[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Vote and Be Damned

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The article below from NYTimes.com 
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Vote and Be Damned

October 17, 2004
 By MAUREEN DOWD 



 

First Dick Cheney said that supporting John Kerry could
lead to another terrorist attack. 

Then Dennis Hastert said Al Qaeda would be more successful
under a Kerry presidency than under President Bush. 

Now the Catholic bishops have upped the ante, indicating
that voting for a candidate with Mr. Kerry's policies could
lead to eternal damnation. 

Conservative bishops and conservative Republicans are
working hard to spread the gospel that anyone who supports
the Catholic candidate and onetime Boston altar boy who
carries a rosary and a Bible with him on the trail is
aligned with the forces of evil. 

In an interview with The Times's David Kirkpatrick,
Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver said a knowing vote for
a candidate like Mr. Kerry who supports abortion rights or
embryonic stem cell research would be a sin that would have
to be confessed before receiving communion. "If you vote
this way, are you cooperating in evil?" the archbishop
asked. "Now, if you know you are cooperating in evil,
should you go to confession? The answer is yes." 

As Mr. Kirkpatrick and Laurie Goodstein wrote, Catholics
make up about a quarter of the electorate, many
concentrated in swing states. These bishops and like-minded
Catholic groups are organizing voter registration and
blanketing churches with voter guides that often ignore
traditional Catholic concerns about the death penalty and
war - the pope opposed the invasion of Iraq - while calling
abortion, gay marriage and the stem cell debate
"nonnegotiable." 

"Never before have so many bishops so explicitly warned
Catholics so close to an election that to vote a certain
way was to commit a sin," the Times article said. 

Once upon a time, with Al Smith and John Kennedy, the
church was proud to see Catholics run for president. The
church was as unobtrusive in 1960, trying to help J.F.K.,
as it is obtrusive now, trying to hurt J.F.K. II. 

The conservative bishops, salivating to overturn Roe v.
Wade, prefer an evangelical antiabortion president to one
of their own who said in Wednesday's debate: "What is an
article of faith for me is not something that I can
legislate on somebody who doesn't share that article of
faith. I believe that choice ... is between a woman, God
and her doctor." 

Like Mr. Bush, these patriarchal bishops want to turn back
the clock to the 50's. They don't want separation of church
and state - except in Iraq. 

Some of the bishops - the shepherds of a church whose
hierarchy bungled the molestation and rape of so many young
boys by tolerating it, covering it up, enabling it,
excusing it and paying hush money - are still debating
whether John Kerry should be allowed to receive communion. 

These bishops are embryo-centric; they are not as
concerned with the 1,080 kids killed in a war that the Bush
administration launched with lies, or about the lives that
could be lost thanks to the president's letting the assault
weapons ban lapse, or about all the lives that could be
saved and improved with stem cell research. 

Mr. Bush derives his immutability from his faith. "I
believe that God wants everybody to be free," he said in
the last debate, adding that this was "part of my foreign
policy." 

In today's Times Magazine, Ron Suskind writes that Mr. Bush
has created a "faith-based presidency" that has riven the
Republican Party. 

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan
and a Treasury official for the first President Bush, told
Mr. Suskind that some people now look at Mr. Bush and see
"this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of
weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to
do." He continued: "This is why George W. Bush is so
clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist
enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be
persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark
vision. He understands them, because he's just like them." 

The president's certitude - the idea that he can see into
people's souls and that God tells him what is right, then
W. tells us if he feels like it - is disturbing. It equates
disagreeing with him to disagreeing with Him. 

The conservative bishops' certitude - the idea that you
can't be a good Catholic if you diverge from certain
church-decreed mandates or if you want to keep your
religion and politics separate - is also disturbing. 

America is awash in selective piety, situational moralists
and cherry-picking absolutists. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/opinion/17dowd.html?ex=1099030459&ei=1&en=710bd4f38213b714


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