Romney’s Catholic conversion
The GOP candidate makes a hard pitch to Catholics, and the church is pushing its members to line up behind him
Friday, Aug 10, 2012 02:40 PM EDT
By Irin Carmon
“Who shares your values? President Obama used his healthcare plan to declare war on religion,” intones the ad released by the Romney campaign this week. That’s followed by footage of Romney talking about Pope John Paul II in Poland, that same pope shaking Lech Walesa’s hand, that same Lech Walesa endorsing Romney. Romney practically is the pope, OK? And he doesn’t like the preventive care provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
It’s been in the making for months, but this week clinched it: Both sides of the presidential election are running hard on “women’s rights” versus “religious liberty,” and that’s not going away. Romney was once reluctant to get drawn into this particular fold, before the continued presence of Rick Santorum in the primary essentially forced his hand. But now, in an apparent sign that he hasn’t closed the deal with his own base, he’s back on the cause of allowing employers – even private, non-religiously affiliated ones – to deny their employees coverage for contraception and what is falsely termed “abortion-inducing drugs.”
Obama, on the other hand, has been here for awhile, from the unwavering support for the provision (lobbied for by pro-choice and other health organizations) to giving a call to Sandra Fluke – the same woman whose very presence caused the GOP to wildly veer off the message of “Obama saying that we must be a less Christian nation” to “only sluts want their insurance to cover birth control.” The Romney ad coincided with Fluke introducing the president in Colorado Wednesday.
What’s fascinating (and terrifying) is that the wedge issue here is no longer abortion, regardless of how badly the Christian right wants to define abortion as the potential blocking of a fertilized egg and ignore the evidence that emergency contraception most likely doesn’t even do it. At a political moment where Personhood supporter Mike Huckabee has already declared, “We are all Catholics,” and an evangelical college is joining in the lawsuits against the provision, it’s broadly clear that the antiabortion slippery slope has inevitably skidded to birth control, where Catholics have always (officially) been. Romney, having such historically weak standing with this increasingly definitive “social issue,” seems to feel compelled to follow them all the way down there.
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/10/romneys_catholic_conversion/
Luke 4 16:21
14 Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news of him spread throughout the whole region.
15 He taught in their synagogues and was praised by all.
16 He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read
17 and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
19 and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”
20 Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
21 He said to them, “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
This is not Romney's year.
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CBHagman
(16,992 posts)...as the bishops are already on record as denouncing his budget proposal.
