The R word

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Sep 22, 2009

You know the smear. If you're white and disagree with Obamacare, you're a RACIST. If you're black and disagree with Obamacare, you're an Uncle Tom, and deserve a beating for being an uppity negro. If you're a free range bishop who disagrees with Obamacare, you’re a REPUBLICAN.

Read Nick Cafardi who has come unglued in the National Catholic Reporter:

Whether they realize it or not, these bishops in their purportedly “pastoral” statements are doing the work of the Republican Party. They are espousing political positions, not moral ones, and they are doing great harm to the body of bishops, not to mention the Body of Christ, in their transparent and patent political advocacy. What they wrote was neither theology nor catechetics nor spiritual direction. It was politics, pure and simple, politics that would warm Rush Limbaugh’s conservative Republican heart.

They need to stop...

In Cafardi's view, and undoubtedly the view of the devoted NCR readership, accusing a few bishops of being REPUBLICAN is tantamount to accusing them of all the sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance (leaving out sodomy, of course, because it’s not a sin anymore.)

But let's get a grip. What is more plausible? (a) that a few free rangers in the USCCB--"the Democratic party at prayer"--are Republicans with the muscle to push the bishops into the arms of the Republican party, OR (b) that a law professor, and former law school dean, Cafardi, masquerading as a Catholic champion of health care for the poor, is a lapdog for the guys who reap billions of dollars suing doctors, the trial lawyers of America?

Really, which smear is more plausible?