Pelosi A "religious Heretic," Says Former GOP Rep.

DENVER - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is a “religious heretic” for suggesting that there is disagreement within the Catholic Church over the definition of conception, former Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-Colo.) said Tuesday morning. Beauprez was speaking to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and other Republicans, who didn’t disagree with the suggestion.

“It’s one thing to torture public policy. It’s quite another to be a religious heretic,” said Beauprez.

On Meet the Press on Sunday, Pelosi told NBC’s Tom Brokaw, in response to a question about when life begins, that “over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. And St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know.” Pelosi said that as “an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time.”

Brokaw pressed her, saying that the church “feels very strongly” that life begins at conception, but Pelosi countered that she was referring to disagreement within the church over the centuries, not in the last several decades. “I understand,” she told Brokaw. “And this is like maybe 50 years or something like that. So again, over the history of the church, this is an issue of controversy.”

Church leaders have criticized her, with Archbishop Donald Wuerl reportedly calling her position “incorrect.”

Beauprez, however, doesn’t limit the heretical label to Pelosi alone. “Heretics like Pelosi and Joe Biden, who also supports abortion and professes to be a Catholic, are giving Catholics a bad name,” Beauprez has written on his blog. “Pelosi, Biden, Obama and the Democrat Party can spin it all they want. Rationalizing evil, wishing it away, doesn’t make it any less evil. They have exposed themselves as the heretics that they are willing to be, to win an election.” (Obama, however, is not a Catholic and in The Crypt’s non-expert understanding could therefore not be a heretic.)