Amid the green beer and the catchy rebel songs, Americans who celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day probably thought little of the Fifth Century bishop and human trafficking victim in whose honor that feast is held.
At age 16, Saint Patrick was abducted in a slave raid from his family in Great Britain and sold to a pagan chieftain in Ireland. He remained in captivity for six years before escaping slavery and returning to his family. Patrick famously went back to Ireland later to spread Christianity there, but another important part of his work was to bring public shame upon the Irish lords — especially the Christianized ones — who still engaged in the sort of human trafficking to which he had fallen victim.
“It is unlawful to flatter men like these,” Patrick wrote in his famous letter to the soldiers of the slaver Coroticus, “nor should you eat or drink in their company, neither should anyone feel any obligation to receive alms from such men; not until the time comes when they do penances so harsh that their tears pour out to God, and that they agree to free those servants of God and the baptized handmaids of Christ.”
It is thus either bitterly ironic or entirely fitting that, to celebrate Patrick’s feast, Senate Democrats again held fast in their filibuster against a bipartisan bill providing funding to help victims of human trafficking, and all in order to satisfy a few abortion fanatics.
Democrats on the Judiciary Committee had unanimously supported this exact bill, which passing it out of the Judiciary Committee with no objections. To no one’s surprise, the human trafficking bill contained the so-called “Hyde Amendment” provision, which bans federal funding of abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and to save the life of a mother.
The Hyde Amendment has been the law of the land in federal appropriations for four decades now and is hardly controversial or new, which is why Democrats didn’t bat an eyelash when they saw this language in the bill in committee. But then their masters in the abortion lobby abruptly moved the goalposts by which they had to prove their loyalty to the cause.
Rather than show courage and common sense, most Democrats are now filibustering the bill they once supported — pandering to the abortion lobby at the expense of abduction and rape victims. They have even rejected an offer at a clean up-or-down vote to remove the abortion language altogether, preferring no human trafficking bill at all to a bill that fails to provide federal funds for abortion.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has insisted that he will keep the Senate busy with this bill until it passes — even if that means it has no time to consider other priorities, such as the confirmation of Loretta Lynch as attorney general. He is right to do so — and if the White House’s refusal to issue a veto threat against the bill is any indication, he has a winning hand.
One can only pity elected leaders who find themselves so financially and ideologically beholden to the cause of taxpayer-funded abortion that they would block a bill designed to help victims of the modern slave trade.
