any time during pregnancy, right up until birth.  She also wanted to force states that restrict abortions to obtain federal approval from the Department of Justice before implementing them.

When Harris was California’s attorney general, she bludgeoned pro-life activist David Daleiden.  He used undercover videos to expose how abortion operatives harvest and sell aborted fetal organs.  She authorized her office to raid his home: they seized his camera equipment and copies of revealing videos that implicated many of those who work in the abortion industry.

In her role as California AG she also sought to cripple crisis pregnancy centers with draconian regulations.  Specifically, she supported a bill that would force these centers to inform clients where they could obtain an abortion.  She was sued and lost in the Supreme Court three years later.

Like many other Democrats, Harris is not content to sanction child abuse in the womb.  Even when they are born, she is okay with letting those who survive an abortion die.

To be specific, on February 25, 2020, Sen. Harris voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a bill that would “prohibit a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion.”  That’s called infanticide.

Harris’ record on abortion and infanticide is at odds with her opposition to the death penalty.  When it comes to convicted serial rapists and mass shooters, she wants to spare their lives.  In 2019, she was explicitly asked if she opposed the death penalty for acts of treason.  She said she did.

There we have it.  Harris says that those who endanger the safety of all Americans by attempting a violent overthrow of the government, or spying on the military for a foreign enemy, should have their lives spared, but innocent children who are moments away from being born are not entitled to have their lives spared.  And children who survive an abortion, but are in need of medical attention, can be left to die on the table, and no one will be held accountable.

The Democratic Party is the proud party of homosexual activists and transgender radicals.

Harris is so happy to see two people of the same sex “marry” that she actually performed “marriages” between gay couples in 2004.  She also opposed Proposition 8, the California initiative barring gay marriage.  The people spoke — they voted for it — but she does not believe in “power to the people”: she believes in power to the ruling class (which won in the Supreme Court).  No wonder her voting record earned her a perfect score of 100 percent by the anti-women and anti-science gay behemoth, the Human Rights Campaign.

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis supported a bill that would prohibit teachers in the early grades, K-3rd grade, from being indoctrinated with gay and transgender propaganda, she opposed it.  In doing so she also showed her contempt for parental rights; the bill prohibited efforts to undermine them.

Harris’ enthusiasm for transgender rights includes allowing females who claim to be men to join the military and males who claim to be female to compete against girls and women in sports.

Religious liberty is a First Amendment right, but her deeds suggest she is not supportive of it.  She is good at “God talk” — when referring to a specific year she occasionally says “in the year of our Lord.”  But talk is cheap.  As a U.S. senator, she co-sponsored the “Do No Harm Act” that would force religious institutions to violate their doctrinal prerogatives.

Harris even co-sponsored the most anti-religious liberty bill ever introduced, the Equality Act.  It would coerce Catholic doctors and hospitals to perform abortions and to mutilate the genitals of young people seeking to transition to the opposite sex.  This bill would sideline the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a bill passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton ensuring that the government does not encroach on religious rights.

In 2018, the Catholic League was among the first organizations in the nation to protest her attack on a Catholic nominee for a federal district judge post.  She badgered Brian Buescher at a hearing, simply because he was a member of the Knights of Columbus, a male entity.

As I pointed out at the time, Harris has never objected to Jewish women groups or the League of Women Voters.  Just a Catholic male group.  What really got her goat is Buescher’s membership in a Catholic organization that is pro-life and pro-marriage, rightly understood.  In other words, she was invoking a religious test for public office, which is unconstitutional.

Not only does Harris harbor an animus against Catholics, she has no respect for separation of church and state.  In 2021, she created a video to be played in Virginia black churches urging everyone to vote for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe.  The video aired in 300 churches for several weeks.  Harris starred in it, beckoning congregants to vote for him.

Harris is no friend of the black poor.  She has consistently voted against school choice, thus keeping inner-city blacks in their place.  If she truly believed in social justice, she would work to see that poor blacks have the same opportunity to send their children to the school of their choice. Instead, she consigns them to schools that no member of the ruling class would ever elect for their own kids.

Her biography explains why she is so insensitive to the black poor.  She was raised in a home of privilege, and has lived a privileged life ever since.  She has successfully exploited her connections to advance her career, having been anointed most of her posts.  She even secured her first job out of law school as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County even though she was not a lawyer (she failed the bar the first time around).

Being a beneficiary of black privilege explains why she is so uncharitable.  When she was California attorney general, her 2011-2013 tax returns showed she made $158,000 but did not give a dime to charity.  Liberals do not believe they need to have any skin in the game — it’s the job of government to pay for the poor.

Another way the government is supposed to fulfill her social justice agenda is by supporting reparations for slavery.  When she was in the senate, she co-sponsored a bill to do just that.  In doing so, she put herself in an awkward position.  Her ancestors were slavemasters.

Her father, Donald Harris, who is a Stanford professor of economics, said in 2018 that his grandmother was a descendant of Hamilton Brown, who was a plantation and slave owner in northern Jamaica.  Brown didn’t own one or two slaves — he owned scores of them.  Most of them were brought from Africa, which has a long history of slavery (it still exists today in some countries).

As I said four years ago, “if the average American has to pay X amount for slavery, Harris should at least have to pay 10X.  Isn’t that what redistributive justice is all about?  Catholics need to know.”

When Priests Are Falsely Accused: The Mirror of Justice Cracked

Stung by claims of cover-up when abuse was alleged in the past, Church leaders and some treatment professionals now set aside the rights of accused priests.

Posted by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on October 13, 2010

Updated April 8, 2023 by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

Are you sick of stories about the sex abuse scandal? I sure am. I’ve been treading water in this deluge for almost 30 years. In August, 2010, Our Sunday Visitor Publisher Greg Erlandson read my mind when he wrote, “Sick of clerical abuse stories? We are too,” (OSV, August 15). It was a bit ironic that in the same issue this site, the blog of a falsely accused and wrongly imprisoned Catholic priest, was profiled in Our Sunday Visitor’s “2010 Readers’ Choice for the Best of the Catholic Web.”

A letter published in a subsequent issue of Our Sunday Visitor (August 29) pointed out that “the Church is not just an easy target for the slurs of Jay Leno and the [New York] Times. It’s also an easy target for lawyers and false claimants looking to score a windfall.” Of my own situation, the letter writer asserted,

“To paraphrase the Gospel parable, this priest was beaten by robbers and left on the side of the road in our Church. A growing number of Catholics have become unwilling to pass him by, no matter how sick we are of the sex abuse story.”

I’m grateful to see such letters. Writer Ryan A. MacDonald had one in an issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review. He wrote about this blog and the case against me, but in a few superb paragraphs he summed up the great danger posed to priests when Catholics are so sick of this story that they stop looking. He agreed to let me use part of his HPR essay:

“Many of the faithful are scandalized yet again when beloved priests disappear in the night, presumed by their shepherds to be guilty of crimes claimed to have occurred two, three, or four decades earlier. Many accused priests have been simply abandoned by their bishops and fellow clergy. Church laws governing their support and defense have been routinely set aside, and many have languished under dark clouds of accusation for years. Some, far too many, have been summarily dismissed from the priesthood at the behest of their bishops without due process or adequate civil or canonical defense.

The Puritan founders of New England would approve of the purging of the priesthood that is now underway, for it is far more Calvinist than Catholic.”

HPR, June/July 2010

Those are powerful words, and they are the truth. If you wonder about the impact on fair-minded Catholics of conscience when their priests are so accused, please take a few moments to read the comments on my post, “The Exile of Father Dominic Menna.” Father Dom was an 81-year-old Boston priest who was removed from ministry and forced to move from his home in 2010 while the Archdiocese of Boston “investigated” a claim of sexual abuse alleged to have occurred in 1959 when Father Menna was 29 years old. That’s the problem with a “zero tolerance” policy. As the media-fueled lynch mob settles down, and people begin to think for themselves again, zero tolerance seems a lot more like zero common sense.

The Boston Globe acted true to form with front-page coverage of Father Menna’s exile while virtually burying the story that Switzerland declined to extradite famed Hollywood film director Roman Polanski in a real case of child rape from which he fled from the United States after being charged. The Archdiocese of Boston was “ground zero” of the Church’s sex abuse scandal in 2002, but now many in Boston question whether they are ready to accept the character assassination of good priests like Father Menna just because someone sees a chance for a financial windfall. More on that next week.

The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team may have won a Pulitzer for its 2002 archeological expedition into ancient claims against priests, but its target wasn’t sexual abuse. I can prove that, and already have. A problem with sensational media “spotlight” reports is that they focus an intense beam in one place while leaving the rest of the story in darkness.

Are Civil Liberties for Priests Intact? After I wrote “Due Process for Accused Priests” in the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, I received a letter from a Florida priest who wrote that he would never have even considered contacting me until he, too, was falsely accused. His letter was very candid. He wrote of his presumption that I and most priests accused must have been guilty of something for the spotlight of accusation to land on us. He presumed this, he wrote, until two men he never even heard of filed demands for compensation claiming abuse at his hands two decades earlier. Now he’s living in his sister’s guestroom, without income, and barred from ministry pending an “investigation” that he fears will be little more than a settlement negotiation with him as an unrepresented pawn. The lawyers for his diocese are meeting with the lawyers for the claimants, but the accused priest cannot afford a lawyer. Like many priests so accused, he is entirely excluded from the closed-door settlement discussions. More on that next week, too!

The priest wrote to me because his bishop and diocese are demanding that he submit to a psychological assessment at a treatment center for accused priests, and he doesn’t know what to do. It’s an all too familiar story. This priest knows that when I was accused I was working in ministry at one such facility as its Director of Admissions. I made some suggestions to this priest that he should find helpful. He needs to be very cautious because he’s in grave peril. I speak from experience, and I’ll describe why below.

Zero Tolerance of Innocence

“An ignorant, self-mutilating psychopath!,” this is how one treatment professional representing the Church labeled Padre Pio, sight unseen, after he was falsely accused for the second time of abusing women in the confessional. The claims eventually fell apart, but not before it became clear how much some in the Church WANTED to believe them because of a cynical agenda to discredit Padre Pio.

After I wrote that story, some readers wrote that they had been unaware of the extent to which Padre Pio suffered at the hands of fellow priests and Church leaders. This aspect of his life was minimized in public awareness for a long time, but I believe it’s important for Church leaders and all of us to understand and learn from what took place.

On September 27, 2010, The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled “Influential Pastor Pledges to Fight Sexual Allegations.” It’s a story about a Baptist pastor accused by four young men. It’s the subject of my post next week. Among the Journal’s vast on-line readership, his announcement that he is fighting the claims was the fifth most viewed article of that day. I make no judgment on his guilt or innocence, but that’s not the point. I have heard time and again that laity want the Church and falsely accused priests to fight the allegations instead of settling them.

At present, however, Church leadership in the U.S., at least, exhibits another kind of zero tolerance. It’s a zero tolerance of innocence. Accused priests who maintain their innocence, and insist on standing by the truth, are in for a very rocky road. Over the next two weeks, I will lay out my case for why I believe this to be true. It’s very important for both laity and priests to understand this. The time in which most priests can feel immune from all this is long past.

Priests, Perpetrators and Profit

Before writing my post about Fr. Dominic Menna, linked above, I received something very disturbing in the mail that no doubt influenced that post. It was a copy of an e-mail exchange between a writer doing research on falsely accused priests and a priest, psychologist, and former director of the largest treatment center for Catholic priests in the United States, St. Luke Institute in Maryland. The writer sent the exchange to me for a reaction, and certainly got one.

Here’s a segment of the priest-psychologist’s response to the writer:

“I am not familiar with the situation of [Father X], but I offer the following as someone who has personally worked with hundreds of priests who have been accused. False accusations are rare. They do happen and more so since all the publicity, nevertheless they are rare and usually don’t hold together under closer examination …. What is challenging to Church officials and clinicians working with offenders is the layers of denial and rationalization which the offenders often believe themselves and desperately try to convince others of …. Priest offenders can be intelligent and particularly convincing.”

Remember Padre Pio’s exasperated response to a Church official who claimed his wounds were psychologically induced? “Go out to the fields,” he wrote, “and look very closely at a bull. Concentrate on him with all your might. Do this, and see if you grow horns on your head!”

I unfortunately have none of Padre Pio’s sanctity, but all of the exasperation he felt at being wrongly accused and unable to offer a defense. Padre Pio suffered under repeated false claims of sexual abuse because such claims are the most potent way to destroy a Catholic priest. We now know those claims were baseless even though some in the media continue even today to exploit them. The irony is that if the claims against Padre Pio were brought today in America, he would be packed off to that very “treatment” center for an evaluation. He would not be an “accused priest” at the center. As the center’s former director described in chilling prose, Padre Pio would be seen from day one as a “priest offender,” and his denials would be interpreted as evidence of his guilt.

False accusations are rare? Tell that to journalist David F. Pierre, Jr. who wrote the book, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories. Tell that to the late Cardinal George Pell, whose wrongful imprisonment and ultimate exoneration was world news.

Justice has turned on its head when men who stand to gain hundreds of thousands of dollars for making a false claim are automatically called “victims” or “survivors” by Church leaders now, while priests accused without evidence from decades ago are just as quickly called “priests-offenders” and “slayers of souls.”

Will the Truth Set You Free?

I’m sure it feels uncomfortable to read about this. It’s just as uncomfortable to write it because I know – we all know – that abuse really did take place in many cases involving priests. At the time I was accused, I was Director of Admissions for the Servants of the Paraclete Center for priests. A significant number of our priest-residents were sent to the center after being accused of sexual misconduct. I had much interaction with priests who were accused, with the Church leaders who referred them for assessment, and sometimes even with their accusers. It is true that some priests who were guilty initially denied guilt. However, another expert in this field recently wrote just the opposite of what the former director of the center for priests said above:

“It is extremely rare for a priest guilty of sexual abuse to maintain plausible deniability for an extended period of time. Those who maintain their innocence should thus be believed, absent solid evidence to the contrary, especially when there is a demonstrated financial incentive for false claims.”

It horrifies me to realize that the dominant treatment center for accused priests in the U.S. operates with a stated bias that denies priests one of the foundational civil rights of American citizens: a presumption of innocence when accused. How does someone win when denial of the crime is used as evidence against the innocent, and often, the ONLY evidence?

I faced this same roadblock years ago. Ryan A. MacDonald wrote about it in “Should the Case Against Father Gordon MacRae Be Reviewed?” It was a response to a piece of sheer propaganda offered up by a member of Voice of the Faithful who condemned me, sight unseen, in terms a lot like those once used against Padre Pio.

Ryan A. MacDonald’s rebuttal article describes an evaluation of me that took place after I was first accused. The clinician, who had an M.A. in something unknown, warned me repeatedly during interviews that my insistence that the claim never took place is called “denial” and it is evidence of guilt. He then, after only three forty-minute interviews, declared me a sexual predator and paved the path to monetary settlements against my will. Perhaps the wrong people are being thrown into prison.

The staff at the Servants of the Paraclete Center was deeply supportive of me when I was accused. They believed my stated innocence, and still do. While not a single priest of my diocese has visited me, and only two have written to me (once each) in over 29 years in prison, several priests from the Servants of the Paraclete order have traveled across the country to visit me on numerous occasions.

When I was accused, our staff advised me to seek out the counsel of a Catholic therapist to help me deal with the stress of being so accused. I was advised to find counsel outside of our own staff. It is a shocking and shameful reality that, even in 1994, I was unable to find a Church sponsored treatment professional who did not automatically assume that every accused priest was guilty.

You may have read about my 1994 trial in The Wall Street Journal. Throughout that trial, the Honorable Arthur Brennan referred to my accuser before the jury as “the victim.” And he was clearly not a child. He was a 220-pound, almost 30-year-old man posing as a victim.

“I should get an Academy Award for that performance!” he was overheard saying after my trial.

I’m told that “The truth will set you free.” Well, that’s true, but first someone has to tell it. I struggle terribly with this. Taking positions contrary to those of my own bishop and diocese is the most painful part of my existence, and not something I do lightly. Cardinal Avery Dulles, and Bill Donohue at The Catholic League, both convinced me that the truth is always what is in the best interests of the Church. So tell it I must.

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Editor’s Note: Fr. Gordon MacRae rejected a pre-trial plea deal to serve one year in prison. He maintains his innocence as he approaches his 30th year in prison having been sentenced to a term of 67 years. Visit The Wall Street Journal’s reports on this story.