Is the Pope Right Wing? The Manhatten Declaration

The whole tone of this America piece on the Manhatten Declaration is not only naive but depressing. See Social Conservatives take Manhattan! Bronx, S.I., rest of America up for grabs

Thankfully some in the comments bring the writer some needed reality. What is in that declaration is nothing more than what the Pope has been saying for ever. Heck it is the same thing John Paul the II has been saying.

It is depressing to see a Catholic writer at a major magazine to label core Catholic issues as just needless "culture wars".

Also why do some Catholic progressives jump to everything is about OBAMA. He is in the mix of course since he is Presdient but this fight is occurring in towns, cities , counties, and on the state level. Not everything revolves around the White House.

Update- I have reread the document and trying to see if various claims that this document is obsessed about President Obama is correct. I can only find on part where he is referenced and that is briefly

"The President and many in Congress favor the expansion of embryo-research to include the taxpayer funding of so-called "therapeutic cloning." This would result in the industrial mass production of human embryos to be killed for the purpose of producing genetically customized stem cell lines and tissues"

That is it. No where else is the President mentioned or even alluded to.

We have this passage:
We see this, for example, in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience clauses, and therefore to compel pro-life institutions (including religiously affiliated hospitals and clinics), and pro-life physicians, surgeons, nurses, and other health care professionals, to refer for abortions and, in certain cases, even to perform or participate in abortions. We see it in the use of anti-discrimination statutes to force religious institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business. After the judicial imposition of "same-sex marriage" in Massachusetts, for example, Catholic Charities chose with great reluctance to end its century-long work of helping to place orphaned children in good homes rather than comply with a legal mandate that it place children in same-sex households in violation of Catholic moral teaching.

In New Jersey, after the establishment of a quasi-marital "civil unions" scheme, a Methodist institution was stripped of its tax exempt status when it declined, as a matter of religious conscience, to permit a facility it owned and operated to be used for ceremonies blessing homosexual unions. In Canada and some European nations, Christian clergy have been prosecuted for preaching Biblical norms against the practice of homosexuality. New hate-crime laws in America raise the specter of the same practice here.In recent decades a growing body of case law has paralleled the decline in respect for religious values in the media, the academy and political leadership, resulting in restrictions on the free exercise of religion.

We view this as an ominous development, not only because of its threat to the individual liberty guaranteed to every person, regardless of his or her faith, but because the trend also threatens the common welfare and the culture of freedom on which our system of republican government is founded. Restrictions on the freedom of conscience or the ability to hire people of one's own faith or conscientious moral convictions for religious institutions, for example, undermines the viability of the intermediate structures of society, the essential buffer against the overweening authority of the state, resulting in the soft despotism Tocqueville so prophetically warned of1 Disintegration of civil society is a prelude to tyranny.

Again President Obama (any President for that matter) and the Federal Government are in the mix but again there are many actors.