We heard a couple lunatic Catholic clergymen on the radio a couple weeks ago ranting about how Catholics cannot in good faith vote for a politician who supports the right of women to make their own reproductive health care decisions, and that such politicians cannot receive communion.* (Pointedly, no such restriction is placed on politicians who support the death penalty, or any of the Pope's other big no-nos.)
Even if a Catholic voter agrees with the candidate on a bunch of other issues, Father Bill Carmody says abortion is trump. Can a Catholic voter support a pro-life pol on the strength of his other positions? Carmody compared such a stance to a vote for Naziism on the strength of Hitler's economic program.
"Because before Hitler, I didn't have bread on my table. After Hitler, I had bread on my table. So they overlooked it. How many of us, when we vote, overlook the life issues because it puts bread on the table?" he said.
We've been stewing about this remark ever since. It's pretty fucking nervy of a Catholic bishop to employ this analogy, because much of their backward clan
did support the Nazis, and not in spite of their attitude toward Jews, but
because of it.
It seems to us that if American voters are looking for moral guidance, they could do a lot better than the international child molesters' network that is the Catholic church.
*Remember, Catholic communion is the rite by which plain old everyday 21st-Century foodstuffs literally become the flesh of Jesus, and the congregation indulges in a sacred orgy of cannibalism. That's right, the wafer is not a symbol; it literally transforms into a hunk of Jesus through the supernatural process of transubstantiation. The wine literally becomes the Blood of the Lamb. (Except the Lamb is not literally a lamb.) Vatican 2 reaffirmed this weird shit as recently as the 1960s. We've tastes blood a few times -- like when we've cut a finger and reflexively sucked it -- and all we can say is that Jesus is one fucking hyperglycemic dude.
We ain't bible scholars, but it seems to us that if the bread and wine weren't meant to be understood symbolically, Jesus wouldn't have served them at the Last Supper in the first place, since He had His own actual flesh and blood right there that they all could have eaten.