“Gentlemen: why are these interdenominational hassles necessary here?”
I’m not arguing for or against Catholicism. It’s politics. I’m saying that Newt converted to get annulments so he could have a better chance of getting the GOP nomination, and being elected President.
However the paper shuffles within the Catholic Church to get Newt his necessary annulments is immaterial to me - if anyone had a lick of sense in the Catholic administrative bureaucracy, they’d have seen this one from a mile away. Let him finish with his political ambitions, then talk conversion. That’s what happened with Tony Blair in the UK. Nobody claimed “politics” in that case. There was no reason to.
There are no coincidences in politics. Many Catholics have legitimate concerns over Newt. I am concerned only with the politics of the matter.
Have you belly ached this much over born sprinkled and revered catholics such as Teddy 'saint' in waiting Kennedy, or Nanny the commie Pewlouise? Give it up because you are exposing yourself to have a log in your eye and 'spiritual' blindness.
1. We have four GOP candidates left: Romney, Gingrich, Santorum and Paul;
2. Paul gives every indication of being a refugee from the planet Neptune and will never be nominated in any event by the GOP;
3. Rick Santorum is an outstanding man, husband, father, pro-life and pro-family champion in his public life and in his private life. He is a well-catechized Roman Catholic and I am personally more comfortable with Santorum than with any other candidate. Unfortunately, he appears not to have a viable path to nomination;
4. Mitt Romney is a liberal Democrat in GOP drag who has a lengthy track record of being pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality, pro-perversion posing as marriage, a gun grabber, a tax hiker on folks of modest means, a nominator of social revolutionary judges, a man who cares not a whit about foreign policy or human rights unless it somehow facilitates opportunities to augment his elite level of income and that of his fellow trust fund babies,a man who governed Massachusetts as a grotesque liberal and left the GOP there in total wreckage far worse than he found it. He did not get defeated for re-election because he shared the obvious knowledge of his pollster that even Massachusetts was thoroughly disgusted with his act. He either got his agenda enacted as governor (in which case his agenda was an unrelenting litany of leftist idiocy thereby disqualifying himself as a GOP POTUS candidate) OR the legislature and judiciary were the actual governors of Taxachusetts during his term (in which case his gross incompetence as a public official disqualifies him as a GOP POTUS candidate).
5. Newt Gingrich is a flawed man as are we all and his flaws are probably more soap opera and titillating than the flaws of many of us. His critics' nonsense notwithstanding, he was a very good Congressman who led the GOP to majority status in 1994. He was felled as Speaker by the propaganda skills of Slick Willie (himself no paragon of marital virtue and an apparent rapist of Juanita Broderick, attempted rapist of Paula Jones, molester of Kathleen Willie, etc., etc., etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseam), the relentless opposition of the LSM that was SHOCKED to find the House run by Republicans, and by a cabal of generally corrupt GOP leaders panting for lobbyists' checks with lots of zeroes uber alles. Dennis Hastert and John Boehner are not my ideal as public officials. Gingrich has a legitimate shot at the nomination and to finish off Romney. No one else in the GOP does among those presently running. Newt is pro-life, pro-family, pro-gun, firm as to foreign policy and stands ready to punish the courts;
6. If many Catholics have legitimate concerns over Newt, that is business and politics as usual. Many ostensible Catholics voted for Obozo. I might question their Catholicism, but it is what it is. We Catholics do not take orders from the hierarchy as to whom we will elect, whatever some folks may fear. I do think that the long term trend of Catholic voting (including Latino immigrants "legal" or otherwise) is to the right and towards the conservative wing of the GOP. We are not electing a new Mother Teresa but a POTUS.
7. As to Tony Blair, I like(d) him personally which is something I can say of no other Brit Labor Party leader. As a Catholic, he leaves much to be desired since he apparently supports legal abortion and "gay" everything. His admission to the RCC should have been postponed until he had actually converted and accepted the tenets of RCC doctrine. I hope he will continue to seek to be actually Catholic but he is not really there yet. Acceptance of Tony Blair into the Church was probably political opportunism not by him but by Brit Catholic bishops. It is the substance of the conversion that matters and nothing, but nothing, prevents accepting conversions just because the convert is an active politician. If the outside world does ot like that, toooooo bad. It is the RCC's business, the convert's business, God's business and no one else's business since others have no horse in the race. The "respect" of other humans is irrelevant. Foolish people care entirely too much for what we Catholics call "human respect," which is a prime source of sin in human society. Sinning to hide reality from public knowledge does not somehow sanitize such cowardly sins and turn them into virtues. How many abortions, for instance, result from a desire to avoid public notice? The baby is just as dead.