At National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters, who has announced he will not vote for President Obama following his decision on contraceptive coverage and health insurance, tells his readers to give Mitt Romney a break after Romney said, "I'm not concerned about the very poor . . . ."
By contrast, in the New York Times, Paul Krugman says that the more Romney and others try to soft-sell his quip about the poor, the more troubling the statement becomes. In Krugman's view, Romney plainly meant what he said, and the remark opens new, brutally honesty frontiers for conservative politicians in American politics. Romney's remark signals a willingness of the political right to admit frankly that it does not care for the poor (and does care for the very rich):
Which brings us back to Mr. Romney’s lack of concern. You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.
One of these two writers seems to understand very well what we Catholics believe, along with others in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, about socioeconomic justice.
The other, not so much.
Tragic, isn't it, how the obsessive, exclusive fixation on fertilized zygotes (and trying to bully the Democratic party into toeing a Catholic party line that Catholics themselves don't toe) can so blinker one at the level of moral insight that one remains essentially adolescent, forever caught in a we-vs.-them club mentality in one's Catholic journalistic approach to political issues. Where we're forever caught in an ongoing adolescent scrimmage in which there always have to be "huge wins" and "big losses" for one team or the other. And where our adolescent all-male clerical club proves its machismo by scoring points against and beating up on women and wimpy Catholic progressives.
With the following result: when one does profess concerns for social and economic justice, people simply stop listening, because those concerns can hardly be compelling any longer, after one has written out of the conversation all those groups whose human rights one is intent to trample as one enforces Catholic purity vis-a-vis contraception and abortion. The Catholic bishops have long since lost any credibility as real pro-life leaders, because of this.
And their adolescent Catholic-tribe cheerleaders are quickly doing the same, as they play the bishops' ugly political games for them in the media.
No comments:
Post a Comment