by CHQ Staff
As soon as former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg entered the race for President as a “moderate” Democrat he began to abandon any pretense of being a moderate, even going so far as to disavow his one apparent success; continuing his predecessor Rudy Giuliani’s stop and frisk crime prevention program.
But as conservatives who have followed his career know well, Bloomberg was never a “moderate” at all.
As our friend Bill Donohue president and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights wrote in a recent column for NewsMax, Bloomberg is one of the most radical pro-abortion politicians in American history. When he first ran for mayor of New York in 2001, he pledged to force everyone training to become an obstetrician or a gynecologist in a city hospital to learn how to perform an abortion. It was NARAL’s New York City office that pushed him to accept this outrageous policy. Bloomberg issued an executive order on this issue, but in the end, he allowed for moral and religious exemptions.
Bloomberg has also personally donated hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions) to Planned Parenthood and even arranged for the abortion giant’s death factory to receive $15 million from a civic facility revenue bond transaction that benefited Planned Parenthood. In 2012, the proceeds of the bond were used to finance the renovation of 104,000 square feet of space in the building that housed the abortion giant, supplying it with equipment and furnishings. The new national headquarters was publicly funded even though the Planned Parenthood Federation of America posted a budget of over $1 billion in 2009-2010.
Mr. Donohue described Bloomberg’s record on religious liberty as cowardly, duplicitous and awful.
Bloomberg’s biggest insult to people of faith was the way he handled the 9/11 ceremonies on the tenth anniversary of the bombings, wrote Mr. Donohue. He banned the clergy, from all religions, from participating: He would not allow a priest, minister, rabbi, or imam to make a short statement. He made matters worse when he had the gall to say that “government shouldn’t be forcing” religion “down people’s throats.” But somehow it was okay for him to shove his secular values down the throats of the faithful.
Likewise, Bloomberg did not endear himself to Irish Catholics, wrote Mr. Donohue, when in 2005 he said he wanted to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade so he could pressure the organizers to allow homosexuals to march under their own banner. His press secretary explained his boss’s reasoning by saying, “The mayor believes the best way to change an organization is to do so from within.” So here we had an agent of the state — the chief executive of New York City — injecting himself into a religious event so he could promote a secular agenda that would undermine its cause.
But it is on the issue of the Second Amendment that Michael Bloomberg has fully revealed himself to be a radical Leftwing anti-constitutionalist.
Bloomberg’s authoritarian outlook on guns is hardly a revelation to anyone who has followed his activism regarding other fundamental constitutional rights.
As the NRA-ILA noted in a March 2018 article, while professing his support for the Second Amendment and that “no one wants to take away anyone’s guns,” his efforts – through his Everytown gun control group and otherwise – have included advocating for bans on the manufacture and sale of “assault weapons” and “high capacity magazines,” increased background checks, and in Washington State, spending a quarter of a million dollars to push through an initiative on the ballot just a month ago, that bans the purchase and possession of semiautomatic rifles by law-abiding young adults, without an exception for guns lawfully acquired before the law takes effect. In an appearance in 2015, he apparently went so far as to advocate an age, race and gender-based ban, to “get the guns” away from minority males.
And those Michael Bloomberg, has empowered and emboldened in Congress and state legislatures are even worse.
As an NRA-ILA news release noted, Bloomberg’s bought and paid for Virginia legislators have wasted no time introducing legislation that would make the Old Dominion’s gun laws worse than those of the billionaire’s home state of New York.
SB 16, introduced by Sen. Richard L. Saslaw, would create a total ban on commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms, like the AR-15. Even worse, the ban would even extend to common firearm parts. The restrictions included in the proposed legislation does not grandfather current owners. The legislation is clearly designed to be firearms confiscation, as current owners would be forced to dispossess themselves of their property or face a felony conviction.
Under Saslaw’s proposed legislation, otherwise law-abiding gun owners found in possession of an “assault firearm,” even one they purchased prior to the ban, could be convicted of a Class 6 felony. A Class 6 felony is punishable by up to 5 years imprisonment.
However, in politics as in physics for every action there is an opposite reaction, and Michael Bloomberg’s anti-constitutional authoritarian attitude toward guns, religious liberty and abortion provokes strong reactions. Virginia gun owners have gathered by the hundreds at Board of Supervisors meetings in counties across the state to send a message to the newly elected Democratic legislature in Richmond. The numbers don’t lie. Of Virginia’s 133 counties and independent towns, 23 have already declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, and another 53 are considering the measure.
We urge our conservative friends to keep an eye open for Bloomberg appearances, especially in the early Democrat primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and to make a point of reminding voters that on guns, religious liberty and abortion Michael Bloomberg is not a “moderate” but an existential threat to constitutional liberty.
