Religious Right leader Brian Brown is blaming philanthropist George Soros for the decision by an overwhelming majority of Irish voters to strip the near-total ban on abortion from the country’s constitution in a referendum held last Friday.
Right-wing leaders around the world have made a habit of smearing Soros as the embodiment of evil; Hungary’s increasingly authoritarian government recently forced his pro-democracy Open Society Foundations to leave the country. Brown, who heads the National Organization for Marriage and the International Organization for the Family, virtually wallowed in Soros-bashing in an email on Tuesday, naming Soros a dozen times (13 if you count the subject line). Here’s a sampling:
Billionaire George Soros is the world's leading leftist. He's determined to remake society by destroying the natural family and by imposing policies that separate people from universal, God-ordained truths and redirect people to a socialist, big-government world untethered to moral realities.
Brown does not mention that Religious Right groups and activists have been active defenders of Ireland’s restrictive abortion law and mobilized to support the “no” campaign before Friday’s referendum. Neither does Brown contend with the cultural shifts that contributed to the vote in Ireland, including the dramatic loss of influence of the Catholic Church based on a series of scandals involving abuse and coverups by church leaders. Other indications of that cultural shift have included a national referendum in favor of marriage equality in 2015 and the election last year of a gay man and son of an Indian immigrant as prime minister.
But Brown blames the most recent vote on leftist intimidation:
We are saddened and disappointed by the referendum results in Ireland but we are not surprised. Having succeeded in muting the voice of the Church, leftist activists used money and power to intimidate many people of faith into remaining on the sidelines, wary of being targeted for retribution. These are the same well-worn tactics honed by LGBT extremists in the US in the battle over marriage, and which have now become the "new normal" for the left around the world. In the Ireland abortion referendum, pro-abortion forces also manipulated social media giants like Facebook to rig the advertising rules to make it harder for pro-life forces to get their messages delivered.
This is what happens when leftist ideologues like George Soros are allowed to exercise power. Far from the utopian state they promise with their so-called progressive policies, they deliver a society that is repressive, discriminatory and, in many ways, totalitarian.
Make no mistake about it – George Soros' agenda is an agenda of death. Countless children in Ireland will soon be sacrificed as a result of his deadly policies.
Brown claimed, without any evidence, that “the abortion industry” will now “push the Republic of Ireland’s national legislature to provide for abortion on demand, up to birth.” In reality, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar is reportedly planning to seek legislation legalizing abortion only until the 12th week of pregnancy.
The real point of Brown’s email is raising money, and he offers an option to give anonymously via crypto-currency.
