Vice President Kamala Harris may be counting on the fact that a bad joke from a comedian who supports former President Donald Trump will deliver the support of Puerto Rican voters, but her history of anti-Catholic bigotry is far worse.
Since comedian Tony Hinchcliffe invited controversy by declaring that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage” at a Sunday Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, the Harris campaign has tried to use the off-color joke as evidence that Trump does not care about the Puerto Rican community, which alone accounts for a half-million residents in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania.
But the Harris campaign is relying on misdirection to convince voters from Puerto Rican backgrounds that she has the best interests at heart while advocating an agenda that explicitly works to undermine the religion that an enormous majority of them hold dear.
More than half of Puerto Rican natives identify as Catholic, which also means that a majority of those who have moved to the U.S. mainland are also Catholic. To illustrate the importance that the Catholic Church has on the island territory, one must only look at the fact that Archbishop Roberto O. Gonzalez Nieves of San Juan, Puerto Rico, called on Trump to repudiate Hinchcliffe and his off-color humor.
“I enjoy a good joke,” the archbishop said. “However, humor has its limits. It should not insult or denigrate the dignity and sacredness of people. Hinchcliffe’s remarks do not only provoke sinister laughter but hatred. These kinds of remarks do not have a place in a society founded upon ‘liberty and justice for all.’”
The archbishop may not have had partisan motivations for publicizing his open letter to Trump, but the fact is that he has not issued similar statements in response to Harris’s extremely public anti-Catholic bigotry.
In 2018, Harris, then a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that Brian Buescher, a nominee to the federal court, was somehow a religious extremist because he is a member of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization that administers to the poor and needy.
The political action committee CatholicVote recently released a new ad that shows Harris cozying up to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an LGBT drag group from California that brazenly mocks Catholic nuns and Christianity at large through pornographic and otherwise offensive displays that rely on the profanation of Christian imagery.
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If Harris genuinely cared about the well-being of Puerto Ricans and respected their religious beliefs, as well as the beliefs of millions of other Catholics in the United States, she would not have imposed a religious test for Catholics to hold office or aligned herself with those who mock the faith.
Hinchcliffe’s joke may have been in poor taste, but it pales in comparison to the utter contempt that Harris has shown throughout her career to those who adhere to the Catholic Church, including Puerto Ricans.