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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Thu. 10/28/04 07:31:41 AM
   
   

Golden Contra Kerry

Boston's congressman, a Catholic Democrat, supports Bush for president.

Plus, some other stuff.

Brian P. Golden writes a guest column at the Union-Leader, Oct. 26:

.... When considering core values issues, the choice for Catholics has not always been clear. But this year is a dramatic exception.
The Democrats offer Sen. John Kerry, a professed Catholic. You may have heard that Kerry’s own Democratic colleagues, by some creative measure, call him the “most Catholic” senator. That’s like calling Tony Soprano a devout Catholic because he shows up at Mass most Sundays and throws some bills in the collection plate. Catholics know better.
For 20 years, on matters most fundamental to Catholics, Kerry has been consistently wrong. Kerry was one of only 14 senators to vote against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. This year, he opposed the federal marriage amendment, which would give the American people a voice in the definition of marriage, rather than leave it to the whims of activist judges like those in Massachusetts. Kerry has even castigated church leaders for weighing-in on the marriage issue, calling it “inappropriate” and a breach of the “separation of church and state.” ....
In 1960, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts inspired many first, second, and third generation Catholic immigrants. John Kennedy’s election was a final blow to the Know Nothings and their descendants. But, in those days, while Democrats and Republicans were debating the general direction of the nation, there was broad consensus on the central cultural issues. Now that the consensus has vanished, we must choose carefully. And while our faith should not direct our choice, it should certainly inform our choice.
This year, with another Democratic senator from Massachusetts running for President, many more Catholics will be avoiding the Democratic lever because the Democratic nominee shows little regard for what matters most to Catholics. This year, the more Catholics know, the clearer the choice becomes....

Golden is interviewed at National Review Online, Oct. 27 (quoted ellipsis in original):

.... NRO: There's a distinct difference between John F. Kerry's approach on faith and public life and John F. Kennedy's, isn't there? Do people see that?
Rep. Golden: If you look at it objectively you can see a profound difference. When John Kennedy spoke to people about his religion, he was essentially saying, "I'm a Catholic, but don't hold it against me." John Kerry essentially says, "I'm a Catholic, but don't hold me to it."
It's one thing if you don't believe that human life begins at conception. However, John Kerry admits he believes that life begins at conception but won't do anything to protect it in law. How does he square his conscience with his official antipathy to all legislation protecting human life? John Kennedy said that "if the time should ever come... 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 likewise." Can you imagine that coming from John Kerry? Senator Kerry's willingness to place political expedience before conscience is disturbing no matter what your faith....

Also, NRO has a review of The American Catholic Voter, dated Nov. 1:

.... To read much in Catholic political commentary is to be told that there really are distinctive Catholic voters out there in America. These voters are strong on social justice and squishy on the war in Iraq. They are unambiguously opposed to abortion, but they recognize that a reverence for life requires contemplation of other issues, particularly the death penalty. They can always come up with a fitting quotation from St. Francis de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life when they have to, and they've read most of Graham Greene's novels. They're Irish, they went to Jesuit schools, and every one of them has a sister or a cousin who was a Maryknoll nun until she resigned from the convent in 1979 and began to teach women's studies at a college in upstate New York.
These Catholic voters have been uneasily registered Democrats since they were in their cradles, and they remember with wryly embarrassed nostalgia the enormous success of the corrupt Catholic Democratic machine politics of James Michael Curley in Boston and Tammany Hall's Boss Murphy in New York.
When Ted Kennedy said in 1996 that he remembered "'Help Wanted' signs in stores when I was growing up saying 'No Irish Need Apply'" — despite the fact that he was born to wealth in 1932 — it mostly proved just how long an urban legend can last. But all these Catholic voters do genuinely have a sense of themselves as something of the underdog in American public life. They remember why Catholics had to build their own social institutions — schools, colleges, hospitals, orphanages, and all the rest — and they remember that these institutions were constucted not with dollars from millionaires but with pennies and nickels from women who spent their days on their knees scrubbing floors for the Protestant upper classes.
American Catholic voters are liberal about government in a way no economic or evangelical conservative can understand, and conservative about morals in a way no socialist or New Age liberal can grasp. They were pro-labor and anti-Communist when both those things really counted, and they remain committed to the possibility of applying the intellectual and ethical fruits of their faith to the messy life of politics.
One further thing needs to be said about these Catholic voters: They don't actually exist. Maybe they never did, at least in the ideal type sketched by Catholic political writers, but certainly we haven't seen many of them since the 1950s. Indeed, by every statistical measure, Catholics are indistinguishable from other voters in the American political scene....

Finally, Jeff Jacoby looks at the "religification of John Kerry", at the Boston Globe, Oct. 26:

.... Voters will have to judge for themselves whether Kerry's newly prominent religiosity is genuine or merely a facade adopted for political purposes. Those political purposes are certainly compelling — according to an August poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 85 percent of Americans say religion is important in their lives and 72 percent say it is important to them that a president have strong religious beliefs.
But there is something wrong, it seems to me, with Kerry's glib equation of higher public spending and more lavish government programs with fulfilling one's religious obligations. He cited Matthew 25:40 — ''Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me'' — and interpreted it to mean that ''the ethical test of a good society is how it treats its most vulnerable members.'' That would be a reasonable understanding if Kerry had meant that each of us individually is called upon to reach out to those in need.
But Kerry immediately turned Jesus' admonition into little more than a call for expanding the welfare state and increasing government regulation. ''That's why we have to raise the minimum wage, ensure equal pay, and finish the job of welfare reform,'' he said. He quoted an earlier verse in Matthew (''I was hungry and you fed me; thirsty and you gave me a drink'') and read it to mean that America must ''take action now to cut the cost of energy so that already overburdened seniors in the colder parts of our country can afford heat in the winter.''
I'm not an expert on Christian thought, but it seems unlikely to me that Jesus was taking a position on minimum wage laws or energy conservation when he called on his followers to do more for "the least of these." ....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 07:31:41 AM
Categorized as Political & Religious.

   

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