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| Rick Santorum maybe about faith and family, but freedom? Certainly not for all Americans. |
Rick Santorum has managed to make himself topic du jour in the blogosphere this Monday morning, which is something considering the Oscars were last night. I'll have to join the Rick mania since I have not heard of most of the Best Picture nominees, much less seen any of them. It seems lately if a movie isn't on Turner Classic Movies or the International Film Channel, I haven't seen it. Ergo I have to write about Rick Santorum. Well, bummer.
What makes Rick the topic du jour is his statement to George Stephanopulous that JFK's 1960 Houston speech on religious freedom 'makes him want to throw up'. OK Rick, but you might also mention that JFK's speech to that suspicious Evangelical Houston crowd, helped pave the way for you to be the front runner in the Republican party some sixty years later. You actually owe President Kennedy and the Democrats a thank you for where you are now. Actually that last thought makes me want to throw up.
I admit I have a very difficult time understanding why Rick Santorum, who also seems very willing to throw up on the entire social justice teaching of the Catholic Church, is receiving any support from our Catholic bishops. Seriously, I have been giving a lot of thought to what the USCCB is really up to and why Ricki Sanctimonious is so important to their plans, and the plans of the Republican Party. But God is good and He does provide, and in today's blogo mania about Rick there have been some real nuggets that have helped my understanding. The first nugget was an article entitled "Why 2012 Is the Republicans Last Chance." It's written by Jonathan Chait for New York Magazine. It deals with demographics and how those demographics spell doom for the current Republican Party. The following excerpt is from the opening paragraphs:
......Rick Santorum warns his audiences, “We are reaching a tipping point, folks, when those who pay are the minority and those who receive are the majority.” Even such a sober figure as Mitt Romney regularly says things like “We are only inches away from no longer being a free economy,” and that this election “could be our last chance.”
The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams. But this is not one of them. To be sure, the apocalyptic ideological analysis—that “freedom” is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care—is pure crazy. But the panicked strategic analysis, and the sense of urgency it gives rise to, is actually quite sound. The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.
The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a natural-majority coalition for Democrats.
The Republican Party had increasingly found itself confined to white voters, especially those lacking a college degree and rural whites who, as Obama awkwardly put it in 2008, tend to “cling to guns or religion.” Meanwhile, the Democrats had increased their standing among whites with graduate degrees, particularly the growing share of secular whites, and remained dominant among racial minorities. As a whole, Judis and Teixeira noted, the electorate was growing both somewhat better educated and dramatically less white, making every successive election less favorable for the GOP. And the trends were even more striking in some key swing states. Judis and Teixeira highlighted Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona, with skyrocketing Latino populations, and Virginia and North Carolina, with their influx of college-educated whites, as the most fertile grounds for the expanding Democratic base.
Obama’s victory carried out the blueprint. Campaign reporters cast the election as a triumph of Obama’s inspirational message and cutting-edge organization, but above all his sweeping win reflected simple demography. Every year, the nonwhite proportion of the electorate grows by about half a percentage point—meaning that in every presidential election, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 percent, a huge amount in a closely divided country. One measure of how thoroughly the electorate had changed by the time of Obama’s election was that, if college-educated whites, working-class whites, and minorities had cast the same proportion of the votes in 1988 as they did in 2008, Michael Dukakis would have, just barely, won. By 2020—just eight years away—nonwhite voters should rise from a quarter of the 2008 electorate to one third. In 30 years, nonwhites will outnumber whites......
These numbers explain why the USCCB has become so important to the Republican party and why Ricki Sanctimonious is running on a platform of 'faith and family values'. It's called the Hispanic vote. It's the reason the New Apostolic Reformation is losing it's political ascendancy in the culture wars. Hispanics are Catholic. The Newt has been working for last six years on his cementing his 'Catholic' qualifications, which should have been a big tip off since Newt has always been about Newt's political ambitions. Unfortunately for Newt, by the time he 'found' Catholicism, he had cycled through two wives and three adulterous relationships and somehow failed to engender any child units. Rick, on the other hand, has had one wife and seven child units. Hmmmm, apparently one can only take religious hypocrisy to a certain level--even in the Republican party. Newt has suddenly found himself way behind Rick.
The USCCB gains by becoming thee voice in the culture wars. This certainly helps undercut the global plans of the apocalyptic home of Sarah Palin, the New Apostolic Reformation, and their not so secret plans for creating their Earthly Kingdom for Jesus before Jesus comes with His nuclear/biogenic angelic army. Since various and sundry units of the NAR are wreaking havoc amongst the Catholic population in South and Central America and Africa, the Vatican gains even more if the USCCB can cement itself as the loudest moral voice in the US, because the US is where most of the money fueling the NAR is coming from. And one should never forget that Rick is not just closely connected to Opus Dei, he's also closely connected to The Family who is closely connected to the NAR. Hmmmm, kind of makes one wonder where Rick's godly allegiances really lay. In any event, it's certainly not to the US Constitution and it's silly notions of the separation of Church and State. That makes him 'throw up'. Whether he's uber Catholic or some Evangelical hybrid mix, Rick is a Dominionist, and Dominionism is not Catholic, and that is not where this country or this world needs to go. It's the longest running fear based human delusion of all time.
I encourage readers to ponder the entire linked article. It's worth the read. I also encourage readers to check this article by Frank Cocozzelli over at Open Tabernacle, and Bill Lyndsey's musings at Bilgrimage. Both articles have links worth chasing down.
