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Boxer Unhinged: You berate anyone who disagrees with you as immoral and corrupt

Barbara Boxer loses it, goes off on Catholic priest who questions global warming



Unhinged. Rob is our resident Catholic, so I defer to him on matters of Catholic doctrine. But from the looks of things I know a lot more about it than self-identified Catholic Barbara Boxer - whose real religion appears to be global warming. Or should I say, the massively expanded and empowered government we'll get if only people stop questioning the left-wing orthodoxy on things like global warming, which demands that all debate stop immediately and that government be given whatever it wants so it can do something, whatever that something might be.
Here Boxer confronts two witnesses. One quite openly identifies himself as a philosopher, which irritates Boxer because she doesn't like being "lectured" about science by a philosopher. (Say, is Boxer a scientist? Couldn't a philosopher object to being disagreed with about science by a politician?) The second is a Catholic priest who irritates Boxer by daring to disagree with Pope Francis on global warming. Boxer seems to think it's forbidden for any Catholic to ever disagree with the pope on anything. Father Robert Sirico tries to explain how this actually works, which doesn't really work out too well because Boxer doesn't want to know. As you'll see, she just wants to yell:

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I used to know Father Sirico in my early days over in Grand Rapids, which was the early '90s when he was first establishing the Acton Institute. The institute's purpose is to defend the moral underpinnings of capitalism against the idea that it's an ideology of greed, and that left-wing systems like socialism (or even big-government liberalism) are more moral systems. He does this exceedingly well. I would interview him occasionally on economic issues and he really knew his stuff. Here, he is trying in vain to get Sen. Boxer to understand the difference between when the pope is making an authoritative pronouncement on a moral or theological matter and when he is just giving his opinion. According to Catholic doctrine, moral and spiritual pronouncements from the pope are considered authoritative when he speaks ex cathedra, or as Fr. Sirico describes it, when he speaks from his "magisterial authority." (I am not necessarily saying I personally accept this as scripturally correct. I am just explaining how Catholic doctrine views it.) When Pope Francis gives his opinion on science, that's just his opinion. A Catholic is not at odds with the church for disagreeing with him about it - fortunately for Rob! Sen. Boxer has no interest in this distinction. She demands a yes or no answer to the question of whether Fr. Sirico dares to disagree with the pope, and she continually cuts him off and yells at him when he tries to explain how all this works. It's pretty typical of the left's approach to just about any issue these days: You berate anyone who disagrees with you as immoral and corrupt, because to deal with the substance of their argument would leave you defending things like junk science and men ogling women in the ladies' room. I suspect Fr. Sirico understands what it means to have to sit there and listen to this. It means he poses a threat to those who know he's right and can't deal with that.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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