May 07 2008
Picking and Choosing
Glen Greenwald has a powerful post today concerning the presidential election and the Catholic vote. Prompted by some on the right who, commenting on the Indiana precinct where a group of 80- and 90-yearold nuns were not able to vote for lack of sufficient identification, asked what the nuns were doing voting for Obama or Clinton in the first place, Greenwald points out that the right is very selective in picking and choosing which issues to exploit: “This is what tawdry religious manipulators like [National Review's Kathryn Jean] Lopez have been doing for years — selectively accepting slivers of moral dogma and religious institutions purely for political gain, while advocating policies that could not be more opposed to that dogma and those institutions.”
Greenwald goes on to say that “John McCain’s entire worldview on foreign policy, cheered on excitedly by Lopez — not only with regard to endless war in Iraq but also Iran and beyond — is nothing but a vehement violation and rejection of “the Church’s teaching on innocent human life.”
On this Greenwald is correct, but right-wing Catholics, of course, are not the only ones who hijack theology in order to pick and choose.
