from America magazine, a Jesuit publication

In All Things

Abortion Politics Part I – The Paleo-Cons
2008-05-12
Michael Sean Winters

If I were ever inclined to become a conservative Republican, I would only have to read the latest press release from Bill Donohue's Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights to be dissuaded. Donohue has called for Obama's Catholic Advisory Board to resign en masse because none of them "stand with the Catholic Church on all three major issues: abortion, embryonic stem cell research and school vouchers." School vouchers? How did that become one of the "three major issues" upon which Catholics should base their votes? More importantly, the chair of Obama's advisory board is pro-life Senator Bob Casey. He is joined by pro-life former Congressman Tim Roemer and pro-life Governor Tim Kaine. So, the factual basis for Donohue's demand is shoddy from the start.

It is where Donohue finishes, however, that is most disturbing. He falsely asserts that Obama "led" the effort to deny protection to babies born after a botched abortion. He labels this "a Hitlerian decision." As a general rule, when you find yourself using Nazi analogies for American politics, you have lost the argument. If Donohue really wants to change America's legal tolerance of abortion, then he needs to engage in the hard but noble task of persuading those who currently disagree with him that they are wrong. The adjective "Hitlerian" is not likely to incline their ears or their hearts to his case.

Donohue is a comic figure, but Deal Hudson is more a tragedian. Hudson played a critical role in soothing Catholic sensibilities for then-candidate George W. Bush in 2000 after Bush gave a speech at Bob Jones ("Rome is the Whore of Babylon") University. When Bush "won" the election, Hudson and many Catholic conservatives acted as if the eschaton was at hand, having created a political alliance with conservative evangelicals that they believed would dominate politics for decades, an alliance that has never quite materialized as they wished.

Hudson has entered the current debate to defend Donohue. He argues that Obama's supporters are wrong to suggest the GOP may be right about abortion but wrong about everything else. "Obama's Catholics talk as if a Republican never had a thought about healthcare, immigration, poverty, taxation, and so on," he opines. The problem is that Republicans think wrongly on these issues as far as Catholics are concerned. Even John McCain, who once championed the human dignity of immigrants, has had to abandon his comprehensive immigration reform proposal in order to appease the Republican base. His health care proposal does little to help the poor. And, he flip-flopped on taxes for the wealthy, discarding his once principled stand against huge give-aways to the wealthiest Americans.

The deeper problem with Catholic conservatives is that they have been complicit in the reduction of religion to ethics that was largely responsible for the inability of the Catholic Church to mount a more effective opposition to legalized abortion in the first place. Once abortion became a "moral issue" the pro-life movement was bound to fail. The issue of abortion needed to reach deeper than ethics, into the most fundamental existential questions the human person can ask: Who am I? What is personhood? What are the obligations of the commonwealth to persons? When the Church is reduced to being an ethical authority, it has lost its deepest self-awareness, and can no longer enter a political discussion as the Church. This was a danger the conservatives never perceived because they were too busy giving interviews: allowing yourself to become an ethical authority was a sure-fire way to gain access to the media.

So, this is where the paleo-cons stand in 2008. They will rant. Hopefully, no one will listen. Tomorrow, we will look at what more thoughtful conservatives are saying in this election year.

Best Wishes for the Happy Couple

Catholics for Obama sends best wishes to the President's daughter, Jenna, and her new husband, Henry, on their wedding. The wedding was officiated by the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell. Rev. Caldwell is pastor of the nation's largest United Methodist congregation, located in Houston, TX. Rev. Caldwell has long been a spiritual advisor to President Bush, as well as a political supporter of Mr. Bush in his races for governor and president.

And, continuing in the pattern of spiritual advisors giving heartburn to those they advise, Rev. Caldwell is supporting BARACK OBAMA for president!

A Voice from the Pews

Millions of faithful, active Catholics have been drawn to the Obama campaign. It is interesting to hear their stories. Here is the voice of one Catholic supporting Obama, from a letter to the editor of the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Press:


Informed conscience

The Catholic Church teaches that Catholics have a moral obligation to inform their consciences and participate in political life. The Catholic Church does not tell Catholics for whom to vote nor endorse single issue voting. See "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States."

Leading pro-life Catholics in good standing have endorsed Barack Obama. Among these are Senator Bob Casey, Jr. and professors Douglas Kmiec and Andrew Bacevich. I believe the reasons are twofold.

First, the leadership of the Republican Party has to a large extent been captured by the neoconservatives with their agenda of preemptive, and thereby unjust, war; making the wealthy wealthier at the expense of the poor and the middle classes; and degrading the environment of the earth, the home of the human family.

Second, Obama's orientation of hope, reconciliation, and community is fundamentally consistent with Catholic social teaching over a wide range of values.

In my judgment, sincere single issue voters are liable to cynical manipulation and we are seeing the disastrous results. My conscience tells me that it is critical that we change course. For that reason, I, like millions of good Catholics, support Obama.

-- JACK HOFFMAN/Grand Rapids

Notre Dame Goes for Obama

Catholics reflect schism in Democratic base

Bloc splitting along age, class, and gender lines

By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff

May 5, 2008

SOUTH BEND, Ind. - Taking a break from studying for final exams, three dozen Catholic students gathered for a barbecue on a grassy area of an apartment complex near the University of Notre Dame, their cellphones dialed in to a conference call with Victoria Reggie Kennedy, wife of Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

She urged them to help turn out the vote in the Indiana Democratic presidential primary tomorrow for Senator Barack Obama, saying the candidate embodies the "Catholic social justice tradition" she was raised to believe in.

For about two months, pundits and analysts have been culling exit poll data from recent primaries to contend that Obama has a problem winning support from Catholic voters in his bruising struggle with Senator Hillary Clinton for the party's nomination.

Last week, a group of former national party chairmen who support Clinton drove home that point in a letter to members of the Democratic National Committee, part of a Clinton effort to stop the steady movement of superdelegates to Obama.

They wrote that Catholics are part of a Clinton electoral base that includes women, Hispanics, seniors, middle- and low-income Americans, and rural, suburban, and urban voters. They called it "a formidable coalition tailor-made for victory in a November general election."

But for both campaigns, the issue of Catholic voters reflects the reality of a Democratic electorate that has split along lines of class, race, gender, and age.

The gathering of Catholics for Obama near Notre Dame last week reinforced a perception that if Obama has a weakness among Catholics, it is with those who fit into other demographic subdivisions: women and older, less educated and lower-income voters, groups that Clinton has attracted.

Conversely, the group that met in South Bend represented Obama's demographic strengths among the more educated, affluent, and, except for a small group of Notre Dame faculty members who attended, younger voters.

After national elections in which the swing voting bloc has been variously identified by pollsters and commentators as the silent majority, Reagan Democrats, soccer moms, or football dads, 2008 is shaping up as the year that Catholics go under the media microscope.
"There is no one such thing as a Catholic voter," said Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at Notre Dame, who attended the event in South Bend and is a member of Obama's national steering committee of Catholic advisers.

Catholics, who account for about 18 percent of the population of Indiana and a quarter of the national electorate, are much more diverse in the United States than they are often portrayed, Kaveny said. The challenge for Obama, she said, is to make Catholics more familiar with his message of economic empowerment, equality, and ending the Iraq war.

The South Bend area is a battleground in tomorrow's Democratic showdown, with characteristics favorable to both candidates. The city of about 105,000 is the seat of St. Joseph County, a blue-collar Democratic stronghold in the region known as Michiana along the Michigan-Indiana border. Like the neighboring city of Mishawaka, South Bend is heavily Catholic, with a history of ethnic parishes.

On the West Side, standing less than 100 yards apart are St. Patrick's Church, an Irish parish that celebrated its 150th anniversary on Saturday, and St. Hedwig's, a Polish parish built 19 years later. Not many years ago, congregations of Catholic immigrants from Belgium and Hungary worshiped at separate churches about a block apart in the same working-class neighborhood.

South Bend also has a large black population of about 24 percent, a significant Hispanic population of about 11 percent, according to US Census Bureau estimates, and a large academic community, centered around Notre Dame, the region's largest employer, a branch of Indiana University, and several smaller colleges.

In earlier contests, Obama beat Clinton among Catholics in states such as Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana, and Virginia, and tied in Wisconsin, exit polls showed. But in the later-voting big industrial states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, the data showed Clinton thumping Obama by 27 and 40 percentage points, respectively, among Catholics.

The Obama campaign disputes that those figures indicate a problem generally with Catholic voters, but it is making intensive efforts to reach out to Catholics. Last month it rolled out an advisory committee of about 50 prominent Catholics, including political figures, academics, and activists.

Last week's event in South Bend was one of many "Call to Family" gatherings of Catholics for Obama in Indiana, where supporters met and then phoned family and friends in the state. Emphasizing the importance of South Bend, Mark Linton, the Obama campaign's national Catholic outreach coordinator, attended the Notre Dame event.

Various theories have been offered by political analysts to explain Catholic voting patterns in a Democratic contest between candidates from Protestant traditions - United Methodist for Clinton and a black congregation of the United Church of Christ for Obama. Some are pseudo-psychological, such as older Catholics being comfortable with a female authority figure like Clinton because they were taught by nuns.

But two political scientists who have studied the role of religion in politics said the Catholic vote reflects a distilled version of other demographic trends that have emerged over the long Democratic battle.

"This is not so much about Catholicism as it is about other demographic factors," said John C. Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron and senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "The Catholic vote tends to be older, more working class, and, in Democratic primaries, more female, so part of what may be going on here is less about Catholicism than it is about other social characteristics."

Green also theorized that the contrast between Clinton's stump style of stressing "a laundry list of particular policies" and Obama's "lofty rhetoric" may work to Clinton's benefit among Catholic Democrats, many of whom tend to support public solutions to social welfare problems.

"Not all that long ago, the Catholic community was basically a Democratic monolith, but that began to change in the 1970s and '80s, during the Reagan era," said David Campbell, a professor at Notre Dame who specializes in religion and politics.

Two of Obama's prominent Catholic supporters - Senator Robert Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania and former US representative Tim Roemer, who represented the South Bend area, say the media are oversimplifying the role of Catholics.

"I think it's overanalyzed, and a lot of it is poorly analyzed," said Casey, who like Roemer opposes abortion, breaking with Obama on that issue.

"Time is Barack's friend," Casey said. "The more voters hear him, the more they'll have confidence in him."

"You can't lump all Catholics into a particular box," said Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy, a Washington-based organization that researches national security and intelligence issues. "We have everything in the Catholic community from Opus Dei on the far right to liberation theology Catholics on the left and everything else in between."

REPUBLICANS STOP NUNS FROM VOTING

With the Supreme Court's green light to a law passed by Indiana Republicans to take away the right to vote from those who cannot produce a photo ID, 12 Catholic nuns in South Bend were turned away today from a polling place because they didn't have state or federal identification bearing a photograph, reports the South Bend Tribune.

The sisters at Saint Mary's Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, all in their 80s or 90s, showed up at their precinct to vote and were told they could not under the Republican law. The law allows for no exception even though pollworkers were willing to testify that the nuns were who they said they where.

Bill Donohue is Back, Showing His True Colors

from the blog, "Vox Nova"

I used to keep a close eye on Bill Donohue’s buffoonish tactics at the Catholic League, but grew tired of it. Now I read, courtesy of David Gibson, that Donohue is attacking Catholics who support Obama, calling them “dissidents” (in right-wing Catholic circles, this usually means “disagrees with me” rather than deviate for core Church teaching, as the cafeteria often wide open for these people). For here is Donohue’s chief concern:

“there is not one who agrees with the Catholic Church on all three major public policy issues: abortion, embryonic stem cell research and school vouchers.”

This is bogus on so many levels. First, it is a lie (and that is a sin, Bill, a non-negotiable one). He completely ignores the presence of pro-life Democrats like Bob Casey and Tim Roemer on the list– and I find it hard to know how he can sniff out the position of every single non-political member on the abortion issue.

But, of course, it is worse than this. Donohue is actually claiming that these are the three most important issue for Catholics in the public policy sphere. He picks two intrinsically evil acts, and ignores the rest (such as torture). And he elevates school vouchers to the top tier, while playing down issues like health care, the environment, and McCain’s love of war. Donohue, like Rick Santorum, is a Protestantized Catholic, one who picks and chooses Church teachings based on partisanship, and who then has the gall to use this as a bludgeon against his political opponents.



http://vox-nova.com/2008/05/05/bill-donohue-is-back-showing-his-true-colors/#more-2427

PRO LIFE CATHOLIC ELECTED IN LA DESPITE GOP RACE BAITING EFFORT

Louisiana voters elected Donald Cazayoux, a pro-life Catholic Democrat, to fill a vacant seat in Congress than had been in Republican hands for 33 years. (The Republican incumbent resigned mid-term to become a big time lobbyist for Wall Street). Republicans tried to win over white voters by appealing to racial fears but Louisiana voters proved they are above such tactics. The defeated GOP candidate, Woody Jenkins, is known for using voter lists provided by former Klansman David Duke. Republicans spent millions of dollars on racial charged TV ads linking Cazayoux to Barack Obama (the two men have never met) and other African-Americans.

Republicans funded their effort through the National Republican Congressional Committee. Individual Republican members of Congress hesitated from donating fearing their constituents would not look kindly at their involvement in George Wallace/Jesse Helms style campaign tactics.

The Louisiana election give further evidence that harsh attacks on Barack Obama with racial overtones will backfire on Republicans this fall.