In Politics, No Catholic Could Do This...

Or maybe I mean no Republican Catholic could do this.

Of course I'm speaking to the fact that the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, now has the open support of thirty prominent African American preachers in Chicago. Obviously these preachers are fearing the damage being done to Obama by the Jeremiah Wright controversy. In case you forgot, the bigoted hate-speech of Jeremiah Wright - Obama's former pastor - have recently come to light. It doesn't help that Wright has since alluded that Obama really agrees with his hate-speech but cannot openly say so because of politics! Whether or not Obama agrees with Wright pales in the face of recent polls which indicate that nearly fifty percent of Democrats and Independents believe Obama does, in fact, agree with Wright. What's more, a vast majority of those polled believe Obama is ending his twenty-year relationship with Wright for purely political reasons.

Enter the African American pastors.

While it is honorable that these thirty prominent pastors seek to support someone in his time of personal woe, I think there is an issue of the division of church and state. If thirty Catholic priests here in Arizona were to stand up and support John McCain, they would be denounced and their parishes would face a loss of tax-exempt status. The same would be true if someone like Jeb Bush, a Catholic, were running.

The fact is, these Chicago churches have long brought politics and religion together. This union of the thirty pastors is simply another example of liberal churches influencing members of their community to vote for a specific candidate. What really bothers me is the hypocrisy of Democrats who tell people in the church's who to vote for while yelling at the Catholic Church for denouncing Catholic politicians within the Church (both Democrats and Republicans) who openly support intrinsically evil acts like abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and euthanasia.