Washington D.C., Mar 2, 2020 / 04:00 pm (CNA).- Catholics attending Mass at the Conservative Political Action Conference convention, held outside Washington, DC, this weekend, told CNA their decision to support President Donald Trump’s bid for reelection is mostly because of his administration’s record on abortion.
CNA spoke to several people who attended one of the daily Masses offered during the event Feb. 26-29.
Several said they could not consider voting for Democratic candidates because of the party’s absolute support for abortion, even while some acknowledged that Trump himself once supported legal protection for abortion.
Javier Martin, an immigrant from Spain who now lives in New York, told CNA after Mass that while he does not agree with Trump on everything, the president’s policies align most closely with his own views, as compared to the other candidates running.
“Policy wise, it’s much harder to vote for Democrats right now, if you felt the pro-life issue is imoprtant to you,” said Martin. “That’s just a non-starter on the Democrat’s side right now.”
Martin said that he thinks that “Trump seems to be going in a better direction” than what other candidates are proposing.
The annual CPAC conference is considered by many to be a reflection of the trends and topics of importance in populist conservative circles. While Trump was considered an outsider at the conference in the years before his presidential candidacy, the 2020 event had many of the trappings of a Trump campaign rally.
Grace Dwyer and Lauren Pels are Catholic students who attended CPAC this year. They are both 17 and will be voting in their first presidential election this November. Both young women told CNA they plan to vote for Trump.
Dwyer, who lives in the Washington area, told CNA that she was galvanized by seeing Trump speak at the 2020 March for Life, saying she found the event “really amazing.”
“I’ve been [to the March for Life] every year since I was two, and just having the president there this year was amazing,” she said.
Dwyer also appreciated hearing Vice President Mike Pence speak at the CPAC conference, especially, she said, because he stressed the Republican Party’s commitment to pro-life values, and invited disillusioned pro-life Democrats to join the Republican Party.
Being pro-life has “always been something big for me,” Dwyer explained.
Pels agreed with Dwyer, and she said that she, too, plans to vote for Trump because of his pro-life record.
“A big thing for me is that President Trump is pro-life, especially with how far the left has moved on abortion,” said Pels, citing recent congressional debates over the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a bill that would require medical care be given to a child who survives an abortion.
Pels also said she approves of how Trump had “stopped giving aid to fund abortions in other countries,” referring to the president’s Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy.
Pels acknowledged that while “some of [Trump’s] past comments have been problematic and conflicted with Catholic beliefs,” she said his actions as president have outweighed his past statements and behavior, “especially when you look at what the actions of the left would have been, which are absolutely egregious,” Pels said.
Another Mass attendee at CPAC cited the president’s pro-life views as the reason she will be voting for him in November.
Bernadette Repisky spoke to CNA after Mass at the conference on Thursday evening. Repinsky traveled to CPAC from the Philadelphia area, and she previously attended the conferences in 2012 and 2016.
Repinksy told CNA that she “loves” Trump because of his pro-life views, and that she believes that “he’s doing more for my country than any president has ever done in my lifetime, and I’m in my fifties.”
Trump had previously supported the right to an abortion, something Repinksy said does not bother her. She also offered her view on criticisms of the president’s moral character, which include allegations of sexual assault and harassment.
“So he might’ve been a Democrat in his former life, might’ve been a playboy in his former life, but I don’t judge him by that,” she told CNA. “That’s for God. I judge him by what he’s doing right now and what he says he’s going to do for us and for this country.”
“I stand behind him one hundred percent.”
While every Catholic CNA spoke with at CPAC indicated plans to vote for Trump, even with reservations, nationwide polling shows that the Catholic vote in November is likely to be far more diverse.
In the recent EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research poll, 46% of Catholics said that there was a “sure” or “good” chance they would vote for Trump, and an additional 8% of respondents said it was “possible” they would vote for the president. Slightly more than a third–36%–said they would “never” vote for Trump.
Fifty percent of Catholics surveyed by the poll said they would consider voting for a third party candidate.
This was the first year that daily Mass was celebrated at the conference, held at National Harbor outside of Washington, D.C., with priests volunteering from nearby parishes.
Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC, told CNA that the decision to include daily Mass at the event came in response to widespread support for a vigil Mass celebrated on the final day of the conference last year.
“There’s so many kids who are here from schools, and CPAC ends on a Saturday, and then most of them then get on airplane Sunday morning,” Schlapp told CNA. “And so we started with a vigil Mass last year and I got so much great feedback. I had people stop me in airports and train stations saying, thank you for doing Mass on Saturday night.”
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Ugh.
Dick’s Sporting Goods, Starbucks, Levi Strauss, Amazon, Yelp, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Mastercard, Lyft, Disney, Meta, Comcast, Airbnb, Patagonia, Doordash, Paypal, Reddit, Meta, Zillow and Uber, with more probably to come.
Now the lines are truly drawn – let the battle begin.
We won’t be buying that treadmill ($1000+) from Dick’s after all. We wrote the Investor Relations contact to inform them of why.
The partial LIST from A to Z: Amazon, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Levi Strauss & Co., Starbucks, Yelp, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Mastercard, Lyft, Disney, Meta, Comcast, Airbnb, Patagonia, DoorDash, PayPal, Reddit, Meta, Uber and Zillow. The embedded link adds three more: Condé Nast, Buzzfeed, and Apple.
An earlier LIST: Overlapping this partial Dishonor Roll were the more than 400 corporations who in 2015 filed amici briefs in favor of gay “marriage.” Together they spontaneously (!) filed their legal argument on separate letterheads, asserting a constitutional right to the oxymoron same sex “marriage.” As broadly reported and rewarded in the media, AT&T and Verizon, Dow Chemical, Bank of America, General Electric, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, and the San Francisco Giants, were among nearly four hundred agenda-assimilated corporations and business organizations that weighed in.
The SCAM in 2015: stock market numbers might benefit infinitesimally from spending patterns! So, the business world gave an entirely new meaning to the term: bottom line! The blip of one billion dollars pencils out as 1 in 6,620 of one percent of the federal budget in 2021 ($6.82 Trillion, while the GNP is nearly four times this figure at $25 Trillion).
Today, the reasoning will be the avoided cost of treating pregnant women like women who are carrying a child.
The pygmies and cannibals are in charge.
This is a throwback to the fugitive slave acts.
Aren’t they being a little presumptuous?
Are they offering an equivalent amount to women who want to keep their babies? Choice and all that.
The most egregious example of this I have seen in Hello Bello, which offer “premium” baby itesm (diapers, wipes, suncreen, etc) direct to your door (I guess they do have store fronts in a few locales). Buy diapers, pay for abortions.
.
It is cheaper to pay for the elimination of an employee’s baby than to give them Family Leave/Maternity Leave or whatever. And much cheaper than to help pay for FL/ML after IVF treatments, so yeah, I suspect nearly any company with (gov’t mandated) health insurance will pay for abortions. It is simply looking out for the bottom line.
.
https://notthebee.com/article/hello-bello-is-the-latest-company-offering-to-pay-for-their-employees-abortionswith-money-made-selling-diapers
The fact is that this is purely a money-saving move cloaked in politically correct garments. Now they can be praised in all the right quarters for saving significant expenditures on things like insurance and parental or sick leave.
This is very revealing. And damning.
The culture of death writ large. Support death but disappear when life makes demands.
STOP! HATING! BABIES!
Business people aren’t stupid. Why would they pay for the mass murder of what would soon become paying customers if there wasn’t some immediate incentive to do so?