Bashing Obama Yet Again With “The Catholic Crutch”

(And also posted over here.)

As many of us are aware, we observed the most important day of the Christian calendar last Sunday in commemoration of Easter. And if you guessed that that has ushered in yet another round of pundit idiocy about how President Obama is supposedly losing the support of Catholic voters, then you win a free picture of Bill Donahue suitable for mounting on a dart board or insertion into the bottom of your cat’s litter box.

The most recent culprit is Amy Sullivan, “religion correspondent” for Time Magazine here (and I have an issue with reporters from our corporate media pretending to write about faith generally, usually because they use it as an excuse for their own twisted brand of pontificating – I more or less go along with it from the Bucks County Courier Times, often because they have good writers, but mainly because fighting that battle isn’t one that I’m going to win).

Here is an excerpt from Sullivan’s column…

…Obama's first few months in office have seen a sustained assault by a loose coalition of Catholic organizations and leaders who are committed to convincing their fellow church members that Obama doesn't share their values. They have strongly criticized his selection of Kansas Democratic Governor (and pro-choice Catholic) Kathleen Sebelius to be HHS Secretary and have circulated unfounded rumors that the Vatican rejected several candidates to be Obama's ambassador there. Most visibly, the right-wing Cardinal Newman Society and a number of Catholic bishops have protested the University of Notre Dame's decision to invite Obama to speak at this spring's commencement. Even Cardinal Francis George, who sat down in the Oval Office for a half-hour meeting on St. Patrick's Day that he hoped would "foster fruitful dialogue for the sake of the common good," slammed the school's action, calling it "an embarrassment to Catholics." (Notre Dame has made clear it will not rescind the invitation.)

None of these attacks should pose a serious problem for Obama. But lined up against his early moves to restore liberal social policies that many pro-life Catholics oppose, they make it easier for the President's Catholic critics to question whether he respects their values and positions.

By the way, Francis Cardinal George, the archbishop of Chicago, has been showing his animus towards Obama for a good while now. I honestly don’t expect that to change.

This is the sort of “doom and gloom” stuff on Obama and Catholic voters that Christine Flowers of The Philadelphia Daily News served up last October here about how anyone who voted for Obama wasn’t a “real Catholic” (gee, I guess he got the support of an awful lot of “unreal” ones, then – and here is a reminder on the FOCA that Flowers railed about, by the way).

Not to be outdone, though, is former Dubya speechwriter Michael Gerson here, who recently characterized Obama as “extreme” on abortion (typical, given that Gerson called Obama the most “polarizing” President here; that talking point came and went about a week ago, I know, and I didn’t comment on it at the time because I thought it was particularly stupid – fortunately, John at Americablog did a pretty good job of shredding that one here).

I believe the bottom line, though, is captured pretty well by US News correspondent Dan Gilgoff here, who points out (entirely accurately, I think) that if a “Catholic rift” exists, it isn’t between Obama and U.S. Catholics as a whole, but by Catholics and their church leaders (kind of an obvious observation when the direction from Rome is to keep beating the proverbial drum over “values” issues at the expense of issues such as health care, the environment, and economic opportunity – also, here is another example of Obama’s Catholic support “not fraying”).

Sullivan also tells us this…

Bill Clinton also benefited from Catholic backing at the polls, but he squandered some of that goodwill when those supporters concluded that he failed to carry through on his promise to reduce abortion rates.

In response, I give you The Big Dog himself (from a campaign story when Hillary ran for president here)…

“When Hillary was in the White House, she supervised our efforts to number one, let young women who have children out of wedlock live with their parents and still keep all their welfare benefits so that the grandparents can take care of the kids while the women went to school. Number two, led a serious effort to reduce teen pregnancy and we had the lowest teen pregnancy rate since the statistics had been kept when we were doing that. And guess what? Without overturning Roe v. Wade, or trying to keep people all torn up and upset or calling them killers, the abortion rate went down almost 20 percent on our watch.”

But the issue wasn’t put to bed just yet. Several minutes later, one of the activists shouted, “What about pro-life, Bill?”

A visibly agitated Clinton responded again, his voice growing stern, his language more forceful.

“I gave you the answer. We disagree with you. You want to criminalize women and their doctors and we disagree,” he said. “If you were really pro-life, you would want to put every doctor and every mother as an accessory to murder in prison. And you won’t say you wanna do that because you know that because you know that you wouldn’t have a lick of political support.

And then Clinton related the issue back to his wife: “You can’t name me anybody presently in politics that did more to introduce policies that reduce the number of real abortions instead of the hot air putting out to tear people up and make votes by dividing America.”

And I would say that this validates Clinton’s claim about the steadily decreasing number of abortions in this country overall since 1990 (though medical abortions rose from 2000 to 2005 with RU-486, as opposed to surgical ones).

I know stories such as the one Sullivan foists on us here get really old after awhile, but they need to be debunked from time to time despite that. Basically, Obama will rise and/or fall with Catholic voters based on his performance on the issues that matter to all voters.

And let’s not forget that it was a Democratic president (and Catholic also) who pretty much “created the template” for how matters of spirituality should be handled in The Oval Office when he said this (here)…

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source--where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials--and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

Pretty smart fellow, that John F. Kennedy.