Any Catholic who supports/votes for Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama is a hypocrite.
If I have to explain it, then they are NOT Catholics!
Americans are among the world's least informed voters...most likely the dumbest!
Catholic voters are the most hypocritical among them...
Further. Many Catholics vote as if Catholicism were a racial ethnicity, rather than a religion. For example: Some people refer to themselves as half French and half Irish (or any other combination). The vast majority of Catholics vote as if they were half Catholic and half Democrat regardless of parental lineage. They have what we call an examination of the conscience prior to going to the confessional but fail to examine a candidate prior to going to the polls. As long as the candidate has a “D” next to their name it’s a viable choice and conscience doesn’t enter the selection process. They also have an innate tendency to believe what a candidate says during the campaign…especially the smooth talkers like Bill Clinton. (Hillary is no different.) And yet, Bill Clinton is the source of many of the problems besetting America today. Neither Clinton has one drop of patriotic blood in their seditious veins yet many (I should say all) Catholic voters who cast their votes for traitor Bill and his equally seditious wife do not have a clue to the Clinton’s objective; a socialist one-world order…just like Hitler.
And these, my friends, are undisputable facts. If it were my opinion, I could change things around a bit…but facts are facts and Mother Nature can’t change them. (N. Hooben March 17, 2008)
Candidates Court Catholics
Bloc's Support May Be Key in Pennsylvania; 'Nun Theory' at Work?
By AMY CHOZICK March 17, 2008
SCRANTON, Pa. -- Sen. Hillary Clinton often evokes her Methodist faith on the campaign trail. But it is Catholics who make up one of her most reliable groups of supporters and could help her defeat Sen. Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary.
The Clinton campaign argues that its strength among Catholics in the primaries could mean Sen. Clinton is a stronger candidate in the general election against presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain.
On Saturday, Sen. Clinton joined the annual St. Patrick's Day parades in Pittsburgh and Scranton, an effort to reach out to some of the more than four million Catholics in Pennsylvania -- or one-third of all voters in the state.
"May the luck of the Irish be with us all. God bless you," Sen. Clinton yelled at the crowd of around 260,000 gathered for the Pittsburgh parade.
Exit polls show that Sen. Clinton captured 63% of the Catholic vote in Ohio and 65% in Texas. Even in states in which she has lost to Sen. Obama by double digits the New York senator has in some cases won among Catholics.
The Obama campaign is trying to show that its message resonates with Catholic voters. In the coming weeks in Pennsylvania, the campaign says it will send mailings to religious voters and launch a Catholic-specific phone-banking system. The campaign recruited Vicki Kennedy, the wife of Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy -- an Obama supporter and perhaps the country's best-known Catholic Democrat -- to hold roundtable discussions with Catholic women before the April 22 Pennsylvania primary.
"We will only be doing more of this important outreach to communities of all faiths, including Catholics, so we expect his performance among Catholic voters to be strong," says Joshua DuBois, national director of religious affairs for the Obama campaign.
Religion has taken a higher profile in the heated race for the Democratic presidential nomination, as the Obama campaign deals with the fallout from controversial comments made by outgoing spiritual adviser Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
About one in four Americans is Catholic and while the anti-abortion and anti-gay-marriage contingent has been vocal, a new wave of progressive Catholics focused on increasing minimum wage, ending the war in Iraq and implementing universal health care has emerged as a key Democratic bloc this election year.
In a recent survey of 19 states that have held presidential primaries this year, 63% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats compared with 37% for Republicans, a sharp increase from 2005 when 42% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats, based on polls conducted by Edison/Mitofsky.
Catholic voters gravitate to Sen. Clinton for various reasons, including favorable memories of her husband's administration and her long-term emphasis on universal health care. Some of her positive showing among Catholics is a result of overlapping constituencies like white working-class voters and Hispanics.
In California, where Hispanics made up roughly one-third of all primary voters, 70% of all churchgoing Catholics voted for Sen. Clinton, compared with 26% for Sen. Obama.
Some Catholic Democrats say that Sen. Clinton's emphasis on specific solutions is similar to Catholic social teaching, which urges its followers to use the doctrine as a way of bring about positive social change particularly when it comes to alleviating poverty.
Meanwhile, some Catholic voters and politicians say Sen. Obama, who talks often about finding religion as an adult at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, now the center of the Rev. Wright storm, has a broader stump speech that is closer to a Baptist or evangelical sermon.
"We've got a history of not only having the faith but acting on it," says Bill Roth, director of the Catholic Democrats of California and a national spokesman for the group. "Maybe the action [Sen.] Clinton has shown in terms of putting forward proposals, whether they work or not, is motivating."
Another argument is the "nun theory," which holds that Catholics are more accustomed to strong-minded female leadership because of the prominent role of nuns. "I think Catholic Democrats...are accustomed to having female authority figures in the form of the sisters in our schools and Sen. Clinton, I think, benefits from that," says Christopher McNally, the Pennsylvania chair for the Catholic Democrats and an active Obama supporter.
The Clinton campaign has a simpler explanation. "It's really about common ground in two places: values and the economy," says Burns Strider, an evangelical Christian and the director of faith-based operations for the Clinton campaign.
As the Scranton parade ended, Clinton aides touted Sen. Clinton's role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland, an important issue among the more than two million Irish-Americans in Pennsylvania, or more than 16% of the state's total population. The Obama campaign has said that Sen. Clinton is exaggerating her role in the Irish peace process.
The Obama campaign says any perceived disadvantage among Catholics has to do with lack of name recognition. Campaign aides point to Sen. Obama's victories among Catholics in Louisiana, Virginia and Wisconsin. "The more [Catholic voters] learn about Sen. Obama, the more they'll resonate with that message," says Obama supporter and former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, who is reaching out to Catholics in Pennsylvania on behalf of the campaign.
Write to Amy Chozick at amy.chozick@wsj.com
