I love belonging to a politically subversive movement...

Progressives seem really threatened by Thomism.

Wikileaks lets us listen in on the anti-Catholic bigotry of the Progressives.

//From:jhalpin@americanprogress.org To: JPalmieri@americanprogress.org, john.podesta@gmail.com  Date: 2011-04-11 21:10

Subject: Re: Conservative Catholicism
   
 Excellent point. They can throw around "Thomistic" thought and "subsidiarity" and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they're talking about.

Jennifer Palmieri wrote:  I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals.

  ----- Original Message ----- From: John Halpin To: John Podesta ; Jennifer Palmieri Sent: Mon Apr 11 18:55:59 2011 Subject: Conservative Catholicism  

Ken Auletta's latest piece on Murdoch in the New Yorker starts off with the aside that both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the WSJ, are raising their kids Catholic. Friggin' Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus.  Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the SC and think tanks to the media and social groups.  It's an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy. //

This is what the "wedge strategy of 2012" and questions about contraceptives was always about.

The "wedge strategy" is an old one.

The importance of being a Catholic: A Protestant View

// Michael Schwartz has persuasively argued in an essay in American and Catholic: The New Debate that abortion has become the test case for the honeymoon between “Americanist Catholics—who are usually well educated and upwardly mobile—and the secular culture to which they have surrendered.” These are the Catholics particularly subject to the paradoxical attitude that secular culture has adopted toward postconciliar Catholicism. That is,

 Catholicism is still despised to the extent that it claims to teach with authority, but that contempt is no longer mixed with fear, only with condescension. The pope is unable to assert his authority effectively over even the clergy, much less the laity. And so we have the new strain of anti Catholic sentiment expressing itself by praising those Catholics who separate themselves from the beliefs and practices of their church. To the extent that the reality of the church is despised, so individual Catholics who subordinate their Catholicism to some secular ideology are held up as models of intellectual honesty, courage, and all around decency. The only good Catholic, it would seem, is a bad Catholic.

Schwartz observes, however, that for such Catholics a crisis was occasioned exactly when their “new found ecumenical friends decided that the next great step in the advance of civilization was to authorize the killing of babies. We were tolerant, and we desperately wanted to be accepted. But we were still Catholics, not barbarians. We drew the line at murdering the young.” In opposition to those in power, Catholics knew this was not just another question to be resolved by interestgroup politics. Catholics knew they had a duty to stand for life, to choose, as Schwartz puts it, Christ over Caesar.//

US News & World Report tells Americans to Impose a Religious Test.

Wow!  This kind of thing was supposed to have died out along with segregated schools and other forms of bigotry.

Catholics in high places of power have the most trouble, I've noticed, practicing the separation of church and state. The pugnacious Catholic Justice, Antonin Scalia, is the most aggressive offender on the Court, but not the only one. Of course, we can't know for sure what Sotomayor was thinking, but it seems she has joined the ranks of the five Republican Catholic men on the John Roberts Court in showing a clear religious bias when it comes to women's rights and liberties. We can no longer be silent about this. Thomas Jefferson, the principal champion of the separation between state and church, was thinking particularly of pernicious Rome in his writings. He deeply distrusted the narrowness of Vatican hegemony.

So, Catholics in "high places of power" can't be trusted not to take orders from the Pope?

"Pernicious Rome"????

What is this?  The 19th Century?

Could you imagine this kind of thing being said about Muslims?

As a Catholic, here's the belief I want to impose - Leave us fargin' alone! 

The State has the power and ability to determine how we live or die, but Democrats are worried about Catholics imposing their beliefs on others????

More Scalia

Sotomayor’s blow brings us to confront an uncomfortable reality. More than WASPS, Methodists, Jews, Quakers or Baptists…

Holy Crap, now she’s channeling Archie Bunker!

…Catholics often try to impose their beliefs on you, me, public discourse and institutions. Especially if “you” are female. This is not true of all Catholics – just look at House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Yeah, Archie Bunker thought that “Little Elmo” down at the docks was “one of the ‘good’ ones”, too.

So, the editorial policy of the USN&W seems to be that Catholics are by nature - if they are truly Catholic - undemocratic and crypto-totalitarian?

This is not a new position, by the way. It was the subject of a very influential book written in the 1950s prior to the Kennedy election.

I can't believe that this kind of "faith-baiting" is being published by a supposedly reputable journal...well, actually I can.

The Obama Kulturkampf Continues.


Elizabeth Scalia takes on another bit of anti-Catholic noise from the US World and News Report.

In this one, the author tries to make sure that Sotomayor stays on the Democrat Reservation for Women and People of Color by mocking her Catholic upbringing.

Stiehm opens with a reveal: she apparently believes that Supreme Court Justices are not supposed to open-mindedly weigh any question before them on its own merits, or check with the constitution. Rather, they should be dependably ideological. Since Sotomayor seems shaky on that point, Stiehm serves her a schoolyard sneer: “what are ya, agood Catholic girl?” Can’t you just hear it?

The Supreme Court is now best understood as the Extreme Court. One big reason why is that six out of nine Justices are Catholic. Let’s be forthright about that. (The other three are Jewish.) Sotomayor, appointed by President Obama, is a Catholic who put her religion ahead of her jurisprudence. What a surprise, but that is no small thing.

Alternate paragraph: “The Supreme Court is full of Catholics and Jews! Not enough enlightened people! The Jews might be alright — they know how to lay low, by now — but these Catholics can’t be trusted! They’re in league with Rome!” Should we tell her that Obamacare’s Individual Mandate survives thanks to the Catholic Chief Justice, John Roberts? Oh, let’s not trouble her with facts and spoil her fun!

That first graph does demand a question, though: is Sotomayor some Rome-bediant, floor-kissin’, passionately papist plant? The answer is important because Stiehm is basing her whole thesis on the idea that she is. The answer is: she’s rather typically Catholic, no daily church-goer like that bad guy, Antonin Scalia.

“Judge Sotomayor was raised as a Catholic and attends church for family celebrations and other important events.”

From the same article:

In 1994, Sotomayor allowed two state prison inmates to wear multicolored bead necklaces under their clothing. The inmates said wearing the beads was essential to their religious faith, Santeria. Prison officials argued that the beads were gang symbols that provoked fights.

Sotomayor, who attended Catholic schools as a child, saw the issue in terms of religious freedom. After chastening officials for favoring “traditional” religions like Catholicism over “nontraditional” religions like Santeria, she ruled that such distinctions were “intolerable.”

That’s bad news, for Stiehm. Sotomayor appears to be that most dangerous thing: an open-minded justice who refers to the constitution! Oh, noes! And she’s Catholic!

Liberals Embracing Their Inner Fascist.

Obama, and his supporters, quite clearly take joy in coercing those seen as enemies to do things they find objectionable. It is indicative of a deep psychological disorder.  - Glen Reynolds

Megan McCardle observes:

I gather that both supporters and opponents of the mandate think the Supreme Court will probably rule that corporations (at least closely held ones such as these two) are going to be granted an exemption from the mandate if they have clear religious objections.

Social media was on fire over this when it happened, and I confess that I am struggling to see why. There was a lot of outraged talk about how corporations aren’t people, of course, but a lot more about employers trying to control their employees’ sex lives, treating women as second-class citizens and so forth. To judge from these reactions, you would think that birth-control pills were a scarce resource that could only legally be obtained through employers. In fact, generic birth-control pills are available for $25 a month through a Costco pharmacy, $50 if you want a brand name.

“But that’s expensive for a young woman on a budget!” you are about to cry. And I am about to answer that it doesn’t get less expensive because an insurer buys it. Regular, predictable expenses such as birth-control pills cannot be defrayed by insurance; they can only be prepaid, with a markup for the insurer’s administrative costs. The extra cost is passed on by the insurers to your employer, and from your employer to you and your fellow workers, either by raising your contribution or lowering the wage they are willing to offer. There’s obviously some cross-subsidy from your fellow employees who don’t use birth control, but overall, there’s no particular reason to force insurers to cover a minor and predictable expense.

The administration didn’t force employers with a religious objection to offer contraception because it made financial or medical sense; they did it because it had great symbolic value to Barack Obama’s political base. And much of that symbolic value seems to actually come from the willingness to coerce people who object to buy the stuff.//

This strategy has been obvious some time.

The wedge strategy:

//The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is arguing in a new lawsuit that the Obama administration is engaged in a “conscious political strategy to marginalize and delegitimize” Catholic “religious views on contraception by holding them up for ridicule on the national stage.”

At issue in the lawsuit is whether the administration can force the archdiocese to secure a third-party administrator for its self-insurance plan who will provide sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs at no cost to church employees at some of the archdiocese’s separately incorporated subunits.

These subunits include a number of Catholic schools and charities, including Archbishop Carroll High School and Catholic Charities of Washington.

“[T]he Archdiocese operates a self-insurance plan that encompasses not only individuals directly employed by the Archdiocese itself, but, in addition, individuals employed by affiliated Catholic organizations,” says the church’s lawsuit.

Here is the Complaint.

Condoms, Human Flourishing and the Meaning of Life...

...or Houston, we have an existential problem:

Nor is it clear what this has to do with a government that occasionally lends a hand to deserving individuals in distress. For all those who need a condom to “keep them from falling,” as well as those whose “ability to succeed in modern America [is] imperiled” for want of a rubber, here’s my crude, heartless, I’ve-got-mine-Jack advice: pursue your dreams and buy one. We are not talking about paraplegic orphans. We are talking about Georgetown law students—the most privileged members of our society, who are training for their future calling (government, or hanging on to it) by haranguing us: you owe us.

I don’t suggest for a moment that Henry actually believes this claptrap. The point, which I think he underestimates, is that a country that doesn’t simply laugh the “free condoms” crowd out of town—without need of explanation—is in serious trouble. The very fact that clever pols can turn this no-brainer into a “wedge issue” makes you wonder about the reservoir of good sense out there.

Maybe conservatism has become disconnected from the thought that “the average person has a moral life that is worth leading and pursuing,” and maybe it neglects or slights the fact that government can at times foster that pursuit. But even if so, that ain’t the major problem. The contemporary transfer state is not about moral worth and aspirations. The administration’s “Julia” had no aspirations and no coherent plan of life, and the government in her story had no objective beyond assuring her that whichever way she might drift or be tossed, there’ll be a government program. To put the point in a sentence: while one can perhaps imagine a government that would help “average” people to realize their transcendent hopes and aspirations, our actual government is designed to wring any meaning out of life. The cheap, nasty free condom campaign encapsulates that agenda.

Henry Olsen is searching for a distinction between a hand up and a handout—between the uplifting and the tawdry, the compassionate and the grasping. But that’s hard to articulate even on paper, and harder still to observe in practice. And against it stands liberalism’s limitless, all-encompassing ethos: If I can’t have my condom, you might as well kill widows and orphans. If conservatism and the GOP often seem disconnected from “average persons” and their need, in distress, for government help, maybe that’s because they sense that before you can explain the needed distinctions, you have to explain that enough is enough and indeed, altogether too much. That strikes me as the right impulse. The hard question is whether even that much, or that little, can still be explained.//

What if, in the effort to make sure that Georgetown law students don't have to shell out a couple of bucks on a Friday night, the paraplegic orphans - who, lord knows, have less political pull than Georgetown law students - get lost in the taffy yank?

Getting organized.

The USCCB is planning to continue to raise awareness of issues pertaining to life, religious liberty and marriage:

Life, marriage and religious liberty are not only foundational to Catholic social teaching but also fundamental to the good of society." 

5 points
 

1. Starting with the Sunday after Christmas (Feast of the Holy Family) and continuing with the last Sunday of every month through Christ the King, November 2013, cathedrals and parishes are encouraged to hold a Eucharistic Holy Hour for life, marriage and religious liberty.
 

2. Families and individuals are encouraged to pray a daily rosary, especially for the preservation of life, marriage and religious liberty in the nation.
 

3. At Sunday and daily Masses, it is encouraged that the Prayers of the Faithful include specific intentions for respect for all human life from conception to natural death, the strengthening of marriage and family life, and the preservation of religious liberty at all levels of government, both at home and abroad.
 

4. Abstinence from meat and fasting on Fridays are encouraged for the intention of the protection of life, marriage and religious liberty, recognizing the importance of spiritual and bodily sacrifice in the life of the Church.
 

5. There will be the celebration of a second Fortnight for Freedom at the end of June and the beginning of July 2013.
 

"With the challenges this country is facing, it is hoped that this call to prayer and penance will help build awareness among the faithful as well as spiritual stamina and courage for effective witness," Archbishop Cordileone said. "We also hope that it will encourage solidarity with all people who are standing for the precious gifts of life, marriage, and religious liberty."
 

 And so it goes in the era of Hope and Change, where the state continues to push its jurisdiction over every sphere of society.  Previously, the Catholic program was limited to "life issues."  Now, in the era of Obama, Catholics have to add "marriage" and "religious liberty" to the items they have to have a particular concern about.

Liberals hate intolerance...

...unless it's directed at those fargin' Catholics, all of whose priests are child rapists...

..in which case it's all good.

Some arch-feminist communications director for a Democrat candidate was "eighty-sixed" for what would undoubtedly have been perfectly acceptible speech on the left:

Sarasota Democrat Keith Fitzgerald’s new communications director didn’t last a week.

Fitzgerald announced Monday that newly hired Ana Maria Rosato is no longer working for his congressional campaign after discovering she had written scathing blog posts in the last year that question why “Republicans Hate Sex,” declares that Republicans are the party of rape, and another that criticizes the Pope and his “pious pedophilic protecting priests.”

Rosato created a blog called SassyPoliticalInsights.com, that has posts going back to April, where she often uses crude language and strongly sexual content to criticize Republicans and Tea Party supporters.

The title of the target article emphasizes that Rosato lost her job because of "sexually explicit" posts, but, if so, that's lame and disingenuous. She should have lost her job because she was offensive to and hateful to 25% of the population, i.e., Catholics, although it seems that liberal pieties must never admit that Catholics are a group that it is possible to say anything offensive about.

Here is what Ms. Rosato had to say on her blog:

The pope and his pious pedophilic protecting priests have invented and invoked a Blackmail Beatitude to silence the women in convents across our nation.

And:

Remember, the pope and his pedophilic priests hold the purse strings that feed, clothe, and shelter these women.

And:

If the predator-protecting pope throws them out on the streets, the nuns have no financial means to secure so much as basic housing.

So, it seems that in Rosato's world, all Catholic priests - all of them - are pedophiles, rather than the 2 to 3% that study after study has shown, a percentage less than any other occupation, profession or vocation.

Overgeneralize much?

What would we say about a person who generalized in this way about any other ethnic, racial or gender group?

I don't want to generalize about Democrats, so I won't. What I will say is that this kind of talk appears to be within the mainstream of public discourse among Democrats. When the light shines on them, they toss someone overboard and describe the issue as being "sassy" or "controversial" and don't mention the sheer hateful bigotry that motivates this kind of thing.

As if you needed more evidence to show how the mainstream of the Democrat party is extremist...

...consider this Sarah Posner article in Religious Dispatches about "Nine Reasons Why Democrats Should Not Invite Nuns on the Bus to the Democrat Convention":

5. As Frances Kissling points out, progressives' sudden affection for the nuns overlooks the reality that the nuns avoid issues relating to sex, gender, reproduction, and LGBT equality. These nuns--the ones targeted by the Vatican for promoting "radical feminist themes"--are hardly radical feminists. Why showcase the nuns and not pro-choice Catholics, or pro-marriage equality Catholics at the convention?

In short, the leftist nuns aren't suitable for the "big tent" party because they are not sufficiently extreme in their dissent from mainstream Catholic teachings to be Democrat symbols.

These people are offensive nuts.

This is their right to do so...

...but it seems that the Democrats, in general, in New York, in particular, and Obama, in particular, are doing this kind of thing more and more often.

NY Post: Cardinal sin: Bam blew off DNC blessing:

WASHINGTON — President Obama turned down a chance to have Timothy Cardinal Dolan deliver a prayer at the Democratic National Convention after Dolan told Democrats he would be “grateful” to deliver a blessing in Charlotte.

Dolan — considered the top Catholic official in the nation, as head of the Archdiocese of New York and president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops — tipped off Democrats a few weeks ago that he had agreed to deliver the prime-time benediction at the Republican convention in Tampa next week, Dolan’s spokesman Joseph Zwilling told The Post.

“He wanted to make sure that they knew that this was not a partisan act on his part and that he would be just as happy and grateful to accept an invitation from the Democrats as he would to have received one from the Republicans,” said Zwilling.

“He has not been contacted by them” since, he added.

A senior Obama campaign official said yesterday that the Democrats would have a “high-ranking” Catholic at the convention, but indicated the arrangements weren’t yet final.

Given how it has defined "high-ranking Catholic" in the past, want to bet that the "high-ranking Catholic" is a nun who agrees with Obamacare?

Obama turns out to be a uniter after all.

Bringing Mormons and Catholics together since 2011.
Romney declares:

Religious liberty — our first freedom of those enumerated in the Bill of Rights. And the president and his administration said they are going to usurp your religious freedom by demanding that you provide products to your employees, if you’re the Catholic Church, that violates your own conscience.

And so whether it’s a Catholic businessperson or the Catholic Church itself they’re being told what they have to do that violates their religious conscience. That attack on religious freedom I think is a dangerous and unfortunate precedent.

And I know we’re not all Catholic in this room. Many presumably are. But I feel that we’re all Catholic today. In our battle to preserve religious freedom and tolerance and freedom in this country, it is essential for us to push back against that.

Video here.

The Catholic Fortnight for Freedom began Thursday.

The TCA has a 14 point action plan for participating, including sharing its video.

So, I will.

"Wedge" this.

The Anchoress advises that Catholic Health Services rejects Obama's accommodation.

According to the Washington Post:

Sharpening an election-year confrontation over religious freedom and government health insurance rules, the nation’s Catholic hospitals on Friday rejected President Barack Obama’s compromise for providing birth control coverage to their women employees.

The Catholic Health Association was a key ally in Obama’s health care overhaul, defying opposition from church bishops to help the president win approval in Congress. But the group said Friday it does not believe church-affiliated employers should have to provide birth control as a free preventive service, as the law now requires.

The hospital group’s decision calls into question a compromise offered by the president himself only months ago, under which the cost of providing birth control would be covered by insurance companies and not religious employers. While churches and other places of worship are exempt from the birth control mandate, nonprofits affiliated with a religion, such as hospitals, are not.

The Anchoress explains that this is a big deal because the CHA originally played "Uncle Tom" to Obama's non-accommodation:

This is, as the Deac says, “big news.”. If it seems written in benign fashion by the WaPo, and dropped late on a Friday in summer, Rocco Palmo explains why:

Coming in a five-page letter sent today by the Catholic Health Association to a top HHS administrator, the move (including draft proposals for an acceptable revision of the controversial Federal rule) follows months of tension between the US hierarchy and the association representing some 2,000 Stateside church health facilities, whose president, Daughter of Charity Sister Carol Keehan, stoked the ire of much of the hierarchy after voicing her approval of the White House’s February “accommodation” on the plan, which the bishops deemed as being insufficient.

Today’s letter was signed by Keehan, CHA’s current board chair [Joseph R. Swedish], and his designated successor.

Recall that Sister Keehan’s initial approval of the “accommodation”, like Dionne’s, was released via the White House religion press portal almost simultaneously with the WH announcement; it gave enormous political cover to the president, and helped him to divide a church that had — quickly and uncharacteristically — united against the HHS Mandate. Now, she’s walking it back.

That’s why this is a big deal. CHA represents over 600 Catholic hospitals and hundreds of nursing and rehab facilities; that’s a lot of Catholic energy to be out of agreement with the US Bishops. Perhaps they considered the recent (largely media-ignored) lawsuits filed against the Obama administration in 12 jurisdictions by 43 Catholic entities (including Notre Dame University), and began to consider the HHS enterprise a loser. Hard to tell.

Obama's wedge strategy works both ways.

Forcing people to decide where there loyalty lies doesn't guarantee that the desired decision will be made.

Life-long Democrat Committee-woman resigns from Democrat party because of conflict with her Catholic faith.

When you hear statement in the liberal media that some "bishops" in California are dissented from the lawsuits against the HHS mandate, get the facts.

Here's the overview:

For weeks now the American bishops have been marching in lockstep unity, completely unanimous in their opposition to the HHS contraceptive mandate. The Catholic hierarchy has been headed into a showdown with President Obama, and not a single bishop had shown any inclination to back away from the fight. But you knew it couldn’t last. And it didn’t.

This week Bishop Stephen Blaire became the first prelate to break stride, voicing his misgivings about the confrontation. Oh, Bishop Blaire wasn’t suggesting that the Catholic hierarchy should accede to the HHS mandate. After all he had already condemned the mandate as unjust, as had the leaders of every other Catholic diocese in the United States. But Bishop Blaire raised a few questions about the strategy being followed by the leaders of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), about the lack of consultation, about the possible public perceptions. That was enough. Immediately liberal Catholics seized the opportunity to launch their own campaign, suggesting that only a minority of “conservative” bishops favor the all-out battle against the HHS mandate.

Now Bishop Blair says that his words were misinterpreted. “I stand solidly with my brother bishops in our common resolve to overturn the unacceptable intrusion of government into the life of the Church by the HHS mandate,” he insists in a follow-up statement. But no one ever doubted his opposition to the mandate. Every reasonable Catholic—excluding the extreme ideologues like Kathleen Sebelius and Nancy Pelosi and “Catholics” for Free Choice—opposes the HHS mandate. What divides liberal Catholics from the mainstream is the question of how to respond to that mandate. Should Catholic voters see this as a crucial battle that we absolutely cannot afford to lose? Or should they look at the mandate as one of many issues to take into consideration during this year’s election campaign? In his remarks to America magazine, Bishop Blaire leaned heavily toward the latter option. “The question is what is our focus as bishops,” he said.

Bishop Blaire evidently has his own ideas about “our focus as bishops.” As chairman of the USCCB committee on justice and peace, he has released a raft of statements on other political issues, taking public stands that usually coincide with the positions of the Obama administration. Now he expressed his concern that “some groups ‘very far to the right’ are trying to use the conflict [over the HHS mandate] ‘as an anti-Obama campaign.” He had never voices any misgivings that people ‘very far to the left’ might exploit his own statements in a pro-Obama campaign.

And here is Bishop Blaire's "walk-back" statement:

I wish to clarify some misunderstandings related to my comments about the HHS Mandate.

First of all, I stand solidly with my brother bishops in our common resolve to overturn the unacceptable intrusion of government into the life of the Church by the HHS Mandate. In March, the Administrative Committee issued a statement of commitment to persuade the Administration to eliminate this interference, the Congress to overturn it or the courts to stop it. I contributed to and voted for this statement, and continue to support it, including its call for legal action as was announced on Monday.

The fundamental issue is the freedom of the Church to carry out her mission as given by Christ. Religious Freedom protects the right of the Church to define herself and her ministries. It is totally unacceptable to have the federal government decide that our religious ministries are not "religious." The continuing effort of the government to intrude itself by re-defining Catholic ministries as somehow less religious or less Catholic because they employ or serve those without regard to their creed is unjust and a violation of religious liberty. The government should not intrude itself in forcing the Church and her institutions to violate her long standing teaching to provide essential health care to her employees.

From my perspective, the recent legal challenges by dioceses and Catholic entities throughout the United States, as well as discussions with the Administration, and the advocacy of Congress, all have one essential goal: to defend the right of the Church to define herself and to preserve the identity and integrity of the Catholic ministries exercised through her institutions.

I am convinced we need to continue to seek to persuade others to join us in this just cause through reasoned, civil and respectful discussion. Our defense of religious liberty is advanced when there is open discussion about the best strategies to promote our common goal.

I look forward to the discussions at the Bishops' meeting in June which will offer us an opportunity to agree on next steps to achieve our common and essential goal of ending this violation of religious freedom.

Apparently, Bishop Blair's statements were initially reported and/or misconstrued in "America." America, the magazine of the American Jesuits, has been notoriously "anti-ultramontane," or "ultrajectine," in recent years; during the German Kulturkampf, America would have been on the side of the Old Catholics and Ignatz Dollinger.

Divided Loyalties.

This is another piece of the division of loyalties that people of faith - actually, everyone at some point or another - face and a model of how to handle that conundrum.

High School Junior Margeaux Graham was invited to the American Legion's Florida "Girls' State." The problem for her was that Girls' State overlapped on a Sunday and she takes her Sunday Mass obligation very seriously. She asked for the accommodation of missing the "non-offensive," non-denominational service in order to attend Mass across the street. Her request was denied. She wrote a nice letter explaining that she wouldn't be attending because her conscience took priority.

Unfortunately, a Catholic flack for Girls' State decided to offer Margeaux some advice, consisting mostly of "get with the program."

Read about it here.

Is Obama another victim of the echo chamber?

The Daily Caller points out Obama's puerile effort to curry favor with Catholics by emphasizing form over content:

Amid polls showing that his efforts to regulate religious institutions have hurt his image among Catholics, President Barack Obama has begun touting his early ties to the church.

“My first job as a community organizer was with Catholic churches who taught me the power of kindness and commitment to others in neighborhoods,” he declared at a Hollywood fundraiser May 23.

“When I was a young community organizer, I was working with Catholic churches and they taught me that no government program can make as much of a difference as kindness and commitment on the part of neighbors and friends,” he said at a Colorado fundraiser earlier that day.

This new emphasis on his ties to the Catholic Church is a change from Obama’s previous speeches and fundraisers, where he did not mention that, early in his career, he was funded and supported by liberal Catholic officials in Chicago.

His Chicago supporters included a radical Catholic priest, Father Michael Pfleger, who has since been admonished by senior church officials for political advocacy.

Obama’s emphasis on his Catholic ties come as polls show a sharp drop in his support among swing-voting Catholics in battleground states after his February imposition of regulations on churches.

If you think about the fact that Obama's contacts with Catholics have been with people like Pfleger and other liberals who place their primary identity with liberalism rather than with the Church, you can see how Obama might have been rope-a-doped into his attack on Catholic doctrine. Why would he have any reason to think otherwise based on the self-described Catholics he interacted with?

Maybe because the pro-choicers killed off their unwanted or inconvenient babies?

According to Gallup:

"Pro-Choice" Americans at Record-Low 41%; Americans now tilt "pro-life" by nine-point margin, 50% to 41%."

The idea that there is a demographic tendency toward pro-life because (a) parents pass on values to children and (b) pro-life parents don't kill their babies was coined the "Roe Effect" by James Taranto. It may exist, but this rapid slide in the popularity of the pro-choice position since the election of Obama suggests that something else is going on.

The relative unpopularity of abortion may be a reason that the Obama administration decided to go after the Catholic Church on "contraception."