In 2004, Deal Hudson resigned from his position as a Catholic advisor to George W. Bush’s re-election campaign over allegations that Hudson had solicited an improper sexual encounter an 18-year old Fordham University freshman. According to the National Catholic Reporter, which broke the story in August 2004, the incident happened in Hudson's campus office after a night of heavy drinking and resulted in a legal settlement and Hudson's loss of his tenured professorship.
Unlike the Bush campaign in 2004, Senator John McCain seems to believe that Hudson’s political value outweighs any of his past indiscretions and has brought him into the “Catholics for McCain National Steering Committee.”
In addition to questions about his personal conduct, Hudson has a long standing history of using Catholic teaching to advance a partisan agenda. In 1999, Hudson’s magazine Crisis authored an influential study explaining how the Republican Party could achieve greater success at the ballot box by making specific appeals to Catholic swing voters, a move that prompted Bush strategist Karl Rove to invite Hudson into high-level campaign conversations. In 2002, Hudson established a White House Catholic Working Group, which deliberately excluded the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops from policy discussions. More recently, Hudson publicly ridiculed a Vatican climate change initiative that didn’t fit his political worldview.
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