November 2009 Archives

Ronald Reagan was famous for invoking the GOP's so-called Eleventh Commandment; to wit: "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. These days, to be sure, it's a commandment often honored in the breach. And maybe the same is becoming true for the equivalent Catholic commandment; namely, "Thou shall not speak ill of any fellow bishop."

Last week, after Bishop Roger Morin of Biloxi gave an impassioned pitch for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) at the USCCB meeting in Baltimore, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln explained why he was declining to take up a collection for the church's anti-poverty agency--which has come under heavy fire from the Catholic right for once having given grants to ACORN and for supporting "pro-abortion" and "anti-family" organizations. In a report on the CCHD, Morin called the charges "outrageous." As LifeSiteNews.com quotes Bruskewitz:

"I didn't think [the report] took into account sufficiently the negatives that have been bantered about with regard to the organization," he said.  He said Bishop Morin was "obviously defending the organization he had been involved in different areas," and now for which he's the chairman.

The report, further, "lacked some of the interests" that concerned people "have brought to the fore," he said.  "I think he was perhaps a little bit too dismissive of them."

So far, there's been no response from Morin.

Just in case you were wondering how Anti-Fox News would play the story. As for FoxNews.com itself, it has this:

Responding to his critics, Huckabee said, "Politics is the last thing on my mind. It should be the last thing on anybody's mind. To me it's repulsive that people are trying to bring something like that up in the midst of what ought to be a concern for these officer's families.

"The criminal justice is far from perfect and in this case it failed miserably on all sides."

Somewhere, a Palin is smiling.

Just in from a friend in Tacoma: "This shooting is more of the darker side of Cascadia--a place of violence and dehumanization.  I'm surprised that no news coverage has made the connection between Tacoma, John Allan Muhammad who was recently executed, and this killing."

With her estranged husband facing impeachment proceedings in the South Carolina legislature, still First Lady of South Carolina Jenny Sanford proved over the weekend that her status as media love object is as exalted as ever. "From Shadow to Limelight," Robbie Brown's front-page profile in Saturday's NYT, enumerates the ways she's turning herself into the best-known Jenny brand since Jenny Craig: trademarking her name to sell clothing, mugs, and other merchandise; managing her own "privately financed" website; appearing among Barbara Walters' 10 Most Fascinating People of 2009; endorsing a gubernatorial candidate to succeed the disgraced Mark; and of course writing The Book, whose title, "Staying True," begs all the right questions.

What's not quite right about the profile is its premise that somehow Jenny Sanford, shy thing that she is, has gradually emerged into the media glare, embracing her unsought celebrity almost against her will--"a person who is growing more comfortable as a headline maker." But as Marie Griffith shows in her article on L'Affaire Sanford in the latest Religion in the News, Jenny has been on top of the game from the outset. She was conspicuous by her absence from her husband's side at his confessional press conference, and then conspicuous by her adroit self-presentation as the scorned but unbowed Christian wife and mother. If "Jenny Sanford" were a 60-year-old movie, Joan Crawford would be cast in the title role--but she wouldn't be playing it any better than the original.

This is how we Nutmeggers used to do it:

That is:

ALTHOUGH, Considering the Judgments of GOD, which are on the Earth, in the great Distress & Desolation brought upon many Nations, both by WAR and PESTILENCE,

AND Considering also particularly, the awful Tokens of GOD's Righteous Anger against us, Especially in the Contagious SICKNESS which has been in divers Places of the Land, and in the continued RAINS, by which great Losses have been sustained, It becomes us to be deeply Humbled before the LORD.

It is nevertheless our Duty to Acknowledge the many Influences of Divine Goodness, which the LORD whose ways, are not as Ours, has Graciously vouchsafed Us and which are never to be forgotten. Namely,

& cetera.

Reacting to Chris Matthews' hard-balling of Bishop Thomas Tobin, the Catholic League's Bill Donohue huffs:

No non-Catholic would ever treat a bishop this way. But too many liberal Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, think they are exempt from the same standards of civility that apply to others.

Let's just say that when it comes to the Irish Catholic civility exemption, Donohue has some personal expertise.

I doubt that Bishop Thomas J. Tobin has received such a dressing down since one of those sisters of St. Joseph caught little Tommy stealing pears from an orchard in Erie, Pa. in 1956. OK, I don't know this. But Chris Matthews did a Hardball number on him last night that His Excellency will not soon forget. Over on the America blog, Michael Sean Winters offers a bit of an apologia and advice to Catholic prelates in their close encounters with media tough guys.

The sympathy is, in my view, misplaced. If bishops venture into the public square to lobby and otherwise give the business to public officials, they should be prepared when others dish it out. Tobin's own characterization of Rep. Patrick Kennedy's behavior as "erratic," reiterated with gusto in today's Providence Journal-Bulletin, is too close to a low blow for comfort, given Kennedy's well-known problems with drugs and alcohol. Kennedy may or may not have misstated (or misunderstood) a fact or two, but there's been nothing erratic about his behavior in his month-long dispute with Tobin, so far as I can see.

Matthews began his interview with a clip from Jack Kennedy's famous 1960 speech to the Houston ministers, in which the presidential nominee says that he believes in an America "where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope." Tobin got off to a really bad start by claiming that Kennedy was actually coming out against the establishment of an official religion in America. There are a number of ways to deal with what JFK said in the Protestant lion's den that day, but that's not one of them. The appearance went downhill from there.

Meanwhile, the Tobin-Kennedy affair has provoked pro-choice Catholic pols in the Northeast into a flurry of activity. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) rose to the defense of Kennedy, as did two senatorial hopefuls in Massachusetts, both of whom took the occasion of a campaign forum to remind their church of the logs in its own eye. For a few years now, there's been a bit of truce in the abortion wars, but thanks to the health care debate, that's over. Some bishops who have been feeling their oats will now be reminded that the other side can get pretty frisky too.    

The NYT's Adam Nagourney has been all over the story of a proposed list of 10 GOP commandments that if you only violate two of them, you're still a Republican in good standing. The list, which will be presented to the RNC for its approval, is apparently the brainchild of James Bopp, Jr., an RNC member from Indiana who is prominent in the Federalist Society and is general counsel for National Right to Life and special counsel for Focus on the Family. He's big in the defense of traditional marriage movement too.

Despite Bopp's impeccable social conservative credentials, the list itself seems a little light on social conservatism: just opposition federal funding of abortion and support of the Defense of Marriage Act. Under the terms of proposal, you could be staunchly pro-choice and in favor of same-sex marriage and have your Party credentials in order. Similarly, there are only two limpish commandments that engage the foreign policy agenda of the party's neocon wing: support for "containment" of Iran and North Korea and for troop surges in Iran (still?) and Afghanistan. So a pacifist Republican would not be an oxymoron. In fact, the purity test hearkens mostly to the conservative economic populism represented by the Club for Growth and the Tea Party crowd. That's why the likes of Dick Army and Grover Norquist think it's just dandy.

Yet, bottom line, this may not be all that it seems. Not only do most of the commandments permit a good deal of interpretive leeway, but the "eight out of ten" proposal permits dissent on what this year have been some very big party-line votes. (Under its terms, you could have voted for the stimulus package and health care reform and not be read out of the Party.) True, as Nagourney points out, exclusionary arguments are possible. But rather than Ivory Soap this is Powdermilk Biscuits--not 99 and 44/100 pure but "pure...mostly." Not a big tent but not a pup tent either.  

For a few days I've been meditating on Sarah Palin's remark to Barbara Walters, explaining why she opposes the Obama administration's opposition to expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. It's because, according to Palin,  "more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead."

This has struck various people as emerging from Palin's pre-millennialist religious roots, and I'm inclined to agree. The idea of us Jewish people flocking to Israel in the immediate future is so completely unsupported by empirical evidence that it can only have descended from the cloud-land of eschatological expectation that Palin (once?) inhabited.

In light of this, it made sense for the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg to seek enlightenment from the executive director of Liberty University's Pre-Trib Research Center, Dr. Thomas Ice. Said Ice:

I've read that Palin has been part of an apparently unique movement I've heard of -- that her pastor, when she was in the Assembly of God, believed based on some personal revelation he claims to have gotten from God, that the Jews would move to Alaska during the Tribulation. But nevertheless, my understanding from what I've seen is that she holds fairly typical Protestant Zionist beliefs, and one of those beliefs is the regathering of the Jews in Israel.

I guess I had missed that first part, and it put me in mind of Michael Chabon's counterfactual historical novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, about a post-World War II world in which the state of Israel doesn't succeed and Eastern European Jewish survivors are settled in Sitka, Alaska. The novel itself ends (not-very-successfully) on an eschatological note. So maybe we first flock to Alaska to ride out the Tribulation, then proceed with all deliberate speed to the Holy Land in time to convert for the Final Judgment. Hey, anyone know of a Post-Trib Research Center?

Update: On Palin qua Post-Tribulationist, see Rachel Tabachnick's piece over on Talk To Action. 

Apart from that little health care vote in the House of Representatives, the biggest political news over the weekend was the latest back-and-forth between Bishop Thomas Joseph Tobin of Providence and Rep. Patrick Joseph Kennedy (D-RI) over the congressman's standing in the Catholic Church. On Friday, Kennedy told the Providence Journal-Bulletin that Tobin had "instructed me not to take Communion and said that he has instructed the diocesan priests not to give me Communion."

On Saturday, the bishop took to his diocesan website to say he was "disappointed and really surprised" that Kennedy had reopened the issue. In a letter he sent to the congressman back in 2007, he had written:

"In light of the Church's clear teaching, and your consistent actions, therefore, I believe it is inappropriate for you to be receiving Holy Communion and I now ask respectfully that you refrain from doing so."

On Sunday, Tobin told the AP that while he doesn't "go out picking these fights," Kennedy had been attacking the church and behaving "erratically." Today, the Journal-Bulletin quotes Tobin as characterizing his original missive as a request rather than an instruction, and vigorously denying Kennedy's claim that he had issued instructions to his priests to withhold Communion. (To the AP, he did allow as how he might have "a little conversation" with any priest who regularly gave the sacrament to Kennedy.)  He also said he presumed Kennedy was complying with his wishes.

"If I had found out that he was regularly violating that request, the next step might have been more direct. An instruction? A decree? I don't know what."

Back in the days when chivalry was in bloom, Catholic hierarchs would discipline a recalcitrant government leader by putting his territory under interdict, barring performance of the sacraments until he shaped up. As recently as 100 years ago, Pope Pius X imposed a 15-day interdict on the northern Italian town of Adria when its citizens mounted a campaign to prevent him from removing their popular bishop. I daresay that Tobin won't do the same for Rhode Island's first congressional district (where he himself sits). But he's evidently prepared to tighten the screws.

What's a little unclear in all this is why Tobin has been at such pains to emphasize his desire to keep his instruction/request hush-hush. Sure, he's got his pastoral concern for the state of his lost sheep's soul. (He's sincerely praying, he says, for Kennedy's "conversion and repentance, and for his personal and spiritual well-being.") But the usual reason for these  exercises is that the pro-choice Catholic politician in question is, by his public stand, creating a scandal among the faithful. And so some local prelates feel it incumbent upon them to Take Public Measures, so the faithful don't get the wrong idea.

But of course, many of the Catholic faithful in America don't like their bishops mixing it up with their elected officials. And a bishop, even a hot-tempered Irish one, cannot entirely ignore the demands...or requests...of Prudence.

Update: here

The Manhattan Declaration, the conservative Christian manifesto nailed (metaphorically) with great fanfare to the door of the National Press Club today, ends with this orotund pronunciamento:

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.  We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's.  But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's.

The Declaration's list of signatories includes not only a bunch of Catholic, (non-Greek) Orthodox, and Protestant prelates and denominational bureaucrats but also "Christian leaders" who are uneluctably lay--professors like Robby George of Princeton (who helped write the thing), editors like David Neff of Christianity Today, activists like Gary Bauer of American Values, etc.

I'm curious to know what rules purporting to force them as individuals to treat, say, same-sex married couples as "marriages or their equivalent" they intend not to bend to. What acts of disobedience to Caesar, if any, are they contemplating? What martyrdom do they seek?

Speaking at an ecumenical meeting in Rome yesterday prior to meeting with the pope today, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams threw down a theological gauntlet to Roman Catholics who regard things like papal primacy and the ordination of women as fundamental obstacles to ecumenical progress. Rather cleverly, Williams used the divided Anglican Communion as a model to show how those who disagree vigorously on issues of practice can nonetheless be in communion with each other (kind of).

For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain. And if it isn't, can we all allow ourselves to be challenged to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that has brought us thus far?

In the course of his talk, Williams waved away the pope's recent opening to disaffected Anglicans as so much pastoral piffle:

In his RNS report yesterday, Dan Burke got a couple if bishops to comment on the John Jay study de-coupling clerical homosexuality from sexual abuse. Most notable was St. Paul-Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt's "I wouldn't put a lot of credence in it." Nienstedt, as Burke notes, was the guy who led the Vatican's post-scandal investigation of homosexuality in the seminaries, the idea being that if you got rid of the gays, the abuse would stop. Not that Nienstedt doesn't have a fall-back position; to wit: "a priest has to be accessible to all his people, and someone with a strong same-sex attraction would not be good to have in the pastoral care of people." As opposed to a priest with a strong opposite-sex attraction?

The bishops' problem with the John Jay study goes beyond Nienstedt's species of homophobia, however. If, as the study suggests, sexual abuse by priests is the result of not homosexual orientation but the availability of certain types of people (i.e. altar boys), then someone might be led to the conclusion that clerical celibacy is a big part of the problem. The horror, the horror!

Gibson reports on latest from the clergy sex abuse study by the folks at John Jay, presented to the USCCB yesterday:

"What we are suggesting is that the idea of sexual identity be separated from the problem of sexual abuse," said Margaret Smith, a researcher from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which is conducting an independent study of sexual abuse in the priesthood from 1950 up to 2002. "At this point, we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and an increased likelihood of sexual abuse."

A second researcher, Karen Terry, also cautioned the bishops against making a correlation between homosexuality in the priesthood and the high incidence of abuse by priests against boys rather than girls -- a ratio found to be about 80-20.

"It's important to separate the sexual identity and the behavior," Terry said. "Someone can commit sexual acts that might be of a homosexual nature but not have a homosexual identity." Terry said factors such as greater access to boys is one reason for the skewed ratio. Smith also raised the analogy of prison populations where homosexual behavior is common even though the prisoners are not necessarily homosexuals, or cultures where men are rigidly segregated from women until adulthood, and homosexual activity is accepted and then ceases after marriage.

How about some reax from a bishop or two? What do they make of this?

Before he became Pope Innocent III in 1198, Lotario dei Conti of Segni wrote De quadripartita specie nuptiarum, a treatise defining marriage as a four-part thing according to the four ways that Parisian scholastics of the day interpreted Scripture: historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. According to Lotario,  the "historical" was the carnal marriage of man and woman, designed for the procreation of offspring and the avoidance of fornication. The "allegorical" referred to the sacramental marriage of Christ and the Church; the "tropological," the marriage of God and the individual soul; and the anagogical, the marriage between the Word of God and human nature in the Incarnation of Christ. For Lotario, the four types of marriages were equally "marriage." His point was to enable each to shed light on the others--to create an interpretive web for enriching his readers' understanding of all the relationships.

This excursus is prompted by a reading of the pastoral letter on marriage issued yesterday by the USCCB. It, too, makes reference to spiritual marriages--between Christ and the Church, within the Trinity. But unlike its medieval precursor, it tends to privilege the historical sense as the only "real" marriage. It's not a medieval document, but I'm not sure it's better for that. Carnal marriage--between a man and woman, sans contraception or divorce--becomes an object of transcendant significance, the bedrock of society and even of the Church. Marriage as an idol has been a Protestant temptation, and a Mormon one--but in recent years the Catholics have embraced it too.

If the Church wants to do that, it's not for us non-Catholics to object. But it also teaches that monogamous, heterosexual marriage is a natural phenomenon, created in obedience to Natural Law, and therefore that it can intervene to try to make society at large toe the line. In that regard, the pastoral's secular argumentation with respect to non-heterosexual marriage is notably weak--mostly just ex cathedra table-thumping like the following:

The legal recognition of same-sex unions poses a multifaceted threat to the very fabric of society, striking at the source from which society and culture come and which they are meant to serve. Such recognition affects all people, married and non-married: not only at the fundamental levels of the good of the spouses, the good of children, the intrinsic dignity of every human person, and the common good, but also at the levels of education, cultural imagination and influence, and religious freedom.

When it comes to plain old cohabitation, the pastoral refers its readers to empirical data:

Social science research, however, finds that cohabitation has no positive effects on a marriage....The findings of the social sciences confirm that the best environment for raising children is a stable home provided by the marriage of their parents.

Regarding same-sex marriage, the findings of social science are conspicuous by their absence.

Jim Wallis' endless apologia pro Stupakia sua on Huffpost is an awe-inspiring exercise in injured innocence. According to him, the collapse of a compromise on abortion in the House health care bill was all the fault of the House leadership (which disrespected pro-life moderates) and pro-choice activists (who just couldn't see past their zealotry). Were there partisans on the other side to be named and blamed? Not so far as Wallis is concerned.

Now as Sarah Posner's fine blow-by-blow on Religion Dispatches makes clear, the abortion issue was badly handled by the pro-choice forces. But as usual, Wallis portrays himself, Rodney King-like, as just trying help people get along. No, in fact they can't all get along. If you're going to be for compromise in order to get health care passed, you've got to take a stand, and tell your interlocutors what to rally around.

To its credit, Third Way has done just that, criticizing the Stupak-Pitts Amendment (as it is now called) for violating the principles of abortion neutrality embraced in word by many, and backing the failed (but perhaps to be revived in the Senate) Ellsworth Amendment. (See memo, after jump) Michael Sean Winters, vigorous pro-lifer that he is, recognizes that Stupak-Pitts went too far, and supports dialing it back for the greater good. Does Sojourners do the same? Tell us, Jim. And while you're at it, how about shouldering a little responsibility for what happened, O Prophet of the Common Ground?

Pew has a new study out on faith-based social service provision, and the striking news is that, although Americans continue to support (by wide margins) allowing faith-based groups to apply for government funding, they remain very separationist in how they want those groups to behave. Thus, by a 68-27 margin they believe "religious charities" should be eligible for government funds, but oppose eligibility for "groups that encourage religious conversion" by 63-28.

And on the major bone of contention--permitting government-funded groups to "limit hiring to those who share their religious beliefs"--Americans are opposed by better than three-to-one, 74 percent to 21 percent. Pew puts a slight gloss on that number by pointing out that "relatively large numbers" of Republicans and white evangelicals support such hiring, but "relatively" ain't much: It's 62-32 against among Republicans and 61-33 against among white evangelicals. Let it be noted that Obama himself took a firm position against such faith-based hiring during the presidential campaign.

Under the circumstances, you've got to wonder why the Obama administration is being so incredibly gingerly about dealing with the issue. Yes, it involves more legal complexity than lay citizens understand. And there are some moderate evangelical faith-based enthusiasts that the administration wants to cuddle with. Still, when you've got over 60 percent of the other side in your corner on an issue, it shouldn't be hard to get the thing done. It's way past time for the Office of Legal Counsel, where it's currently languishing, to make with a set of rules.

Sean Michael Winters, fighting the good fight at the USCCB. Good luck with that, SMW. I'll believe it when I see it.

If the extraordinary interview-by-proxy of radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi in today's WaPo is to be believed, accused Ford Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hasan made contact with him last December, and emails between the two followed from there--including "two or three" responses from al-Aulaqi. The Yemeni journalist who conducted the interview--a man with close ties to Aulaqi--"declined to comment" when asked "whether Hasan mentioned Fort Hood as a target."

Did he or didn't he? Whatever, it's hard to believe that the FBI was as blithe or asleep at the switch as it now claims about the connection. Al-Aulaqi is, as the Post makes clear, a very well known figure--one of a handful native English-speaking radicals capable of influencing susceptible American Muslims to engage in acts of violence. And Hasan had given more than sufficient indiciation that he was susceptible.

But: Did Hasan pretend to the FBI that he was just pretending to be susceptible? In the reporting on his background, there are various stray remarks that people thought he was conducting research on the impact of Islamic teachings on Muslims in the military. It seems less and less plausible that what was going on here was nothing more than a troubled man increasingly drawn into a radical version of his faith and pushed over the edge by assignment to an overseas combat zone.

In its summary of the Hasan evidence to date yesterday, the NYT states that it all

will be studied by Army and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents trying to answer the same questions that many Americans have debated over the last 10 days:

Was Major Hasan a terrorist, driven by religious extremism to attack fellow soldiers he had come to see as the enemy? Was he a troubled loner, a misfit who cracked when ordered sent to a war zone whose gruesome casualties he had spent the last six years caring for? Or was he both?

Or, in addition, was he a man whom the FBI and/or the Army thought they were using for their own counter-terrorism purposes? And who will be looking into that question?

A week ago, over at the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg chastised his fellow Atlantians for the sin of political correctness in not identifying alleged Fort Hood murderer Major Nidal Hasan as the Muslim jihadi Goldberg takes him to be. A double standard, he claimed, is at work here: "elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims."

Here's a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

By way of response, religion prof. Dan Mathewson argues over on Religion Dispatches that, in fact, the MSM did pull its punches when it came to attributing Christian motives to Scott Roeder, the man charged with murdering abortion doctor George Tiller. Roeder, writes Mathewson, "was described in the media as a right-wing, anti-government, anti-abortion activist; but not a single article that I was able to find in the mainstream media discussed Roeder's Christian faith as a motivating factor of his crime."

Actually, as Andrew Walsh points out in his article on the Tiller case in Religion in the News, the very mainstream Kansas City Star, whose coverage was superb, gave extensive attention to Roeder's somewhat complicated Christian journey and how that related to his anti-abortion and anti-government views. But it's true that Roeder was not generally characterized as a "Christian extremist"--and, so far as I know, no one has proposed calling what he did "going Christian," the way Tunku Varadarajan, over on Forbes. com, provocatively proposed "going Muslim" to describe Hasan-like acts.

Varadarajan, whose column is not quite as appalling as it sounds, remarks in passing (in contrast to both Goldberg and Mathewson) that the real problem is not the media's favoritism toward one religious tradition over another but towards religion in general: "This is part of a larger--and too-hot-to-touch--American problem, which is the privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse." The same point is made today by On Faith's leading secularista, Susan Jacoby: "My own view is that the U.S. media, when a violent act is linked to religion--any religion--always downplay any influence that might have been exerted by an extremist interpretation of that religion."

The secularists have a point. There is something like what Jacoby calls "religious correctness" that has long led Americans to downplay religion as a motive for public hostility. The "Know-Nothings" of the 1850s were called that because the members of the American Party recognized that it was un-American to say openly that their primary motivation was anti-Catholicism--religious prejudice.

For all that, it's hard to argue that religion has not been part of the national discussion of both the Roeder and Hasan affairs. Debate over responsibility for the murder of Dr. Tiller centered on the demonization of "Tiller the Baby Killer" and the advocacy of violent action against abortion providers generally by religious activists in the anti-abortion movement and their advocates in the, ah, MSM. Likewise, Hasan's Muslim connections and views have been vigorously pursued by, yes, the MSM. As in the case of the Know-Nothings, everybody knows what the game is. And minimizing the significance of the religion of the alleged perpetrator, and accusing others of political correctness in refusing to blame that religion, are both part of the game.

Yesterday, JTA reported that Samuel Rodriguez's National Hispanic Christian Leadership NHCL) Conference is joining forces with John Hagee's Christians United for Israel to express their common love for, well, Israel. Over at Talk to Action, the ever-vigilant Bruce Wilson rings the theo-political changes on the alliance, but misses the key link--which Hagee himself provides in his quote to JTA: "My wife and the majority of my 20,000 congregants are Hispanic."

The key thing to understand about the Hagee trajectory is that his Cornerstone Church has made its way by evangelizing Mexican-American Catholics in San Antonio. That's why he was on the Catholic League's radar screen in the first place. NHCL is, of course, chock full of former Catholics too, and whatever the organization feels about Israel, Cornerstone Church belongs in it. The CUFI connection is ethno-religiously overdetermined.

In one of those classic New England Irish Catholic manos-a-mano, Providence Bishop Thomas J. Tobin and U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy have been going at each other, with the congressman (son of the late Sen. Ted) criticizing the bishop for opposing health care reform that doesn't deny abortion coverage, and the bishop criticizing the congressman for disrespecting the church. And the congressman saying that just because he disagrees with the Catholic hierarchy on abortion doesn't make him "any less of a good Catholic" and the bishop saying yes it does.

Far be it from me to presume to say what makes a good Catholic, but perhaps it's worth putting this dispute in the context of what's been going on in Rhode Island Catholicism. According to the ARIS surveys (here and here), over the past two decades, the proportion of self-identifying Catholics in the most Catholic state in the nation has declined by over 25 percent--from 62 percent in 1990 to 51 percent in 2001 to 46 percent last year. Data from the quadrennial studies done at the University of Akron by John Green show more New England Catholics to be pro-choice than pro-life, with only half of even "high commitment" Catholics falling into the pro-life (as opposed to pro-choice or "moderate") camp.

Bishop Tobin is evidently part of the small-is-beautiful school of contemporary Catholic thinking, and will help his diocese continue on its current demographic trajectory. Given his views on who is a good Catholic, roughly a quarter of Rhode Islanders would seem to be up to snuff. I'd guess that by 2030, that'll be the actual size of his flock, if he lives that long.

By way of a footnote to the last post, consider the following items. First, there's today's column by E.J. Dionne, foremost example of a Common Good Catholic in the pundit biz. Dionne makes the case for embracing pro-life Dems, contends that the Stupak Amendment is no biggie, and challenges his bishops to step up to the plate now on health care reform.

Then there's Rep. Tom Perriello, co-founder of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and the only freshman congressman representing a district that voted for McCain last year to vote for the health care bill. As Walter Shapiro points out in an appreciative (and slightly aghast) profile over on Politics Daily, Perriello, whose district includes Virginia's very conservative Southside, also voted for the president's stimulus package and cap-and-trade. But he was one of 64 Democrats to vote for Stupak.

Yes, Dionne hints that it might be a good idea to allow abortion coverage into the public option (which Stupak prohibits). And Perriello would seem to be a dependable vote for whatever health care bill emerges from an eventual House-Senate conference committee. But pro-choicers need to realize that there are pro-lifers of conscience even among the staunchest liberal Democrats.

For a very different take from my own on this, see David Gibson's piece over on Politics Daily. David thinks that the pro-life folks did compromise by not standing in the way of contraceptive coverage and sex educution--which strikes me as de minimis. The key question, though, is whether the idea of segregating the funds was just an accounting fraud--as the Atlantic's Megan McArdle claims: 

The fact is, on a pooling basis--and that's the level at which the federal government operates--giving someone money to buy insurance that covers abortions is exactly the same thing as directly paying for their abortions. The original compromise, segregating the funds so that the federal subsidy wouldn't pay for the abortion part, was a transparently ineffective gimmick.

Maybe I'm a dope, but I don't see why that should be the case. Of course money's fungible. But what's the difference between segregating the funds as the compromise proposed or having the same insurance company deposit the dollars it receives from its abortion-covering and non-abortion-covering policies in the same bank account? A particular dollar from a no-abortion policyholder could end up going to pay for an abortion, if you choose to look at it that way. But the point is, once all the dollars go into the account, it's meaningless to ask whose they were. The relevant question, under the compromise, is whether there would be enough money in the segregated account--i.e. non-federal dollars--to pay for the number of abortions provided. And that's why God created actuaries.

In re: Gibson, it's perhaps worth noting that there are lot of liberal Catholics (viz. Michael Sean Winters) out there who are, in fact, pro-life (let's call them Common Good Catholics as opposed to Catholics for Choice). It's just that, unlike their conservative co-religionists, they have been prepared to support non-pro-life health care reform for the sake of what they take to be the greater good of (near) universal health coverage. But at the same time, it's very hard for them to oppose pro-life amendments once these make it into legislation.

Let me once again opine that it would have been not only politically smart but accurate for the House leadership to call the subsidies "health care vouchers." Voucherization has been the preferred conservative approach to laundering tax dollars in order, for example, to dispose of Establishment Clause problems. If a citizen's objection to paying for someone else's religious school is solved by turning her tax dollars into a school voucher, why isn't a citizen's objection to paying for someone's abortion solved by turning her  tax dollars into a health care voucher? Especially since using tax dollars to pay for religious schools directly is unconstitutional whereas using tax dollars to pay for abortions is not.

It was clever of Bart Stupak and his friends to claim that they were merely applying the Hyde Amendment to the health reform bill, as if all they wanted was to maintain the status quo with respect to federal abortion restrictions. In fact, they went a good deal further.

With respect to Medicaid, what Hyde does is to bar federal monies from being used to pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, and endangerment to the woman's life. But states are permitted to provide complete abortion coverage with their own funds, and 17 of them do. It has gone largely unnoticed that the Stupak amendment prohibits the use of state Medicaid matching funds to pay for abortion services--that is, it changes the way Medicaid currently functions for those additional women who would be covered by Medicaid under the legislation.

In addition, the amendment requires that, for those whose insurance is subsidized by the federal government, abortion can only be covered via a "separate supplemental policy"--on the grounds that merely limiting federal subsidies to non-abortion coverage in a given policy (with the individual providing the balance) is just an accounting trick. But if the underlying objection is that the subsidy would then make it possible for women to obtain abortion coverage thanks to federal support, the supplemental policy approach (which would presumably require the basic subsidized policy) would do the same--just at a much higher price. The object of the exercise is simply to make access to abortion more difficult, not to protect pro-life taxpayers from having to pay for abortions. As for the stipulation that insurance companies participating in the exchange program provide policies that do not cover abortions along with those that do, that has nothing to do with the federal funding restrictions of the Hyde Amendment.

How did Stupak & Co. manage to get their way? I go along with Amy Sullivan's judgment that the Democratic leadership was asleep at the switch. Rather than engage with pro-choice members--and the Catholic bishops conference--early on, Pelosi et al. acted as though this was nothing much to worry about. Over at TNR's Plank, Bill Galston claims that the result shows the continuing power of Catholicism in the Democratic Party, while Alan Wolfe argues that Catholicism is all over the lot and not the bogey some liberals are now making it out to be. But the point is that, when the fate of a bill hangs in the balance, a few votes one way or the other make the difference. Had the Catholic bishops been prepared to settle for half a loaf, so would Stupak.

Among the losers here must be mentioned the commongroundniks, including the good folks at Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, who were supposed to be in business to help pro-choicers and pro-lifers find a middle way on abortion in order to achieve social benefits that both sides agreed on. In fact, when crunch time came in the House, the pro-lifers got everything they wanted. As liberals, the commongroundniks have had some success pushing pro-choicers to compromise. But it's not clear that they have any standing with the pro-life community to do the same. So it will fall to the enraged old-time pro-choice forces to provide push-back to Stupak in the Senate bill. Abortion business, in short, as usual.

From the president's remarks:

It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know - no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice - in this world, and the next...

We are a nation of laws whose commitment to justice is so enduring that we would treat a gunman and give him due process, just as surely as we will see that he pays for his crimes.

We are a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses. And instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln's words, and always pray to be on the side of God.

That seems pretty good as these things go, but I wish Obama would abandon his use of that fake Lincoln quote about praying to be on God's side. Better to quote the great last graph of the Second Inaugural:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Amazing stuff out today. NYT reports on his emails with a bona fide radical Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico of Yemeni parents, now in England praising Hasan as "a hero." And Wapo has scored a Powerpoint presentation that Hasan gave at Walter Reed two years ago, the final slide of which is spooky in the extreme: "Department of Defense should allow Muslims [sic] Soldiers the option of being released as 'Conscientious objectors' to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events."

If, as has been reported, Hasan sought a discharge from the Army rather than be deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, you've got to wonder what his superiors knew, and when, and what they were thinking.

Usually, the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting has all the repose of a bee hive, with way too many professors and graduate students swarming in and out of elevators and generally clogging all available floor space. This year, the recession and the extra-U.S. locale kept the numbers down, and Montreal's mammoth Palais des congrès actually made it seem like a rather small affair. Shortage of attendees meant shortage of funds generally, and so the celebration of the organization's centennial was a pale shadow of what some imagined it might be a couple of years ago. But then, this multi-disciplinary, hugely various body doesn't make itself easy to love anyway.

The biggest star in attendance was Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim intellectual whom the Bush administration kept out of the U.S. via the Patriot Act's "ideological exclusion provision"--a move that the Obama administration, typically, is expected to reverse but has not quite gotten around to yet. In any event, Canada doesn't indulge in such ideological exclusions, so Ramadan was finally able to accept the AAR's long-standing invitation to grace it with his presence. The talk of his I attended was, to put it generously, mediocre: a simplified rendition of the main argument of his next to last book, to the effect that reforming Islam depends on changing not the faith itself but interpretations of it--and on transforming Muslim minds--all in unspecified ways. Whatever. Even Ramadan's Euro-panache didn't keep a huge audience prepared to enthuse from drifting to the exits before he was done.

By contrast, Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher renowned among the theoretically inclined, provided some great (Groucho) Marxist stand-up in a session on the continuing life of Death of God theology. He was preceded by the granddad of the American D of G school, Thomas Altizer, whose  pronouncements on Blake, Satan, Kierkegaard, et al. were delivered with such oracular verve that it had the audience grinning. Who would have thought the Death of God could be such fun?

On the religion and politics front, an Obamaite session on the presidency included such faith-based luminaries of the present administration as Eboo Patel, Susan Thistlethwaite, and Shaun Casey (the Wesley Theological Seminary professor not the model). Prominent in the Beltway enterprise of helping the Democrats get religion, Casey was indiscreet enough to give last year's Obama campaign a C- on religious outreach, though not indiscreet enough to say why--other than to allow, "We could have done a lot better than we did." By contrast, he gave high marks in the outreach department to both Howard Dean's DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

He also made it clear that the biggest frustration came in dealing with religious leaders--"the most difficult of all constituencies...I think they are very limited."  By contrast, I guess, religion professors are positively tractable.

The decision of the House leadership to allow a vote on Rep. Bart Stupak's robust pro-life amendment is, of course, bad news for pro-choicers, and a big win for the Catholic bishops, who played hardball and are now on top. But it confronts House Republicans with an interesting dilemma. They can vote en masse for the amendment, get it in the bill they hate, and thereby improve the bill's chances of passage by depriving themselves of a critical talking point and bringing on board the USCCB and some staunch pro-life Blue Dogs.

Under the circumstances, you wonder whether the GOP leadership will contrive some way of preventing passage--such as by arranging for some members not to vote, or sending signals that such pro-choice members as there may be should vote their consciences. Perhaps it's no accident that, as Gilgoff notes, the Family Research Council has not used abortion as the basis for its opposition to health care reform. Maybe they know something.

I'm going to Montreal tomorrow morning for a few days among the religionists at the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting. No computer (don't ask), so posts will be few if any. Back Tuesday. A good weekend to all.

They have 20 parishes in the UK, and claim 400,000 members worldwide. Maybe this is all there is to it. Much ado about precious little.

Taglit-Birthright is the operation the sends young Jews on free trips to Israel in order to firm up their Jewish identity and assure the "continuity" of the tribe. To that end, it mounts programs for alumni of the trips--via Birthright NEXT. And next up on a Birthright NEXT-sponsored program in New York is Gordon Robertson, son of Pat Robertson and current CEO of the family biz, CBN. And, as the Jewish Week Forward [sorry, Week] reports, someone who promotes the idea that Jews can believe in Jesus as the Messiah and still be Jews.

OK, so Robertson is scheduled to talk not on the theology of Jewish identity but on whether evangelicals are "more fervent Zionists than American Jews." Nanny-nanny-boo-boo. But like, I'd be real surprised if the Birthright people, or the Jewish organizations that have clasped it to their bosoms, would include Jesus-believing Jews within the Pale of Continuity.

Keeping young Jews away from evangelicals is not the point. Whatever one says about John Hagee, for example--take John Hagee, please--he's earned the enmity of some of his co-religionists by effectively embracing the doctrine that Jews possess a still valid covenant with God and therefore should not be the object of evangelism. But giving a platform to a promoter of Messianic Judaism? Please.

As you can see, the new issue of Religion in the News leads with the notorious C Street house, which figures in both the editor's column on The Family and Marie Griffith's examination of L'Affaire Sanford. Andrew Walsh reviews the Tiller murder blame game, not without tough words for the (who us?) pro-life community. On the Middle Eastern front, Molly Fitzgerald assesses the warm reception for Obama's Cairo speech; Babak Rahimi reports from Tehran on the Iranian protests; and Ron Kiener and Sarina Roffé offer outsider and insider looks at the Syrian-Jewish graft-and-money-laundering scandal.

Next, Christine McMorris takes on the horror story of child abuse by religious orders in Ireland. Andrew Manis does a number on the shrinking Southern Baptists. Frank Kirkpatrick makes sense of the latest Episcopalian resolutions. And Andrew Walsh (again) tells you what nobody else has about religion in the Michael Jackson send-off. Knock yourselves out.

Over on the Religion Dispatches blog, where religious progressives go to shake hands with each other, there's a little excitement about some research purporting to show that all that fuss about the God Gap was overdone. As Candace Chellew-Hodge enthuses:

A new study from the University of Florida may just be the amplification of our voice that we need. It confirms that there is a growing religious left in this country and dispels the "God gap" theory "that white religious Christians are conservative and more likely to vote Republican, said UF researcher Kenneth Wald."

Then along comes Pastor Dan Schultz, also enthusiastic:

It wasn't until I read about this study that this made sense, but it's precisely the communal faith of mainline Protestant denominations that makes me caution political observers about writing them off as irrelevant. It's true that mainliners are a relatively small chunk of the population--about 12-15%, compared to roughly 25% each for Catholics and Evangelicals--but as the study points out, the communal ideal cuts across denominational lines to some extent.

Unfortunately, however, Chellew-Hodge and Schultz are relying  on last week's press release from UF. Had they looked at the actual paper by Wald, Stephen Mockabee of the U. of Cincinnati and David Leege of Notre Dame (given last September at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, and available here under the title "Is There a Religious Left?"), they would have realized that there's a lot less to its God Gap critique than the release suggests.

After a hiatus of I don't know how many weeks, the comments function has been restored to this blog. So feel free to comment away.

The recipe for GOP success is a return to the Gingrich days of the 1980s and early 1990s, with Reaganesque candidates like Virginia's Bob McDonnell hiding their social conservatism under a bushel as social conservatives mobilize quietly behind the scenes. My guess is that the much touted "war within the GOP" will be smaller than advertised. In these times, the hard-eyed guys in the party will succeed in persuading their candidates that the economy and big government are the issues to run on. In New York 23, Deirdre Scozzafava may have been center-right in the New York Assembly, but on the hot-button issues of abortion, same-sex marriage, and the stimulus package, she was beyond the national Republican pale. In the GOP, her kind is almost non-existent as it is.

Mainers' rejection of same-sex marriage--combined with the success of Washington State's expanded domestic partnership law--takes some of the heat off the Obama administration and its congressional allies on gay rights. With voters "not yet ready" to go all the way, there's reason to continue the slow-walk on DADT and  DOMA.

Overall, the God Gaps--the preference of the most religious for Republicans and the least religious for Democrats--are alive and well.

Vito Lopez, the capo di tutti capi of the Democratic Party in Brooklyn, is currently the beneficiary of robo-calls by Nicholas DiMarzio, the capo di tutti capi of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, urging every registered voter in City Council District 34 to support Lopez.

 Why City Council District 34, when Lopez, who's not exactly in political trouble (and not even running this year), represents the 53rd state assembly district?

Well, City Council District 34 is represented by someone Lopez wants to get rid of; namely, council member Diana Reyna, in favor of a new protégée, Maritza Davila. The reason, as NYT's Michael Powell lays it out, is that Reyna, along with Rep. Nydia Velasquez and local nonprofit housing groups, has been opposing Lopez over rezoning a little 31-acre parcel of land known as the  Broadway Triangle. (It's a bitter dispute, pitting Latinos against Hasidic Jews--Lopez is mostly Italian.) The opponents have been suggesting that Lopez earned DiMarzio's love by switching positions and killing a bill that would have extended the statute of limitations on childhood sexual abuse lawsuits. And that, in return, the bishop got rid of a priest as head of a local housing group who had annoyed Lopez by opposing the rezoning.

The dispute prompted Msgr. Kieran Harrington, DiMarzio's consigliere (see  Hagen, Tom), to opine in a column in the diocesan newspaper that Mss. Reyna and Velazquez had disrespected his boss. He explained to Powell that the robo-calls were just to "thank Vito who has taken the greatest grief for helping us." The story ends with a late-breaking Harrington quote that unfortunately didn't make it into the online version:

In a measure of how heated this election has become, Monsignor Harrington called a reporter back late on Sunday and accused two of the diocese's priests in Bushwick of supporting Ms. Reyna and fomenting criticism of the diocese.

"Canonically, a priest is not supposed to be involved in partisan politics and it creates a problem for us," he said. "Some of these priests are really renegades."

And we know what happens to renegades in the Diocese of Brooklyn. Canonically, of course, a bishop can do as he damn pleases. Hey, Times! Save that kicker!

Follow: Over on dotCommonweal, Paul Moses, who used to ply the religion beat for Newsday, notes that Bishop DiMarzio has rather enthusiastically--in a full-page, color ad in the diocesan newspaper--endorsed Mayor Michael Bloomberg for reelection. (Along with a picture of the two standing together in Yankee Stadium, the ad reads, "MIKE BLOOMBERG: PROTECTING NYC'S CATHOLIC SCHOOLS. FIGHTING FOR US.") Moses points out that while Bloomberg is famously pro-choice, DeMarzio, chair of the committee that drafted  the bishops' statement on Catholic voting, wrote a letter to the NYT denyingthe paper's claim that  the statement "explicitly allow[s] Catholics to vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights if they do so for other reasons."

Speaking of which, you wonder how this story is playing across the East River, where the rosy-cheeked new archbishop recently took it upon himself to go after the Times for anti-Catholic bias. Another item for the catalog, Excellency? Welcome to Big Apple media, Tim.