“Something Is Stirring”: There Is New Space For Debate And Rethinking Of The Catholic Church’s Rightward Tilt
To say that the Belle Harbor neighborhood on New York City’s Rockaway Peninsula was slammed by Hurricane Sandy understates the case. Like many other parts of the region, it has suffered the kind of devastation we usually associate with wars.
In these circumstances, people turn to government, yes, but they look first to trusted friends and to neighborhood institutions that combine deep local knowledge with a degree of empathy that arises only from a long connection with residents of a particular place.
Two of my brothers-in-law who have been washed out of their homes are involved in one such group, the Graybeards, a local nonprofit recently featured on the “NBC Nightly News.” They immediately took up the task of restoring the city blocks they love.
And at the heart of the relief effort is the Roman Catholic parish of St. Francis de Sales, the epicenter of so many practical works of mercy that it has received a mountain of earned media attention. The Post published a photo last week of a big Thanksgiving dinner organized in the parish gym where I once watched my nephews and my niece compete fiercely on the basketball court. Last week, for a moment anyway, competition gave way to fellowship.
I intend to come back again to the determined struggle of this neighborhood to rebuild. But I also hope that the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops contemplating the future of the church’s public and political engagement notice how the witness of this parish has inspired people far beyond the confines of Catholicism.
During the presidential campaign, many bishops, though by no means all, seemed to enlist firmly on one side of a highly contested election. The church didn’t endorse anyone, but some bishops made clear their preference for Mitt Romney over President Obama. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia was about as clear as he could be short of putting a Romney-Ryan sticker on his car.
“I certainly can’t vote for somebody who’s either pro-choice or pro-abortion,” he told the National Catholic Reporter. On the other hand, he said of low-tax conservatives: “You can’t say that somebody’s not Christian because they want to limit taxation.” No doubt Paul Ryan smiled.
For such bishops, the election came as a shock. I’m told by people who attended the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops post-election meeting this month in Baltimore that many of them had been convinced Romney would win. Yet Romney not only lost; he also narrowly lost the Catholic vote, partly because of overwhelming support for Obama among Latinos, the fastest-growing group in the church.
The fallout: disarray in the Bishops’ Conference. This is actually good news. One person’s disarray is another’s openness. There is now new space for debate and a rethinking of the church’s tilt rightward over the past several years.
One surprising result in Baltimore was the refusal to endorse a vague statement on the economy after the document came under attack from more progressive bishops for failing to deal adequately with inequality, the rights of unions and poverty. Rarely does a document reach the floor of the conference and then fail to win the two-thirds majority necessary for approval. Something is stirring.
There are also influential bishops who now want to work with the Obama administration to secure a compromise on the contraception mandate under the health-care law. This, too, would be a positive break with the recent past, and the president should seize the opportunity. He can provide contraception coverage while building on the adjustments he has already made in the mandate to accommodate the church’s legitimate conscience concerns. And there’s nothing that should stop the bishops from cooperating with the administration and other progressives on behalf of immigration reform.
But above all, the bishops need to learn what I’ll call the St. Francis de Sales lesson. A church looking to halt defections among so many younger Catholics should understand that casting itself as a militantly right-wing political organization — which, face it, is what some of the bishops are doing — clouds its Christian message. Worse, the church seems to be going out of its way to hide its real treasure: the extraordinary examples of generosity and social reconstruction visible every day in parishes such as St. Francis and in the homeless shelters, schools, hospices and countless other Catholic entities all over the nation.
Politics divides Catholics. The works of mercy bring us together and also show the world what the power of faith can achieve.
By: E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 25, 2012
“The Fizzling Of A Divine Plan”: Is The Religious Right In Trouble?
If we’re going to count the losers of the 2012 election, the religious right has to be high on the list. Its members said they would turn out in extraordinary numbers to fight that infidel in the White House, but Ralph Reed’s turnout push fizzled. Gay marriage is now legal in three more states than it was on November 5, with more sure to come. In response, some on the religious right are wondering whether this politics thing just isn’t working out for them. It isn’t that they failed to get their message out, said influential religious-right quote machine Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “it’s that the entire moral landscape has changed. … An increasingly secularized America understands our positions and has rejected them.”
We’ve heard this kind of thing before, and Ed Kilgore warns that the religious right’s stranglehold on the Republican Party hasn’t lessened at all:
Lest we forget, every single Republican candidate for president in 2012 toed the Christian Right line in every major detail. The second-place finisher in the nomination fight, Rick Santorum, was himself a Christian Right Culture Warrior of the most impeccable purity, willing to openly smite not just Secularists but Liberal Protestants and Catholics as infidels and instruments of Satan. The old chestnut of a “struggle for the soul” of the GOP between economic and cultural conservatives turned out to be as empty as ever, as the former embraced an aggressive campaign against legalized abortion and for “religious liberty” even as the latter continued to baptize laissez-faire capitalism as part of the Divine Plan.
Ed also notes that the potential 2016 GOP contenders all have impeccable religious-right credentials as well. All of that’s true, but as a faction they still have an uncertain future. Ed’s last point about the deal between economic and cultural conservatives—the former pretend they care deeply about abortion and oppose gay rights, while the latter proclaim that if Jesus came back tomorrow his highest priority would be cutting the capital gains tax—is right, in that it isn’t so much a “struggle” as a negotiated arrangement. But in the last few years, culture has been pushed further and further into the background. If you added up all the time Mitt Romney spent talking about the business and the wonder of markets and compared it to the time he spent talking about abortion and same-sex marriage, the ratio would probably be ten to one or more. The Tea Party may have been made up in large part of cultural conservatives, but they swore up and down that all they cared about was their economic agenda. Republicans are as engaged as ever in a culture war, but the primary enemy in that war isn’t godless secularists, it’s government-loving socialists.
There’s no question that the GOP can’t abandon the religious right. But what it may do is confine its pandering to as brief a period during the primaries as possible. Let’s remember that though Rick Santorum may have finished second to Romney, he scared the living daylights out of the Republican establishment, precisely because his message was so retrograde and filled with hostility.
The problem will only get worse for the religious right. There’s an inexorable demographic evolution going on, one in which older, more culturally conservative people are dying off as younger, more culturally liberal people become adults and play a larger political role. How will they handle the shrinking of their appeal? One answer is for the religious right to undergo its own evolution. They’ve done it in the past, and there’s no reason they can’t do it in the future. The Southern Baptist Convention, which in the past had supported slavery and then segregation, recently elected its first black president. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if 20 or 30 years from now, nearly all the institutions we now consider part of the religious right will have changed their position on gay people. They won’t have to change on abortion—the country looks like it will remain split on that issue for the foreseeable future—but they may change on any number of other issues.
On the other hand, they may just hunker down; as Ed says, these folks love being able to consider themselves martyrs, surrounded by hostile forces and bravely standing up for God. But what happens when, a few elections from now, some incredibly charismatic Republican comes along and says he supports gay marriage and somehow manages to win, proving that maybe Republicans don’t need them? Then they’ll be in real trouble.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 14, 2012
“The Answer Was Clear”: Why I Didn’t Hate Martha Raddatz’s Abortion Question
Precious little time during last night’s vice-presidential debate was devoted to an issue the Republicans have been hellbent on politicizing since they took control of the House in 2010. That, of course, was the niggling question of whether Romney and Ryan would work to further restrict access to abortion and contraception—or outlaw it altogether—if they win on November 6. Romney’s long career of flip-flopping on this issue has hit some kind of time-lapse photography in recent weeks, with his flips and flops coming fast and furiously: in Des Moines on Tuesday, he told an audience “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.” Perhaps he should alert his running mate, who’s a co-sponsor of no less than thirty-eight abortion-restriction bills. (Romney’s staff walked back his statement the next morning.)
Debate #2 was a good time to clear this up, since Jim Lehrer failed to raise the issue in last week’s Obama/Romney match-up. And, with about ten minutes left in the debate, moderator Martha Raddatz finally did. But many of us watching at home, the question she asked left a lot to be desired:
RADDATZ: I want to move on, and I want to return home for these last few questions. This debate is, indeed, historic. We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion. Please talk about how you came to that decision. Talk about how your religion played a part in that. And, please, this is such an emotional issue for so many people in this country…
RYAN: Sure.
RADDATZ: …please talk personally about this, if you could.
There is a good argument against this way of framing the question. Joe Biden and Paul Ryan’s personal and religious beliefs aren’t really the most salient issue here: their policy positions are, and the way those positions impact 52 percent of the population of this country. Raddatz’s question took the focus off how restrictions on abortion rights impact actual women (plus, as Katha Pollitt put it last night, her voice “got all mourny and tragic”).
For many Democrats and pro-choicers, talking about religion and abortion in the same breath has long felt like playing on right-wing turf. As Irin Carmon wrote, “[S]he chose to frame the late-breaking, much-yearned for question about “social issues” in just the way Republicans prefer: in terms of religion.” But does it have to be that way? Joe Biden offered voters who struggle with the morality of abortion a way to separate their personal, religious beliefs and their public, political orientation toward the issue. He didn’t quite make the case that his religion leads him to support abortion rights, but he drew a clear distinction between his religious beliefs and his political position. And he acknowledged that equally devout people can and do come to different moral determinations about abortion than he does.
BIDEN: My religion defines who I am, and I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life. And has particularly informed my social doctrine. The Catholic social doctrine talks about taking care of those who—who can’t take care of themselves, people who need help.
With regard to—with regard to abortion, I accept my church’s position on abortion as a—what we call a [inaudible] doctrine. Life begins at conception in the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life.
But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews, and I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here, the—the congressman. I—I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people that—women they can’t control their body. It’s a decision between them and their doctor.
It’s not intrinsically anti-woman to grapple with abortion through the lens of religion or morality. It’s just that religion has so often and so effectively been used as a weapon against women, demeaned them, made them incapable of being moral actors and dismissed the complexities of their lives. And while “personal views” aren’t necessarily best placed at a vice-presidential debate, I’m glad we have a prominent Catholic politician on record that faith and respect for women’s own decision-making don’t have to be opposed.
I wasn’t thrilled that Sister Simone Campbell, one of the Nuns on the Bus traveling the country to oppose Ryan’s budget, identified as pro-life in her DNC speech, either—but if she was going to go there, I loved that she did it by describing support for the Affordable Care Act as “part of my pro-life stance.” Both she and Joe Biden have offered pro-choice, anti-choice and confused Catholics a way to vote for the Democratic ticket with a clear conscience. And for that I’m grateful—to Raddatz, too. Besides, as Amy Davidson notes, Raddatz made use of one of her many strong follow-ups in a way that put the attention right back on women: “I want to go back to the abortion question here. If the Romney-Ryan ticket is elected, should those who believe that abortion should remain legal be worried?” For anyone who still hadn’t figured it out, by the end of the night, the answer was clear.
By: Emily Douglas, The Nation, October 12, 2012
“The Chosen One”: Mitt Romney’s Peculiarly Mormon Elitism
At first blush, it’s difficult to equate Mitt Romney’s faith with his recent comments that he’s powerless to convince America’s victim class–that 47% of the country he says are dependent on government entitlements–to vote for him. Isn’t Mormomism predicated upon the missionary effort to convert complete strangers (not to mention redistribution of wealth, through tithing)? Indeed, when the 47% video surfaced, many simply assumed the candidate was just pandering to the crowd of $50k/plate donors. The Real Romney was back somewhere in 2006.
But in his excellent piece on Romney’s work as Mormon state leader in Massachusetts, New York’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells makes a convincing case that Romney’s faith and his elitism are in fact closely linked. Wallace-Wells reports that Romney’s missionary work in Lynn, Massachusetts, during which he oversaw a mostly failed attempt to convert a Cambodian community, never discouraged him. While others in his Church grew frustrated at their fruitless efforts, Romney seemed satisfied with their minimal progress, telling a colleague that “if you only get a handful of members, that’s still a good result.”
Romney’s missionary efforts were guided by the belief that if one was able to correctly follow Church guidelines, he would achieve salvation. If not, oh well. As Wallace-Wells put it: “What he offered was salvation via a rule book, a recipe for getting ahead in America that had less to offer the doubters, the uncommitted, the foreign.” Romney, perhaps swayed by the influence of party elites and his running mate Paul Ryan, has now lumped 47% of America into that same category.
In this way, Romney conceived of himself as a member of a series of overlapping elite clubs–Mormons, businessmen, suburban family men–who have played by the rules, and justly reaped the benefits. Quoting the Mormon scholar Claudia Bushman, Wallace-Wells writes that Romney seems to abide by the traditional Mormon perspective that he is something of a chosen one, inhabiting “an island of morality in a sea of moral decay.”
But the idea of elite membership–of exalted status–goes beyond this. Mormon faith holds that men don’t only wish to please God, they can eventually join him, be him. As Harold Bloom–that sometimes scholar of Mormonism–wrote last fall in the New York Times, “Mormons earn godhead though their own efforts…the Mormon patriarch, secure in his marriage and large family, is promised by his faith a final ascension to godhead, with a planet all his own separate from the earth and nation where he now dwells.”
This is not to say Romney thinks Mormonism represents the only path toward material success. Rather, Romney’s own Mormonism–and his success by it–simply reinforces the merits of the “No Apology” elitism he’s adopted on the campaign trail.
By: Simin van Zuylen-Wood, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 30, 2012
“Not Ready For Prime Time”: Mitt Romney Has Turned This Election Into A Referendum On Himself
Mitt Romney’s strategy was to make this election a referendum on President Barack Obama, one in which voters unhappy with the struggling economy would vote out the incumbent. Obama sought to make this a “choice” election, presenting himself as the better pick.
Now, Romney, through his own actions, has done the unfathomable: He is bringing the campaign back to a referendum. But it is increasingly becoming a referendum on Romney.
There were so many missteps in Romney’s response to the tragic murder of a respected, career U.S. ambassador and three other Americans that it’s hard to decide which was most troubling. The former governor issued a hasty statement—and on a day of remembrance for the 9/11 victims, despite a gentleperson’s agreement not to campaign negatively on that day—accusing the Obama administration of making an “apology” to those who attacked U.S. embassies and killed four people in the service of the U.S. government. This was based on a simple and very defensible statement issued by the U.S. embassy in Cairo hours before the outposts in Egypt and Libya were breached: It simply said that the United States condemns the “misguided” efforts by a few to insult a religion—any religion.
To Romney, this was an “apology” to assassins. In fact, it was basic diplomacy. Hordes were beginning to gather outside the Cairo embassy, reportedly because they were upset by a very offensive film that depicts the prophet Muhammed as a killer, enslaver, child abuser, and pervert. It’s useless to have an intellectual discussion about whether it’s reasonable for Muslims abroad to associate the film with the United States or American policy. The point is that many do, and basic diplomacy (not to mention aversion of a violent crisis) dictates a response to assure people that no, that is not the view of the U.S. government. That is not an abrogation of American values as the GOP nominee suggested—it was a reaffirmation of the basic and proud American value of respecting all religions. One would think that Romney, who has suffered insults and misconceptions about his own Mormon religion, would understand that.
Hours after the deadly attack in Libya, Romney defied basic diplomatic procedure and issued a statement attacking the commander in chief in the middle of a still-unfolding international crisis. That was not only poor manners, but raises questions about how much thought Romney would give before reacting to an international crisis should he end up occupying the Oval Office. When something that tragic and yet potentially headed toward something even worse occurs, the sensible thing is to gather all the available intelligence and act in a manner that protects and affirms U.S. interests without escalating things—particularly when there are other American diplomats still in potential danger. True, Romney is not privy to classified intelligence. That’s all the more reason to hold one’s rhetorical fire.
Then Romney doubled-down, ignoring an overwhelmingly negative early reaction to his first statement. He repeatedly used the word “apology”—whether he’s trying to sell more copies of his book No Apology or whether he’s desperately trying to keep alive the canard that Obama has gone around the world “apologizing for America,” is not clear. But it was a political statement, not a reasoned response of someone who hopes to be the nation’s chief diplomat. One wonders who is advising Romney on foreign policy. One of them is former Ambassador Richard Williamson, who went on MSNBC to defend the governor. When Williamson was reminded of criticism levied by respected former diplomat Nicholas Burns, he interjected to assault Burns’s own record. Burns is a career foreign service officer and White House foreign policy adviser, and has served in the administration of both former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Williamson shot back to host Andrea Mitchell that Burns had worked for Carter. That’s true—that’s what foreign service officers do; like soldiers, they work for whomever is in office. But Williamson’s effort to diminish the star diplomat by connecting him to an unpopular president is pathetic and an insult to every member of the diplomatic corps who serve honorably—sometimes risking their lives—for their country. Williamson’s experience has been as a political appointee, and some of his career has been indeed driven by politics: He ran for Senate as a GOP candidate from Illinois and served as the state’s Republican chairman. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a different experience than being a career foreign service officer, as Burns—not to mention slain Ambassador Christopher Stevens—was.
And the episode exposes another problem for challengers for federal office: You can try to keep your campaign focused on issues you think work for you. But when you’re in office—be it in the White House or Congress—you can’t pick your issues anymore. Romney may try persistently to stay on message, answering questions on other topics by saying, “What I think Americans really care about is the economy,” but you can’t do that when you’re commander in chief. Even if voters indeed are most worried about the economy, stuff happens, and a president has to respond. A CEO can plan, and Romney seems like a good planner. But being chief executive of the U.S. government means dealing with things that were not part of the plan. A venture capital executive can choose his or her investments. The U.S. government by definition, because of its role in the world, is automatically invested in a wide array of issues and regions. The president, whomever it is, must be able to respond responsibly to all of them.
Romney’s comments do not come under the category of “gaffe,” since they were not made off-the-cuff or off-mike. He—or someone—clearly thought this through, and very deliberately decided that it made sense for Romney to use an ongoing international tragedy to portray the president as ineffective or inconsistent on foreign policy. Instead, Romney revealed himself as a man who is more interested in a blustering, “no apology” approach to dealing with other people—not a good sign for domestic negotiations, either, given that whoever occupies the White House next year is likely to face even more closely-divided chambers in Congress. And his reaction put on display a startling lack of understanding of basic diplomacy—something we already saw, with far fewer potential consequences, during his trip to Britain, Israel, and Poland. It was a big risk—and apparently, a calculated one—Romney took. It may have succeeded only in turning the attention away from Obama’s performance in office and put it squarely on Romney’s readiness for office.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, September 13, 2012
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