OPINION:
People go to the Episcopal Church on Sunday because they want to mingle with the country club set and don’t play golf. Some want to feel morally superior to the masses by hearing sanctimonious sermons based on the Gospel of Woke.
That’s what a captive audience — including President Trump — had to endure during the inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral on Jan. 21. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon was a political hissy thinly disguised as Christianity.
The Episcopal bishop of Washington urged the president to “show mercy” to liberals’ favorite victim groups, including illegal aliens and “transgendered youth.”
She claimed that the overwhelming majority of those “who may not be citizens or have proper documentation” aren’t criminals. I beg to differ. Entering the country illegally makes them criminals.
“These are the people who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals,” Bishop Budde declared, tugging at our heartstrings with a practiced hand.
They are also the people who sex traffick women and children, smuggle fentanyl and gang-rape and murder 12-year-old girls like Jocelyn Nungaray.
With the flood of illegals we saw under President Biden, it’s easy for hardened criminals to enter with the dishwashers and farmworkers.
Illegals who take low-wage jobs are competing with our own workers, one reason 54% of Hispanic men voted for Mr. Trump last year.
Bishop Budde bleated, “There are gay, lesbian and transgendered children … some who fear for their lives.”
Mr. Trump has the audacity to recognize reality — that there are only two genders. Does that really put the lives of so-called transgendered children at risk?
What about the youths who are mutilated because they’ve been told a lie: that there’s something called sexual identity that doesn’t match their bodies?
How about the women who’ve been raped in prison by biological males? What of the girls who’ve been injured by males playing women’s sports and women who no longer have privacy in bathrooms and changing rooms?
The establishment celebrates the courage of Bishop Budde. But it doesn’t take guts to lecture a captive audience. If the bishop had invited the president to join her in the pulpit and debate the issues, that would have been courageous.
Bishop Budde has become the darling of the legacy media. The New York Times, “The View,” NPR and Time magazine sing her praises because she parrots their cliches.
The bishop is a doctrinaire leftist. On the website of her diocese, she boasts of her support for “racial equity, gun violence prevention, full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons and the care of creation,” the last referring to the green agenda.
During the George Floyd riots, Bishop Budde said she had “given up” trying to talk to Mr. Trump, because “Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence.” In the twisted world of compassionate liberalism, not condoning arson and assault in the name of racial equity inflames violence.
Bishop Budde also urges mercy in the Gaza Strip.
While condemning the savagery of Oct. 7, 2023, Bishop Budde pleads for “the vast majority of Palestinians living in Gaza” who are “not terrorists.” Yet opinion polls show that the vast majority of Palestinians support terrorism, including the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Bishop Budde is the very model of a compassionate liberal whose mercy machine produces tearful pleas right on cue.
Kaeley Harms isn’t taken in. A survivor of child sexual abuse, she called the sermon “gross emotional manipulation.”
Writing about Bishop Budde’s transgender advocacy in The Christian Post, Ms. Harms charged: “Mercy doesn’t look like capitulating to ideologies that lead to harm. Mercy looks like intervening to stop that harm from happening, and it’s precisely that intervention that Bishop Budde was standing against in her speech.”
In the war for the soul of America, words are weapons.
Illegal immigrants aren’t noncitizens who “lack proper documentation.” They are criminals, some worse than others. Transgender youths aren’t being persecuted; they’re adolescents who are confused about the biology of their bodies. Victims who claim to be oppressed don’t applaud butchery.
Bishop Budde isn’t courageous but a trained propagandist who uses pleas for mercy to push her toxic ideology, which is being rejected even by her flock.
According to Religion in Public, there were 150,000 fewer Episcopalians in 2022 than in 2020. The refugees have probably gone back to playing golf.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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