11/29/2007
Henry Hyde, once the Republican congressman from the 6th district of Illinois, has died. He was quite good on immigration, according to NumbersUSA, but I remember him for his noble service during the Clinton Impeachment, where he was attacked savagely by the press, and received many death threats from Clinton supporters.
Ann Coulter wrote recently that
Rep. Henry Hyde saw an affair he had in 1965 become front-page news because he wouldn’t waver from doing his job under the Constitution.
You can read a speech by Congressman Hyde here, from a speech delivered September 24, 1984, at the University of Notre Dame Law School.
Here the question of consistency comes clear. Had the Archbishop of New York quizzed a conservative Catholic President about his commitment to nuclear arms control, would there have been impassioned hand-wringing at the New York Times editorial board about "mixing politics and religion?" Yet this is precisely what happened when the Archbishop of New York questioned a liberal Democratic candidate for Vice President about her approach to the public policy of abortion. Why is it that Archbishop O'Connor threatens the separation of church and state when he tries to clarify Catholic teaching about abortion, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson doesn’t when he organizes a partisan political campaign through the agency of dozens of churches? These confusions are not merely a matter of anti-Catholic bias, although that is undoubtedly present; they reflect the chaotic condition of public understanding on the larger questions of religious values and the public policy debate.[Keeping God in the Closet]
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