Topic category:  Other/General

Time is determined to make readers, especially Catholics, think that (1) Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. is a permissible presidential choice for Catholic voters, (2) John Sidney McCain is not a preferable alternative to Obama, (3) the protection of life and traditional marriage are less important to Catholics today than they used to be and (4) Professor Douglas Kmiec, a Democrat turned Reagan Republican, typifies pro-life Catholics choosing Obama over McCain.

Like Newsweek, Time should be on the Obama payroll and is not to be believed.

From Amy Sullivan’s “The Battle for Catholic Voters,” Time, July 2, 2008:

“In a climate in which Catholics aren't voting based on a rather narrow ideological agenda, the mechanics of how campaigns court them become more important. And it's on that level that perhaps the biggest changes from 2004 can be seen. McCain has a team of Catholic politicians, including Sam Brownback and Frank Keating, who serve as his surrogates, but has few aides within the campaign to coordinate outreach. The lack of high-level religious advisers became obvious earlier this year when McCain accepted the endorsement of Evangelical pastor John Hagee, who has called the Catholic Church ‘the great whore of Babylon,’ a phrase unlikely to warm the hearts of McCain's Catholic supporters.

“Obama's campaign more closely resembles the 2004 Bush outreach effort. An extensive religious outreach team has focused the bulk of its work on training ordinary Catholics to reach out to friends and neighbors by holding ‘values’ house parties and explaining their support for Obama. The Democrat also has a roster of high-powered Catholic surrogates who have fanned out across swing states - including Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey Jr., whose father, the pro-life former governor, was widely viewed by Catholics as a victim of Democratic intolerance after he was not allowed to speak at the party's 1992 convention.

“Obama, whose work as a community organizer was partly funded by a Catholic social-justice group, recently laid out his plan for a new and improved faith-based initiative. It is a policy extension of the phrase he often uses – ‘I am my brother's keeper’ - to express his belief that members of a society are responsible for one another. And it is an idea rooted in the Catholic concept of the common good.

"This ‘bottom-up, personal responsibility’ message, as he describes it, appeals to Kmiec, allowing him to be not just a McCain skeptic but also an Obama supporter. That decision has not come without a cost - this spring Kmiec was denied Communion by a priest who denounced his endorsement of Obama. But with Catholics almost twice as likely to name the economy, Iraq and terrorism as their top concerns over abortion and gay marriage, Kmiec has plenty of company. Come November, that priest may be holding on to a very full bowl of wafers.”

What a despicable way for Time to refer to consecrated Communion hosts that Catholics believe to have literally been transformed into the Body of Christ and other Christians believe to symbolize the Body of Christ!

It’s not surprising that after Obama did not get a big bump after Hillary suspended her campaign Newsweek suddenly reported one.

Likewise, it’s not surprising that Time, in the recent article by Ms. Sullivan, highlighted Professor Douglas Kmiec’s support for Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.:

”Douglas Kmiec is the kind of Catholic voter the G.O.P. usually doesn't have to think twice about. The Pepperdine law professor and former Reagan Justice Department lawyer (Samuel Alito was an office mate) attends Mass each morning. He has actively opposed abortion for most of his adult life, working with crisis pregnancy centers to persuade women not to undergo the procedure. He is a member of the conservative Federalist Society and occasionally sends a contribution to Focus on the Family.

“He is also a vocal supporter of Barack Obama. Kmiec made waves in the Catholic world in late March when he endorsed the Democratic candidate. But Kmiec insists that while he still considers himself a Republican, his choice is clear this election year. ‘I have grave moral doubts about the war, serious doubts about the economic course Republicans have followed over the last seven years, and believe that immigration reforms won't come about by Republican hands,’ he says. ‘Senator McCain would not be the strongest advocate for the balance of things that I care about.’”

Time went on to claim that the so-called Catholic vote is split evenly between Obama and McCain: “A new TIME poll of Catholic voters reveals that Kmiec is part of a broader pattern. Although Obama was thought to have a ‘Catholic problem’ during the Democratic primaries, in which Hillary Clinton won a majority of Catholic votes, he has pulled even with John McCain among that constituency - Obama now polls 44% to his G.O.P. opponent's 45%.”

While acknowledging the importance of the “Catholic vote,” Time noted that it is not “monolithic”:

“There are 47 million Catholic voters, and while they are too numerous and varied to speak of as a monolithic Catholic bloc, they have long been a kind of holy grail for presidential candidates. The winner of eight out of the past nine elections has captured a majority of Catholic votes (they voted for Al Gore in 2000), and there are large Catholic concentrations in key states like Florida, Ohio and New Mexico.”

Time admitted that most Catholics are pro-life—“The TIME poll confirmed that a majority of Catholics (59%) can be broadly defined as pro-life (opposing abortion except to protect a woman's life or health or in cases of rape or incest)”—and then asserted that “these pro-life Catholics are actually split into two voting camps.”

According to Time, what divides the “camps” is the importance of life and Kmiec typifies a shift from those who make life the paramount issue to those who do not: “'Many conservative Catholics consider abortion to be the determining factor in their electoral decisions, and as a result they almost always support Republican candidates. But for other Catholics, social issues can be trumped in times of economic and national insecurity. What's interesting about this year is that Catholics like Kmiec are moving from the first group of voters to the second.”

Time essentially described Obama as a Democrat Ronald Reagan: “Just as Ronald Reagan brought large numbers of Catholic Democrats into the G.O.P. in the 1980s, Obama is hoping to woo them back and create a new Catholic category: Obama Republicans.”

But Reagan appealed to voters (including Catholics) as a pro-lifer and Obama embraced infanticide by voting to deny legal protection to babies born alive as a result of botched abortions.

I remember Reagan.

Obama would be the anti-Reagan.

Time noted that “Kmiec was part of the wave of Reagan Democrats who were drawn to the Republican President's policies and vision.”

But Obama’s policies and vision are hardly comparable to those of Reagan.

Time lamented that Priests for Life… spent $1 million on television and newspaper ads in the last month of the [2004 presidential] campaign.”

As though promoting life is a bad thing.

Time conceded, however:

“The [Republican 2004] Catholic initiative was the most ambitious religious outreach effort ever undertaken by either party. And it paid off. Bush might have expected more competition for those votes from his Catholic opponent. But John Kerry found himself the target of stinging criticism from a few bishops who argued that he should be denied Communion because of his support for abortion rights. No one on the Kerry campaign was devoted to Catholic outreach, and Kerry chose not to respond to the attacks. Bush won the Catholic vote that year, 52% to 47%.”

Considering that the other two Catholic Democrat presidential candidates won 80% (Governor Alfred E. Smith) and 78% (John F. Kennedy) against their non-Catholic Republican rivals, non-Catholic Bush winning a majority of the Catholic vote against Kerry was a remarkable achievement.

Time put it this way: “The G.O.P.'s success with Catholic voters in 2004 was an astounding victory born out of Bush's personal appeal to pro-life voters and six years of party organizing at the parish level.”

What Time omitted was that those Bush Catholic voters were following fundamental tenets of their Catholic faith that Kerry had chosen to abandon: (1) the right to life is paramount and (2) faith and life should not be separated. As the Second Vatican Council put it: “This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age."

Bishop Rene Henry Gracida authoritatively and helpfully wrote before the 2004 presidential election:

“When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons strictly defined. Since abortion and euthanasia have been defined by the Church as the most serious sins prevalent in our society, what kind of reasons could possibly be considered proportionate enough to justify a Catholic voting for a candidate who is known to be pro-abortion? None of the reasons commonly suggested could even begin to be proportionate enough to justify a Catholic voting for such a candidate. Reasons such as the candidate’s position on war, or taxes, or the death penalty, or immigration, or a national health plan, or social security, or aids, or homosexuality, or marriage, or any similar burning societal issues of our time are simply lacking in proportionality.

“There is only one thing that could be considered proportionate enough to justify a Catholic voting for a candidate who is known to be pro-abortion, and that is the protection of innocent human life. That may seem to be contradictory, but it is not.

“Consider the case of a Catholic voter who must choose between three candidates: candidate (A, Kerry) who is completely for abortion-on-demand, candidate (B, Bush) who is in favor of very limited abortion, i.e., in favor of greatly restricting abortion and candidate (C, Peroutka), a candidate who is completely against abortion but who is universally recognized as being unelectable. The Catholic voter cannot vote for candidate (A, Kerry) because that would be formal cooperation in the sin of abortion if that candidate were to be elected and assist in passing legislation, which would remove restrictions on, abortion-on-demand. The Catholic can vote for candidate (C, Peroutka) but that will probably only help ensure the election of candidate (A, Kerry). Therefore the Catholic voter has a proportionate reason to vote for candidate (B, Bush) since his vote may help to ensure the defeat of candidate (A, Kerry) and may result in the saving of some innocent human lives if candidate (B, Bush) is elected and introduces legislation restricting abortion-on-demand. In such a case, the Catholic voter would have chosen the lesser of two evils, which is morally permissible under these circumstances.”

Time claimed that “a backlash in many Catholic circles…is shaping the current election.”

According to Time:

“Alarmed that their fellow Catholics were being told that abortion and gay marriage were the only relevant Catholic issues, progressive Catholics have founded several organizations in the tradition of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who preached a ‘consistent ethic of life.’ One group, Catholics United, ran radio ads in the fall of 2007 targeting pro-life Republicans who voted against expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program, arguing that such votes were not ‘pro-life.’

“The American bishops also made an effort to broaden their teaching. In the fall of 2007, they released Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility, an unusual document that counsels against divisive politics and reminds Catholics that ‘all life issues are connected.’ Such statements have cleared the way for Catholics like Kmiec to reevaluate what it means to cast a pro-life vote. ‘It's been 20-some years of trying to get the next vote on the court to overturn Roe,’ says Kmiec, ‘and I asked myself, What does that amount to?’ He worries that by backing the G.O.P. strategy of holding out for a ban on abortion, pro-life voters have not focused on more pragmatic ways to reduce abortion rates.”

Unsurprisingly, Time took a quote out of context and ignored the basic teaching of now Pope Benedict XVI. In 2004, in a memorandum, delivered as guidance for the first of the 2004 meetings of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, stated unambiguously: "Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”

As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stated earlier in its Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life: “[T]he lay Catholic's duty to be morally coherent…is one and indivisible. There cannot be two parallel lives…: on the one hand, the so-called 'spiritual life', with its values and demands; and on the other, the so-called 'secular' life, that is, life in a family, at work, in social responsibilities, in the responsibilities of public life and in culture.”

How many "Catholics" will choose Obamamania over their faith?

Time (NOT the magazine) will tell who chooses heaven and who chooses hell.

Michael J. Gaynor

Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.