In an excellent article today Jonah Goldberg takes on liberal Catholics, especially Joe Biden.
Biden says he personally accepts his Church’s “de fide doctrine” that “life begins at conception. . . . I accept that in my personal life.” But he refuses to impose it on others who don’t share his faith.
Goldberg demonstrates that liberals believe it’s fine for religion to inform and shape who they are and what they do, but all of a sudden they react in horror when conservatives, equally acting on the basis of religious and even non-religious convictions, try to “impose their religious views on the rest of of us.” He’s perfectly willing to grant Biden’s sincerity “so long as he remembers that the ‘liberal’ comes first in ‘liberal Catholic.’”
Short-time readers or long-time readers with short memories will understand why I like Goldberg’s article so much if you read (or re-read) the following old posts of mine:
Cuomo Praises Lincoln But Sounds Like Douglas
Califano Would Confess … But He’s Innocent
Life Begins … Life Ends (Kerry in 2004)
Article Of Faith And National Interest: One And The Same? (Kerry in 2004, but a Kerry who sounds eerily like a precursor of Obama. The entry on “precursor” in the Thesaurus built into my MacBook Pro’s OS X gives the example of “a precursor of disasters to come.”)
Joseph Califano Solves The Church-State Problem … Again (Califano, 2009)
In 1966 Ole Miss historian James Silver quipped that in 1964 Mississippi became the only state in American history ever to remain a one party state while switching parties. (This quip may be something I heard him say discussing his book rather than something he wrote in the book; I can’t remember.) My view of the Cuomo-Califano-Kerry-Biden line of liberal Catholics is that they are similar to Silver’s Mississippi: they have all remained deeply reverential, devout, even orthodox, congregants of their church … but their “one true church” (“… the body of true believers”) switched from the Catholic Church to the Democratic Party.
