[denydenydeny]

Gotta say, I don’t understand Obama’s election calculus. Are there really that many minorities+yuppies in America? Because he’s alienated everyone else.

[Verginius Rufus]

It's possible that he's just doing this to prove to his base that he means well, and will back down if necessary. But he may figure that the percentage of voters who will decide their vote on this issue is too small to worry about.

Even among the bishops, if Obama paints the election as between helping the poor and being nice to illegal aliens (himself) and helping the rich and being mean to illegals (the Republicans), he could get a lot of their votes despite this issue.

In my parish the bishop's letter (almost identical to the one from the Bishop of Phoenix posted here a couple of days ago) was included as an insert in the bulletin, and part of the sermon was about it, although it wasn't read out in its entirety. Maybe the assumption was that we can read.