The Kennedys, virtually all Irishmen in New England, and the modern Irish, make me ashamed to be Irish.
Over a century ago, the Catholic hierarchy and the laity threw themselves into the arms of the party of slavery, the KKK, and Jim Crow, and they have largely continued to snuggle in those arms as that party became the party of baby-murder and sodomy.
A good article and paper on this is The Curley Effect: Using Redistributive Politics to Shape a Left-Wing Electorate.