Posted on 03/23/2012 2:22:38 PM PDT by NYer
Interesting perspective, ping!
The KKK act was written to protect:
“Catholics, Republicans and Negroes” in the Reconstruction South.
The writer is not completely accurate.
If the Catholics want to take credit for the mess we call the Grand Old Party, more power to them.
That is quite a stretch.
Actually, the DNC is pushing catholics out.
For a believing catholic, the Democratic Party is an increasingly hostile place.
Agreed. I trend towards Conservative. However, the GOP is far better than the Democratic party to which far too many catholics still subscribe.
The key, mentioned in the article, is that Catholic social and political conservativism is rooted in human rights and Natural Law. This is not exclusively the property of Castholics, of course; quite the contrary. It is exactly a Natural Law perspective that emphasizes that moral law makes “natural sense” and thus makes it politically defensible in secular terms.
“Actually, the DNC is pushing catholics out.”
The notion that the GOP is being Catholicized is hokum. Catholics have been a reliable Democrat constituency for decades, despite the justices and candidates cited by the author. Exceptions are not the rule.
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I would say, not so much that the conservatives are being “Catholicized”, but rather that the post-Vatican II mess was an aberration in the life of the Church. The Catholic Church is a naturally conservative institution, — think what you will of its theology, the Church’s sole objective is the preservation of the Deposit of Faith given the Apostles 2000 years ago. The reason American Catholics lurched to the left with J.F. Kennedy was transient and now we observe an almost instinctive correction. In one generation from now the Church might be smaller, possibly even driven underground, but she will be considerably more conservative.
You should try reading the article.
There weren’t a lot of Catholics in the antebellum South but there were some, especially in Maryland, Kentucky, and Louisiana. The one Catholic among the Signers of the Declaration of Independence and the one Catholic among the Signers of the Constitution were Marylanders. Chief Justice Roger Taney (from Maryland) was a Catholic. Jefferson Davis got some of his education from Catholic educators. There is a street in Macon, GA, named in honor of Pope Pius IX (Pio Nono). There is a Catholic Church in Edgefield, SC, that dates back to 1856.
**Six out of nine justices of the Supreme Court are Catholics, and five of them are Republicans.**
A lot of people don’t realize this!
Well, and Scarlett O’Hara was Catholic. ;-) “Fiddle-dee-dee! Obama and his HHS mandate! It’s ruined every party this spring!”
Where I live in Tennessee, whih is not a large city. There is an relatively impressive(at least by local standards) antibellum Catholic Churh downtown, nearby an Methodist and Presbyterian church of of the same period and size. so there was and continues to be an active Catholic presence then as is now.
The original KKK was virulently anti-negro rights, scalawags and northern carpetbaggers. If anyone who happened to be Catholics were confronted by the KKK, it was because they were in favor of the aforementioned. Their religious beliefs were inconsequential at this period of time.
I know what it says, and it can be found in any of the OLDER legal books.
But, of course, Lincoln, the first REPUBLICAN President, had this to say:
“Many of Lincoln's public anti-slavery sentiments were shown in the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, his opponent who defeated him in the Senate race. Douglas criticized him as being inconsistent, saying he altered his message and position on slavery and on the political rights of freed blacks in order to appeal to the audience before him, as northern Illinois was more hostile to slavery than southern Illinois.
Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed in 1855:
How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be take pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].[
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_and_slavery
If you insist that I locate the Preamble to the KKK Act, I can find it in print form at the local law library.
Many pieces of legislation have floor debate or written preambles attached to them, in older law books, as some form of guidance as to intent.
My point, of course, is that Lincoln and Grand BOTH were defenders of Catholics as well as Blacks.
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