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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...
22 comments
Read more

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...
26 comments
Read more