Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "Oh, Religious Liberty....ZZzzzzzzzzzz......."

At National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters, who will not give up the religious liberty charade to save his soul, writes, 

Race Matters and 2012 Elections: Implications for Churches

Twelve days before the elections, I went on one of my usual rants here and noted my frustration with some of my fellow Catholics with whom I'd been talking about race and the coming elections at the Commonweal blog.  I wrote,

The GOP's Very Bad Night: The Racial Subtext That Is Not Subtextual at All

As I post this piece this morning, the lead article at the CNN site is Tom Cohen's analysis of the challenge now facing the Republican party after Tuesday's elections.  Cohen writes,

The Challenge Now Facing American Catholics: Paying Attention to What Bubbles Up from Catholic Sewers

Meanwhile (this is a postscript to what I just posted about the important, much-appreciated contribution of Catholics too numerous to mention to the victory for human decency and human rights in four U.S. states two days ago), things got really ugly at many of the National Catholic Reporter threads yesterday.  I'll be blunt and say that they got downright vile.  

Turning Corner with Marriage Equality (and Catholic Contributions)

And, of course, one of the biggest news stories of this election cycle, which still has not received as much attention as it deserves in the national media, is the story of the unprecedented victory of marriage equality in not one but four states.  As Ashley Fetters notes in The Atlantic, the election marks the first time in American history that marriage equality was passed by a popular vote, breaking the streak of unbroken ballot-box defeats on which the religious right, with its attendant Catholic organizations like the Knights of Columbus and the National Organization for Marriage, has long counted to establish precedents for denying rights to LGBT citizens.  

New America of 2012 Elections: Implications for Religious Conservatives and American Catholic Centrists

Vis-a-vis religion-and-politics news, one of the big narratives emerging from this election cycle is the increasing impotence of the religious right in American politics, and the significant challenges posed to the religious right by the broad coalition of voters (African Americans, Latinos, women, gays, and young people) that, during this election cycle, refused to be browbeaten into submission by the aging white men (including the Catholic hierarchy) who have created and continue to run the religious right machine.  Here are a few statements about this matter:

Post-Election Commentary: History Turning a Corner with the New America

This morning, a selection of post-election commentary from the last two days that, to my mind, makes valuable points and raises interesting questions: the following all focus on the new America that one commentator after another sees expressing its political will in the 2012 elections, in which a record number of Latino voters voted, in which the gender gap nationwide was 18 points, in which significant numbers of progressive young voters made a powerful difference at the polls, in which 77% of gay voters backed Obama, and in which black voters responded to ugly, raw GOP attempts to suppress their vote by turning out in droves to exercise the right to vote: