By: Richard Cohen, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 27, 2012
Susan “Lucy” Collins: The Tragic Death Of “Centrism” In Washington
As I’ve been noting here, one of the key things to watch for in today’s vote on the Blunt amendment is how many Republicans defect from the party’s support for it. On the Senate floor just now, one of the key “centrists” that Dems were watching, Susan Collins, announced she will vote for it.
“I feel that I have to vote for Senator Blunt’s amendment, with the hope that its scope will be further narrowed and refined as the legislative process proceeds,” Collins said, vaguely accusing both sides of “playing politics” with the issue.
Collins had been undecided, and the reason she offered for supporting the Blunt measure is that she had asked the Obama administration for further clarification on how Obama’s contraception mandate compromise — which would be undone by Blunt — would impact self-insured religious organizations. She claimed the answer provided by the administration was insufficient.
The question, of course, is whether any answer would have been sufficient. Given Collins’ repeated role as Lucy to the Dems’ Charlie Brown, it’s fair to ask whether this was merely an excuse to cast the Yes vote on Blunt that she would have cast no matter what reassurances the administration offered.
And this goes to the heart of another debate that’s been raging of late. Olympia Snowe’s announced retirement has prompted a great deal of hand-wringing about how supposed “centrist” politicians no longer have any meaningful role to play in Washington. The demands for ideological purity on both sides, we’re told, have grown so strident that the possibility of bipartisan compromise has vanished.
But here you have a case where one of these “centrists” decided not to opt for the compromise position, and instead is going with the extreme one. Obama’s compromise is supported by six in 10 Americans, including 62 percent of independents, according to a new Kaiser poll. The Blunt position, by contrast, is the ideologically rigid one.
If there is no longer any “center” in Washington, it’s because “centrist” Republicans are not embracing solutions that are actually centrist. If bipartisan compromise is no longer possible in Washington, it’s because “centrist” Republicans are embracing the uncompromising positions, rather than the ones that represent genuine compromise.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, March 1, 2012
“The Second Coming”: Women Don’t See GOP’s War On Contraceptives As About Religion
Some Republicans thought the fight over birth control coverage would cost President Obama the election. Instead, it may have unleashed a second coming of the Anita Hill controversy, alienating women who otherwise might be attracted to a fiscally conservative, small government message.
The Obama administration looked weak at first when the Catholic Church balked at regulations requiring religious-affiliated institutions such as universities and hospitals to cover birth control under their employees’ health insurance. The White House had not lined up women to defend birth control as a critical part of preventive healthcare, so the chaste church elders dominated the dialogue, presenting it as an issue of religious liberty. The idea that women had the liberty, as well, to decline the rules offered by the church—particularly in cases where the female employees did not practice Catholicism—took longer to emerge.
But now, lawmakers at the state and federal level (along with presidential candidates) are continuing to hammer away at the issue, and it’s a dangerous game. The Senate today voted down a bill that would allow any employer to deny healthcare coverage of anything if it violates his or her moral principles, a standard so broad it invalidates any federal health insurance standards (which may well be the point). Even if the law were limited to religious teachings only, what would prevent a business owner who is a Jehovah’s Witness from denying coverage of transfusions? Or a Christian Scientist from denying coverage of any kind of medicine at all?
As if on script, supporters of the bill say, “It’s not about contraception,” and it is this repeated comment that stands to get them into the most trouble with female voters. If you’re not of the gender that can get pregnant, you have the luxury of seeing the issue as theological. If you stand to lose control over your life and future because you can’t prevent yourself from becoming pregnant, it is indeed all about contraception. The lecture sounds particularly annoying to a woman when it is being made by men, as has largely been the case on the moral exception bill. It’s the same as when male lawmakers were so utterly baffled and skeptical when Anita Hill told a story of sexual harassment that has been shared by so many, many other women.
Virginia state lawmakers took it even further, considering a bill that would have required women to have ultrasound exams before getting an abortion. Many women found the whole basis of the bill to be fairly insulting, since it suggested that women really have no idea what goes on in their bodies and need to be schooled about it before having an abortion. That could be the only reason a woman would seek an abortion, the thinking went—she simply was too simple or ignorant to know what she was doing. But the mostly male lawmakers knew.
Except that they didn’t. Remarkably, in seeking to teach women about their own bodies, they hadn’t done much learning on their own. They did not know that the jelly-on-the-belly sonogram that makes for such touching scenes in movies is not done in the first trimester of pregnancy (when the vast majority of abortions are performed) because the pregnancy hasn’t developed enough at that point to see anything. Women at that stage of pregnancy must undergo a “transvaginal probe,” an invasive procedure. The phrase itself made some lawmakers so uncomfortable that they didn’t want it uttered aloud during debate, so as not to offend the young pages. The bill was watered down somewhat, so that women would not have to endure a procedure critics described as state-sponsored rape. But the guts of the bill passed the state Senate and are making their way to the governor, who will sign it.
The contraception legislation may well do what it was intended to do—shore up the social conservative base of the Republican party and convince some people that Obama or Democrats are antireligion and pro big government. But proponents also risk energizing a group of women who long ago earned the right to control the size and timing of their families. For those women, it is, indeed, all about contraception.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, March 1, 2012
“Mullah Rick”: Enough Of Rick Santorum’s Sermons
Mullah Rick has spoken.
He wants religion returned to “the public square,” is opposed to contraception, premarital sex and abortion under any circumstances, wants children educated in what amounts to little red schoolhouses and called President Obama a “snob” for extolling college or some other kind of post-high school education. This is not a political platform. It’s a fatwa.
But that’s not all. On the Sunday shows he even lit into John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech to Protestant ministers in Houston, in which he called for the strict separation of church and state. Santorum said the speech sickened him.
“What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?” Santorum asked George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.” “That makes me throw up.”
Earlier, he said, “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” not noticing that he was speaking from what amounts to the public square.
Kennedy’s speech is actually a sad document, a necessary attempt to combat the bigoted and ignorant notion that a Catholic president might take orders from the Vatican. He told the ministers in attendance that he believed “in a president whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.”
Oddly, the assurances that Kennedy offered that day are ones that I would like to hear from Santorum. He, too, is a Catholic, although not of the Kennedy variety. Santorum is severe and unamusing about his faith, and that is his prerogative. But he has shoved his beliefs in our faces, leaving no doubt that his presidency would be informed by his extremely conservative Catholicism. Santorum’s views are too conservative even for most Catholics.
This is a perilous and divisive approach. We have all of world history to warn us about what happens when religion takes too prominent a role. The public square gets used for beheadings and the like. While that is not likely to happen now — zoning rules and such forbid it — we do know that layering religion over politics is dangerous. Santorum cannot impose — and should not argue — that his political beliefs come from God. That closes all debate and often infuriates those who differ.
This belief that religion has been banished from public discussion is a conservative trope without foundation. New York City is now recovering from a frenzy of celebratory publicity regarding the elevation of Timothy Dolan to cardinal. We have applauded the feats of Tim Tebow, the so-called praying quarterback, who seems unintimidated in publicly expressing his religious convictions. And, of course, we have the prattling of Newt Gingrich, who believes in belief and believes you and I ain’t got any — certainly not if we vote Democratic. As any European can attest, the American public square is soaked in religion or religion-speak.
Santorum’s views on the place of religion and his quaint ideas about education are so anachronistic they would be laughable. But whenever I start to giggle a bit, I find that some absurd statement resonates with Republican primary voters. On the other hand, when Rick Perry said it was fine to help the children of undocumented immigrants go to college, he got pilloried for it. When Gingrich balked at deporting literally millions of people, he was excoriated. Every time some Republican says something sensible, the roof falls in on him.
But for nutty ideas, Santorum is a one-man band. His intellectually abhorrent defense of what might be called blue-collar culture — no education past high school — is a prescription for failure. What he calls their “desires and dreams” is a sucker’s game: Welcome to an economy that can provide few, if any, jobs for the minimally educated. And his jibe at Obama for wanting to do something about it is not politics as usual — it’s just plain irresponsible.
Rick Santorum is not, as some would have it, the Republican Party’s problem. The GOP is half the political equation, and so its inability to offer candidates of sound views and judgments is everyone’s problem. We have to vote for someone after all. But when I mull Santorum’s views on contraception, the role of women, the proper place for religion and what he thinks about education, I think he’s either running for president of the wrong country or marooned in the wrong century. The man is lost.
“In His Own Words”: John F. Kennedy On The Issue Of His Religion.
December 5, 2007
On Sept. 12, 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy gave a major speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of Protestant ministers, on the issue of his religion. At the time, many Protestants questioned whether Kennedy’s Roman Catholic faith would allow him to make important national decisions as president independent of the church. Kennedy addressed those concerns before a skeptical audience of Protestant clergy. The following is a transcript of Kennedy’s speech:
Kennedy: Rev. Meza, Rev. Reck, I’m grateful for your generous invitation to speak my views.
While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset that we have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election: the spread of Communist influence, until it now festers 90 miles off the coast of Florida; the humiliating treatment of our president and vice president by those who no longer respect our power; the hungry children I saw in West Virginia; the old people who cannot pay their doctor bills; the families forced to give up their farms; an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space.
These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues — for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.
But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured — perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church I believe in — for that should be important only to me — but what kind of America I believe in.
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
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.
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew— or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.
Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of presidency in which I believe — a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group, nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation, or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.
I would not look with favor upon a president working to subvert the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so. And neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test — even by indirection — for it. If they disagree with that safeguard, they should be out openly working to repeal it.
I want a chief executive whose public acts are responsible to all groups and obligated to none; who can attend any ceremony, service or dinner his office may appropriately require of him; and whose fulfillment of his presidential oath is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.
This is the kind of America I believe in, and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a “divided loyalty,” that we did “not believe in liberty,” or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the “freedoms for which our forefathers died.”
And in fact ,this is the kind of America for which our forefathers died, when they fled here to escape religious test oaths that denied office to members of less favored churches; when they fought for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom; and when they fought at the shrine I visited today, the Alamo. For side by side with Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty and Bailey and Carey. But no one knows whether they were Catholic or not, for there was no religious test at the Alamo.
I ask you tonight to follow in that tradition, to judge me on the basis of my record of 14 years in Congress, on my declared stands against an ambassador to the Vatican, against unconstitutional aid to parochial schools, and against any boycott of the public schools (which I have attended myself)— instead of judging me on the basis of these pamphlets and publications we all have seen that carefully select quotations out of context from the statements of Catholic church leaders, usually in other countries, frequently in other centuries, and always omitting, of course, the statement of the American Bishops in 1948, which strongly endorsed church-state separation, and which more nearly reflects the views of almost every American Catholic.
I do not consider these other quotations binding upon my public acts. Why should you? But let me say, with respect to other countries, that I am wholly opposed to the state being used by any religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to compel, prohibit, or persecute the free exercise of any other religion. And I hope that you and I condemn with equal fervor those nations which deny their presidency to Protestants, and those which deny it to Catholics. And rather than cite the misdeeds of those who differ, I would cite the record of the Catholic Church in such nations as Ireland and France, and the independence of such statesmen as Adenauer and De Gaulle.
But let me stress again that these are my views. For contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.
Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.
But if the time should ever come — and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible — when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.
But I do not intend to apologize for these views to my critics of either Catholic or Protestant faith, nor do I intend to disavow either my views or my church in order to win this election.
If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I had tried my best and was fairly judged. But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser — in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.
But if, on the other hand, I should win the election, then I shall devote every effort of mind and spirit to fulfilling the oath of the presidency — practically identical, I might add, to the oath I have taken for 14 years in the Congress. For without reservation, I can “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, so help me God.
By: National Public Radio, February 28, 2012: Transcript courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, delivered by JFK on September 12, 1960
“Regurgitating Rick”: The Separation Of Church And State Makes Santorum Want To Vomit
Appearing on both ABC’s This Week and NBC’s Meet the Press this morning, Rick Santorum claimed that he “almost threw up” while reading President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech on the separation of church and state. When asked by an incredulous George Stephanopoulos to respond, Santorum held firm: “I don’t believe in an America where separation of church and state is absolute,” something that Kennedy explicitly called for. “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square, absolutely that makes me want to throw up.” And since such a barrier disenfranchises the religiously-minded while protecting secular opinion, Santorum claims, it is also a violation of the First Amendment.
Except, that is not at all what Kennedy was advocating.
I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office. I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty; nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so.
It’s right there. People’s First Amendment rights to practice and preach their own morals or religious beliefs should never be subverted, rather it is a preach-y president that Kennedy warns against, one who lets his (or her) own religious views affect the decisions they make in office. And, as Kimberley Strassel pointed out in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, that possibility is exactly what frightens voters most about Santorum, who seems perfectly willing to govern the entire country on the basis of his personally-held beliefs.
Mr. Santorum’s mistake is in telling people how to live. His finger-wagging on contraception and child-rearing and “homosexual acts” disrespects the vast majority of couples who use birth control, or who refuse to believe that the emancipation of women, or society’s increasing tolerance of gays, signals the end of the Republic.
And it is a vast majority of Americans. A recent study by the First Amendment Center found that 67 percent of Americans agreed that there should be a “clear separation of church and state.” This is at least one issue where Santorum seems to be badly out of stop with not only the rest of the country, but the march of history.
By: Andre Tartar, Daily Intel, February 26, 2012
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