and second is, ‘here is why’ ‘level of devotion’ ‘theological purity’, ‘racial purity’ ‘angels on the head of a pin’ etc, which ends up basically saying that ‘no they don’t’.
is nonsense.
I pretty distinctly said "Some do,"which is NOT at all, "No they don't."
One of the errors in thought addressed by Plato is that it gets us nowhere to say only a good football player is a REAL football player. There are bad football players and there are bad Catholics. In the election last week we got a suggestion of how many bad Catholics there are -- lots.
Again, my saying there are lots is not saying "No they don't."
This is why God gave us data-mining. It may be true, for example, the minorities tend to get harsher sentences than whites for some crimes. That does not mean they get the harsher sentences BECAUSE they are minorities. It could be (though I doubt it) that they get harsher sentences in spite of their being minorities. But standards like employment, domestic situation, family income and assets, academic performance, etc. may influence sentencing while ethnic or racial issues don't.
People who point directly to the correspondence between race and sentencing usually have an axe to grind.
But if one does not see the difference between "some do" and "no they don't" there's not a lot of future in the conversation.
What I said was correct, even conservative catholics want to go into the tall grass and get into, at best, internal catholic discussions about purity and level of devotion etc.
As a conservative, I look at the catholic vote and see it going republican five times in all of history, possible 6, by slim margins, and only once against an incumbent democrat.
The catholic vote is dependably democrat, even within Hispanics the Protestant/Catholic divide exists.
Catholic immigration is serving the democrat party as it always has, when we talk about losing Texas, we are talking about the catholic vote turning it blue.