Letters to the Editor
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HP
The Vatican is realistic about what it can get from American Catholics, and we do pay a lot of the bills. So they've been pretty hands-off on the war and death penalty when push comes to shove.
Good observation. Churches are more than spiritual communities- they are businesses. I don't think it's fair to say that all, or even most Catholics vote based on pro-life, but many Americans ones probably do. And yet even though the Pope explicitly condemned the war, the Vatican is still "hands-off" as you say. But what else could you expect from combining politics, religion and money?
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This Is Why They Constantly Attack "Moral Relativism"
Conservatives are so deeply mired in moral relativism that they can only maintain their state of denial by constantly projecting their moral relativism onto liberals.
Same thing with lack of patriotism and courage, too. The list goes on and on.
This game is so overplayed, that I can't help but think that tens of millions of ordinary voters have caught onto this, despite the virtually total media blackout of voices critical of conservative hypocrisy. This almost certainly part of the mass exodus from the GOP that's been going on since 2004 (down 18% according to a Pew poll a month or so ago), which now has Democrats winning special elections in deep red districts.
The punditalkcrazy will be the last to know.
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How does she know which party's primary the nuns were intending to vote?
The articles I read did not specify the party. Oh, now I see she has acknowledged that possibility @
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2M2MzNlM2YzYTM1MTg1YjRhZWIzYmNkYjY4NWUwM2U=
So, it's not enough that these elderly nuns are disenfranchised. Now the right wants to make them into political enemies. What is wrong with these people?
Btw, that Indiana voter ID law is a terrible law. Indiana now has officially disenfranchised more nuns than they have busted actual illegal voters, either before or after this mean-spirited law with no proven need went into effect. This is about disenfranchising the poor and the elderly, who typically are not part of the Republican base, and nothing else.
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pollitical catholicism
Yes the right exploits Catholicism. So does the Left. The Right specialized in using Catholicism for reactionary purposes since the 18th Century. The Left began in the early 19th Century to use Catholicism to favor socialism. The Vatican itself is guilty of the same thing. In the 19th Century Polish Catholics were ordered to refrain from rebelling against Russian tyranny by the Vatican, more interested in other things. Under Pius XII, Cardinal Tardini remarked that Vatican diplomacy began with Peter's denial of Christ. That says it all.
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c'estmoi
If you're Catholic, and trying to follow the church's teachings, then you have to offset 1MM deaths in Iraq plus a few thousand executions vs. 50MM deaths via abortion since Roe.
If you're following the church's teachings, neither party is perfect, but the "deaths" to be laid at the Democratic party's door are 30-40x those for which the Republicans are responsible.
It's not just the deaths in Iraq- it's also the deaths in Afghanistan, Somalia and all the other places where America has interfered.
"deaths via abortion"- doesn't account for all the illegal abortions that would take place regardless of Roe v. Wade decision- and the subsequent deaths of the mothers from taking unsafe abortions. Plus that was over 30 years ago, compared to 5 years in Iraq. And giving birth to an unwanted child is a terrible, terrible thing for both the parents and the child.
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@ GG
-- Just because you think you're above these tactics and they only work on "folks with stunted minds and no growth potential" doesn't mean they can or should be ignored. What else needs to happen for that lesson to be learned?
Indeed. Because those who Alan Bennett (not the playwright, surely) describes as "folks with stunted minds and no growth potential" - or for that matter the same group of people described in less perjorative terms - do vote. That is why Bush received enough votes to manipulate his way into office.
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This to my way of thinking renders religion useless!
The Catholic Churches ability to embrace unbridled corruption (the Republican Party) in order to see abortion outlawed is only one reason I stopped practicing Catholicism. My conscious would no longer allow me to darken the same building as these people! It's pretty much like ignoring crime running rampant around you to dwell on a petty issue that was never any of your business to begin with. If the Catholic Church wants to teach that abortion is immoral that's fine with me! But, ignoring blatant corruption in order to advance your selfish cause is also immoral! But, the Catholic Church is no more guilty than all other organized religions who preach morality while embracing one of the most corrupt administrations in the history of this country! Most people with any ethic's start viewing religion with disdain! This to my way of thinking renders religion useless! Most religions in this country have lost touch with their religion. They are so concerned about imposing there moral's upon a nation they have lost what little they had to begin with.
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Life vs. Lives
The schizophrenia in the misuse of Catholic doctrine is reflected in the general inability of Republicans and their allies to distinguish a life from lives.
If there can be an image of a cute baby, a distraught pregnant woman, or even, on the positive side, a hunger distended child with a begging bowl, then that is "a life" that such persons empathize with and want to save. However, as soon as the person stands in a group, that group becomes unreal to these thinkers. The group is "people," and people do not matter. A starving child will get them to contribute to Trapper John MD or Sally Struthers, but the starving masses in Africa are a nuisance on the nightly news. A gunned down nun is horrific, but five hundred pilgrims blown up by a bomb is just people.
The problem here is both the immediate dehumanizing of the person into a collective noun, where suddenly doctrine and Christianity are held in abeyance, and the silent moral judgment of "innocence." A group is never innocent. A nation is never innocent (because the nation becomes "Saddam Hussein" or "Kaddafi" or "Idi Amin," and the moral stain of the leader metonymically reverses onto all of the citizenry), and so they can forget Christ's command to "love your neighbor as yourself" might mean all the neighbors and not just the "innocent" ones.
It is why the same people can be rabid and venomous about the abortion argument, one way, and capital punishment, the other. The innocent life is to be saved, and the guilty is to be extinguished.
To say that they are hypocrites is almost beside the point. Of course they are. However, they have made themselves hypocrites by convenient tricks of language and incoherent habits of mind, and the best fight against them is showing them individual after individual, as you have done, and asking them to account for each innocent life.