The View’s Meghan McCain blasted President Joe Biden on Monday over his pro-choice stance, claiming that the president will need to “ultimately talk to his creator when the time comes” because he is “doing grave spiritual harm to himself and harm to this country.”
In recent days, Biden—a devout and practicing Catholic—has drawn the ire of American bishops over his support for abortion rights. Defying appeals from the Vatican, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops approved the drafting of a statement that would result in the rebuke of Catholic politicians over the divisive issue and deny them Communion.
Devoting the ABC daytime program’s first “Hot Topic” segment to the church targeting the president, co-host Sunny Hostin—who is also Catholic—wondered aloud if the bishops were practicing selective moral outrage over the issue of abortion, noting that there are prominent conservative Catholics who are divorced or support the death penalty, among other cardinal sins.
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“What about, let’s say, Newt Gingrich, who is Catholic, and his wife Callista,” Hostin noted. “He admitted to having an affair. He, I believe, divorced his second wife Marianne in 2000, and married his third wife Callista. She was actually the United States ambassador to the Holy See stationed with the Vatican role. Were they permitted to receive Communion? Because apparently divorce in the Catholic Church is seen as a sin.”
McCain, a conservative who is outspokenly anti-abortion, not only didn’t have a problem with the church’s punitive move—saying it’s “not unprecedented”—against Biden but felt that the president needs to seek penance for his stance.
“If you’re a devout Catholic, abortion is a cardinal sin that can do deep spiritual harm to you, and President Biden had been supportive of the Hyde Amendment up until 2019 when he decided to run for president, and that amendment means the government would provide federal funding for abortion, or wouldn’t, and now he is for it,” she declared. “I think that sort of has been the threshold.”
Saying that Biden’s shift on the Hyde Amendment was a “deep paradigm shift” for anti-abortion voters, McCain reiterated her belief that “abortion is murder” and the amendment means Biden supports the “government funding of killing of the unborn.”
Pointing out that Biden has said he is personally opposed to abortion but doesn’t feel he has to right to impose that view on the country, McCain said she “doesn’t understand this argument” as someone who is “pro-life.”
“It doesn’t register with me,” she exclaimed. “I don’t get it, so it’s ultimately up to the church, but he’s walking a very fine line here, and ultimately, all of these issues are life and death for Catholics, for devout Christians.”
The right-wing host then concluded by casting moral judgment on the president.
“And he’s going to have to ultimately talk to his creator when the time comes, as we all do, and reconcile his politics with his personal faith,” she intoned. “And I believe that he’s doing grave spiritual harm to himself and harm to this country.”
