Posted on 03/01/2012 11:54:47 AM PST by marshmallow
(CNN) -- Sen. Rick Santorum, who is campaigning to become America's second Catholic president, disagrees from the bottom of his gut with the first Catholic to hold the office.
In October, he told a Catholic university audience that when he read the 1960 speech in which John F. Kennedy said: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," he "almost threw up." More recently, he elaborated on his dyspeptic condition in an ABC television interview, calling JFK's credo "an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960."
But the Baptist ministers who witnessed Kennedy's speech surely felt differently. In the 1960s, evangelical leaders were not concerned that Kennedy was too secular; they were concerned that he was too Catholic.
For most of American history, the Protestant majority has regarded Catholics with deep suspicion. Many of the 13 colonies banned Catholics from public office and prohibited Catholic rituals. Priests were banished and sometimes executed.
After independence, the Constitution protected Catholics from the worst persecutions of the Colonial period, but discrimination persisted, and anti-Catholic paranoia raged with an intensity that would have made Glenn Beck blush. One popular book, "Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States," warned of a secret Jesuit plot to deliver America to the Austrian empire. Its author was Samuel Morse, co-inventor of the telegraph.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Thats right folks. We've just imagined all of those court rulings, laws and vitriol in the mainstream media directed against Christians and expressions of their faith over the past 40n years.
Just recently we imagined that Barack Obama mandated that Catholics violate a major theological precept of their's.
Speaking of imaginary, how about that constitutional grounded principle of 'seperation of church and state'?
?? I haven't seen that any of the literature.
Well, yes. The Baptist ministers were worried that if elected President, JFK would be a puppet of the Pope, since their view was that Catholics have to do whatever the Pope tells them, no matter what.
So Kennedy said, “separation of Church and State,” which is NOT the same things as “there shall be no ESTABLISHMENT of religion.” Meaning, no official national religion, as there was in England at that time. Kennedy kept his word, and governed like a liberal atheist.
Now, the situation is entirely different. Most Evangelicals realize that the dire threat today is not the Pope, but the Communist big government dictators who want to destroy Christianity, root and branch, Catholic and Protestant.
Catholics and Evangelicals can work together against that threat, while still disagreeing about other issues.
Incidentally, Gingrich is now a Catholic, too.
Many evangelicals hated JFK not for his Catholicism but for being soft on Communism, pro-Third World, pro-union and a welfare-state socialist.
It is worth noting that the founder of CNN, Ted Turner, was humanist of the year (American Humanist Association) in 1990
This ‘imaginary’ enemy is very real,... real people, real ideas, real culture war.
Before my time but I doubt Evangelicals HATED JFK.
Also it seems the secular press has now pretty much elevated the term Evangelical to cover all Protests.
all Protestants that is.
True, JFK was a pro-immigration lefty, and Protestants, who had only voted Democrat twice in history, voted for JFK in about the same numbers Democrats had gotten in recent elections.
JFK got 43% of the Protestant vote which was better than the 42% of 1952 and 1956.
Well, yes. The Baptist ministers were worried that if elected President, JFK would be a puppet of the Pope, since their view was that Catholics have to do whatever the Pope tells them, no matter what.
For the Southern baptists the key worry was that JFK would follow the Popes teachings on segregation (my understanding was that "Jim Crow" had been declared abhorrent), this speech was JFK assuring the Southern clergy that segregation would not be interfered with by the federal government if he was elected.
The removal of the historical context of this speech is part of the popular press and much of the left leaning academia whitewashing of the history of the Democrat party.
I don't get this guy. He could write an article that gave the facts and subtly influenced readers to believe what he wants them to. But he has to show his hand with that "imaginary enemy" comment.
I guess the point isn't to give the facts, or even to influence readers, but to put down his enemies, even at the cost of revealing his agenda and losing his influence.
It's like that with a lot of bloggers: what motivates them is the emotional release of expressing their hostile feelings. But why any news agency would give them space and a paycheck is harder to figure out.
I would be interested if anyone has documentation on priests being executed in colonial America. AFAIK, the only executions for religious reasons were of Quakers by Massachusetts.
A priest might have been executed for a capital crime, other than that of being a priest, of course.
How many people who voted in 1960 are still alive and voting?
Immigration was not an issue at all in 1960. Kennedy was thought to be a strong anti-communist. Bobby had worked for Joe McCarthy.Even the unions, at least the Catholics in the unions were known to be strongly anti-communist. One of JFK’s loudest complaints was about the “missle gap” between the USA and the USSR. And as for the Houston speech, it was aimed as much at the liberal Protestants, such as Oxnam, the head of the Methodists as at more fundamentalist Southern Protestants. Religion was a big, big issue. Kennedy won a big round when he took the West Virginia primary, where ole Joe bought off a lot of local democratic officials. West Virginia was strongly protestant, and Hubert was angered because he knew this neutralized the religious issue.
Bull, one of JFK’s (and the left’s) big goals was to replace Americans with non-Protestant foreigners. He even wrote a book on it in 1958, it helped drive the Catholic vote for him.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
Not a big issue sixty years ago. The immigrants he was thinking about were displaces refugees, many of them from countries taken over by the Communists. For one thing, the suppression of the Hungarian revolution had made the country much more open to changing the immigration laws. Hardly a left-wing initiative. As for Mexico, the Eisenhower administrative had worked out the bracero plan. In any case, looking back, I contend that the biggest reason for the immigration problem we have now is what I call the ZPG mentality which ended the baby-boom and has so greatly reduced the Euro-American population in this country.
Again, LOL.
Not a big issue? You think that JFK just wrote that book in 1958 for nothing, and that only a quick seven years later the most destructive legislation in American history was signed into law?
There were two reasons for the McCarran-Act, and both similar to the restriction acts of thirty years before. One was a fear of communism, the other the desire to maintain the ethnic balance of 1920. But now there was a recognition of the needs of political refugees, of the relatives of war brides etc. There was also something you forget: the successful integration of the children of the earlier immigrants, so that the earlier fear of being swamped was lessened. One of the cliches of war movies and movies about the war made afterwards, was the platoon consisting of a Kelly, a Picard, a Krauss, and Polaski, a Martinez. The American power to assimilate seemed strong. The Baby=boom swelled the ranks of the americanized. Who know that the next generation would stop having children?
Evidently you are just a pro-immigration guy.
In the 1960s overpopulation in America was the concern. America was already approaching 200 million and we did not want to become like China and India, which were constantly discussed as having problems due to their huge populations, it was a common discussion in our public schools.
The left knew what they were doing when they changed immigration to non-white, non-Protestant, and endless and functionally unlimited, conservatives fought it but the left controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress.
Americans never wanted to be a nation of a billion stressed out, crowded peoples with no common language or culture, the left knew what they were doing, and why.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
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