http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/How-the-Faithful-Voted.aspx
Posted on 04/20/2012 5:25:19 AM PDT by marshmallow
Has the title of this blog post got your attention? Good. Many of this blog’s regular readers and com-boxers could be classified as conservative Catholic, myself included (though I do my best to elude fixed categories). So I hope you will take this to heart, and maybe even take the debate outside the confines of this blog if you feel so moved.
I like Bill Donohue. I sympathize with him and his organization, The Catholic League. I share many of their sentiments, including outrage and disgust, whenever the media decides to take another whack at Christianity. So I certainly don’t critique Donohue or the CL from the left. Nor is my critique limited to Donohue and CL, but could extend to any number of Catholic and Protestant organizations as well.
With that said, here are two things that I wish they would all stop doing, and they are closely related.
1. Stop demanding that people “apologize” for their anti-Christian remarks.
As a young man trying to be a faithful Catholic, I am simply not the least bit interested in apologies from Bill Maher or Jon Stewart, the current target of Donohue’s organization. There are several reasons for this.
First, forced public apologies are the modus operandi of the hysterical and politically-correct left. The left demands forced apologies for every off-color comment made about race, gender, or sexual preference because its views on these topics, rooted as they are in egalitarianism and other constructed ideologies, can never triumph in a free and fair marketplace of ideas. People have to be forced to accept the leftist narrative about these topics as legitimate because most of that narrative is contrary not only to science and sound scholarship, but to everyday wisdom and common sense as experienced by the vast majority of people.
Catholicism............
(Excerpt) Read more at the-american-catholic.com ...
More Catholics voted Republican or did not vote at all than Catholics who voted Democrat so what ever point you are trying to make cannot be statistically demonstrated.
It is a fact that women overwhelmingly vote democrat in percentages exceeded only by black voters. Do you share an equal disdain for women and blacks as you apparently do for Catholics?
Wah!
Meanwhile this type of attack is allowed to stand.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2874380/posts?page=17#17
Vulgar and abusive behavior? Like the FReepmails you send me?
Grow up...
When you use as your authoritative source a Pew report that relies on MSNBC exit polling numbers anyone with any education would question the accuracy or objectivity of the data. But assuming they are somewhat correct the actual numbers show that of all Catholics in the US, less than 25% voted Democrat.
As I asked another FReeper in an earlier post, since blacks and women of all religions vote Democrat at a far higher rate than Catholics do you too harbor a greater contempt for women and blacks too?
What A GREAT LINE/THOUGHT/EPIGRAM/BON MOT/STARTLING APERCU*.
obviously, your relationship with the Blarney Stone went way past First Base, Stevio.
*BTW, consider that line stolen.
Nice straw man deflection from the facts you got there...
Typical...
Good grief, look at the percentages of Jewish folks voting Democrat. What in heavens name could they be thinking? (Obviously, they AREN’T thinking!)
It’s a small set, but I’m at the point that some posts/posters are only worth the effort it takes to scroll past.
I couldn't disagree more.
Comparing me to "angry femenists," using the leftist tool to disuade differing opinion, marks this clown as clueless.
I have a cure for that.
I either re-post them in open forum, with a warning when warranted, exactly as received, or forward them to admins with a request for action.
I don't keep my actions a secret.
I don’t know why you are angry, or what you mean by disdain, or why you claim that the female vote is more democrat than the Jewish vote, or the Hispanic vote, or the homosexual vote, by the way the female vote used to always be republican, they have a much better record than Catholics, even now it is close, a 2 point difference in 2008.
Obama got 56% of the female vote, and 54% of the Catholic vote.
I pointed out that the Catholic vote is something the democrats can usually depend on, but boomers have actually made it a little less so, not more so.
That is a nonsense claim, the female vote was 56% for Obama, the Catholic vote was 54%, I would like to see your numbers for the 'Protestant female' vote that you claim to know, also the Evangelical female numbers.
Southern Baptist is America's second largest church second only to the Catholic church, how do you think Southern Baptist women voted?
It depends on the point one is trying to make. If you, or anyone else, for arguments sake, can aggregate all Catholics in to a group to establish the premise of an syllogistic (if/then) argument then I can freely aggregate any arbitrary group into a similar population to refute it.
You aren’t making any sense at all, the Catholic church is a single church of church baptized, and church counted Catholics, the Vatican tells us they are Catholics and counts them as such.
Catholics and women voted almost the same in 2008.
How do Southern Baptist women vote, like Catholics? How about the catch-all of incredible diversity, “Protestant” women?
In 2004 Catholic Hispanics voted about 31% republican while Protestant Hispanics voted 56% republican, in 2008 it was about the same for Hispanic Catholics and 48% for Hispanic Protestants, how do Protestant females vote?
2. Stop whining about “double-standards” like a bunch of radical feminists.
When the New York Times ran a full page ad viciously attacking the Church in a manner that any rational person would label an incitement to hatred and perhaps even violence, there were many conservative commentators who could only focus on one thing: getting in a similar shot at Islam. It became the obsession of the week for some people, with one public figure, Pamela Geller, even drafting an anti-Islam ad for the Times.
Bill Donohue complained in a similar manner when the television show South Park mocked the Church. All he could focus on was taunting the creators of the show to take a shot at Islam (which they actually would have done, had Comedy Central not censored their work out of fear). And so I’ve seen, over and over again, the first response to any attack on Christianity being “why aren’t you attacking Islam too?”
This is irrational behavior. Setting aside how I might feel about Islam as a religion, I must ask: what did America’s Muslims do to deserve this kind of treatment? Why wasn’t there a voice that said that it is wrong to incite hatred against anyone? Seeing Islam and Muslims themselves mocked and humiliated the way the Church has been isn’t something that is going to make me feel better. I don’t think it is going to make anyone feel better.
It has nothing to do with fear of terrorism either, but rather with the axiom we all learned in kindergarten (which is itself derived from Christianity): two wrongs don’t make a right. Not only that, but how absurd is it to – as I have sometimes seen – both demand an apology for remarks made against one’s own religion and insist that “fairness” requires that another religion be ridiculed?
There’s just a whiny quality to these demands as well. The obsession with the double-standard really infected our culture through feminism. Books and books have been written that solely concern themselves with the double-standards that society holds for men and women. Do double-standards exist? Yes. Can they sometimes be unfair? Yes. Can they be eliminated? No! Sometimes life is unfair.
Moreover, if you are a Christian, you ought to expect it to be unfair. It is time to get used to the fact that we live in a pagan society, not a Christian one. We see certain evidences of a past in which Christianity was the dominant cultural paradigm, and it may tempt us into thinking that we have more political and social weight than we really have.
This is the reality: “If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you… If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you” — Jn. 15:18, 20
Compared to what Catholics have suffered in different times and places around the world, we have it pretty easy. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be concerned, even outraged, when Christ is disrespected in public. But the two major response types I’ve covered here range from immature to immoral. How about instead of boycotting Jon Stewart, or demanding he apologize, or insisting that he take some shots at Islam, we pray for his conversion to the Catholic faith? Not only is that what God wants of us, not only is it what is objectively best for Jon Stewart, it will bring upon us the kind of hatred that makes us more worthy of Christ, the hatred of the world for His sake. What would 1 million prayers for the conversion of Jon Stewart result in? I’d like to find out.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.