And About That Notre Dame Controversy…

So now you’ve posted twice about non-factuals presented by Ed Henry, who nobody cares about, regarding faux controversies which nobody cares about.
.
Whatever.

“It’s gotten a lot of attention in the press, that’s true.”
.
AS you are beyond parody.

I’m not sure it’s the Catholics who have to get on-message. Seems more like the it’s a singed media star who needs to do a little more homework, before he misleads viewers. Again. And he shouldn’t be using his position on TV to publicly work out that major ego-debt he’s repaying from having been schooled by Obama in the last presser, either.

Amy, I think you missed the meeting. We all got together back in the 1700s and decided not to take orders from dudes in funny hats.

The Notre Dame controversy is funny to me. How many universities would fall all over themselves for Obama to deliver the commencement address. And some funny hated (thanks, Cliff), pointy headed, voodoo cult catholics take exception to his presence? What a hoot. What nothing.

Pew surveys “Catholics” (i.e., non-Catholics) like Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and Andrew Sullivan and finds that “only 28% … think Notre Dame was wrong to have invited Obama”? Evidently, to Pew, opposing everything having to do with the Catholic church or having driven near a Catholic Church once in the last 50 years qualifies as being “Catholic”.

textee, what are the figures for Oral Roberts and Jim Jones “universities”?

Obama should just trash that invitation and go wherever he pleases. I would suggest Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Cambridge. You know, some real center of learning.

The RW Catholics are throwing a fit. They don’t like Obama and didn’t vote for him but, guess what, Obama WON the Catholic vote. He didn’t win the Protestant vote. Obama does not have a problem with Catholics. RW/Republicans don’t like him. Big surprise. Water is wet, the sky is blue, etc.

An interesting piece in Commonweal on this.
.
Draws a nice comparison between this and another time Catholics were “outraged” about an invited speaker.
.
William F Buckley in 1961.
.
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2500&var_recherche=Notre+dame

Another hard-hitting report from Amy “Oooh, shiny!” Sullivan…
.
@Cliff: In think you meant to say 1500s. Spot on about teh hats.
.
#6: Hmmmm, so now I’m a non-Christian if I sin? I thought Christ died for…oh, never mind.

The Notre Dame issue merely confirms my impresssion that a small group of Catholics like to behave like idiots. And what’s this about Ed Henry. Is he getting himself into another questionable scene? He is a member of the Best Political Team on Television? Is he Catholic? is the Pope Catholic?

By the way I am Catholic and I advise Pres Obama to refuse Notre Dame’s invitation.

“opposing everything having to do with the Catholic church ”
.
From the Commonweal story
.
“The church is not simply the prolife movement, and to the extent that every interaction between the church and our political system is held hostage to the demands of the most confrontational elements of that movement, the church’s social message, including its message about abortion, will be marginalized and ineffectual.”

Ed Henry ought to take a little time to make sure he knows what he’s talking about.

kristiia, you may be right, but the RW catholics are sure stinking the place up, aren’t they? And just after we fumigated for the stench of Bush/Chaney.

Wow, 28% of Catholics are so intolerant that they can’t handle a sitting President who doesn’t agree with them on a particular issue speaking at Notre Dame? That’s millions of people. I had no idea that the Notre Dame campus was held in the same regard as Mecca. Does that mean that opposing football teams – whose coaches share Obama’s political leanings – shouldn’t bring their teams to South Bend?
.
This overt hatred of Obama has to end. Obama wants to reduce abortions, and he doesn’t want to impose his faith on others in regard to what women do with their bodies. Egads, he’s a monster. The way some people view him it is like he looked the other way while a bunch of children were molested, or he signed off on torturing other human beings.
.
And Jon Mecham seems astounded that Americans are leaving organized religion? Maybe it is has something to do with religious institutions being completely out of touch with the way the majority of ethical, morally grounded, reasonable good people want to live their lives.

bitterpill, in all due respect to your catholicism, please check out the number of rw crazy commentators who are catholic. They lost Glenn Beck who left for mormonism.

Ed Henry has smashed the Peter Principle. He’s one of the least impressive reporters on cable television, which is a quite an achievement.

Not to mention rw catholic politicians and celebreties. And the pope, too.

This “controversy” is nothing more than a conservative ruse. And Ed Henry is such an out of touch dweeb…

http://www.political-buzz.com/

At one time “only 28%” of the American people approved of Bush. That’s a big number any way you look at it. African Americans AND Hispanics together are about 28% of the population. Evangelicals don’t care for Catholics, do they?

The real lesson is that there’s not enough interest in, or concern for, “religion and politics” to justify Bible Girl’s continued presence in Swampland. The real world needs the space.

Try this again as I forgot about his language…
~
Off topic, but who gives a “holy sh!t” what AS has to say anyway–months into her shameful tenure here, has she ever deigned to speak to the peasantry?
~
And speaking of peasants:
~
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/21289
~
I guess I’ve been living under a volcanic J-rock or something, but since when was Matt Taibbi so f@cking awesome. Here he’s riffing on some serious Howard Zinn smackdown sh!t:
~
“After all, the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who f-cked them over. Beck pointedly compared the AIG protesters to Bolsheviks: “[The Communists] basically said ‘Eat the rich, they did this to you, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” He then said the AIG and G20 protesters were identical: “It’s a different style, but the sentiments are exactly the same: Find ‘em, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.
~
But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your sh-t. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.”

I, for one, appreciate Amy calling out Ed Henry for wasting his question about a phony controversy. And Ed Henry probably thinks this negative publicity is good for him. He’s applauding himself for trying to embarrass Obama I’m sure. He always does.

Ed Henry getting something wrong? Blow me the fukk over.

formerlyjames: my catholicism is for me; I respect all religions and faiths. Totally ashamed on the abuse of children by our Clergy; totally at odds with a decadent leadership. Better for me to practise my faith and not shout about it. So: I don’t see why Pres Obama should speak at Notre Dame. There are far more distinguished universities where he would be welcome.

I was a junior at Notre Dame in 1982. Ronald Reagan was the commencement speaker. Gipper and all that, you understand. Some liked his politics, some hated them (and his acting, for that matter), but nobody doubted that it was meet and proper for the President to speak at Notre Dame.
Although, as a budding liberal, I wasted my graduation ticket and took a nap instead.

Evangelicals don’t care for Catholics, do they?
.
That’s the part about introducing religion into government that everyone better be careful about . . . whose religion will be promoted?
.
Anyone see a problem with a Catholic president needing to redress the perceived slights by the last Baptist Admin? Or the Lutherans? Did the Methodists get their fair share of the judgeships? What about the Mormans?
.
THIS is why there’s a separation between church and state. The Founding Fathers got it right for some very obvious reasons.

Hey! A good Amy Sullivan post.
.
I have been extremely irked watching the press characterize small, fringe self-proclaimed Catholic leaders as representative of Catholic opinion. It’s incredibly lazy to take a fax from a guy in an office in New York and just repeat it, without checking to see whether there is any support for it at all.
.
Such laziness is all too common.

THIS is why there’s a separation between church and state. The Founding Fathers got it right for some very obvious reasons.
.
Hear, hear, afguy!
.
It’s a shame that more Americans don’t know anything factual about the way our system of government was devised. The Founding Fathers faced a religious environment that was very similar to the one you’re describing, drew the relevant conclusions, and implemented them.
.
This argument was settled long, long ago.

Meh, Notre Dame (like many American Catholics I see) probably doesn’t care about what the Pope says, so this doesn’t matter.

FT,
.
The sad thing is that you don’t have to know any of the historical specifics about how the government was devised.
.
Just apply a little common sense from day-to-day life in this country and it just jumps out at you.
.
People just aren’t thinking!

Come to think of it, I don’t really know what the Pope thinks about this whole matter. I was referring to the abortion issue.

” .. only 28% of Catholics …”

dammmm!
Can’t a god-fearing, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy say somefin’ for christ without being proven syntifikully wrong the next minute!

[And Gosh! Months after the invasion of Blair's barbarians in the Middle East, most(say, 70%) of us christians watching FOX News BELIEVED that we had found the, eh, holy grail - Saddam's WMD's in Iraq. Bible gal, it was - it is - our right to BELIEVE without pollsters poking in, right?]

yoshi,
.
Mainline Protestant theologians and educators are watching closely to see whether (or how much) Benedict is going to gut Vatican II. Ecumenism is significantly less interesting and important without the involvement of the Catholic Church. Like many American Catholics, we care about what the Pope thinks as it relates to relationships with other American church bodies – are we going to move closer together or farther apart?
.
So far, I’d say it’s “Answer unclear, ask again later.”
.
I believe this is OT but it was what I thought of when I read your comment. I guess I’m going “free range” today.

It’s ok, Friar.
.
For what it’s worth, my wife is Catholic. We were married in the Catholic church. But despite the Pope’s comments (I seem to remember his previous incarnation was as a GOPer????) she’s an Obama gal and I don’t think that will change anytime soon.
.
I think this is just another “balloon controversy” that the right is trying to inflate.

Cardinal Newmans wrote Idea of a University and I copy:Ithe singular example of an heterogeneous and an independent body of men, setting about a work of self-reformation, not from any pressure of public opinion, but because it was fitting and right to undertake it.

Yo dudes of the Funny Hat Society, and the Society of NO,at Notre Dame and beyond : Think freely, listen to those with opposing thoughts and debate… Or, we can go back to the days of the Inquisition, Reformation, Pograms, and the Land of Denial….
By the way, no O’ no public funding of any type for the U,
Works for me.

..the Land of Denial….
.
eliyoyo,
.
You mean Egypt?
.
Sorry, it’s Friday . . . my “pun” gene needed a “fix”.

[...] than an hour later, Sullivan sought to marginalize conservative Catholics who are disturbed by Notre Dame honoring the very pro-choice President [...]

[...] than an hour later, Sullivan sought to marginalize conservative Catholics who are disturbed by Notre Dame honoring the very pro-choice President [...]

[...] than an hour later, Sullivan sought to marginalize conservative Catholics who are disturbed by Notre Dame honoring the very pro-choice President [...]

…there’s that 28% number, again. Funny how it seems to correspond to W’s approval rating…although it is a bit higher than recent GOP identification rates….