Skip to main content

Worth reading: a brilliant piece on how President Obama is successfully courting the Catholic vote...

... despite the obvious differences on abortion.

The two important take-aways from David Gibson's brilliant article on the President's meeting with the Pope are:

(1) Love him or hate him, support or oppose his policies, think he's a disaster or a triumph, Barack Obama is an immensely skilled politician and you will always underestimate him at your peril..

(2) Catholics--even American Catholics--are not the pro-life voting monolith that social conservatives would like to believe they are.

Here's the tiniest snippet of an article you really should read in full:

For his part, Obama has been diligent in courting the Catholic vote, and there appears to be more than political maneuvering at work. Obama knows how to "talk Catholic," in the words of more than one participant at last week's White House meeting between Obama and a select group of Catholic journos from across the spectrum. At that meeting he cited the late Chicago cardinal, Joseph Bernardin, as an inspiration and he spoke easily about Bernadin's "seamless garment" approach to pro-life and social justice issues. He can talk theology and original sin (as he did at Notre Dame) and he knows that you address the pope as "Your Holiness" -- something it took George W. Bush a while to learn. (At a 2007 meeting with Benedict, President Bush made aides wince by repeatedly referring to the pope as "sir.")


As a Catholic who believes that a secular society should defend women's right to control their own bodies--including abortion--I found this article extremely interesting.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?