I’ve got my differences with his Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, but at least I feel he is a consistent man as to placing the utmost value on human life. He opposed the Iraq War as unjust and spoke out about it frequently. He is against the death penalty. He is against stem cell research. And undoubtedly, he is against abortion. On two of the four recent political issues I mentioned, right wing social conservatives find themselves allied with the Pope, and they have used that agreement to demonize liberals and Democrats as evil over the last 25 years, even though they themselves do not agree with the Pope on the death penalty, Iraq, and the aspects of Catholicism that focus on poverty and social justice.
In the April 29, 2009 issue of the Vatican’s own newspaper, the L’Osservatore Romano, there was an opinion piece by the newspaper’s foreign affairs contributor on President Obama’s first 100 days in office. And he was insufficiently accusatory and condemning for the right wing’s tastes.
To the dismay of many conservatives, the Vatican’s own newspaper […] has offered what one antiabortion Catholic blog called “a surprisingly positive assessment of the new president’s approach to life issues” — so positive, in fact, that a spokesman for the National Right to Life Committee was moved to criticize Pope Benedict XVI’s daily.
[…]
The April 29 essay by Giuseppe Fiorentino […] painted Obama as a moderate on many fronts. “Some have accused him of practicing excessive statism,” Fiorentino wrote, “if not even of making the country drift toward socialism.” But “a calmer analysis,” he said, suggests that Obama “has moved with caution.” […] On abortion and the other life issues, the article concluded that Obama “does not seem to have established the radical changes that he had aired.”In loosening the rules on federal funding of stem-cell research, the paper noted, Obama did not go as far as many in the antiabortion movement feared he would. “The new guidelines regarding embryonic stem cell research do not in fact follow the [prospective] change of route laid out months ago,” Fiorentino wrote. “They do not allow for the creation of new embryos for research or therapy purposes, for cloning or reproductive ends; and federal funds can only be used for experimentation with surplus embryos.”
Then came a carefully worded sentence declaring that “these measures do not eliminate the reasons for criticism in the face of unacceptable forms of bioengineering that work against the embryo’s human identity, but the new regulations are less permissive than expected.”
In response, the legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee said the assessment was “not helpful” and “there’s nothing middle of the road about the substantive policies that this administration is pursuing on life issues.”
Not helpful. That begs the question, helpful to what ends? Helpful to protecting “life” in America? Or helpful in opposing President Obama? EJ Dionne goes on to make the point that right wing conservative Catholics have no credibility when it comes to life issues, for they refuse to criticize Republican politicians who fail to fulfill their promises on abortion. Further, right wing social conservatives have no problem with supporting the death penalties and wars of choice. And they have no problem with taking from the poor to give to the rich. Yet they criticize the Vatican for being “not helpful” on opposing President Obama. The Vatican is not supposed to be “helpful” in opposing President Obama. It is not an arm of the RNC.
I have said this before and I will say it again. The biggest mistake that social conservatives made was to choose sides in the partisan war. Now they have no credibility, and that is sad.