Gabriel Garnica
Nancy Pelosi: The Vegetarian Who Eats Meat
By Gabriel Garnica
If I call myself a vegetarian, but I eat meat when it suits me, am I truly a vegetarian? Likewise, if I call myself a vegetarian, but I redefine "vegetarian" so I can eat meat when it suits me, am I a true vegetarian? If I am a vegetarian, but I constantly honor those who mock vegetarians, what kind of vegetarian am I? Perhaps, in all of these cases, I am not really a vegetarian at all but, rather, someone who conveniently calls myself a vegetarian in some pathetic attempt to give my views some kind of legitimacy.
I can say that I am a practicing and devout vegetarian, ironically, until the cows come home but, unless I observe, practice, respect, and defend the beliefs of vegetarians, my claims are nothing but so much hot air; empty, misleading, and fraudulent. If this is true for anyone claiming to be a vegetarian, then it is likewise true for anyone professing to be a devout, practicing Catholic who claims that his or her faith is an important part of their life.
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life rightly called out Nancy Pelosi for her typically outrageous and mindless portrayal of abortion during a June 13 press conference as "sacred ground" which she, "as a practicing and respectful Catholic" does not think should have anything to do with politics. Fr. Pavone correctly noted that such absurd statements mock the Catholic faith rather than respect it and blur the core moral issues involved rather than clarify them.
Confronted by both the reporter at the above press conference and Fr. Pavone in his letter to her with the simple question "What is the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before birth?" Pelosi chose to reprimand the reporter and ridicule the priest, calling him and his organization ancient, medieval, arrogant, and hysterical and arguing that their comments were not intellectual enough to deserve a response.
Anyone vaguely familiar with Nancy Pelosi would agree that questioning another's intellect or calling them arrogant are not areas she wants to explore. After all, we are talking about a woman who once told Tom Brokow that natural gas, a fossil fuel, is a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuel. We are talking about a person who has said, on more than one occasion, that 500 million Americans would lose their jobs if a recovery package did not go through. This is a woman who has web sites dedicated to her foolish statements and moments of sheer gibberish This is the person now telling us that non-intellectual comments deserve to be ignored which, in view of the above examples, therefore means we should be ignoring most of what she says as well.
As for arrogance, we may recall that Pelosi once told us that we had to pass the Obama health bill to find out what was in it, and stated her opposition to Congressional pay cuts on the grounds that such cuts disrespected the work of Congress. CNN's Jack Cafferty once called Pelosi's arrogance "breathtaking." On the issue of having ancient beliefs, I will assume that Pelosi is referring to natural law and reason contradicting a woman's right to kill her unborn or just born child and not the actual practice of killing infants, practiced in many ancient societies, which she defends.
In an interview with the liberal web site Think Progress, Pelosi argued that the faith she loves runs very deep and has nothing to do with Pavone or his views, that she grants and recognizes the Church's abortion position, but that her faith is not about that position. She defined her faith as being based on individual free will, personal responsibility over personal moral standards, Christ as her savior and the Church belonging to Christ. The problem with this argument as stated by Pelosi is that she says that she only has to answer to Christ and not the Church she admits belongs to Christ, a Church she admits to disagreeing with. Taken as a whole, Pelosi is really saying that her Catholic faith has nothing to do with the present Catholic Church, which belongs to the Christ she answers to, but that she can keep calling herself a respectful, practicing Catholic. If any of the above makes logical sense to you, you must be a very loyal Democrat.
If truth be told, Pelosi is simply the poster child for the roughly 40% or so present buffet Catholics steeped in the spew of social justice; subjective and rationalized morality; radical secular and liberal ideas dressed in progressive rhetoric; and family and life positions which would make NPR, CNN, and CNBC leap for joy. These are sham Catholics, nurtured on a brew of diluted Catholicism, secularism, modernism, and subjective hippie morality where anything goes as long as you do it with a smile on your face and a self-righteous attitude in your heart. Anyone who disagrees with you is, therefore, an arrogant, ancient, hysterical druid counting Rosary beads on one hand and clutching a crucifix on the other. In fact, you might say that, in the image of Nancy Pelosi above, she is telling us what she actually knows about the Catholic faith she pretends to practice and respect.
I personally do not know which is worse, the fact that Pelosi is so clueless about how clueless she actually is or the fact that she is so arrogant about how clueless she is. Either way, many equally clueless people got her to where she can spill her ignorance on a dime in full view of the entire nation. She readily admits that her faith is inconsistent with the very faith she pretends to follow, yet calls herself respectful and practicing. In a word, she is Joy Behar with political power. Pelosi publicly pretends to be something she is not, has taken a faith name she does not represent, and has therefore degraded that name by associating it with inaccuracy. In our legal circles, we call those actions fraud, appropriation, and defamation.
I heard that in the Netherlands there is a shop called The Vegetarian Butcher which sells products that taste like meat which are not really meat at all. The difference between Nancy Pelosi and The Vegetarian Butcher, however, is that the latter jokingly pretends to be a butcher while readily admitting to be selling false meat, but the former seriously calls herself Catholic while never admitting to preaching false Catholicism. I realize that I began this piece by saying that Nancy Pelosi is like a vegetarian who eats meat but, in light of her position on the topic of this article and her penchant for readily calling herself exactly the opposite of what she really is, it might indeed be apropos to call her our own vegetarian butcher.
© Gabriel Garnica
June 27, 2013
If I call myself a vegetarian, but I eat meat when it suits me, am I truly a vegetarian? Likewise, if I call myself a vegetarian, but I redefine "vegetarian" so I can eat meat when it suits me, am I a true vegetarian? If I am a vegetarian, but I constantly honor those who mock vegetarians, what kind of vegetarian am I? Perhaps, in all of these cases, I am not really a vegetarian at all but, rather, someone who conveniently calls myself a vegetarian in some pathetic attempt to give my views some kind of legitimacy.
I can say that I am a practicing and devout vegetarian, ironically, until the cows come home but, unless I observe, practice, respect, and defend the beliefs of vegetarians, my claims are nothing but so much hot air; empty, misleading, and fraudulent. If this is true for anyone claiming to be a vegetarian, then it is likewise true for anyone professing to be a devout, practicing Catholic who claims that his or her faith is an important part of their life.
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life rightly called out Nancy Pelosi for her typically outrageous and mindless portrayal of abortion during a June 13 press conference as "sacred ground" which she, "as a practicing and respectful Catholic" does not think should have anything to do with politics. Fr. Pavone correctly noted that such absurd statements mock the Catholic faith rather than respect it and blur the core moral issues involved rather than clarify them.
Confronted by both the reporter at the above press conference and Fr. Pavone in his letter to her with the simple question "What is the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before birth?" Pelosi chose to reprimand the reporter and ridicule the priest, calling him and his organization ancient, medieval, arrogant, and hysterical and arguing that their comments were not intellectual enough to deserve a response.
Anyone vaguely familiar with Nancy Pelosi would agree that questioning another's intellect or calling them arrogant are not areas she wants to explore. After all, we are talking about a woman who once told Tom Brokow that natural gas, a fossil fuel, is a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuel. We are talking about a person who has said, on more than one occasion, that 500 million Americans would lose their jobs if a recovery package did not go through. This is a woman who has web sites dedicated to her foolish statements and moments of sheer gibberish This is the person now telling us that non-intellectual comments deserve to be ignored which, in view of the above examples, therefore means we should be ignoring most of what she says as well.
As for arrogance, we may recall that Pelosi once told us that we had to pass the Obama health bill to find out what was in it, and stated her opposition to Congressional pay cuts on the grounds that such cuts disrespected the work of Congress. CNN's Jack Cafferty once called Pelosi's arrogance "breathtaking." On the issue of having ancient beliefs, I will assume that Pelosi is referring to natural law and reason contradicting a woman's right to kill her unborn or just born child and not the actual practice of killing infants, practiced in many ancient societies, which she defends.
In an interview with the liberal web site Think Progress, Pelosi argued that the faith she loves runs very deep and has nothing to do with Pavone or his views, that she grants and recognizes the Church's abortion position, but that her faith is not about that position. She defined her faith as being based on individual free will, personal responsibility over personal moral standards, Christ as her savior and the Church belonging to Christ. The problem with this argument as stated by Pelosi is that she says that she only has to answer to Christ and not the Church she admits belongs to Christ, a Church she admits to disagreeing with. Taken as a whole, Pelosi is really saying that her Catholic faith has nothing to do with the present Catholic Church, which belongs to the Christ she answers to, but that she can keep calling herself a respectful, practicing Catholic. If any of the above makes logical sense to you, you must be a very loyal Democrat.
If truth be told, Pelosi is simply the poster child for the roughly 40% or so present buffet Catholics steeped in the spew of social justice; subjective and rationalized morality; radical secular and liberal ideas dressed in progressive rhetoric; and family and life positions which would make NPR, CNN, and CNBC leap for joy. These are sham Catholics, nurtured on a brew of diluted Catholicism, secularism, modernism, and subjective hippie morality where anything goes as long as you do it with a smile on your face and a self-righteous attitude in your heart. Anyone who disagrees with you is, therefore, an arrogant, ancient, hysterical druid counting Rosary beads on one hand and clutching a crucifix on the other. In fact, you might say that, in the image of Nancy Pelosi above, she is telling us what she actually knows about the Catholic faith she pretends to practice and respect.
I personally do not know which is worse, the fact that Pelosi is so clueless about how clueless she actually is or the fact that she is so arrogant about how clueless she is. Either way, many equally clueless people got her to where she can spill her ignorance on a dime in full view of the entire nation. She readily admits that her faith is inconsistent with the very faith she pretends to follow, yet calls herself respectful and practicing. In a word, she is Joy Behar with political power. Pelosi publicly pretends to be something she is not, has taken a faith name she does not represent, and has therefore degraded that name by associating it with inaccuracy. In our legal circles, we call those actions fraud, appropriation, and defamation.
I heard that in the Netherlands there is a shop called The Vegetarian Butcher which sells products that taste like meat which are not really meat at all. The difference between Nancy Pelosi and The Vegetarian Butcher, however, is that the latter jokingly pretends to be a butcher while readily admitting to be selling false meat, but the former seriously calls herself Catholic while never admitting to preaching false Catholicism. I realize that I began this piece by saying that Nancy Pelosi is like a vegetarian who eats meat but, in light of her position on the topic of this article and her penchant for readily calling herself exactly the opposite of what she really is, it might indeed be apropos to call her our own vegetarian butcher.
© Gabriel Garnica
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