Compare and contrast
First from Central Florida today.
Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan on Saturday derided President Obama’s space program and called his administration’s requirement that hospitals and universities, including Catholic ones, be required to offer contraception an “assault on religious liberty.”
Ryan promised at a town hall meeting in Orlando that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney would reverse the contraception mandate on “Day 1″ if he is elected president. The mandate requiring all insurance plans to include access to contraception was part of Obama’s health care overhaul.
Ryan’s comments came in a response to a woman’s question about whether he would ask Vice President Joe Biden in a debate how he reconciles his views as a Roman Catholic with the Democratic Party platform.
Both Ryan and Biden are Catholic.
“It will be gone. I can guarantee you that,” Ryan told the crowd of 2,200 supporters in an arena at the University of Central Florida.
Ryan handled that question I think in an appropriate manner. As a public official running for one of the highest offices in the land I think it would be very improper for him to get personal on Biden. If Biden or for that matter Ryan's positon causes a scandal to the Catholic faithful that is for us to discuss not the Biden or Ryan IMHO.
Now lets us look at the Senate Majority Leader tonight :
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he agrees with a fellow Mormon who wrote recently that Mitt Romney has "sullied" the LDS faith and that the GOP presidential candidate is "not the face of Mormonism."
Reid, a Mormon Democrat from Nevada, blasted Romney in a conference call for reporters over a litany of things the Republican nominee has said recently. And Reid added that Latter-day Saints aren’t buying Romney’s rhetoric.
"He’s coming to a state where there are a lot of members of the LDS Church," Reid said in advance of Romney’s Friday visit to Nevada. "They understand that he is not the face of Mormonism .
I think that crosses a line. Again that is for the Mormon faithful to discuss. But there is some a tad distasteful about the Senate Mahority leader of the U.S. getting so personal as to this issue. It also seems like bad civics.
I am not exactly sure where the line is in all this. But at this moment Biden , Reid, Romney and Ryan are not some backbencher from Idaho. I think it was crossed here.
I believe that I know where the line is that must not be crossed--Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Someone should tell these Catholics that the VP of the USA does not need to reconcile his Catholic religon to the government of these United States, and indeed it would be unconstitutional for him to try to do so. In the days when JFK was running for POTUS, citizens were rightfully concerned that his election might put the Pope in charge of America, and he gave assurance that he understood the separation of church in state and was committed to the Constitution to govern, rather than the Catholic Church. But in this day and age, there is a concerted subversive effort to overthrow constitutional government and to deceitfully and deceptively institute a theocracy in its place.
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of nations in the world where Catholicism is the established religon, and politicians are indeed obligated to reconcile their governance with the Catholic Church. I know that one of my own ancestors was a French Huguenot who legally immigrated to Virginia in the seventeenth century to escape the persecution of the Catholics. If someone wants to live under that system, there are already plenty of nations where they can do so, but this is the United States of America, it is not the United States of Catholicism, and Biden should be impeached if were to start trying to impose his Catholicism on the rest of us.
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