Glass Monument Erected to Kamala Harris Outside Lincoln Memorial: Girls Deserve a Better Role Model
Despite having held the position for less than a month, Vice President Kamala Harris was commemorated on Feb. 4 with the installation of a glass monument in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
According to Fox News, the piece’s creator, Simon Berger, began his work after the November election and modeled it after a picture of Harris captured by photographer Celeste Sloman. The artist intentionally cracked the glass on a 6-by-6-foot, 350-pound portrait to symbolize how Harris shattered the “glass ceiling.”
The fact that Harris is the first woman of color elected to the second-highest office in the nation is indeed worthy of celebration. As historical as this is for our country, however, the former California senator’s character casts a long shadow over the achievement.
The vice president’s legal and political record is rife with scandal. Though she also claims to be an advocate for women, Harris has consistently stood for policies that are more likely to denigrate women than empower them.
Kamala Harris’ Record of Corruption as a California Prosecutor and Attorney General
The co-sponsors of the exhibit, Chief and the National Women’s History Museum, praised the monument for highlighting how Harris’ political and legal legacy encourages women to ascend to powerful positions. The admiration the two women’s organizations expressed for the vice president conveniently neglected to mention Harris’ history of making controversial decisions when in a position of authority.
While Harris proclaims herself an advocate for assault survivors, she failed to prosecute Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse as San Francisco’s district attorney and later as California’s attorney general.
“She did nothing,” Joey Piscitelli, Northern California spokesman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, told The Associated Press in 2019.
“Piscitelli says Harris never responded to him when he wrote to tell her that a priest who had molested him was still in ministry at a local Catholic cathedral,” the AP reported. “And, he says, she didn’t reply five years later when he wrote again, urging her to release records on accused clergy to help other alleged victims who were filing lawsuits.”
“Of all the DAs in the Bay Area, she’s the only one who wouldn’t cooperate with us,” said Rick Simons, Piscitelli’s personal attorney and a court-appointed lawyer coordinating the clergy abuse cases filed in Northern California.
As the AP noted, Catholics make up a large voting block in San Francisco. Michael Meadows, a Bay Area attorney who has represented clergy abuse victims, said Harris’ silence on the issue was likely motivated by the “potential political risk” involved with moving against the church.
The refusal to prosecute Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse is not the only smudge on Harris’ record, however.
As The Appeal reported in 2019, when Harris was state attorney general, she refused to test DNA evidence that could have exonerated Kevin Cooper, a man on death row at California’s San Quentin prison. Harris did not reverse her position until she was out of the prosecutor’s office and no longer had the power to help Cooper.
The former attorney general also used the authority of her position to protect a political patron: namely, Planned Parenthood. After pro-life journalist David Daleiden and his undercover team at the Center for Medical Progress exposed the abortion provider for illegally trafficking aborted body parts, Harris targeted Daleiden at Planned Parenthood’s request.
A motion filed by the Thomas More Society to “quash and traverse” the search warrant Harris ordered against Daleiden in 2016 exposed her deep ties to the abortion industry. The motion noted that Planned Parenthood executives communicated with Harris’ office to determine how a warrant might be obtained to search Daleiden’s apartment for evidence related to CMP’s undercover investigation.
Instead of pursuing criminal charges against Planned Parenthood, Harris pushed for an investigation into Daleiden and his fellow CMP activist Sandra Merritt. When Harris was elected to the Senate, her successor, Xavier Becerra, followed through by filing criminal charges against them in 2015.
Harris’ ironically wrote in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” that “America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.”
“I know this history well — of innocent men framed, of charges brought against people without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate application of the law,” she wrote.
Yet, Harris is guilty of the very thing that she is condemning. Her past is difficult to gloss over, and any attempt to add a feminist spin to her career is rendered into a performative gesture.
Kamala Harris’ Abortion Advocacy Undermines Women
Another problem with Harris’ brand of feminism is that it pits women against their own children. According to Vote Smart, Harris has a 100 percent rating from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
“I will also protect Planned Parenthood from Republican attempts to defund essential health services, nominate judges who respect Roe v. Wade and reverse the Trump administration’s illegal attempts to cut evidence-based Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants,” Harris, then a Democratic presidential candidate, wrote in a 2019 Op-Ed for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire.
“I will also continue to fight so that all women have access to reproductive health care regardless of how much money they make by continuing my career-long opposition to the Hyde Amendment,” she wrote.
According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the Hyde Amendment — which bans federal funding for abortion unless the woman’s life is in danger or the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest — has saved more than 2 million lives.
Repealing the Hyde Amendment would force taxpayers to fund abortion against their will and increase the number of innocent lives lost to abortion — specifically, the poor women Harris claims she is trying to protect.
Is abortion the only remedy a reported feminist like Harris can offer women faced with a challenging pregnancy? Not only does this demean women, but the consequence of Harris’ policy proposals is that all Americans could be forced to support abortion.
Harris has supported forcing states to allow legal abortion even if Roe were overturned. She has also opposed state-level restrictions that would require abortion clinics to meet the same basic health standards as any surgical facility.
Young girls deserve a better role model than a woman who values a radical abortion ideology over women’s lives.
Erecting a glass monument to someone like her celebrates the recent inauguration’s historical weight but entirely disregards the relevant nature of a woman’s character and how it determines her eligibility to serve as a role model.
Harris’s record of corruption and support for abortion as a source of women’s equality means girls should not settle for less by looking to her as a source of admiration.
The White House did not respond to The Western Journal’s request for comment.
Did you know that The Western Journal now publishes some content in Spanish as well as English, for international audiences? Click here to read this article on The Western Journal en Español!
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
