The spectacle of fundamentalist preachers extending their hands blessing Rick Santorum’s candidacy at a religious convocation in McKinney, Texas, several weeks ago was jarring. The image stays with the mind, especially as the controversy over birth control – can that be right, a controversy in the year 2012 over birth control? – continues to roil the race for the Republican nomination for president and leaves Andrea Mitchell breathless.
How far today’s politics have come from the days when John Kennedy spoke in Houston in 1960 to Protestant ministers worried about his Catholicism! Kennedy’s defense of religious liberty – which the ministers understood and accepted – was the converse of what reigns today in politics. Kennedy pledged that his Church and his beliefs would not have sway on his public decision-making. Today, instead of Houston we have McKinney: Candidates profess that their beliefs will affect their decisions. O, to go back to the future.
The danger that the ministers in Houston feared from the Catholic Church is fast coming about, threatening the very foundation of the republic. Conservative Catholics and fundamentalists have lost all sense of constitutional balance. They make common cause in wanting to trump up a war that they allege the Obama Administration is waging against religion. This Catholic-fundamentalist phalanx forgets that the authors of the Constitution also protected the right of freedom from religion and not just the right to freedom of religion.
It hardly matters if 98 or 68 or 28 or 8 percent of Catholic women have used or are using methods to control births. But it does matter that the only Catholics who want birth control seem to be their male bishops. That fact alone signifies how warped our politics have become. It is one thing for we Catholics to put up with such nonsense but many of us draw the line at bishops crowding out the Constitution. HispanicLatinos, most of whom are Catholics at least in name, should pause to consider that their Church is participating and encouraging nothing less than a slow erosion of the constitutional provisions that protect their civil rights.
I am sure that the recent news of my unmarried grandniece’s pregnancy stirred the minds of my five sisters who I suspect have all used birth control. I do not know that for a fact but I do know that their birth rate is far below the HispanicLatino norm. I bet they had wished that our 20-yeare-old grandniece had had available the birth control that might not have ruined a life yet but has sure made it harder. I am fairly convinced, too, that my sisters can draw the dots to where any efforts to control the decision-making of women lead.
They lead to McKinney.
The scene in McKinney represents the new normal – which is abnormal. A Catholic majority on the Supreme Court – Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts – is set to turn back the clock on voting, civil and educational rights for HispanicLatinos not seen since the mid-1960’s.
At every turn of the irrelevant birth control controversy, the word “conscience” is thrown about as the end-all and be-all of the fundamentalists’ drive for political power. It ought to be a matter of conscience for HispanicLatinos that the rabidly religious politics of the time do not take the Constitution straight to hell.
HispanicLatinos in Florida and across the nation should worry that Sen. Marco Rubio has injected himself on the side of the fundamentalists. He is becoming more of a threat to HispanicLatinos beyond his hypocritical stance on immigration. He is part and parcel of an expanding threat to the civil liberties not just of the HispanicLatino community but to the rest of America.
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