A conservative Catholic advocacy group has launched a $9.7 million campaign against Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, targeting Catholic voters in swing states.
As Breitbart News reported Tuesday, CatholicVote has published a 93-page “Biden Report for Catholic Voters” that intends to offer “a comprehensive examination of Joe Biden’s 47-years in public life from a Catholic perspective.”
CatholicVote plans to send a condensed version of the report to 5 million “active Catholic voters” in key swing states.
“Today Joe Biden is running for president as a prominent U.S. Catholic with regular references to his faith and Catholic upbringing, citations of popes, and purported embrace of Catholic moral values,” the report states, and yet on the 8 issues most vital to Catholics Mr. Biden is actually “hostile” to the faith.
The searing review of Joe Biden’s political record explores Mr. Biden’s stance on the issues of abortion, judges, employment, religious liberty, health care, marriage, education, and immigration.
CatholicVote operates independently from Catholic Bishops as a “layperson-led effort” and is set up as a grassroots lobbying organization, according to its website.
“Joe Biden’s record makes clear he will not protect our Catholic values or defend our way of life,” said CatholicVote president Brian Burch said in a statement. “For Catholics who cherish the Faith and their freedom to live it, a Biden presidency represents an existential threat.”
“Catholics are less focused on Joe Biden’s claims about his personal faith, and instead on what his policies would do to the culture, and their freedom to live out their own beliefs,” Burch added.
In its campaign, CatholicVote is kicking off in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where it will run both digital and video advertising as well as engaging in direct mail and canvassing.
A first video ad targets on Biden’s “radical stance on abortion,” with the narrator saying: “Joe Biden would force American Catholics to pay for abortions, sacrificing his Catholic values to kneel before the leftist mob.”
Because of his strong stance favorable to abortion and same-sex marriage and against school choice and religious liberty protections, Joe Biden has faced an uphill battle with members of his own Church.
Last month, Catholic News Agency examined seven key policies in Mr. Biden’s campaign platform and found that all but one — the death penalty — oppose the teaching of the Catholic Church.
When Biden’s announced his choice of Kamala Harris as running mate, the National Catholic Register warned that this decision may hurt his appeal with religious voters due to Harris’ “aggressive pro-abortion and anti-religious freedom record.”
Harris’s position on a number of issues directly clashes with Catholic teaching and thus could “spell trouble for his efforts to appeal to religious voters,” the article stated.
For his part, Catholic League President Bill Donohue warned of Harris’s “Catholic problem” in an August essay, underscoring her radical support for abortion rights as well as her outright “anti-Catholicism.”
“In 2018, she sought to stop a Trump nominee for a seat on the federal bench simply because he was Catholic,” Dr. Donohue wrote. “In doing so, she invoked a religious test for the bench, a patently unconstitutional act.”
In grilling federal district court nominee Brian Buescher, Harris suggested that being a member of the Knights of Columbus — a Catholic social and charitable organization — could disqualify a candidate for the federal bench.”
“In short, her real target was the Catholic Church,” Donohue wrote.