Posted on 11/10/2012 8:42:39 AM PST by NYer
The most anti-Catholic American president ever scooped up the Catholic vote again, winning half of all Catholics. This is down four points from 2008, but it is still an impressive feat after four years of persecuting the Church.
Historians will no doubt record the grim irony of his achievement with some wonder. He has now won the Catholic vote twice and boasts an honorary degree in law from one of the Church's most prestigious universities, all while breaking her. Saul Alinsky, who pioneered the technique of bamboozling and exploiting the Church, would be proud.
Obama also won the religious vote in general over Romney 50 to 48, another remarkable accolade for a party that tried to remove God from its platform earlier this year. That the Republicans couldn't win the religious vote amidst Obama's open war on religion is either a testimony to its ineptitude or calls into question the Romney campaign's decision to focus almost exclusively on the economy. The last Republican to win, George W. Bush, thumped John Kerry in the religious vote 51 to 48.
Romney fared better than Obama amongst regular churchgoers. But Obama still managed to poach a fair number of these from him. Almost four out of ten church-going Catholics voted for Obama and 55 percent of Catholics who go to Mass a "few times a month" voted for him, according to the Pew Forum.
The work of Obama's allies within the Church paid off. Obama's Fifth Columnists steered money into his campaign (Jesuit college and universities raised donations for him), honored his HHS secretary at Georgeown even after she hatched the contraceptive mandate, erected pro-Obama Catholic front groups like Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, motivated Catholic college students to get out and vote for him, and spread propaganda through Sisters Carol Keehan and Simone Campbell that Obama posed no threat to the Church.
Hispanic Catholics, under the tutelage of the Catholic left, voted for Obama over Romney 75 to 21. That was up three points from 2008.
Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, California, who is Congressman Paul Ryan's nemesis, complained earlier in the year that the bishops had given too much aid to "anti-Obama" forces. If that only were true. Once again, the bishops proved feckless and divided. Some bishops raised their voices against Obama; most didn't. Nor did the bishops counter Joe Biden's misrepresentations of "Catholic social doctrine" and "de fide" abortion teaching late in the campaign.
Plenty of mixed signals were sent: depending on which bishop was speaking, Biden and Paul Ryan were either equally good Catholics or equally bad ones. One bishop wrote to his flock to tell them that Ryan was as "inconsistent" in his adherence to Church teaching as Biden. Such bishops served as useful idiots for Biden, who used a campaign commercial featuring images of a crucifix to sell voters on the idea that the Obama administration embodied Catholic social justice.
The Obama campaign was worried enough about the Catholic vote to cut a few ads and set up a Catholics for Obama web site. But given the mixed signals of the bishops and given the unwillingness of Mitt Romney to hit Obama on his secularism, liberals didn't have much to fear. Obama shrewdly sensed that the HHS mandate would prove a greater political boon than liability. It nudged up the female vote and didn't cost him the Catholic one.
The Obama campaign had found a fallen-away Catholic, Michael Wear, to serve as its "faith vote coordinator." According to CNN, Wear was moved from the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to that position in order to put out fires related to the HHS-mandate backlash.
George Soros-backed Catholic front groups also went to work putting out those fires, whose operatives enjoyed ties to Catholic chanceries. Until earlier this year, one of the US bishops's chief political advisers was John Carr, a former White House staffer under President Jimmy Carter. (Carr organized for Carter an event that openly touted support for "abortion" and the use of the federal government's power to promote "family planning" and "homosexual rights.")
Obama's divide-and-conquer strategy was bound to work again in a Church still salted with such operatives. The unholy alliance that he formed with the Church in 1980s Chicago remains intact.
I do think many Catholics are somewhat like Jews in this way: they keep the label even after they lose their faith. A totally non-observent Jew or Catholic will still “identify” with the religion of their childhood (”Sure I’m Jewish, Bar Mitzva in 1992” “Well of course I’m Catholic, with a name like ‘Stan Cyterski’, what else would I be? I was an altar boy at St. Casimir’s!”) whereas an ex-Presbyterian will just describe themselves as “unchurched” or “none”.
I brought up St. John Fisher to my RCIA students just last Thursday. I pointed out that some bishops will sell out to avoid the axe -— others, just to avoid the tax.
I made a similar comment on another thread. Even in a small parish, we see how this plays out. From time to time, a lapsed family will return to the fold and ask to have their children (ages range from 1 to 13), baptized. Or, a family will return with their young children who were baptized but never received First Communion. After meeting with the pastor who does an excellent job of addressing the reasons they left, he insists the children be enrolled in Religious Education classes. After one year of attending classes and attending weekly mass, the children receive the Sacraments of First Penance and First Communion and the family disappears, never to be seen again.
Hence these children grow up being told they are "catholic" but have little or any understanding of their faith. As adults, they are counted among the 'catholics' on exit polls.
As government grows, fewer people turn to God in times of distress. They trust in government, not God, so much so, that they pay little heed to politics. I also believe that our contemporary society, so accustomed to texting, has reduced its patience with political debate down to the level of believing sound bites. Not surprisingly, this year's election featured some very negative images and short statements that people believed. The msm aided and abetted the Democrats in projecting negative screed.
The Catholic vote has always been democrat, the realization of some white Catholics that they should start voting republican, came too late to seriously damage the relationship between the democrat party and the denomination.
No one can figure out the black vote, no one, (well, at least no one wants to try).
While the Catholics have always been devoted to the democrat party and have only voted republican 5 or 6 times in history, blacks have voted republican many times in history, in fact in every single election until the 1936 election, when they suddenly reversed to becoming a permanent pro-democrat voting block.
As strange and unexplained as the black vote is, whether they are protestant, Catholic, or non-religious, or Muslim, it hasn’t thrown the collectively measured, non-catholic Christian vote, into the democrat column.
Blacks have black churches many of which we don’t even know the name of, or what they instill into people that are members of them, but the members of the single denomination called “Roman Catholic” are a very dependable voting block for democrats, and always have been, and they are a single, denomination, under a single authority.
Seems to me the lesson is that the blacks are first and foremost black. The color of their skin is all that matters. MLK would be disgusted.
Speaking of that - I’m wondering what happened to Mia Love? She seemed to be a great candidate. Are the Republicans the only ones who can’t elect a black? The rats elect Jesse Jackson JR while he is in the nuthouse and with big ethical problems but Alan West and Mia Love can’t be in office?
I hate the rats.
That has nothing to do with anything, renouncing Christ is a whole different category, that applies equally to all Christians whether Catholic or Protestant, for the few people that do that, then they are not included as Christians naturally, Protestants that drift away from church, are still Christians, and still Protestants, they just no longer are members of a denomination, even FR has many like that. A Lutheran that no longer wants to be a member of that church, yet still believes in God, is no longer a Lutheran, but he is still counted as a Protestant, the same as an ex-catholic, he would be called a protestant, only Catholics who considers themselves catholic, are counted as such. Pollsters rarely even ask what denomination they are, for instance America's second largest denomination is Southern Baptist, they voted 80% republican in 2008, while Catholics, (the largest denomination) voted 46% republican.
Protestant in these polls, means anyone that considers themselves part of Christianity, but not a member of the single denomination of the Roman Catholics.
Protestant means baptized or nonbaptized people, church members or non church member people, people who have never belonged to any church, or that have drifted away from a particular church and no longer consider themselves a part of that church, but they still consider themselves believers in God, rather than being an atheist, it of course includes all the actual members of any and all Protestant churches including Obama's, Catholic means only members of the Catholic denomination.
Like every other group in the country, the Catholic Church in America is too busy distancing itself from "those awful rednecks" to give a hoot about any attack on the Church from the Left. They've been courting the Black community for years with a "civil rights" agenda and condemning "racism" (the only sin Blacks seem to acknowledge, and then only when they are the victims). In both racial and immigration issues rural white Southerners have proved a convenient whipping-boy.
Any group that spends so much time defending "halloween" and ridiculing creationism (a topic of apparent non-concern to Black Protestants) in order to make sure no one confuses them with "those awful people" simply doesn't have the 'ovnayim to fight against the Left.
Considering that the only country in history to be truly Fascist (with a captial "F") was Italy, that's a strange word for you to be using to describe anti-Catholic Protestants.
I understand you are a former Lutheran and you're doubtfully very embarrassed by the behavior of your current church. I humbly suggest that constant redneck-bashing in the name of that Church is not only counterproductive, but one reason the Church in America is so loath to attack the Left.
So your main criticism is with those Catholics who are out of communion with the Church, who deny the teaching authority of their Bishops and Church, those who choose for themselves what is right and wrong base only upon the secular manipulation of their own reason and emotions....you know, Protestants.
Peace be with you.
That sure didn’t have anything to do with my point, you can make it easier if you just post your vanities to yourself.
haha.. outstanding.
Quit typing and go back to using both hands to search for your butt. Maybe this time you’ll find it.
I've never equated Protestants with fascists but it's extremely interesting to see just which of the moles pop out of their hole to make that claim.
Got any other total distortions of my opinions you'd like to toss out at the moment?
How about another few comments on how all Christians are worthless scum as you've stated in the past?
Or are you now saying you want to defend those Protestants you characterize as "rednecks"?
It's tough to do when you know as well as I do that no matter HOW qualified they may be,they'd be portrayed as nothing but Uncle Toms or our "tokens" by the left and their propaganda wing (formerly known as the tv network news).
Still angry, buddy? You got what you wanted. Cheer up. Maybe you're still hung over from celebrating?
It sounds like you are trying to decide how people should think of themselves, rather than letting them do so themselves.
I'll grant that a lot of people who don't belong to any church may consider themselves still Protestant. I'm just saying they're less likely to do so than Catholics who may be "cultural Catholics" without accepting the dogmas of their church, somewhat like Jews who may consider themselves Jewish without having any belief in God at all.
Once upon a time, Protestants were very similar. In some parts of the world (Scotland, Ireland) or in some parts of the country they still are, but that intense identification began to decline among Protestants before it did among Catholics.
Look at the Pew graphic. The category for those who don't fall into the other categories is "religiously unaffiliated." It's not "atheist" or "agnostic" or "unbeliever," though people who describe themselves as such on other occasions would be considered "religiously unaffiliated" by Pew. I submit that a lot of those people were born Protestant. More of them were Protestants than Catholics, I would say, even when you take their proportions in the population into account.
Now that's changing. More Catholics are joining the "religiously unaffiliated" category, but for a long time lukewarm, unreligious, even atheistic Catholics still considered themselves "Catholic" to a greater degree than Protestants did.
Here is a map of the predominant religions by state. In those four Northwestern states "No Religion" or "Unaffiliated" is the top choice. I don't think most of those people were born Catholic.
Things are changing, though. Lately, the most "unchurched" region of the country is Northern New England. A lot of former Catholics have joined former Protestants in those states. But there's always a time lag on these things.
There is no need for the personal attack and mind reading.
People that don’t belong to any church, perhaps never have, that probably have never been baptized, and that might not even know what “Protestant” is, but who consider themselves Christians, are placed into the Protestant category, if they are not members of the Catholic church.
People who don’t have any particular religion and are not Christians, but believe in a deity, or deities, are “religiously unaffiliated, which often includes atheists, depending on how detailed the poll is. PEW seems to have lumped in the atheists with the religiously unaffiliated, so far.
Catholic, of course, means Catholic. Those who are members of the Catholic denomination.
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