Kamala Harris’ message to progressives by skipping Al Smith Dinner

On Thursday night, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will attend the annual Al Smith Dinner in New York City.

His Democratic counterpart will not.

Vice President Kamala Harris announced last month that she would break with tradition and decline her invitation to the event, which raises money for Catholic charities and, in most presidential election years, features collegial remarks from the candidates.

Its noble purposes are twofold: To support good causes and remind Americans of their ability to come together even in times of high-stakes partisan competition.

A Harris campaign official preemptively explained her absence by noting that she would instead spend her time campaigning in a swing state, and it has since been announced that she will spend Thursday crisscrossing Wisconsin.

But her excuse for skipping out on the dinner remains a poor one.

Thanks to the modern miracle of air travel, it would be easy for Harris to spend most of the day pounding the pavement on the campaign trail and make an appearance at the dinner.

And remember: Harris recently carved out the time in her schedule to appear on the raunchy Call Her Daddy podcast, as well as to attend a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles.

The choice to spurn the event is just that: A choice.

And although her campaign may chalk it up to the importance of winning the election and denying Trump the presidency, it shouldn’t be hard for any reasonable person to sniff out the real reason she’s dodging the dinner.

Harris is an antagonist of religious Christians, someone who neither enjoys time spent around them nor wants to alienate her far-left political base by doing so.

Her record on religious issues speaks for itself.

The vice president isn’t just pro-choice, she’s weaponized the government against pro-life activists who exposed Planned Parenthood’s barbarism in undercover journalistic work and provided pregnant women in need of support with an alternative to abortion.

Indeed, as California’s attorney general, Harris called herself a “proud” co-sponsor of — and zealously enforced — a state law requiring pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to also provide free advertising for abortion clinics.

As it turns out, Kamala Harris, super lawyer, can’t even grasp the purpose behind the First Amendment; that law she was so proud of and used to harass her pro-lifers was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

She didn’t cool off after leaving California for the Senate.

Harris mused, during a 2019 town hall event, that she could not so much as “tolerate” pro-lifers’ perspective before launching into a series of smears unbecoming a fully-developed adult, much less a commander-in-chief.

And in confirmation hearings, she has grilled Catholic judicial nominees about their membership in the Knights of Columbus, a fraternal organization dedicated to community service and other charitable activity.

It’s no wonder why Harris is reluctant to face a room full of Christians after the stunts she’s pulled.

Wouldn’t you be?

To win the White House and wield the awesome power of the executive branch, Kamala Harris has cast herself as a unifying consensus builder.

In fact, that’s how she’s explained her flip-flops on all manner of embarrassing positions she took during her last campaign for the presidency.

But Harris’s spurning of the Al Smith Dinner serves as yet another reminder that this is just a political branding exercise, rather than reflective of a genuine change of heart.

She remains not just one of the most progressive electeds in all of America, but one of the most regressive in her willingness to use state power to punish her political opponents.

And that’s the most compelling explanation for why she’s unworthy of the office she seeks.