K-Lo need not worry about the Indiana nuns voting Democratic. I'm sure they were part of Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos.

It is manipulative of the Republican party to suggest that it is aligned with the Catholic Church in the matter of abortion. This is not only because Republican policies conflict with Church teachings on other issues, although they do. But the Republican position on abortion is no closer, morally, to the Catholic Church than the Democrat position. A Catholic voter who wants to cast a pro-life vote doesn't have a candidate in this race.

The Catholic teaching is that abortion is wrong in all cases. No exception is made for the health of the mother; to the contrary, if there is a conflict between the survival of the mother or of the unborn baby, the Church teaches that the baby must be saved.

McCain's position is that abortion should be available when a continuation of the pregnancy threatens the health of the mother. Republicans know what this is. This is abortion on demand for the country club crowd, since one can always find a doctor who understands it is his job to determine that continuing the pregnancy would pose a grave risk to the mental health of the mother. Depression, stress, thoughts of suicide. McCain's position is abortion at will for girls from nice families. (We feel just awful about the whole thing, as you can imagine. But Muffy would have suffered so.)

Catholics who want to vote their consciences may as well vote for the candidate who represents in aggregate the greatest respect for human life. On the issue of abortion, there is no practical difference between exceptions for the health of the mother and abortion without restriction.

I respect Catholics who struggle with the prospect of voting in conflict with an issue they see as an irreducible position on the value of life. And the argument that there can be no exception to this position has a lot of moral force. If slavery is wrong because it deprives a person of freedom, then it is wrong even if the abolition of slavery poses an economic hardship to the slaveowner. I understand why the Catholic voter doesn't want to compromise on this. But voting for Republicans is no solution.

that's funny.

We also saw a lot of this around the Pope's visit: Stories about Bush being the second "Catholic" President and even Fox news calling Benedict an "honorary Republican." (I blogged about that at the time: http://blog.faithinpubliclife.org/2008/04/the_pope_is_not_a_republican_o.html) The Catholic Church doesn't fit nicely into any partisan box, something that is consistently and systematically ignored by conservatives like Lopez, Bill Donahue and many others.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

-Steven Weinberg

As an adolescent 40 years ago I came to the conclusion that during my lifetime the fundamentalists of major religions would begin wars rather than abandon rigid doctrines developed millenia before science.

I was raised in the Unitarian church and did not encounter the concept of original sin until I went to school. I cannot articulate how horrified I was. Same when I found out that stillborn children could not go to heaven. (Recently rejected by the Vatican). Since I was taught the essence of Jesus' teaching, without the divinity, the extent of the hypocrisy led me to develop a personal understanding of how this is possible in a race that has the capacity to question and reason.

In a nutshell it comes down to the indoctrination of the child's mind before the age of 7 when development has progressed to the point where it is possible to differentiate between fantasy and reality. After 7 most children are able to see that Santa Claus is a myth - because they are allowed to. Between the ages of 3 and 5, a child can ask 300 to 400 questions a day. If this is encouraged, they will question the irrational aspects of the religious teachings. A few years ago, SAT scores were studied based on the religious preference of the students. The top ten denominations were spread over about a 140 point spread. # 2 was about 70 points behind #1, numbers 3-10 were about 55 points behind #2.

The Jews were second. Unitarian-Universalists first. The denominations that emphasize the importance of questioning the most.

Meanwhile, around the time of the bitter comments I ran across an article about how Europeans in countries with universal health care, guaranteed vacation time, more job security, child care, higher education and retirement benefits have moved away from strict adherence to religious dogma, church attendence and reading the Bible.

One of the horrible aspects of the Iraq occupation has been the increase in abortions in that country. A combination of lack of contraceptives and the horror of living in the middle of civil war. Add the effects of high stress seriously interfering with the development of the brain during infancy and toddler years, the country is faced with a group of kids whose life potential is greatly diminished before they even get to school.

I can only hope that the American voters are waking up to the reality that the world as we know it is facing a perfect storm of crises that will require transformational changes in how we think, act and what we choose to do. Even if there is a God, we have to take responsibility for the mess we are in and act to change it.

man, that's one AWESOME handle you got there Magritte's Pipe!

Thanks to the concept of original sin, none of the already born are completely innocent.

Therefore Republican blocking of single payer health care does not cause the death of innocents.

Surely, Roman Catholic doctrine would hold that original sin inheres in a human being from the moment of conception, not from the moment of live birth, so Aycharaych's notion of "complete innocence" would be no more applicable to a foetus than to any person after birth.