{"id":535,"date":"2008-11-25T13:19:55","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T13:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/11\/decadent-stupid-catholics.html"},"modified":"2008-11-25T13:19:55","modified_gmt":"2008-11-25T13:19:55","slug":"decadent-stupid-catholics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/11\/decadent-stupid-catholics.html","title":{"rendered":"“Stupid” and “Mindless” Catholics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Conservative George Weigel at the Ethics and Public Policy Institute writes:<\/a><\/p>\n

This year, the pro-abortion candidate carried every state in what Maggie Gallagher calls the “Decadent Catholic Corridor” — the Northeast and the older parts of the Midwest. Too many Catholics there are still voting the way their grandparents did, and because that’s what their grandparents did. This tribal voting has been described by some bishops as immoral; it is certainly stupid, and it must be challenged by adult education. That includes effective use of the pulpit to unsettle settled patterns of mindlessness. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t want to intrude on the debate over whether you’re a bad Catholic if you vote for a pro-choice candidate. But I need to note a factual error. Obama won not primarily because Catholics reflexively vote Democratic but rather because millions of Cathoilcs who had been voting Republican<\/em> switched to the Democrats this time.<\/a>
\nWhat’s more, this was not driven only by “cafeteria Catholics” or those with a tenuous grasp of Catholic teaching: Barack Obama won 47% of Catholics who attend mass weekly<\/em> compared to 43% who voted for John Kerry.
\nIt seems to me that, from a Catholic perspective, one of the central questions from this election was why did so many of the most religious Catholics disregard their Bishops?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conservative George Weigel at the Ethics and Public Policy Institute writes: This year, the pro-abortion candidate carried every state in what Maggie Gallagher calls the “Decadent Catholic Corridor” — the Northeast and the older parts of the Midwest. Too many Catholics there are still voting the way their grandparents did, and because that’s what their…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n"Stupid" and "Mindless" Catholics - Steven Waldman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/11\/decadent-stupid-catholics.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""Stupid" and "Mindless" Catholics - Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Conservative George Weigel at the Ethics and Public Policy Institute writes: This year, the pro-abortion candidate carried every state in what Maggie Gallagher calls the “Decadent Catholic Corridor” — the Northeast and the older parts of the Midwest. 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