UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
No, the religious right hasn’t gone the way of the dodo bird. No, it’s not extinct. No, it’s not somehow distinct from the tea party movement that is now indistinguishable from the Republican party itself.
These are all points that Fred Clarkson makes very well yesterday in a piece at Talk to Action linking to an essay Simon Brown has just published in Church and State. I like, in particular, a point that Fred has made in the past and which he reiterates very clearly in his latest statement at Talk to Action: this is that the religious right has received in infusion of new blood in American politics due to the deliberate decision of the U.S. Catholic bishops to ally themselves with the evangelical right in an even more direct and bellicose way after Barack Obama was elected to the presidency.
Fred writes:
Earlier this year, I published a report in The Public Eye about the historic convergence in the politics of the protestant evangelical Christian Right and the Roman Catholic Bishops. This convergence, decades in the making, fully emerged in the publication of the 2009 manifesto, The Manhattan Declaration, in which more than 50 Catholic Bishops and such familiar Christian Right figures as Tony Perkins, James Dobson and Samuel Rodriguez expressed solidarity to the point of civil disobedience on three interrelated matters: life, marriage, and religious liberty. In that order.
Why don’t the U.S. bishops under the leadership of Timothy Dolan want to survey American Catholics about their views re: contraception, same-sex marriage, and divorce? They don’t want to do so because they have made a bargain with the devil by entering into an overtly partisan alliance with other U.S. religious groups for whom the GOP is God’s anointed party and President Obama is in league with the devil. “Discovering” that a majority of U.S. Catholics disagree with them about contraception and same-sex marriage, and consider their absurd Fortnight for Freedom protests a colossal waste of time and a sinful misallocation of resources, would make waves for that alliance that now drives much that the bishops do and think.
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