For Immediate Release Contact:
July 16, 2008 James Salt
Catholics United Calls on Senator John McCain to Remove Controversial Strategist from Catholic Advisory Committee
Deal Hudson Resigned from the Bush Campaign in 2004 amid Sexual Misconduct Allegations; Now Advising McCain on Catholic Outreach
Washington, D.C. – Catholics United today called on Senator John McCain to remove influential Republican strategist Deal Hudson from his position on the “Catholics for McCain National Steering Committee.” Mr. Hudson apparently continues to serve on the committee despite having stepped down from a similar position with President Bush’s reelection campaign when an alleged episode of sexual impropriety came to light in 2004.
In August 2004, the National Catholic Reporter disclosed that Hudson was forced to leave a tenured professorship at Fordham University over allegations that he solicited sexual activity with his 18-year old freshman student. According to the report, the encounter happened in Hudson’s campus office after a night of heavy drinking.
Hudson has proven himself an invaluable member of McCain’s Catholic advisory team. In May 2008, according to the New York Times, he helped broker a meeting between controversial televangelist John Hagee and conservative Catholic political operatives to soothe tensions over anti-Catholic statements Hagee had made.
In addition to questions about his personal conduct, the thrice-married Hudson has a longstanding history of misappropriating Catholic teaching to advance a partisan agenda. In 1999, Hudson’s magazine Crisis authored an influential study explaining how the Republican Party could achieve greater success at the ballot box by making specific appeals to Catholic swing voters, a move that prompted Bush strategist Karl Rove to invite Hudson into high-level campaign conversations. In 2002, Hudson established a White House Catholic Working Group, which – as he bragged in his recent book – deliberately excluded the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops from policy discussions. Last year, Hudson publicly ridiculed a Vatican climate change initiative that didn’t fit his political worldview.
“If John McCain wants to represent a new kind of politics, then he and his Catholic committee would be well served by disassociating from divisive and controversial figures such as Deal Hudson,” said Chris Korzen, executive director of Catholics United. “Many Catholics find it disconcerting that McCain would embrace Hudson, an individual with a history of questionable moral judgment, as a public face of his Catholic outreach efforts.”
Catholics United issued its request in the form of a letter to Senator McCain. It has also launched a national online petition effort calling for Hudson’s removal.
For more information:
Catholics United letter to Senator John McCain:
www.catholics-united.org/files/hudson-letter.pdf
Catholics United online petition:
www.catholics-united.org/hudson-petition
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Religion.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 16th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
This could certainly cost the Senator a large voting block.
July 17th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
I don’t know what the fuss is all about; all this guy did was get drunk himself, while a professor at a Catholic school. Oh, and then he got an eighteen year old girl drunk, too. Given the strangeness of our laws, this chick was old enough to legally engage in sexual relations, but not old enough to legally drink. He then solicited her for sexual relations, and she succumbed to his undoubted charms, him being drunk and all. Forget the fact that the woman had been in and out of foster care since she was seven years old, which means that she’s likely a victim of childhood sexual abuse herself, and thereby particularly subject to sexual exploitation. Oh, and she was one of his students. I can understand why McCain would want a guy like that on his team.
The stupidest part of this is that this story has been out there since 2004. It took me ten seconds to find it on the internet. On August 23, 2004, Deal Hudson guy was named No. 8 on DemocraticUnderground.com’s list of the “Top Ten Conservative Idiots” of that year’s campaign, when the story first broke in the National Catholic Reporter, a magazine that has often been the best source for information about the Catholic sex abuse scandal.
The Catholics’ response at the time, of course, was to shoot the messenger. The American Spectator, itself a rabidly right wing rag, ran a good article by Jeremy Lott, which said in part:
“Lay theologian and sometime Crisis contributor Mark Shea (disclosure: we’re good acquaintances) went the furthest of any of Hudson’s defenders. Shea wrote that the National Catholic Reporter “covered itself in ignominy. Period.” Though Shea allowed that “from a purely journalistic perspective” he could see why someone would want to pursue the story, he alleged that reporter Joe Feuerherd had “no other object in mind than to destroy somebody whose politics are inimical to the editorial posture of the National ‘Catholic’ Reporter.” Shea called the Reporter’s coverage — and I wish I was making this up — “as satanic a violation of the Sacrament of Reconciliation [Confession] as a predator priest is of the Sacrament of Holy Orders.”"
Okay, maybe you can excuse a crazy right winger like Shea. But in the same article they quote everybody’s Mr. Catholic, Bill Donahue, of the Catholic League in a similar vein:
“In a press release, Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, minimized the charges against Hudson and attempted a joke at the Virgin Mary’s expense. “Effective today,” Donahue wrote, his organization had “a new requirement for all future employees: all candidates must show proof of being immaculately conceived, that is, they must demonstrate that they were conceived without sin.”"
Guys like this, and those who support him, make me sick.