Posted on 08/01/2010 12:55:17 AM PDT by GonzoII
Republican is not right wing. It is a bit better than the Democrat, but we have not had a true conservative political party. We may get something we can work with in the Tea Party. Like I said, I am hopeful.
The Catholics I see and interact with are conservative. The Church teaches all conservative things: traditional family, traditional sexual morality, centrality of religion to public life, self-government. American Catholics used to be blue-collar ethnics: the Irish, the Italians and the Poles who supported the Democrats because they felt that the Democrats were the party of the working class. For many of them to vote Democrat is a family tradition. This is changing, I think. In 2004 it was, everyone acknowledges, the Catholic swing block that carried Bush to victory over nominally-Catholic Kerry (remember a Catholic girl with the abortion question in the debate). In 2006 Obama knew how to hustle up Catholic support, and got some Catholic vote. I doubt he and his party would get much of that today.
I very much wish that the liberal Catholics — who oppose the Catholic Church on sexual morality, authority of the Church and women “ordination” for priesthood — would leave the Church and go to maybe Episcopalian Church that en masse shares their values. They are Catholics in name only, and their fake catholicism is dying.
Tell yourself whatever you want to but you can’t change the reality of what made America liberal, even FDR would have only had his normal two terms if Catholic devotion to his agenda had not overcome the majority Republican vote by Protestants in 1940 and 1944. The monsters of American presidential history are FDR, JFK, Lyndon Johnson and Obama.
Imagine the last 70 years of American leftist history if they could not elect radical left Presidents and liberal Congresses. Imagine how far to the right electioneering and political issues and the national dialogue would have moved, as the two parties had to compete without such a dependable, large liberal base for the left’s agenda. For that matter, go back to the 90 years before that even.
For conservatives, it is important to know who the opposition is, not pretend to not know because they are a group that you share a tribal identity with. We cannot fix what we cannot identify, and if we are to undo the damage that the Kennedys did opening the border flood gates to more Catholics, then we need to figure out how to get them to quit being so liberal and to start voting like Protestants that come from their same exact background. We need to figure out how to Americanize them or we will will continue to become a more Catholic and leftist nation.
Hopefully you were happy to see the Republicans finally win a tiny majority in the house in 1994, perhaps you wondered who had been driving congressional liberalism so effectively for the 60 years before. “Catholics were solidly Democratic in House elections from 1932 to 1992. Thus, the 1994 results were somewhat shocking as Republicans captured 52 per cent of the Catholic vote”
Sounds like your opposition is not to the Catholic Church but to liberal Catholics. I share that with you. In fac,t liberal Catholics trouble me more than they trouble you because they foul up my spiritual home as well as my national home.
“Broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many go therein.”
“Narrow is the way that leads to everlasting life, and few that go in.”
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