{"id":6116,"date":"2006-09-04T08:56:33","date_gmt":"2006-09-04T08:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/catholic-pol-varia.html"},"modified":"2006-09-04T08:56:33","modified_gmt":"2006-09-04T08:56:33","slug":"catholic-pol-varia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/catholic-pol-varia.html","title":{"rendered":"Catholic pol varia"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bob Casey and Rick Santorum on Meet the Press yesterday. Rod Dreher reports:<\/a><\/p>\n

Then the Plan B issue came up. Santorum said flat-out that the pill is sometimes abortifacient, which is certainly true if you believe that life begins at conception; the pill can work by preventing the fertilized egg (that is, a human being) from implanting on the uterine wall. Santorum said he was against Plan B for that reason. Casey, who insists he’s pro-life, said he was in favor of Plan B because "the science is clear" that it’s contraception. That’s a shameful dodge. The science is clear about how Plan B works; whether or not that counts as abortion is a moral question — and a question that the Catholic Church answers very clearly. Casey is trying to lay claim to his father’s pro-life mantle, and he’s not worthy of it. Not only is he for a potentially bortifacient pill to be distributed over the counter, but he dissembles about what he perfectly well knows the pill is. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And from a reader who caught Joe Biden last night:<\/p>\n

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Joe Biden was on C-Span’s "Road To The White House" series on Sunday. I couldn’t find a transcript but there is a video of the interview at the web site. <\/a><\/p>\n

You might be interested in how he is finessing his Catholicism and his votes on life issues. He says he admires Thomas Aquinas and John 23rd and that, when he was coming of age, the Church was all about being against "the abuse of power". On abortion, he muddies the water by suggesting that the Church has been pro-life for a thousand years but that there has always been disagreement on the subject, that things changed significantly with Pius IXth and that he is very interested in theology (I think he said it was his "avocation") and knows a lot about it. I think this is probably the way Catholics will handle this now: skip over the Didache and the FIRST thousand years, throw in a diversionary mention of Aquinas (who only questioned the time of ensoulment, as far as I know), and imply that Pius IX changed everything. Thus, dissenting Catholics are in the tradition of Aquinas and respectfully resisting the exercise (and possible abuse of) power by Pius IXth. <\/p>\n

As Biden will be speaking throughout the country, this is a candidacy that could be confusing to the public and dangerous to Church teaching unless it is noticed and addressed. It is one thing to say "I don’t accept the constant teaching of the Church" but quite another to say (I’m not quoting him here) "The constant teaching hasn’t really been constant and was actually imposed in the 19th century so there’s plenty of room for debate and disagreement." <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bob Casey and Rick Santorum on Meet the Press yesterday. Rod Dreher reports: Then the Plan B issue came up. Santorum said flat-out that the pill is sometimes abortifacient, which is certainly true if you believe that life begins at conception; the pill can work by preventing the fertilized egg (that is, a human being)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCatholic pol varia - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/catholic-pol-varia.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Catholic pol varia - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Bob Casey and Rick Santorum on Meet the Press yesterday. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}