I grew up on the West Side of St. Paul. Most of my friends were Catholic and went to "parochial school," as we called it. A lot of them were Mexican. They all went to church every Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning, though I never did.
My mom had been a Jehovah's Witness, and the battles between her and my dad over religion convinced me that religion was basically a scam, a way to control people and extract money from them.
If Barrett is confirmed, pro-life Catholics can vote for Biden with a clear conscience, knowing that the future of abortion will rest in the hands of seven Catholics on the Supreme Court.
My first girlfriend was Catholic. I went to mass with her because I was over at her house on Saturday afternoons. It was kind of funny because Father Esterka, the priest who gave the mass (he was Czech), sounded like Bela Lugosi when he said the words "the bahdy and blahd of Christ." Even back then the whole ritual vampirism and cannibalism of the eucharist seemed kind of creepy to me.
My best friend in high school and college, and best man, is Catholic.
My wife was raised a Catholic and we were married in a Catholic church. The priest who married us didn't care that I wasn't baptized, and I found out years later that he left the priesthood and married a former nun.
When I was a kid all my friends' families had five or six kids. It wasn't just a Catholic thing, my family had six kids too: birth control was just coming out in the Sixties. My wife's brothers and sisters, all good practicing Catholics, have zero, two or three kids in their families. Which is to say that all of them practice birth control, completely ignoring the dictates of the Catholic Church.
My step mother-in-law is an even more devout Catholic than my father-in-law was. But when they left their house for an assisted living facility, they gave their house to her gay grandson and his partner. Even though the Church itself still preaches against homosexuality it's an open secret that perhaps half of all priests are gay, and this has been the case for a thousand years.
This is all to say that pretty much everyone I knew growing up was Catholic, so I know Catholics. The reality is that the average Catholic is just an average American. That is, they're just like Joe Biden.
They probably wouldn't have an abortion if they got pregnant unexpectedly, but they also don't want to force anyone else to have an unwanted child. Like Joe Biden. But there are Catholics who have a much more doctrinaire stand on abortion.
Which brings us to Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court seat vacated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Specifically, Barrett was a member of a fringe Catholic group called People of Praise, where she held the creepy title of "handmaid." More disturbingly:
Also, while in law school, Barrett lived at the South Bend home of People of Praise’s influential co-founder Kevin Ranaghan and his wife, Dorothy, who together helped establish the group’s male-dominated hierarchy and view of gender roles. The group was one of many to grow out of the charismatic Christian movement, which sought a more intense and communal religious experience by embracing such practices as shared living, faith healing and speaking in tongues.
When Republicans claim that Democrats are demonizing Barrett for her religion they imply that Democrats are anti-Catholic. Which is false. The Democratic party platform, with the exception of reproductive rights, tracks much more closely with Catholic teaching than the Republicans, especially on questions such as the death penalty, guns, social justice, immigration, etc., etc., etc. Republicans are mostly Old Testament reactionaries who completely disregard Christ's moral teachings, while most Catholics are New Testament Christians who embrace tolerance.
It is Barrett's relationship with this man Ranaghan that brings up the question of undue religious influence of this fringe group on the judge, not Catholicism in general.
The Supreme Court currently has five Catholic justices, one Episcopalian/Catholic justice and two Jewish justices.
Which brings up an interesting question: why aren't there any Protestant justices? (Episcopalians are basically Catholics with the serial numbers filed off.) You'd think that all the Baptist Trump supporters in the South and would be asking this question.
Why should there be seven Catholics on the Supreme Court? Especially since Baptists like major Trump supporter
Robert Jeffress think Catholics are Satanists.
According to Pew Research, Catholics are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. But as I mentioned above, the teachings of the Catholic Church are much more in line with the Democrats than the Republicans on everything except abortion.
Abortion is the single issue that I think convinced a sufficient number of Catholic voters in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, which Trump took by only a few tens of thousands of votes, to hold their noses and vote for Trump on the promise that he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade.
Now, imagine you're a pro-life Catholic. If Barrett is confirmed, a six-to-three conservative majority will be ensconced on the Supreme Court, which could spell doom for Roe v. Wade.
As police sirens blared in the background, Mr. Trump, his lips set in a thin line, stood with his back to the boarded-up, graffiti-laden facade of the buttermilk yellow church.
He cradled a Bible, bouncing it in his hands as if testing its weight.
“Is that your Bible?” a reporter yelled.
“It’s a Bible,” Mr. Trump responded, and hoisted up the book so reporters could see.
Trump's racism, immorality, selfishness, greed, mendacity, vengefulness, arrogance, hubris and vulgarity are the antithesis of everything that the Catholic Church -- and every other church -- stand for.
If Barrett is confirmed, pro-life Catholics can vote for fellow Catholic Biden with a clear conscience, knowing that the future of abortion will rest in the hands of seven Catholics on the Supreme Court.
It would be irony of ironies if Trump sabotaged his own reelection bid by actually carrying out a campaign promise. Especially since it's the only one he's kept.
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