[lit-ideas] Bush and G-d's People
- From: Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 18:44:16 -0400
Dear Julie,
Re: "and then she actually said, "you know, a vote for Bush is a vote for God"
and I
wanted to be ill."
Yes, I agree...there does seem to be a bit of a 'disconnect' in the brains of
some of those sorts.
This article in the NY Times kind of made me ill.
Btw, If anyone has a television station owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Corp in
your area, you might be interested in knowing that not only have they given
lots to all the Bush campaign (the CEO has given the maximum), but they are
planning on airing the weekend before the election a new 'documentary' by the
Swift Boat weird ones ... In Kansas City, our WB network is owned by Sinclair.
(they own one station in St. Louis, too, but I have no idea what is happening
there...)
It was pretty disheartening to read about this morning. But, I just checked my
email (obviously <g>) and have had some updates--the KC4KERRY people had found
out the local advertisers and posted their phone numbers--so people had been
calling--I may stop by the Sylvan Learning Center on the way home...
Commerce Bank, Applebees, Sylvan Learning Center, and someone else...are the
advertisers. Commerce Bank has already stated that they will pull their
advertising.
I don't know if a station managed here but owned by someone else has the
authority to pull something like that, but if they do not have the advertising
for it...well, at least they would have to pay themselves for it...We will see.
New York Times
October 12, 2004
RELIGION
Group of Bishops Using Influence to Oppose Kerry
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
ENVER, Oct. 9 - For Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, the highest-ranking Roman
Catholic prelate in Colorado, there is only one way for a faithful Catholic to
vote in this presidential election, for President Bush and against Senator John
Kerry.
"The church says abortion is a foundational issue,'' the archbishop explained
to a group of Catholic college students gathered in a sports bar here in this
swing state on Friday night. He stopped short of telling them whom to vote for,
but he reminded them of Mr. Kerry's support for abortion rights. And he pointed
out the potential impact his re-election could have on Roe v. Wade.
"Supreme Court cases can be overturned, right?" he asked.
Archbishop Chaput, who has never explicitly endorsed a candidate, is part of a
group of bishops intent on throwing the weight of the church into the elections.
Galvanized by battles against same-sex marriage and stem cell research and
alarmed at the prospect of a President Kerry - who is Catholic but supports
abortion rights - these bishops and like-minded Catholic groups are blanketing
churches with guides identifying abortion, gay marriage and the stem cell
debate as among a handful of "non-negotiable issues."
To the dismay of liberal Catholics and some other bishops, traditional church
concerns about the death penalty or war are often not mentioned.
Archbishop Chaput has discussed Catholic priorities in the election in 14 of
his 28 columns in the free diocesan newspaper this year. His archdiocese has
organized voter registration drives in more than 40 of the largest parishes in
the state and sent voter guides to churches around the state. Many have
committees to help turn out voters and are distributing applications for
absentee ballots.
In an interview in his residence here, Archbishop Chaput said a vote for a
candidate like Mr. Kerry who supports abortion rights or embryonic stem cell
research would be a sin that must be confessed before receiving Communion.
"If you vote this way, are you cooperating in evil?" he asked. "And if you know
you are cooperating in evil, should you go to confession? The answer is yes."
The efforts of Archbishop Chaput and his allies are converging with a concerted
drive for conservative Catholic voters by the Bush campaign. It has spent four
years cultivating Catholic leaders, organizing more than 50,000 volunteers and
hiring a corps of paid staff members to increase Catholic turnout. The campaign
is pushing to break the traditional allegiance of Catholic voters to the
Democratic Party, an affiliation that began to crumble with Ronald Reagan 24
years ago.
Catholics make up about a quarter of the electorate, and many conservative
Catholics are concentrated in swing states, pollsters say. Conservatives
organizers say they are working hard because the next president is quite likely
to name at least one new Supreme Court justice.
Catholic prelates have publicly clashed with Catholic Democrats like former
Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York and Geraldine A. Ferraro, the former
representative and vice-presidential candidate.
But never before have so many bishops so explicitly warned Catholics so close
to an election that to vote a certain way was to commit a sin.
Less than two weeks ago, Archbishop Raymond L. Burke of St. Louis issued just
such a statement. Bishop Michael J. Sheridan of Colorado Springs and Archbishop
John J. Myers of Newark have both recently declared that the obligation to
oppose abortion outweighs any other issue.
In theological terms, these bishops and the voter guides argue that abortion
and the destruction of embryos are categorically wrong under church doctrine.
War and even the death penalty can in certain circumstances be justified.
But it is impossible to know how many bishops share this view, and there is
resistance from a sizable wing of the church that argues that voting solely on
abortion slights Catholic teaching on a range of other issues, including war,
poverty, the environment and immigration.
Liberal Catholics contend that the church has traditionally left weighing the
issues to the individual conscience. Late in the campaign, these Catholics have
begun to mount a counterattack, belatedly and with far fewer resources.
In diocesan newspapers in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, they are buying
advertisements with the slogan "Life Does Not End at Birth." Organizers of the
campaign say it is supported by 200 Catholic organizations, among them orders
of nuns and brothers.
"We are looking at a broader picture, a more global picture," said Bishop
Gabino Zavala, an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles who is president of Pax
Christi USA, a Catholic peace group that initiated the statement. "If you look
at the totality of issues as a matter of conscience, someone could come to the
decision to vote for either candidate."
In the presidential debate on Friday, Mr. Kerry discussed his religious
beliefs. "I was an altar boy," he said. "But I can't take what is an article of
faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn't share that article of
faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever."
Alexia Kelley, director for religious outreach for the Democratic National
Committee, said Mr. Kerry's policies reflected overall Catholic teachings.
The Republican Party is betting that many observant Catholics will disagree.
The National Catholic Reporter reported that that on a visit to the pope this
year Mr. Bush asked Vatican officials directly for help in lining up American
bishops in support of conservative cultural issues.
For four years, the party has held weekly conference calls with a
representative of the White House for prominent Catholic conservatives. To ramp
up the Catholic campaign last summer, the party dispatched its chairman, Ed
Gillespie, and a roster well-known Catholic Republicans on a speaking tour to
Catholic groups throughout the swing states.
The party has recruited an undisclosed number of Catholic field coordinators
who earn $2,500 a month, along with up to $500 a month for expenses to increase
conservative Catholic turnout.
In an interview this week from Albuquerque, where he was rallying Catholic
outreach workers, Leonard A. Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist
Society, a conservative legal group, who has taken the role of informal adviser
to Mr. Bush's campaign on Catholic issues, said Republicans hoped that Mr. Bush
could draw even more of the Catholic vote than Reagan, who attracted 54 percent
when he ran for re-election in 1984. Mr. Bush received just under half of the
Catholic vote in 2000. In a Pew Research poll this month, 42 percent of white
Catholics favored Mr. Bush, 29 percent favored Mr. Kerry, and 27 percent were
undecided.
"I can't think of another time in recent political history where a political
party and a campaign have paid more attention to faithful Catholics," Mr. Leo
said.
How the bishops' guidance or the new voter guides are playing in the pews
remains to be seen. In a poll for Time magazine in June, 76 percent of
Catholics said the church's position on abortion made no difference in their
decisions about voting. But in a New York Times poll conducted over the summer,
71 percent of Catholics favored some restrictions on abortion, compared with 64
percent of the general public.
Republican strategists say Catholics and others who attend religious services
at least once a week tend to be more conservative. Fifty-three percent of those
Catholics supported Mr. Bush in 2000 compared with 47 percent of all Catholics,
according to exit polls. The Rev. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests
for Life of Staten Island, N.Y., says priests with his group are going from
church to church in swing states like Florida, giving fellow priests sample
homilies for each Sunday in November, inserts for church bulletins and voter
guides.
Father Pavone spoke by telephone from Aberdeen, S.D., where he said he was
meeting with dozens of priests and nuns to teach them how to organize
transportation to take parishioners to the polls. Addressing abortion, he said
he told audiences, "One can't hold public office and say it's O.K. to kill some
of the public."
In past elections, the main voter guide distributed in many Catholic churches
was a questionnaire from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that
listed candidates' stands on dozens of issues. This year, conservative Catholic
groups sought to derail the questionnaire, because it appeared to give equal
weight to each issue. When neither the Bush nor Kerry campaigns responded to
the questions by the deadline, the bishops' conference abandoned the effort, a
spokesman, Msgr. Francis Maniscalco, said.
Many parishes are having free-for-alls over what materials to use in helping
Catholics think through their choices. Many bishops are using a document the
bishops developed last year, "Faithful Citizenship." It tells Catholic voters
to consider a range of issues and vote their consciences. Other parishes are
instead using a guide from a conservative Web site, Catholic Answers, at
www.catholic .com. The guide says it is a sin to vote for a candidate who
supports any one of five "non-negotiable issues," abortion, euthanasia,
embryonic stem cell research, human cloning and homosexual marriage.
Archbishop Chaput says he has had no contact with either campaign or political
party. He says his sole contact with the White House has been his appointment
to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. The prelate
acknowledged that his communications director, Sergio Gutierrez, had worked in
the Bush administration, but Archbishop Chaput said he had known Mr. Gutierrez
long before that.
It was only logical for the Republicans to view the church as a "natural ally"
on cultural issues, the archbishop said. He said that would end if a Republican
candidate supported abortion rights.
"We are not with the Republican Party," he said. "They are with us."
Mr. Kerry's Catholicism is a special issue for the church, Archbishop Chaput
said. To remain silent while a President Kerry supported stem cell research
would seem cowardly, he said. The Rev. Andrew Kemberling, pastor of St. Thomas
More Church near here, said he agreed with the archbishop, but he acknowledged
that parishioners sometimes accused him of telling them how to vote. He said
his reply was: "We are not telling them how to vote. We are telling them how to
take Communion in good conscience."
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