Conservative religious women continue to shape Republican politics

whoa anonymous, talk about demonizing here!

just read the Palin-Biden debate and count the mistatements . . .

To Anon who wrote: "However to the abortion lovers, she committed the one sin that is unforgivable, and she did it twice, first she had an opportunity to viciously and delibrately kill her handicapped son...but she didn't. Then, that same year she got a chance to redeem herself in their eyes, an opportunity to enable and push the murder of her grandson, and again she didn't.

Generations of those on the left who have been promoting the LIE, that they are fighting for women, especially when they are about to give birth to a handicapped child, or are teenage mothers, were exposed for frauds they are. In some twisted way these murder hungry, child killing, monsters think they can save face if they can somehow demonize Sara Palin."

Anon, did you actually hear someone say, "that woman had an opportunity twice to abort children and she refused?" Did you actually read that?

I neither heard nor read that and, in what I know is a very arrogant statement, I do not believe you heard a (serious) statement to that effect by a person who is pro-privacy or pro-choice.

I do think it likely you or others heard statements from which you construed or constructed that meaning because it met an ideoogical need. People on all sides of debates do it all the time and it is dishonest but can be powerful.

What I did hear people say, again and again and regardless of their other assessments of Palin, is that these two women (Palin and her daughter) faced difficult circumstances and made choices consistent with their own belief systems...................and that they are clearly filled with joy in their roles as mothers, that these chilldren are deeply loved and welcomed.

It would indeed be delicious for single-issue, anti-abortion advocates if progressive women actively hated and sought to destroy Palin and her daughter because of their private decisions about their own pregnancies.

That, alas, is a anti-abortion camp fantasy that did not become real nor will it.

Women who DID NOT support Palin withheld that support because of who she is as a politician, as a then-governor, as a public figure. The list of women's concerns about who she is in those roles is long. For that part of the female electorate, according to everything I read and heard, Sarah Palin's personal reproductive choices were and are and will remain her private choices.

Women who DID support her supported her, I hope, because of who she is as a politician, as a then-governor, as a public figure, though clearly, many women voted for her because of her personal reproductive choices.

If personal reproductive choices are important and central criteria for evaluating women as candidates, there are millions and millions and millions of American women who meet your criteria: they are raising their grandchildren by the tens of thousands; raising unplanned babies by the millions; raising profoundly disabled children by the tens of thousands. A good many of those women are anti-abortion. And another good many are pro-choice, pro-privacy and would not want their personal choices to be used, privately or pubicly, to bludgeon other women.

The reproductive choices of Sarah Palin and daughter did not contribute to the McCain/Palin loss. And their reproductive choices did not win the election for McCain/Palin.

I would think that might suggest to people that the reproductive choices of women, even women running for highest office, are neither appropriate nor game-winning public campaign platforms.

So, a bit of campaign advice in future:

GET OUR BODIES, ALL OUR BODIES, even Sarah Palin's, OFF YOUR CAMPAIGN SIGNS AND OUT OF YOUR CAMPAIGN SPEECHES AND STATEMENTS.

Jean (pro-privacy Democrat and pro-life Catholic)

I can't remember the last time I got this torqued by a blanket statement.

I admit I chuckled at how successful Sarah Palin's daughter was with abstinence only sexual education, but neither myself, nor my friends, ever ever thought Sarah Palin was wrong for any decision relating to Trigg or Bristol. These were freely chosen decisions and we honored them. Especially those of us who have children who are not genetically perfect or born in the 'traditional' family.

You don't have a clue what you're venting about. Rather than being pro life, you ought to try getting a life.

Simply read the transcript of the Biden-Palin debate, and weep, and count the incoherent lies (or may we more mercifully say, mispeakings . . .)

Now the insurance death panels decide who lives and who dies by the size of your coverage, by the fat of your wallet.

Is that more just to you?

While we poor die like flies outside the clinics in our clunker cars . . .

Now the death panels are run by Wall Street HMO and Drug Comapny stockholders

Are they compassionate?
NOT!

And then there was the whole Black city of New Orleans . . .

Well, Dennis, what she said about death panels was a prediction, not a lie. It remains to be seen whether it will be accurate or not. More than a few people are apprehensive, especially in view of the fact that the folks who wrote the section of the bill involved are all people who advocate what we would call health care rationing. I'll bet if the media treated Palin as favorably as they do (let's say) Biden, she would look a lot smarter than he does. Here's an example. I read recently where approximately 80% of people surveyed believe that Palin offered the fact that she can see Russia from her state as proof of her competence in dealing with the Russians. I was among that 80% till I read that she never said that or anything remotely like it. Her impersonator on TV said it to caricature her. The slick media reported it in such a way as to make most people believe it came from Palin's lips. That, to me, says far more about our mischievous media than about Palin. They are out to destroy her because she pulls the rug from under feminist philosophy.

As President John Fitzgerald Kennedy quipped while receiving an honorary degree from Yale, "I now have the best of both worlds: a Harvard education and a Yale diploma."

Yale is an old boys school (as witnessed by the three generations of Bushes, the last born there, not in Texas as alleged), early the spawning ground of such great "Christian" humanitarians as the right Rev. Cotton Mather (he of the witch hunts and torture during trial and interrogations). Yale is not noted for high academics but for forming an elitist social network

Read sometime the merciful grades received by W at Yale; read how very nearly he was not accepted there but for the strong intervention of his grandfather the Senator for CT after his dismal performance at a Massachusetts exclusive prep school. Read how he passed his time at the Harvard Business School spitting tobacco juice from a chair vacated by more honorable men like Sen. John Kerry who went to war while Bush slept. During that time W was AWOL from the TANG and under orders to report to the Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts. With impunity as always he never went. Again he barely passed his classes, only but for the kindness of his intimidated professors.

Poor job, Mr Green, in trying to advance revisionist history. The rest of your comments are too murky for me, but leave this one question, and I remind you that you are under an Oath of Fidelity.

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Republican Party?

You cannot serve two masters. You cannot be Republican and Catholic. We saw this under Al Haig and Jeannie K. We see it now with the lord high executioners Scalia and Thomas and Alito and Roberts. You hate the one and love the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon, and in serving mammon you despise us commoners.

Clint, your comment here is reflective more of your chosen subjective stance than it has in the objective reality of the history of the Democratic Party and the relationship they have with the people, workers and trade unions in this country. As I come from a devout conservative Republican family, I have had no particular interest in condemning them, they just have the knack of twisting things absurdly to the point that one can not avoid investigating and questioning their obvious disdain and fear for the people and working class and trade unions.

Obviously, the working class did not buy the phony talk to them by Palin with her winks and the allusion that she can relate to the working class with a beer or her supposed alliance with Joe the six-packs which is a caricature. The workers and the large trade unions in this country typically vote for a Democrat in the Presidential elections, because the Dems typically support and back them. The Republican Party makes it necessary for there to be a counter-political party to protect the interest of workers and that would be the Democratic Party. How you can avoid this historical truth is beyond my understanding and yours is more a reflection of a ghettoized view of the labor movement from the perspective of an elitist.

The day that the Republicans and Democrats fail to represent the people of the US, its workers, is the day we all lose as a country. That day was when NAFTA was passed by both Dems and Republicans. The working class witnesses this with a tremendous loss of jobs and income. The Republicans witness this as profit for their own pockets.

No country can sustain itself without the workers contributions and inclusiveness to the entire economy and the wealth of a nation. The two parties actually should balance one another from one extreme to another. The Republicans got way out of line in their greedy policies that truly were against most people's interest in this country. When an infrastructure is left to decay, jobs are outsourced, those in their forties and fifties are rolled over, laid off, to make way for a younger, cheaper, leaner workforce, a war economy replaces an economy for sustaining and creating life and a new infrastructure, it is natural for the competing party to state, identify those weaknesses and prepare policies that are for the common good of its citizens.

As for "intelligent presidents" and those like GW Bush who have a college diploma like the tin man has a brain, credentials and nothing more to prove such intelligence truly exists as evidenced by his unintelligent speech and policies, whose only "intelligence" if one chooses to call it that, was in his ability to swoon voters by way of fear driven politics. Obviously fear and intelligence works for the Republicans as a propaganda vehicle to garner support for policies which are against everyone's best interest, but for their few corporate elite buddies profiting immensely.

The interest that Republicans have for workers is in their ability to use them, or abuse and discard them for anyone who will work cheaper for them as the case has been, as a means to an end for the selfish interests of those at the top of corporate interests profiting in the worldwide market. Were it not for Democrats and workers who see and hear what Republican policies have done over the years, we would undoubtedly still have children working in coal mines, no minimum wage and no unions whatsoever, and hardly a middle class to speak of. Unfortunately, the Republican Party has gone their own way and is at war with the working people and creating a sub-class of people who are older and out of work, whose young have fewer prospects for gaining a job from their higher education and forced to work in jobs a high school grad was doing. Their interest is greed, and nothing more than that, as seen in the health care industry for profit that most people cannot afford, but the elite can, and the insurance industry that sustains itself by such greed that people really die from the weight of the greed by the insurance industry. If you cannot see the results of the leadership of the Republican Party for the last forty years, that is not intelligence, but avoidance of reality and the true results of their policies. To wish to continue to support such policies is backward and testifies to a low level of spirituality that is for self only at the expense and abuse of others.

Republicans have a lock it seems on feeding the elite (oil, gas, & coal companies, insurance & pharmaceutical companies, companies that supply a war economy, credit card companies with no restrictions to interest or extra charges when late, mortgage companies loaning without oversight or restriction, and starving the workers out of a living wage and jobs, affordable housing, affordable energy, as evidenced by the tax breaks of GW Bush to the wealthiest, who did not re-invest their profits into our US economy and our future here, but hoarded it all for themselves, while Bush relied on loans in billions from China and Saudi Arabia to sustain this madness, which you back as "intelligent."

The workers, the middle class, had to make up the difference in that lost tax revenue gained by the wealthiest by Bush's tax cuts to them, who also had more tax breaks to begin with prior to such a tax break, and who enjoyed also immense profits garnered from those without such profit or tax breaks. A tax break for the wealthy is a tax increase on the middle class. Interesting how this concept was twisted in the McCain/Palin ticket, who were going to continue the tax breaks for the wealthiest, who needed such tax breaks like we need a hole in the head. They lied to the American people and said that Obama was going to increase your taxes. We saw an increase in our taxes from the Republicans for years and an increase in the deficit from them. FACT: All the years that Republicans have been in power have not reduced our taxes or the deficit, nor have they reduced the size of the government but have increased it. GW Bush and the Republicans that remain are nothing but a bunch of liars and deceivers and fanatical right wing elitist. Anyone with intelligence can see this, which is why we voted them out of power.

You seem to measure one's intelligence by the school or the grade's one has received or in their public stature. That's an elitist view. That is one type of intelligence, but truly does not prove intelligence of the sort that not only knows that one plus one equals two, but can also understand that Christ fed thousands with only a few fish, and that kind of intelligence is the sort we need to develop if we are to survive as a nation and as a species.

Obama has no "disdain for average, working-class Americans" and this is so untrue and a distortion of reality to say. It is just bull crap and so typical a right wing elitist's delusion.

The economic policies that I have read of yours in past posts, Clint, are "disdain for average, working-class Americans" and only elitist with disdain for people would support your views.

Clint, Frere Charles was not contending what you say he was contending and it's a false accusation. He merely says: "The GOP prefers their presidents malleable to big business" He didn't say anything about schools or education, you did. And it is true what Frere Charles says as the GOP prefers someone malleable to big business, because they represent the interest of big business.

Yeah, she's a holy terror, all right. Better stay out in the desert.

Willelm, I ask you to read our recent social encyclical while comparing and contrasting it with Palin's platform, such as it is.

Most conveniently, there is in fact here excellent summaries of the encyclical under the REverend Father Richard P. McBrien's by-line.

The fact alone she is a militarist ought to be suggestive . . .

Where does she stand on the death penalty?
Immigration rights?

Read the USCCB's The Challenge of Peace, shining its bright light into the pale Palin darkness . . .

Palin's views (as inarticulate and inconsistent and undeveloped as they have been) "in line with the Catholic Church om the major issues of today?"

Willelm, you are sadly mistaken . . .

yours
frère charles du désert OSB OBLAT (Congrégation de Subiaco)

Yes, she has many of the same social/moral beliefs as Catholics, but she also shares beliefs with other Evangelicals which are inimical to Catholicism.

These prayer warriors truly believe Roman Catholicism is possessed by a demon they refer to as the "Queen of Heaven" and are busily trying to exorcise that demon. Her particular strand of Evangelism has a publically stated plan of seven strategies designed to take over the world for Jesus, but run it themselves. They are bent on a world wide theocracy and the "C" Street crowd is every bit as dedicated to this goal as Sarah Palin.

Two websites you might find interesting are Talk to Action, and the Military Freedom Foundation.

willelm -

I think you ask a really important question: "Why would not Catholics support her? I am a Roman Catholic and I can see nothing in her life, her actions or her beliefs that would prevent a Catholic from supporting her."

The United States Constitution was written with a primary goal of separating church and state. Many Catholics make voting decisions with that founding goal and commitment in mind. I am one of those. I want my individual votes to support that separation of church and state. I understand that the separation of church and state does not require that I consider my own votes in that manner - that I separate my desires as a Catholic from my action-by-vote as a US citizen - but I believe that, for the US to be what our Constitution says we are, I need to make my vote consistent with the separation to which I hold our government accountable.

For me, as a US citizen acountable to the US Constitution, "render to Caesar what is Caesar's" translates as "vote in a manner consistent with the Constitution and its demand for separation of church and state on every level". I consider my personal US citizenship and vote as an important and critical component of "the state". For me, when I am exercising MY role in "the state" (when I vote), my fidelity needs to be to "Caesar", the US Constitution and its goals.

In every other circumstance, I work dilligently to "render unto God what is God's" and, for me, that is my fidelity to the Catholic Church and its teachings that do not require I defy a primary aspect of "American Caesar": the US Constitution and its guarantee of separation of church and state.

Again, your question seems a very good and honest one, willelm. my response is an honest one. I hope it helps you understand at least one Roman Catholic who did not and does not want to see Palin in national office.

Jean