Kamala Harris is skipping the Al Smith dinner.
Kamala Harris is skipping the Al Smith dinner, a Catholic Charities fundraising event hosted by the archbishop of New York at which the two presidential candidates traditionally attend (the dinner’s namesake, of course, is the first Catholic presidential nominee). Noah and Michael have hit two of the lessons to take from this: that Harris is contributing to the decay of civil discourse in our campaigns, and that she is afraid to appear in a venue that requires wit, warmth, and the possibility of going off-script.
But it should also not be overlooked that Harris is sending a message by boycotting a high-profile Catholic event, during a season of the campaign when past candidates eagerly pursued the opportunity to break bread with the most prominent Catholic cleric in the nation. The Associated Press suggests that Harris may be motivated by the fact that “Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who plays a prominent role in the dinner, has been highly critical of Democrats, writing a 2018 Wall Street Journal op-ed that carried the headline, ‘The Democrats Abandon Catholics.’” She’s rather making his point, isn’t she? Cardinal Dolan responded that he’d have liked to have Harris there, and noted, “This hasn’t happened in 40 years since Walter Mondale turned down the invitation. And remember, he lost 49 out of 50 states.”
Harris has not been shy in the past about bashing Catholicism. On the Senate Judiciary, she grilled two judicial nominees (Brian Buescher and Paul Matey) over belonging to the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic charitable and fraternal order founded in 1882 and claiming 2 million members, entirely on the basis that the Knights formally adhere to the teachings of the Church. The Knights were once uncontroversial — John F. Kennedy was a member, and so was his brother Ted — and they haven’t changed; progressive anti-Catholicism just got more open. Harris asked Buescher, in a written question:
Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men. In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as “a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.” Mr. Anderson went on to say that “abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale.” Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?
She asked as well whether he was “aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when [he] joined the organization” and whether he had “ever, in any way, assisted with or contributed to advocacy against women’s reproductive rights.”
The belief that abortion is the taking of a human life, and recognition of marriage as solely between a man and a woman, are not things the Knights of Columbus thought up; they’re straight from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. (Indeed, defining marriage as flowing from God having created us male and female comes directly from the mouth of Jesus in Matthew 19: 3-12). The suggestion that membership in a mainstream Catholic organization is disqualifying because it professes standard Catholicism is scarcely distinguishable from arguing that membership in the Catholic Church is itself disqualifying.
So, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that Harris wants nothing to do with a Catholic event.