Thanks for pointing out that the Catholic church is also opposed to the Iraq invasion on moral grounds.

Please note also that if a Catholic voter or politician is required to vote according to all the Church positions on morality, then that voter must vote against ALL of these:

Abortion

Wars of aggression including the invasion of Iraq

Capital punishment

If failing to vote according to Church positions should lead to excommunication or refusal of the sacraments, then the only real Catholics are the ones who consistently oppose ALL three of those.

Which means that there are probably no more than a dozen or so real Catholics in this entire country.

C'mon gang, get it right: the correct term here is "recovering Catholic" (I should know because I'm one too).

Personally, my question to the religious folks about separation of church and state is this... if they REALLY got every law they clamored for passed to outlaw every possible sin... what would be left for the church to do anyway?

Render unto Caesar and all that.

Lopez falsely characterized Catholic doctrine when she wrote

" Church's teaching on innocent human life." The Catholic church considers human life sacred and allows no distinction between innocent human life and guilty human life. The teaching on "innocent human life" is the teaching of the anti-abortion movement which accepts capital punishment.

To my very limited knowledge (and I'm an atheist raised by atheists and so should be much more ignorant than Lopez) for the Catholic Church the death penalty is just as unacceptable as abortion.

Thus even within the phrase you quote, Lopez demonstrates her cynical willingness to reject teachings of the Catholic church while claiming to speak for it.

Also she is totally ignorant of what happened in Indiana. There was a Republican primary in Indiana. The Nuns may well have been attempting to vote for McCain or Paul (the candidate not the saint) not Clinton or Obama.

Lopez's ignorance might be explained by laziness and the fact that the Republican nomination is arithmetically locked up (before Tuesday there was barely more doubt about who the Democratic nominee will be).

However I suspect that she assumes that everyone has as much bad faith as she does. Liberals object to the violation of the rights of the Nuns, therefore, concludes Lopez, the nuns must be Democrats, because, Lopez assumes, all arguments are motivated only by partisanship, and no one really cares about rights or principles or anything else.

You said it perfectly. You, sir, are bang on the head with your post. They the Repubs and specifically Lopez always assume everyone is as vicious and duplicitous as they are. The gneeralize their motives and though processes to everyone else. They're crooked so they just assume everyone else is the same, How the Repub party of Barry Goldwater morphed into these extremists is a good question and will be debated and discussed for a long time, should America survive that long.

As regards my last point and lest we forget the Bushie Repubs have ten countries on thier hit list and the Pope(my religion) has at least the Communist countries on his hit list.

The Pope thinks the Virgin Mary told him to 'hit' the Communist countries. Would Jesus, that liberal Jewish guy, who always spoke of love and peace and gave us the Sermon On the Mount actually have sent his mother to tell the Pope to destroy the Communists. Maybe He would have sent hismother to speak about converting Communists to freedom but not to destroy them. So does the Pope think we are supposed to nuke Russia.

Thanks for your post..

has demonstrated time and again how concerned it is with the innocent lives of children and women.

Don't know what all the hullaballo is about. They both are made for each other. Catholicism is hardly a victim of the right-wing luntatic fringe.

Glenn, your article today touches a subject which I have struggled with for all of my life. As a Roman Catholic, I respect all human life, including that of the unborn, and pray that abortion is never a decision that I will have to face in my lifetime. Nevertheless, I am also a fervent believer in the U.S. Constitution, and the guarantee of the right of privacy and the equal protection of all people who come under the rule of law. I believe that abortion is wrong, but also believe that we cannot make it illegal, because to do so would invalidate the right of every person to have control over his or her own body, a fundamental right of personhood in our society. Because of my status as both a Roman Catholic and a U.S. Citizen, I resolve the conflict between the church’s teaching on abortion, and the U.S. Constitution, by saying that abortion is a personal decision, and not one that can be legislated. We need to strive to eliminate abortion, as much as possible, by education, availability of contraceptives, and encouragement of adoption as an alternative to abortion, if that is the choice of the mother. The position of the Lopez’s of this world is very unfortunate, because it drives progressives such as myself away from the Catholic Church. I applaud Douglas Kmiec’s endorsement of Barack Obama.

Hillary has not had an abortions herself. Neither Barack nor Hillary has ever tricked and manipulated anyone into having an abortion. All they have said is that people whose moral values may differ from their own should be allowed to make this moral choice themselves.

But Bush and Cheney lied and manipulated this entire country into a war that the Catholic church outspokenly opposed as a sin. And the church opposed the war even before the extent of the neocons' mendacity was fully understood.

Bush and Cheney eagerly committed the act that the church says is a sin. Barack and Hillary did not. To my mind, that should make them far less acceptable to Catholics.

Ever read about how the Central Party (essentially constituted by the Catholic Church) provided the margin of victory in the Reichstag in March 1933, allowing Hitler extraodinary powers, and, hence, a full dictatorship? Oh, promises were made (that's really new!), but the result was what counted, wasn't it? We must keep church and state separate even if unequal. And I like to remember, too, that "the religious right" is neither.