Sure, that’s the real problem here:
The scrutiny focused on Ms. Barrett’s beliefs has provoked allegations of old-fashioned anti-Catholicism on behalf of her Democratic critics. A good amount of febrile nonsense has indeed been floated regarding Ms. Barrett’s spiritual life, such as the notion that People of Praise inspired Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a charge that is reminiscent of 19th-century myths of nuns kidnapping good Protestant girls to force the faith upon them.
People keep pointing out the absurdity — the Democratic presidential nominee is a Catholic, the Speaker of the House is a Catholic, THE ONLY CATHOLIC PRESIDENT WE’VE EVER ACTUALLY HAD WAS A DEMOCRAT — and it’s such a fundamental misunderstanding of Catholicism as a part of modern electoral politics that I have to laugh.
Republican Catholics do not make room in their Republicanism or in their Catholicism for anyone who is not fervently anti-abortion.
That’s it.
That’s all there is.
You cannot be a Democrat and a Catholic, because Democrats generally support abortion rights. This has been the line for three decades at least, that the only issue that matters is abortion, the only Roman Catholic position that life begins at conception, and therefore there is no moral option to support a candidate who does not oppose abortion in the strongest of ways from the earliest stages of pregnancy, with no exceptions whatsoever.
No, not even if the anti-abortion candidate is a subhuman slime mold who’s likely paid for several abortions himself. Not even then. Because, you see, the slime mold still appoints anti-abortion judges. So it’s worth it.
That’s how you have churchgoing politicians told they’re hostile to religion, while a guy who couldn’t spell Jesus if you spotted him the J and both S’s gets a pass and his henchmen get awards for “Christlike behavior.”
You can point out the hypocrisy all day long. I’m not here to kinkshame you. We’re in a global pandemic. Make your own fun.
Just stop expecting it to matter that the candidate of a party that is supposedly so anti-Catholic is, himself, a Catholic. The people calling him godless know very well that he isn’t. They don’t care, and they know the people they’re talking to don’t care either.
They want an anti-abortion judiciary and they will tie themselves into any knots they have to in order to get to one. Stop acting like if you win the meme wars with your maiden aunt/racist uncle somehow this will convince them of anything. They are dishonest in their means but they are 100 percent serious about their ends.
Far better to spend our time focused on dissuading purportedly objective news outlets from allowing six reliably-available-for-a-quote dickheads from defining Christianity in general, defining Catholicism in particular, and promoting the entire idea that Americans are electing a spiritual leader of any kind. (The job entails drone-bombing schoolchildren, do you really want to give it to a monk?)
Democrats elected, let us not forget, the most devoutly Christian president in modern times in James Earl Carter, shortly before it began to occur to Republicans that they could use this one issue to cleave Holy Mother Church in two and leave Her for dead in the alley. Carter, you’ll recall, was roundly characterized as some kind of Communist pussy and is presently 856 years old and hammering nails into Habitat for Humanity Houses on weekends, in between curing diseases and brokering world peace.
So maybe the next time someone who hated him and his party opens their yawp about who does and doesn’t have JC on speed-dial, instead of arguing with the jackass we ask why he’s allowed in the stable in the first place.
A.