Conjecture About The Catholic Bishops Role In The Republican Party’s Defeat

By Donald A. Collins | 8 November 2012
Church and State

In the aftermath of an election which apparently astonished Rove and the Koch boys since it took Romney hours to acknowledge his defeat after the Networks called it for Obama—did Wall Street’s day before the election Dow Jones stock market rise mirror their expectation of winning?—one can make many estimates of why and the pundits have left us no end of conjectures to ponder.

However, the main stream media has steadfastly and consistently ignored a couple of ideas about why so many Americans were turned off on Romney and Ryan and the Republican Party in general, despite the nearly 8% unemployment and the slow pace of our economic recovery.

The media did note the fact that young voters and many women were turned off. No wonder if you recall the Republican platform plank against abortion for any reason including life of the mother!

Then the statements of Todd Akin about legitimate rape in his race against Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Representative Joe Donnelly, a three-term Democrat, won an open Senate seat in Indiana on Tuesday, beating Richard E. Mourdock, a Republican who had been on the defensive since he said in a debate last month that if a woman was raped and became pregnant, that was “something that God intended to happen.”

But notice how infrequently does the MSM mention the immense efforts of the Catholic Church bishops in mobilizing its flock to vote against Obama.

And do we know how much influence the RCC has with the Tea Party, which seems composed of the hardest right wingers in America?

The RC Bishops’ main issues such as its continuing war on women’s reproductive rights and against allowing women choice on abortion, meshes neatly into the political positions of those folks, such as former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), a devout Catholic, whose views dominated the actions of the Republican primaries.

While the RCC has operated flagrantly in favor of open borders for aliens, legal or illegal, their immigration arguments were muted in this cycle because they focused on the canard of having their freedom taken away! Apparently they did this so they could better discriminate against women in their employ by trying to deny them coverage under various Catholic health plans.

One poll I heard asked if Obama was to blame for the slow economic conditions, the deficit and other downers mentioned by Romney or was it George W. Bush? A majority of the poll’s respondents said Bush was to blame. That doesn’t take too many smarts. Perhaps one of the most informative photos of “W” taken while he was President was amidst a bunch of red clad Cardinals smiling broadly as they were knowing that his position was theirs on keeping women down. In another scene, Bush is bowing to the Pope, which you can view by going here: http://www.spirituallysmart.com/bush.html

So now that the dust has cleared and the Republican Party is assessing the demography of defeat, one of my friends, Frosty Wooldridge, has offered the Party some very good advice.

He is such a clear thinker and writer that I will quote him extensively from his OP ED piece just published.

Republicans must come to terms with pro-choice
By Frosty Wooldridge

Both parties run our country over a financial cliff, wreck us environmentally, fail to generate jobs for over 14 million Americans and culturally destroy our country with endless immigration. The list grows.

One wonders why any American voted for either party’s candidates. Our U.S. Congress provides the finest example of the Peter Principle—total incompetence. Both candidates should have lost. A third party candidate would do a better job because it’s obvious that democrats and republicans have failed the American people for two decades.

As the vote showed, 51 percent to 49 percent, we share a divided country. Half hate Obama and the other half ride on his ability to provide welfare, food stamps, government jobs, assisted housing, amnesties and free medical care. From 36 million to 47 million Americans now subsist on food stamps during Obama’s first term. A lot of folks cannot secure a job and a lot of folks like a free ride.

“Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” Thomas Jefferson

With such a failed four years by Obama, how did he win another term in the obvious light of his incompetence? Answer: he enjoyed the majority-minority welfare vote. Folks love getting things for free. But of particular note, Obama captured all those women who demand pro-choice.

At some point, the Republican Party must evolve out of the Dark Ages and accept Pro-Choice as a single, viable right for millions of women in America. No one can legislate morality, ethics or personal choices. Around the world, 46 million women annually choose abortion. They choose it because they cannot provide for another child. They choose it because they cannot secure birth control. They choose it because they suffer desperation of their poverty.

Notice that whenever a republican president reaches the White House, he kills the annual $180 million given to International Family Planning and birth control. Republicans represent modern day moral troglodytes. They never think about the 10 million children that starve to death annually around the globe because of the lack of birth control.

I remember my college years in 1965, when rich girls became pregnant, they took “Mercy flights” to Great Britain and returned un-pregnant. The poor however, delivered babies by the truck load. Their poverty became cyclical and horrific.

At the same time, 1.2 million American women turned to backroom medical butchers for abortions. Some doctors provided abortions, but feared for their licenses from capricious women who might expose them.

Finally, in 1972, the Supreme Court provided Roe vs. Wade and gave women a choice. Today, women may visit a Family Planning Clinic for counseling to either keep the baby or choose to terminate it. It’s got to be a terribly distressing situation and choice either way.

But, by God, republicans and the religious right condemn it and vote to send those female sinners to the gates of hell. What they don’t understand about choice is this: it’s none of their business. It’s no one’s business how you eat even if you are so obese you are killing yourself. (You ARE killing yourself, too.) It’s no one’s business if you smoke or get drunk every night in an ongoing attempt to kill yourself. It’s no one’s business if you smoke pot or not.

Finally, your morality cannot be applied to anyone else

If the Republican Party expects to continue as viable, it must evolve into the 21st century. It must deal with reality. It must grant women their personal choices and its leaders must move to a pro-choice platform. It needs to stop its “nanny-state” caretaking as to abortion, drugs and gay marriage.

If it fails to evolve, it will proceed at a rapid speed toward extinction. The fact remains as Thomas Jefferson said, “A republic provides for the tyranny of the majority.” In this case, the majority of women demand pro-choice. Republicans either get onto the train or they will be left behind standing on the railroad tracks of the past.

Frosty like most writers who favor reproductive rights gets the arguments right, but fails to mention who the real miscreants are!

Certainly the time has come in America to put aside the venom and the absurdity of trying to tell women about reproductive rights. These RCC males and others of that sex are finding that since the Pill arrived in 1960, women were going to make a great leap forward into a time when reproduction and housekeeping were not the dominant roles they would be allowed to play. Look at the growing numbers of women in Congress and in every aspect of public life.

As for abortion options, pills allowing early termination are fast overtaking the need for surgical methods which are subject to dangerous political restrictions by those who agree with the RC bishops.

If we are going to have a viable 2 party system in the USA, the Republicans better shuck off the bishops and their Tea Party doxies and get with the fact that the majority of our young people will not ever vote for their forced pregnancy policies again.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013.

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