Catholic League president Bill Donohue has blasted President Joe Biden’s nomination of Xavier Becerra to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services, calling him “a menace to life and liberty.”
In a searing essay Thursday, Dr. Donohue lays out 16 reasons why Becerra should not be confirmed for the post, including his feverish promotion of abortion at any time up to birth, his support for doctor-assisted suicide, and his serial attacks on religious freedom.
“It would be impossible to find a more enthusiastic advocate of abortion-on-demand,” Donohue writes, and Becerra’s extremist views on the practice place him well outside the mainstream.
The Catholic League is not alone in opposing the confirmation of Becerra. An ad released Thursday from Heritage Action for America notes that Becerra “supports government run health care,” “sued Catholic nuns” as California attorney general, and would “decriminalize illegal immigration.” The ad also says that Becerra is “a radical partisan and not a doctor” and is the “wrong appointee” in the middle of a pandemic.
For its part, the conservative CatholicVote.org has called Becerra “an extreme choice” and Brian Burch, the group’s president, said Becerra “has a long record of open hostility to people of faith, and if confirmed, will serve as the abortion industry’s puppet.”
In his own critique, Donohue echoes these criticisms but goes even deeper into Becerra’s disturbing record.
“Becerra’s lust for abortion even allows him to support partial-birth abortion, a practice which allows the abortionist to crush the skull of a baby who is 80% born so that the child can exit the woman’s birth canal,” Donohue notes.
His enthusiasm for abortion is such that as California Attorney General, Becerra sought to effectively close down all crisis pregnancy centers across the state that did not provide abortion or abortion referrals, Donohue observes.
Also as Attorney General, Becerra brought felony charges against pro-life activists who went undercover to film Planned Parenthood officials trafficking in aborted baby parts, a coup that would have won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism rather than criminal charges in a better world.
As a congressman, “he voted against a bill that would criminalize the killing of an unborn child during the commission of another crime,” because, for Becerra, “the unborn child has no rights that the law needs to respect,” Donohue writes.
At least Becerra is consistent, Donohue notes, and his disdain for innocent human life at its beginning is matched by his disregard for it at its end, and his “strong support for doctor-assisted suicide won him the kudos of the most radical proponents of this cause.”
Becerra has been a vocal adversary of conscience rights and has sought to trample them whenever possible.
“Few Attorneys General in the United States fought more ferociously to deny the Little Sisters of the Poor their religious rights than Becerra,” Donohue writes. “At every stage, Becerra hounded them” and he even “filed lawsuits against the Trump administration for shielding the nuns from the HHS mandate.”
As a congressman, Becerra was a co-sponsor of the Equality Act, which would be “the most serious assault on religious liberty ever enacted,” Donohue observes.
It would be “hard to think of a more unfit person in the United States to serve as Secretary of HHS than Xavier Becerra,” Donohue concludes. “His positions on life and religious liberty make him an outlier and should automatically disqualify him from serving in this capacity.”
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