Infinite Monkeys

A Word on Sobran

In an earlier Blog, I posited these two questions:

- Which candidate better reflects Catholic values, Kerry, a lifelong Catholic, or Bush, an elite child of east-coast mainline protestants who personally kicked the hooch later in life after "accepting Jesus Christ as personal lord and savior"?

- What are we to make of Republican and Bush administration, Karl Rov-ish "outreaches" to Catholics? - what do their methods and strategies tell us about these Republicans and what they must think of Catholics?

Appropo to these two questions, especially the second, Joseph Sobran, in a relevant missive, asserts this: "Kerry’s election would be a misfortune for faithful Catholics. Catholic laymen should tell him what they should have been telling every phony Catholic pol all these years: 'If you’re going to call yourself one of us, you’d better act like one of us.'"

An interesting charge, more and more common from the right, as it regards Catholics. The charge seems to make two assumptions:

1. There is a "Catholic" vote
2. That vote is obviously right-leaning, as if Catholicism obviously lends itself to right-of-center political thought

In fact, as the National Catholic Reporter points out, in the coming election, roughly 25 million of America's Catholics will vote. About 12.5 million will vote for Kerry, about 12.5 million will vote for Bush.

I'm reminded of an Elmo episode my 1-year old watches, where Elmo talks to himself, only in 3rd person, "Elmo wonders ..." he says.

Well, Dan wonders:

- What do Catholic voting statistics state, if anything but that there is no such thing as a "Catholic" vote? Or that the nation's 60 million Catholics form entirely too large a group to place into any ideological pidgeonhole?
- Who do these clowns think they are, to try and speak for millions of Catholics?
- How offensive are these electoral strategies, whether peddled by right or left, that characterize entire demographies as if they were one mind?

Just this morning on NPR I heard a pollster relating that with 53% of hispanics supporting Kerry, and 38% supporting Bush, "both" candidates should have "more support" from hispanics. By the pollster's tortured logic, Kerry, because that's obvious, and Bush, because earlier he had greater hispanic support.

What?

So all issues are settled if you are hispanic? All issues are settled if you are Catholic?

This racist and chauvanistic posture would be offensive enough by itself if the statistics didn't destroy it, but, but ...

Abortion - Not now, nor in 20, nor in 100 years, will this be made illegal, and if we were to turn into a theocratic military dictatorship in 2015 and ban abortion, it might reduce the number of abortions by 2/3rds, but it would simultaneously increase deaths due to botched illegal abortions 100-fold, and increase the misery of women in poverty and children born to poverty and underage mothers by an inverse-mastercard-"priceless" value that can't be measured.

So since that isn't going to happen and abortion is going to remain legal, to attempt to reduce abortion by way of making it illegal, is to sell a bill of goods.

George W. Bush knows this. Dubya knows this and he knows that to oppose abortion buys a feel-good vote, without costing him a thing.

Bill - O - goods.

Stem cell research - Dubya's position on stem cell research could at best be described as Bill Clinton's position on stem cell research. At worst, it could be described as confused.

Whatever it is, please don't conflate it with "the" "Catholic" position on stem cell research, whatever that is.

The environment - Bill Clinton wouldn't of allowed Kyoto to pass into law, and in doing so would have kept the agreement open for future concessions from other nations. Bill Clinton might have opened up ANWAR. But Bill Clinton would never have opened up ANWAR without a steep compromise from Republicans to tighten up fuel efficiency, automotive emissions and factory emissions standards. Bush will not succeed at opening up ANWAR, and he'll tighten emissions and efficiency requirements over Laura's dead body.

What's the "Catholic" position on the environment?

Poverty - reformation of welfare into the TANF programs has in many respects been a success, thank you Bill Clinton. That is, so long as one judges success by the number of families taken off of welfare roles and put into work. It is not clear, however, that the families moving out of welfare are able to break through the poverty barrier, working or not.

The statistical picture is a bit complicated, but looks something like this: the "middle middle" class is shrinking, growing more and more into the "upper middle" class. The "lower middle" class is also shrinking, and appears to be growing into both the "upper middle" and the "lower" class.

Translation:
Less people make 40-49K, and less people make 24-40K.
More people make 50-79K, and more people make <24K.

Left-wing interpretation - the middle class is shrinking, poverty is growing and the the upper class is getting ahead.
Right-wing interpretation - almost everyone's getting wealthier, some of the poor are getting poorer or else will never break out of abject poverty, not in this generation or the next. Why, again, does that bother you?

The right would have us turn a blind eye to the problem of poverty, pointing to statistics like these and the success of TANF in getting families off welfare.

We could turn the blind eye, but spend an afternoon in another part of town, one less blessed, just to remind yourself of how the "other half" lives. The experience may serve to remind that breaking out of poverty, with a family to raise, a vocational education and under $10/hour wages, is a feat approximating a natural miracle.

Kerry and Edwards argue that we, being such a rich society, rich as no previous society has been, owe something more to the working poor.

What's "the" "Catholic" position?

Immigration - no one even knows how many illegal immigrants from Central and South America there are in the U.S. Bush's solution: make them all "guest workers", whereby they will be allowed to work legally for 3 years, but then must return to their country of origin without the possibility of U.S. citizenship.

I keep wondering where the 14th amendment, and that inconvenient clause about "equal protection of the laws", is supposed to fit in.

One wonders how it is possible to have "guest workers" who are not simultaneously second-class citizens?

I'm not really sure what's "the" "Catholic" position is on that one, but I'd of thought that the American heritage position, the one founded on "all men are created equal", "equal protection of the laws" and near-universal immigrant ancestry, would have nothing of it.

Education - I don't even know where to start with that. Is there coherent posture on education that can be remotely described as "Catholic"? Someone help me. The joke possibilities on that one alone ...

Health care - 47 million Americans are uninsured. I will make reference to one Matthew Yglesias, who makes a compelling point on this: to argue, as Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review Online does, that government should take a "hands off" approach to solving the health care crisis, is good, right-wing ideology.

But it also belies the fact that the right is simply not serious about health care.

Over 40% of medical expenditures are already made in the public sector. This to say nothing of the massive regime of health care law and regulations. The government IS in health care.

If Republicans were serious about their ideological positions on health care, they'd have some bills on the table to deregulate and divest the public interest. They don't, and they won't.

Meanwhile, we are amid a health care crisis, and millions of people live that crisis every day.

What is "the" "Catholic" position on what we should do for those people?

Okay okay okay, so let's try this one: the war in Iraq:

I for one do not know what the "Catholic" position happens to be on this now very complicated war, but the Vatican position on the war was quite clear: don't have one. An interesting conundrum, as Bush himself asserted shortly before hostilities began, "War is not inevitable."

Laying aside too the philosophical question of a "Just War", a Catholic might be reminded of Jesus's more earthy, practical admonition that before one mounts a campaign against an army of 20,000, one should count his army of 10,000. Iran is enflamed. North Korean is paranoid. Both are actively seeking nuclear WMDs. Taiwan's situation is as tenuous as ever. Our allies, even our most trusted allies, the British, have had their trust in American "leadership" utterly squandered as if their support were beyond the pale of dignity and respect and our military, by every measurement, is stretched thin to the breaking point.

Support for the Bush administration in Iraq, which is no longer occupied but a "host" country, is said to have been reduced to 5%. Fears exist that in the coming elections, if they occur, the Shiite vote will bring an intolerable, anti-liberal, anti-Western theocratic-mandate, the Sunnis will be left out because cities in the "Sunni Triangle" are safe for neither the provisional government nor coalition forces nor UN operatives who might proctor a fair election, and the Kurds, for their part, may secede.

With all this in mind, what was, what is, "the" "Catholic" position on the war in Iraq?

I have a theory. The Republican Party is atwitter with legions of evangelical Christians, a certain body of religious folk who, when their number is divided along racial lines, tend to vote alike, with white evangelicals voting Republican, and black evangelicals voting Democrat.

Driven as they are in their voting patterns by their religious animus, evangelical voters, pollsters and campaign strategists believe that other folks of religous stripes are similarly motivated to vote as one massive, borg-like, "we-do-what-we're-told" (thank you Peter Gabriel) automotan.

Hence, we have a spectacle among writers on the right that betrays an attitude that seems to say, "if only they could explain to those pesky Catholics that Catholics are supposed to think 'this' way, but dag-nab-it no one has told them so yet. Here, let me be the one!"

But reality is reality, and no matter how some may strategize to convince us otherwise, the earth still orbits the sun. And no matter now some strategize to convince us otherwise, there is no "Catholic" vote, Catholics think for themselves, and 25 million will prove this, again, on Nov. 2, by sending 1/2 their votes to Bush and the other 1/2 to Kerry. The Republican Catholic strategy is "a chasing after the wind".

Posted by Dan at September 28, 2004 03:27 PM | TrackBack