"Catholics" Shift into Righteous Crusader Mode re: HHS Contraception Guidelines: None So Blind as Those Who See

Saturday, I wrote, 

I have news for American Catholic intellectuals of the center: every tribe can be spectacularly wrong.  And the more certain a tribe is that it and its leaders have the moral edge on every other tribe in the world, the more likely it is to be spectacularly wrong.  The more certain and set apart a tribe is, the more likely it is to be ignoring valuable information necessary to making well-rounded intellectual and moral judgments.

And today, I'm interested to read (via a link at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish) Ben Shattuck's take-home conclusions about recent research into the reasons the righteous, religious, law-abiding Puritan colony of Massachusetts executed witches in the foundational period of what became the United States:

The take-home from the trials shouldn’t be that poisonous plants can make you hallucinate, but that a perfectly capable, religious, and law-abiding community that laid the roots for American justice legally and conscientiously executed 20 of its own innocent citizens; that over 150 people in Salem that year who were charged as having consorted with the Devil. In Witten’s theory, the girls went crazy. In Norton’s, the town went crazy.

Every tribe can be spectacularly wrong.  And the more certain a tribe is that it and its leaders have the moral edge on every other tribe in the world, the more likely it is to be spectacularly wrong. 

And, A perfectly capable, religious, and law-abiding community that laid the roots for American justice legally and conscientiously executed 20 of its own innocent citizens.

These are historical points to be taken into serious consideration as the U.S. Catholic bishops work up an unholy partisan political dither these days to try to place their anointed party in the White House in 2012.  And as centrist Catholic intellectual leaders jump onto the unholy bandwagon and exult that "Catholics" are finally united behind righteous leaders in a righteous crusade.  

 A crusade that ruthlessly and deliberately identifies the overwhelming percentage of Catholics approving the use of contraceptives as the unrighteous and impure. 

 A crusade that asks us to believe the U.S. Catholic bishops, with their abysmal record as pastoral leaders, have suddenly become moral exemplars. 

 A crusade that asks us to believe that the Republican party as represented by people like Mr. Gingrich or Mr. Romney is uniquely pro-life, interested in promoting the values of life, and concerned to address the root causes of abortion. 

 A crusade that asks us to believe and disseminate a bald lie--that contraceptives are abortifacients, and we're now being asked by the Obama administration to support abortions with taxpayer dollars.  

 A crusade that asks us to ignore well-documented and longstanding research that making contraception widely available  prevents abortion.

 A crusade that asks us to believe that the righteous Catholic crusaders who are perfectly willing to define the majority of their own brother and sister Catholics out of the Catholic church somehow represent the Catholic ideal (and pro-life values) in some exemplary way.

None so blind as those who see--particularly when those who see are in righteous crusader mode.

I think I'll take my chances with the blind about this issue.  Particularly if the new standard-bearers of morality in the American political sphere are the U.S. Catholic bishops, Mr. Gingrich, the eminently anti-life Catholic right who promote leaders and policies entirely antithetical to a pro-life ethic, and the morally blind centrists who have never recognized the danger these righteous, politicized Catholics of the right pose to Catholic values as we seek to transmit those values to the public sphere.

P.S. There's an addendum to this posting here.