Democratic senator and career bureaucrat Dianne Feinstein of California has passed away, leaving behind a legacy of leftism, abortion advocacy, and destruction of American ideals.
Feinstein began her career on the California Women’s Parole Board in 1960 before moving on to the San Francisco board of supervisors and eventually becoming San Francisco’s first female mayor in 1978. After a failed bid for the governorship of California, Feinstein ran in a 1992 special election to become the senior U.S. senator from California, an office she has held ever since.
She secured for herself positions as chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee and the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. Hailed by left-wing pundits and establishment figures as a senatorial powerhouse, Feinstein’s career has been characterized by rabid promotion of abortion, lying about and calumniating political opponents, and denigrating Christianity. The New York Times once called Feinstein a “liberal lioness.” She passed away late Thursday at the age of 90.
Quena Gonzalez, senior director of Government Affairs at Family Research Council, commented to The Washington Stand, “It is a very serious moment when someone dies, and should drive us to soberly consider our own lives in light of eternity. No one, no matter how high their office, is above God’s judgment; no one, no matter how deceived by sin, is beyond God’s grace. Christians may hope that Dianne Feinstein repented of her sin before she died, including her public, persistent, and callous disregard for the plight of the most vulnerable among us, the unborn. … May God have mercy on her soul, and on each of ours.”
For the first three decades or so of her career, Feinstein was just left of center. She collaborated and cooperated with California conservatives (more numerous in the 1960s than they are now) and supported such policies as use of the death penalty. The Los Angeles Times once noted that Feinstein would even “stand up to” the more radical faction of the Democratic Party when necessary, but shifted exponentially leftward later in her career, particularly over the last 20 years. But consistent core tenets of Feinstein’s career have included rabid promotion of abortion, strong support of the LGBT agenda, feverish advancement of gun control policies, and outspoken disdain for Christianity.
Abortion
Feinstein has long been a vocal advocate of abortion in the U.S. Senate. Early on in her career, as a member of the California Women’s Parole Board, Feinstein actually penalized abortionists, who she noted not only broke the law (abortion wasn’t legal in the state at the time) but often hurt the women whose unborn babies they killed. Despite handing out prison sentences to abortionists, Feinstein did admit that she sympathized with them and the women who sought them out, but reiterated her commitment to the rule of law. She said, simply, “I really came to believe that the law is the law.”
But as a U.S. legislator decades later, it was within her power to craft the law, including laws regulating (or de-regulating, as the case was) abortion. Pro-abortion think tank NARAL Pro-Choice America regularly gave Feinstein a 100% rating for her voting record on abortion, which included a 2003 vote against banning partial-birth abortions. Her abortion activism has been a constant throughout her career, even one of her career’s defining characteristics. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Feinstein abandoned the rule of law and argued that not only should Democrats act legislatively to enshrine abortion in the U.S. Constitution, but that the Senate filibuster should be scrapped in order to achieve this goal.
LGBT Agenda
From early in her career, Feinstein was a supporter of what was then called the “gay rights movement,” which has since morphed into the pervasive LGBT agenda of today. When campaigning for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Feinstein was endorsed by several locally-prominent LGBT activists. While serving on the board, she was close friends with LGBT activist Harvey Milk. She cast the deciding vote in support of fellow supervisor Willie Brown’s legislation decriminalizing homosexual sex acts, and she proposed an ordinance banning workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. During her time as mayor, San Francisco’s identity as a hotbed for gay bars and bathhouses burgeoned. San Francisco LGBT activist Cleve Jones once said that “of all the big-league Democrats in the United States, Feinstein was undoubtedly the most consistently pro-gay voice.”
Feinstein carried this background with her to the national level in the U.S. Senate, where she remained a strong advocate of the LGBT agenda. In 1996, she voted against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which legally declared marriage to be between one man and one woman. She tried to have DOMA repealed in 2011, and in 2022 co-sponsored the misnamed Respect for Marriage Act, which not only repealed DOMA but forced all state and local governments to recognize same-sex marriage.
Gun Control
Feinstein spent much of her career advancing gun control policies. In 1994, she introduced the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, commonly known as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which criminalized numerous firearms for the next decade. In that legislation, Feinstein employed a tactic which has become common among left-wing gun control advocates: erroneously declaring commonly-used weapons with little or no military-use capacity as “assault weapons.” In 2013, Feinstein introduced a bill that would have banned the sale, transportation, or import of numerous firearms she classified as “assault weapons” — namely, semi-automatic guns with a magazine capacity of over 10 rounds. The bill failed.
Christianity
Feinstein’s family was Jewish, but her mother was raised as a Russian Orthodox Christian and insisted her children be raised Christian too, having Feinstein educated at the Catholic Convent of the Sacred Heart High School. Despite her appreciation for Catholic pageantry, Feinstein vehemently rejected Christianity and always identified as Jewish. Her antipathy towards Christianity was evident in her voting record, but also in how she conducted herself when interacting with prominent Christians.
Perhaps most infamously, Feinstein grilled future Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett on her Catholicism back in 2017, after Donald Trump appointed Barrett to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Although Barrett affirmed, “My personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge,” Feinstein disregarded the legal scholar’s testimony and warned that she believed Barrett would intentionally fail to uphold Roe v. Wade due to her Catholic faith. The senator notoriously quipped, “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern.”
Death
Feinstein’s health was declining for years, leading some to question her fitness for her office. Last year, The New York Times declared Feinstein’s failing cognitive health an “open secret,” reporting that she had difficulty remembering colleagues’ names, meetings she attended or was supposed to attend, phone calls she had had, and even how she spent her time. Earlier this year, health issues (including partial facial paralysis) led to Feinstein being absent from the Senate for months. Upon her return to the Senate three months later, Feinstein shockingly told reporters she hadn’t been absent.
Feinstein died late Thursday. The cause of death has not been made public as of the time of writing.
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
