This piece was penned for WorldNetDaily by the Acting Director of the Parents’ Rights Coalition after Paul Cellucci had been appointed as Ambassador to Canada.

Fistgate Comes Back to Haunt Gov. Cellucci
Wall St. Journal Editorialized Against Cellucci
Alan Keyes Laments Mistake of Appointing Cellucci

By John Haskins
May 2001

American parents have a victory -- in some ways a very significant one -- in the circumstances under which Paul Cellucci got his ambassadorship to Canada.

Not too long ago the Massachusetts governor was loudly touted by White House Chief of Staff Andy Card as guaranteed a choice of cabinet positions. That didn’t happen, so then Cellucci was a shoo-in for assistant secretary of this or that. But the second tier jobs also went to people with less, um, ethical baggage handcuffed to their wrists.

President Bush did finally find his good buddy a job, way down the pecking order, but the president was reportedly “shocked” at how much political capital he had to expend in the Senate. And Cellucci has been humiliated by being certainly the first and only presidential appointee in history to be publicly forced to sign a statement that says he will not allow his, er, unusual personal philosophy to affect his job.

Gov. Was Desperate

So desperate was Cellucci’s need to escape the heat of various scandals in Massachusetts, so desperate was the president’s desire to control the damage as outrage about Cellucci’s legacy spread across the country, that both quietly acceded to a remarkable demand.

Alerted by citizens’ groups in the U.S. and Canada to information that “raised my eyebrows,” Sen. Jesse Helms extracted a signed statement that while representing the United States, Cellucci would keep to himself his now well-known disregard for parents’ rights and for the unborn child and his view that public education is not so much about reading, writing and arithmetic as about such scientific curiosities as fisting and anal sex.

Had the Big Media allowed word of Canadian disgust with Cellucci to become widely known, the damage could have gotten way out of control. There was talk in Canada of demonstrations at the American Embassy to drive the point home to Mr. Bush.

Had that happened, there would have been other places where Mr. Cellucci would have felt quite comfortable: Portugal, Holland, Spain, or any of half a dozen NATO allies that have caved in repeatedly to their homosexual lobbies so that 12-year-old lads are now legally accessible to 60-year-old men who just can’t get little boys off their minds. One can imagine a Dutch diplomat interviewing Cellucci: “Given your success as a governor, Mr. Ambassador, how soon do you expect Massachusetts to become as tolerant as Holland?”

So Paul Cellucci will hide out in Canada until the dogs lose his scent.

White House leverage and the senatorial influence of Teddy Kennedy and John Kerry will make darn sure that someone else -- or perhaps no one at all -- takes the heat for what smells like an orgy of corruption in the Big Dig. The important thing in big-time politics is that you play team ball, not that you have principles.

Bush Squandered ‘Trust’

As for President Bush, far more important than the capital he expended in the Senate, he squandered desperately needed trust among pro-family groups and among grass-roots voters all over the country.

Many Americans have had quiet doubts since day zero about George W. Bush’s frequent assurances about his values. Alan Keyes and Pat Buchanan warned us that George W. Bush simply hadn’t the character or integrity for the Big Job. But “Read my lips,” George W. seemed to be saying over and over and over.

He has pushed his friends and his father’s hangers-on upon us, assembling a Cabinet most of which, except for his Attorney General, could have served comfortably as token Republicans in a Gore administration. Ushering partial-birth-abortion enthusiast Christine Todd Whitman into the corridors of Washington power was perhaps his strongest signal that he may be a man of deeply confused loyalties.

Showily opening lines of communication with groups that are driving the radical homosexual agenda forward inch-by-mile was followed by refusing to meet even briefly with representatives of former and non-practicing homosexuals -- yes, that’s right, former homosexuals, the very existence of whom is apparently a fact far too controversial for the public to know about.

This President now seems to have protested a bit too mightily that he begins every day on bended knee. One disappointed Massachusetts mother recently wondered aloud if George W. had bent his knee before paying off his friend Cellucci for fund-raising services rendered in the recent campaign. In either case, talking on bended knee is by no means the same as listening on bended knee.

Jolt to Canadians

Mr. Bush’s standing with citizens of our closest neighbor and ally has been markedly diminished in world-record time. Millions of Canadians had great hopes that America’s brand new “pro-family president” would understand their struggle to protect their own children against the postmodern fascism that is slowly suffocating Canada. Many are no longer sure that George W. Bush is a such a steady friend in the struggle to save the best of Western Civilization, to put it in terms that the late Professor Alan Bloom used.

This loss of trust was expressed in the letters Canadian community leaders sent to the White House and to every U.S. Senator. These leaders have also expressed their disappointment to me repeatedly on the telephone over the last month. The comments I have heard over the last month from pro-family members of Canada’s Parliament and their staff members reflect the same confusion and disappointment with Mr. Bush.

Canadian families have endured the equivalent of 30 years under a federal government that functions roughly like a Hillary Clinton-Jane Fonda-Barney Frank junta, propped up daily by the Canadian counterparts to the Boston Globe, The New York Times and Peter Jennings -- that is to say relentless mass-media demonization of anything that smacks of old-fashioned morality. The works of Ottawa’s neo-socialist heavy hand are not well known here, south of the longest undefended border in modern history.

Apparently, our charming new President and his Western Hemisphere policy experts haven’t a clue as to why a dozen organizations representing millions of Canadians pled with him not to dump the Republican Party’s toxic waste on Canadian territory. “We desperately need a break here in Canada,” they wrote to the new pro-family president. Indeed. Mr. Cellucci’s fellow travelers in Canada are hauling people before Human Rights Commissions and having them punished and humiliated for saying the wrong things about homosexuality or abortion. Public apologies are coerced from the politically incorrect. Mao is alive and not doing all that badly in Ottawa.

Censorship of wrong thoughts in the media is routine and the commissars who wield the big scissors and black markers and make religious speech suddenly go silent on radio and television programs are — just by chance of course — all the kind of people who work for Hillary Clinton or edit the New York Times and who admire the war that Paul Cellucci has waged against parents rights in Massachusetts. But don’t get the wrong idea. They’re just enforcing tolerance in Canada, which is one heck of a lot easier to do when you don’t have a First Amendment or a Second Amendment and when judges merely take the law under advisement anyway.

‘Family’ Senators Ignore

Pro-family U.S. Senators who looked the other way as Cellucci was rewarded for his betrayal of Massachusetts parents and children also expended some political capital -- though they may hope otherwise. Sen. George Allen’s staff told me that “as a former fellow governor and a personal friend who knows of Paul Cellucci’s integrity, Senator Allen will absolutely support this nomination.” The staffs of other Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee said more or less the same thing.

“Integrity” is such a funny word in politics.

There will be voters in every state who will remember for a long time that their Senators were hiding under the table as a federal seal of approval was placed on a politician who eagerly bartered away the innocence of Massachusetts children and the rights of their parents in return for the political backing of groups that exist mainly for the purpose of propagandizing children when their parents are not around to protect them. Respected civil rights attorney Chester Darling, one of few people to have won a unanimous decision before the U.S. Supreme Court, put it clearly for those who still don’t get it: “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a pedophile.”

Can the Party of George W. Bush, John McCain and George Allen not understand that they can keep their tax cuts, their campaign finance reform, their “thousand points of light” (or was that a different president?) if they will just get across to educationists, local and state officials, judges and governors that our children belong not to the state, nor to the schools, much less to the predatory groups getting money every year from the Massachusetts state budget to teach children about homosexuality and anal sex.

Senators, nothing that you will ever vote on in your entire career is more important to us than our children and grandchildren. Their bodies, their minds and their souls do not belong to any government -- local, state, federal or to any international organization. Mr. President, no schoolteacher, principal, senator, president or governor can trade access to the minds and the innocence of our children to anyone who seeks to undermine the morality of their parents. “Tolerance” — by whatever definition — is for parents to teach. Read our lips.

Our responsibility to protect the bodies, minds and souls of our little ones is a sacred trust that we cannot and will not abdicate. This is not Portugal or Holland.

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