I have a feeling that the coming center-left ruling majority is going to have a different feel to it than the old New Deal coalition. This is one example of what I’m talking about:
Some Catholics in Metro Detroit are organizing a media and Internet blitz against three local members of Congress, saying the representatives’ stand against a Democratic proposal to finance the State Children’s Health Insurance Program — known as MIChild in Michigan — is inconsistent with their vow to oppose abortion rights.
“The important thing to communicate to them is that Catholics regard this as an issue of social justice and basic human rights — this is a life issue,” said Michael Hovey, the director of the Office for Catholic Social Teaching for the Archdiocese of Detroit.
A campaign of radio advertisements and e-mails to the offices of Reps. Joseph Knollenberg, R-Bloomfield Township; Thaddeus McCotter, R-Livonia; and Tim Walberg, R-Tipton, is to begin Monday. The advertisements will be broadcast on local Christian radio stations.
I’m pretty familiar with the Metro Detroit Catholic mindset. They are almost prototypical Reagan Democrats. Almost all of them have some connection to the auto industry and, thus, labor unions. But many of them are also refugees from the city of Detroit…scarred by the riots, and deeply hostile to the remaining population. Reagan’s appeals to patriotism resonated with them, but his rhetoric about welfare queens reverberated at a lower, deeper level. By the early 1990’s they were buying up Rush Limbaugh’s books in droves.
I think most of them are back in the Dems’ tent.
and these folks probably aren’t representative of the suburban population there.
the vibe i get from most of the folks is apathy mixed with desperation. terms like social justice and human rights aren’t used… ever.
that being said, i basically agree that the premise of your post is correct. these people are back in the democratic tent. they just don’t like the smell of all the ethnic food the dirty fucking hippies are eating.
detroit metro, in particular, epitomizes ‘suburban’ life. there is NO public transit (auto companies made sure of that), there is intense segregation, and severe income disparity.
generally, people are terrified/disgusted by anything involving the ‘public sphere’ it’s too dirty for them. they prefer their tv and tgi fridays.
basically, it’s not what i would call a ‘society’. some people are part of pseudo-tribes, but most are just isolated slaves to consumer culture. Hillary Clinton’s dream voters.
still, considering the state of class relations in america (and michigan), they are going to vote democrat for a long time.
The key for the Reagan Democrats of Michigan: “Reagan’s appeals to patriotism resonated with them, but his rhetoric about welfare queens reverberated at a lower, deeper level.”
At a deeper level, indeed. Michigan politics is still a racist divide. You either vote for or against Detroit. Engler used the tax issue, but his rhetoric against Black Detroit kept him in office well beyond his time. He screwed up the state financially in degree that the next governor, a Democrat, had to spend the next eight years in office cleaning up the mess. But many people here still believe that it is possible to have everything without paying for it. They would also include Democrats who still believe in Reaganomics as opposed to liberal-socialism.
Well, this is the leadership. They are being led, lobbied, to get active on children’s health. Whether the respond to it is another matter, but it is a different message than they were hearing during the Clinton years.
Stopping abortions trumps early child death. If the Catholic church were really concerned about the death of young children, they would have weighed in heavily on that UN statistic showing 25,000 children under the age of five die every day around the world. I doubt if there are that many abortions every day around the world.
Okay, we get it now. Those 25,000 children get to heaven on a free pass, while the fetuses aborted get nixed and reside in limbo. Why is that?
My issue with the Catholic church is not even the abortion issue – which is big – but it is the prohibition of contraception.
If there was better access to contraceptives more women would take advantage of it and fewer children would die or be aborted.
However taking care of children is high on my priority list and thus I am happy to see them take this action.
I probably know nothing of what I’m talking about here, but isn’t it a rule of every church to make their number grow. They can’t grow and spread the word and stay at status quo. Conversion just isn’t fast enough. The young minds are need so zealotry can be ingrained.
The abortion issue and contraception aren’t really an issue, because they don’t want it to be. Now I don’t know, but I suspect the religious powers that be would never say we should reduce our numbers, and all the money that comes in too.
I think with most religions it’s the same as with government. Power and money.
Oh I forgot one church that didn’t push for reproduction – The Shakers. Nice furniture though.
Most mainstream Protestant churches in the US and Europe have almost zero issues with contraception for married couples – and that’s actually the root of the Catholic prohibition on contraception. One of the Popes (Pius XI) was casting about for things to play “gotcha” with against the mainstream Protestant churches – things that he could use to say “see – these people aren’t really Christians”. So he played up every difference between Protestants and Catholics as “grave sins” and heresies. Protestant faiths had started allowing birth control for married couples (specifically because of how horrible it was to bring 12 or so children into an industrial society where it was very difficult to provide for all of them), so the Pope decreed that Catholics couldn’t do it.
Sanity tried to intervene in the late 60s when a Pope called a Papal Council to investigate the subject again. The Council voted fairly overwhelmingly to relax the restrictions on birth control to be similar to what most of the mainline Protestant faiths had. Except that a different Pope had ascended by the time the report was given and he basically threw it out and said “nope – no birth control”. This was part of the start of the reactionary backlash against Vatican II – the birth control change would have been a continuation of the modernization movement of the Church that Vatican II spear-headed – in the late 60s the reactionaries took control of the hierarchy and they’ve been trying to not only stop modernization, but revert certain parts of the Church back to the pre-Vatican II era. They certainly weren’t going to be in favor of something that made the Church MORE like the various Protestant churches (especially if that means admitting that the various Protestant churches were, in fact, right and the Catholic Church was wrong).
The RCC birth control stance is less a “make a lot of worshippers for the Church” stance than it is a “we absolutely refuse to admit that we might be wrong about something” stance. Par for the course for a Church that only recently apologized to Galileo for what they did to him in the 17th century. The Church will probably come to a modern stance on birth control sometime around the year 2300 – if they haven’t succeeded in making themselves completely irrelevant by then. I find it sad because they can be a force for good in the world, but they get caught up in these silly petty political squabbles and forget what their mission is supposed to be.
Well, I’m happy to see them taking a positive position on health care for children. Although, generally, I’d prefer if churches would just stay out of politics.