Catholics for Choice

Key findings include:

• Latinos, Catholic women and Catholic millennials show the largest support for Clinton over Trump.
• Sixty percent of Catholic voters say that the views of the Catholic hierarchy are not important to them when they are deciding who to vote for in the presidential election.
• Six in ten Catholic voters do not feel an obligation to vote the way the bishops recommend.
• Sixty percent of Catholic voters say that abortion can be a moral choice.
• Seventy-two percent believe that abortion should be available to pregnant women who have contracted the Zika virus.
• Seventy percent of Catholics do not think that companies should be allowed to use the owner’s religious beliefs as a reason to deny services to a customer or employee.

Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice said, “The Catholic vote is like a jump ball in basketball—every election it comes into play and both parties try to claim it as their own. As it represents 25 percent of the electorate, considerable effort goes into trying to determine which team will grab it. However, as this new poll shows what we’ve always known: Catholics are concerned with social justice and compassion and do not vote with the bishops, no matter how much the bishops try to project their own beliefs onto this section of the electorate.”

The poll was conducted before the vice presidential debate between Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence, where the two squared off on religious liberty and abortion, but in a statement released after the debate Catholics for Choice said, “Catholics act according to their own conscience and they do not stand with the Catholic hierarchy on abortion, access to healthcare or the rise of religious refusals backed by the bishops, and similarly do not think they nor Catholic politicians have an obligation to vote according to the Bishops. In fact, Senator Tim Kaine said it was not the role of a public servant to mandate their faith through government, and on fundamental issues of morality, like abortion, we should let women make those decisions.”

Rhode Island is routinely said to be the most Catholic of the United States.

Dear Bishop Tobin,

On May 10, you asserted in a public commentary that all drug use is sinful and immoral. You urged state legislators to reject the legalization of marijuana. As a member of the Protestant clergy, I reach a very different conclusion.

We read the same Bible, worship the same God, and seek to follow the teachings of Jesus. What, then, explains where we differ, and why? You acknowledge that a case, which you do not refute, can be made for the recreational use of alcohol. Marijuana is far less dangerous than alcohol, yet you do not attempt to justify this double standard.

You then quote the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “The use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life.” You cite the words of Pope Francis two years ago: “Drug addiction is an evil, and with evil there can be no yielding or compromise.”

The reality is that we live in a drug-using society. Most of us consume some kind of drug on a regular basis: alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, prescription drugs, or marijuana. The question that challenges us both, then, is how to respond to the possibility that drug use can become addictive. Sadly, your understanding of addiction is incomplete and outdated.

In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan became its general. His wife Nancy was credited with the famous phrase “Just Say No” as the path to avoiding addiction.

We can be grateful that medical science today has helped us to understand more about the complexities of addiction than we did in the era of Ronald Reagan. In light of current knowledge, the War on Drugs is immoral. “Just Say No” seems simplistic, even fatuous.

Addiction is far less about the properties of an individual drug than the inner pain that causes a user to seek temporary relief. This inner pain is, more often than not, the “gateway” to drug abuse, not any particular substance. That’s why not just drugs, but certain kinds of behavior, can become addictive — gambling, sex, the internet, shopping, and even food.

Most people who experiment with drugs move beyond them. You speak of our youth as ‘immune to reality with their electronics – hoodies on, heads down, ear buds in…” But most of the “zombie youth” you deride will outgrow this behavior. It’s this kind of being out-of- touch that leads to youth not paying attention to adults’ advice in the first place.

In December, I participated in a conference in Providence’s Gloria Dei Cathedral. Police, physicians, and clergy addressed the impact of the War on Drugs. One of the panelists, a former president of the Rhode Island Medical Society, noted that about 10% of those who use drugs run a serious risk of addiction. About half of those will avoid addiction through treatment. It is the remaining 5% we must worry about.

Medical experts are determining that trauma and profound stress are the primary, though certainly not only, causes of addiction. Trauma and stress can take many forms, ranging from sexual abuse to acute loneliness and isolation. Pope Francis is correct when he notes a connection between addiction and extreme poverty.

People struggling with addiction are, most often, neither sinful nor weak, as increasingly outdated moral teachings would have us believe. The phrase “self-medication” is not an accident. Arresting people with an addiction is morally wrong and does nothing to alleviate their underlying pain.

My Christian faith also tells me that punishment and “tough love” are rarely the best way to change behavior. We are most likely to reach others when we respond to them with care, compassion, mercy, respect, and honesty. This is what Jesus did. Condemnation was not his instrument of change.

We are living in the dawn of a new drug policy in this country. It is called harm reduction and is based on the tenets that drugs can never be completely eliminated and that we should help drug users without insisting on abstinence. At least 35 states now have needle exchange programs as a life-saving means of avoiding HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C.

In opposing marijuana legalization, you are complicit in the failed and immoral War on Drugs. In Rhode Island, which has already decriminalized marijuana, you are nevertheless supporting fines on poor, most often young people, who can ill afford to pay them, and may face lifetime consequences as a result.

You refer derisively to “benign forms” of marijuana: “cookies, brownies, and mints” in states where it is legal. But isn’t this safer than leaving our youth to sellers in back alleys who sometimes offer toxic, adulterated marijuana, and are happy to provide the harder drugs.

Most importantly, in continuing to focus on marijuana legalization, you are distracting attention and resources from what we both fear most – the dangers of addiction. We share the common purpose of reducing the harm of drugs in our society, but we differ on the means. Your commentary is clever and engaging, but ultimately it is wrong.

Yours in Faith,

Rev. Alexander E. Sharp

Executive Director
Clergy for a New Drug Policy

Tobin was in the news for a blog post he wrote calling on lawmakers to keep cannabis illegal in Rhode Island. “In opening the door to drug use even a little bit, we have so much to lose and absolutely nothing to gain,” he wrote. But as I responded on TV, “The Bishop is essentially siding with mass incarceration if he wants marijuana to stay illegal, and that’s a far greater sin than indulgence.”

I called him a “moral failure for our state and for the Catholic Church.”

In the online segment I made clear my harsh judgement is not for his position on drug policy. It’s also not for taking a strong position against abortion. It’s because he has been completely absent from the public discussion on poverty and war – issues that have been central to all Rhode Islanders lives during his tenure as bishop. “I want the Church to advocate for issues that matter to the people of Rhode Island,” I said.

In his interview with Bill Rappleye (about 3:10), Tobin expressed his views on war.

“Of course I’m against wars, I don’t know anyone who is in favor of wars,” Tobin said. “I think it was St. John Paul who said war is always a defeat for humanity. It’s never good.”

But, he added, “Sometimes there are prudential judgments.”

He continued, “The Catholic Church has a long tradition of talking about a ‘just war theory’. It is never to say someone is just in starting a war, but we certainly believe in the right of self defense. What would someone do to respond to the attacks of terrorism, of ISIS, the terrible persecution of Christians taking place in the Middle East, the attacks on our own country or in France or in Belgium? How do we respond to these violent terrorist attacks without having some means of self defense. That’s where I think someone providing legitimate armaments and self defense has a legitimate role to play. Again, no one is in favor of war.”

On transgender bathrooms, Tobin, a Republican who said he probably won’t vote for Donald Trump, showed some compassion before invoking a popular conservative talking point.

“I have no doubt there are some people for physiological or psychological reasons have to deal with being transgendered and those people deserve all the support and respect and cooperation and assistance we can offer them but I’m also concerned this seems to be becoming a politically-driven agenda. It does seem to me to be very sweeping and overarching and perhaps another intrusion of the federal government into areas that are best decided at the local level.”

When I was at Hendricken, there was something called the Irish Club, a group of students and faculty that engaged in an after-school celebratory discourse about Celtic Catholic spirituality and culture. We would from time to time touch on the tremendously fraught issue that is the Irish Republican Army. The overwhelming opinion was that, even though the IRA was right in its aims, they were wrong to launch attacks in a fashion that resulted in civilian casualties. Leaving aside my own further intellectual development since I discovered the works of Frantz Fanon, the reality is that one can and should apply this logic to the murder of people at a women’s clinic.

Anything less than a full-throated rejection of an act of religiously-influenced domestic terrorism on par with the violence of 9/11, including modifying phrases that condemns the activities of the victims, is the stuff of cowardice. If a school should be involved in such acts of cowardice, their ability to be serviced by taxpayer-funded free school bussing should be revoked, as should the supply of taxpayer-funded text books in math, science, and other subjects. If we are going to have some individuals harping and howling over whether President Obama was taught in a radical Muslim madrassa in Indonesia, we are going to hold Catholic education to the same standards while remembering that Osama bin Laden was also opposed to abortion rights.

One of the lessons that I took from 9/11 that I think very few others likewise took was understanding why that event happened. Some would call this a Left position, others an anti-American position, but I call a logical and educated position. Those attacks were not random acts, they were a violent climax of events over decades involving American military force in the post-colonial world. From the bloody vistas of Vietnam to Jimmy Carter’s idiotic policies in Afghanistan and beyond, America planted hateful seeds abroad that blew back onto our shores and killed civilians.

We should be wise and apply this logic herein. This violence was not random, it was a violent and bloody culmination of years of a coordinated series of anti-choice actions that the media has refused to cover or failed to properly dissect in the name of their farcical ‘objectivity’. Clinics nationwide have been closed over the past several years with a series of Kafkaesque building codes. For months, there have been arson attacks on women’s healthcare clinics that have not been front page news on the Providence Journal (do not even get me started with their misogynist coverage of this violence). The farcical and utterly transparent videos produced by anti-choice scoundrels this summer are now confirmed to have fueled this madman’s violence and that vanguard of objectivity, Edward Achorn, printed letters and columns in his editorial pages that furthered those lies. I would not hesitate to show him as much contempt as some of his colleagues have shown for Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning (though the fact is that they were telling the truth whereas Achorn was promoting lies). The trail of tears leads to many doorways, including his. No longer can he talk of concerns about promoting terrorism in the Arab world without having this held over his head.

Let us consider for a moment the odious Bishop Thomas Tobin, whose war against women included his Know-Nothing rally at the doors of Planned Parenthood last summer. I would respect Bishop Tobin if he was actually serious about protecting children, but considering how he continues to give soft glove treatment to Bishop Emeritus Gelineau while the man has reams of testimony against him regarding sexual abuse of minors (here, here, and here), I would trust Charles Manson to protect a youth before I trusted Bishop Tobin. What is more, he is a publicly-registered Republican and actively opposed the Affordable Care Act, a law that provides the very contraceptive care that can prevent unwanted pregnancy and therefore abortion. If the Church opposes contraception, fine, that is the realm of moral instruction of membership. But when you get into actively lobbying against public policy, that is a wholly different realm. The Providence Diocese for a long time now has ceased to be a purely religious body and become the politically lobbying Grand Old Diocese, or GOD. This is such a transparent farce that the Three Stooges would blanch in embarrassment.

But there is plenty blame left. What about our allegedly pro-choice Gov. Gina Raimondo, who threw women under the bus this year at the whims of the aforementioned Republican Diocese? Can we call this rolling over for both the opposition party and the Church that took her picture off the walls of LaSalle Academy anything but a terminal lack of backbone? Why is our democracy allowed to be controlled by a body that fails to pay taxes, shelters child abusers, and supports terrorism? Are all the women of Rhode Island worth a quickie compromise with these fools? The precedents she has created are deadly and fed into this madness.

Yet the ultimate amount of guilt lies with ourselves. We failed women. We were unable, unwilling, or uncaring enough to take these warning signs serious enough. We should have been more full-throated about this than a bickering fest about a baseball stadium. In the days before 9/11, the record shows that a select few government employees were running around Washington like their hair was on fire, begging the Bush administration for attention. Were there such figures in the Ocean State landscape I missed? Steve Ahlquist has been one, his coverage of the Raimondo legal moves have been admirable and is going to be used as primary sources by future historians. But was there a Richard Clarke on hand telling we alleged feminists to watch out? Why were we not like he was? To quote the Bard “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but ourselves.”

After this, every reproductive healthcare center should be under the same level of protection that T.F. Green Airport is. After this, we should quit worrying about Syrian Muslim terrorism and start worrying about American Christian anti-choice terrorism. After this, we should be more vocal and saying that abortion accounts for only 3% of Planned Parenthood medical care and the rest is focused on low-cost healthcare for men and women, including contraceptive, cancer, and STI testing/treatment care, medical care that would otherwise be unavailable for many of their patients. We should vocalize that, prior to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, the largest killer of women of child-bearing age was septic abortion, more than car accidents or cancer.

If moral absolutists are going to argue that they do not want their tax dollars funding abortion, they should be as vocal about funding our murderous, child-killing military-industrial complex and be pro-life regarding Palestinian children. Yet the only religious group I know of that does that is the generally pro-choice Quakers. Are Catholic Bishops willing to use the same condemnatory tones used towards those who help procure abortions with Catholic soldiers and threaten automatic excommunication for drone killings, especially since the revelations by The Intercept and other publications reveal the targeted assassinations program has killed so many innocent children?

I write Hendricken ’05 on my pro-choice petitions to our Congressional delegates because Jack Reed is a Catholic and James Langevin went to Hendricken. I write Hendricken ’05 on my pro-choice petitions because, once you void the privacy of the doctor’s office, you create a slippery slope that could void the privacy of the Catholic priest’s confessional due to the fact clergy and medical personnel are protected by the same statutory logic. I sign Hendricken ’05 because I oppose terrorism. I sign Hendricken’05 because I believe women know better than anyone else what medical care they need and that the patient is always the best advocate for their care, not priests. I sign Hendricken ’05 because I respect the female teachers at Hendricken. When I was a student, there were instances where male instructors would sometimes talk about the ‘morality’ of regarding why some of these teachers did not have a large number of children, behavior showing of a lack of respect for these women that screams Human Resources complaint. But I also sign Hendricken ’05 because I believe in sanity, secularism, feminism, and maturity and do not believe in governance by religious fundamentalism. It was John Adams who said “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Finally, I sign Hendricken ’05 because all Hawks are quality one, even if they are pro-choice. By pro-choice, I do not mean I push my sexist nose into the doctor’s office to observe all the activities therein. Rather, it means I respect when that door closes and do not dare open it ever lest I have the same be done to my mother, aunt, grandmother, sister, or female friends. This is the kind of respect I also express for the Seal of the Confessional.

Those who tell you that being pro-choice automatically means being in favor of abortion are lying. It is the complete opposite. Being pro-choice means not being in favor of anything a woman chooses to do in her doctor’s office because it is none of your business, period. Being pro-choice also means opposing state-mandated abortion, such as the Chinese one-child policy, because a law like that strips a woman of her agency and intrudes on the relationship she has with her doctor. Men are not subjected to the level of regulation and scrutiny when they choose medical care that I might not agree with, ergo a woman is due that same level of respect. Refusal to grant that is defined by an SAT vocabulary word, misogyny.

Despite having more Roman Catholics than any other state in the country, no Pope has ever visited Rhode Island. In September Pope Francis will be the fourth Pope to visit the United States in what will be the tenth papal visit to our shores.

The first Pope to visit the United States, or even the Western Hemisphere, was Paul VI in 1965. He limited his visit to New York. He met with President Lyndon Johnson, spoke before the United Nations, held a mass at Yankee Stadium and visited the New York World’s Fair, cramming a lot into a 14 hour visit.

Pope John Paul II , 14 years later, made his first of seven visits to the United States. This Pope visited Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Des Moines, Anchorage, Fairbanks, Miami, Columbia, New Orleans, San Antonio, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Denver, Newark, Brooklyn, Baltimore and St. Louis over 20 years of visits.

Benedict XVI was the last Pope to visit the United States, arriving in Washington and visiting New York in 2008.

In Rhode Island, Catholics make up about 44 percent of the population, the highest in the nation. But if Rhode Island Catholics want to catch a glimpse of their spiritual leader, they need to travel to where he is. That’s why the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence is leading a pilgrimage of 400 faithful to Philadelphia, where the Pope is speaking before the World Meeting of Families.

Pope Francis, while being true to his predecessors on the subjects of reproductive rights and homosexuality, (he’s against both) has nonetheless upset conservative Catholics in the United States with his stance on the environment and capitalism (which he has compared to “the devil’s dung.”)

Quoted in Politico, Sam Clovis, a Catholic and political activist who’s run for US Senate and state treasurer in Iowa said, “In northwest Iowa, we are discussing this a great deal, and sometimes it’s hard for us to reconcile the pronouncements we read from the Holy Father with our conservative principles.”

Meanwhile, Republican Catholics running for president, such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum are all trying to differentiate between what their Catholic faith compels them to believe and what are merely the opinions of Pope Francis. The same politicians who once said to Catholics in support of LGBTQ and reproductive rights that such positions were impossible to square with true Catholicism are now facing the same criticism themselves on the issues of economic and environmental justice.

Locally, we are seeing similar reactions to Pope Francis. Conservative Catholic blogger Justin Katz wrote a piece last month for the ProJo in which he asked, “What’s the deal with Pope Francis?” Katz is examining Catholic theology as a way of navigating the difficult questions Francis poses to conservative Catholics.

Bishop Thomas Tobin of the Providence Diocese has publicly proclaimed his disappointment with Pope Francis, saying “…he hasn’t, at least that I’m aware of, said much about unborn children, about abortion, and many people have noticed that.” Tobin, who publicly switched his political party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, has received a fair amount of criticism for this and other remarks about his boss.

Even Bernard Healey, the Catholic priest who lobbies the RI General Assembly on behalf of the Providence Catholic Diocese, has dinged Pope Francis, beginning testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 25th with a guilty smile, saying, “I would quote Pope Francis, who is widely quoted in the media. You probably missed this quote, they normally miss the ones that I agree with,” implying that he disagrees with much of what Pope Francis has been saying.

Nationally, 54 percent of Catholics support same-sex marriage. 66 percent think abortion is at least sometimes justified. 69 percent support contraception. Given such numbers, it seems the Catholic Church is out of step with American Catholics on the political left as well as the right.

Yet here in Rhode Island the Catholic Church exerts formidable political power. The governor, speaker of the House and Senate president are all at least nominally Catholic, as are many members of the General Assembly. Tobin has his own part time lobbyist working our part time legislature. Politically speaking, the Roman Catholic Church is a power player here in Rhode Island and that means that in order to understand our state, we have to understand the dynamics of political Catholicism.

And to do that, you have to understand the Pope.

Since Pope Francis isn’t coming to Rhode Island, RI Future is going to the Pope. To do that, we’re running a GoFundMe campaign to secure the $1000 I’ll need to cover train travel, food, lodging and other expenses. Over the course of five days, from September 23-27, I’ll be in Washington DC, New York City and Philadelphia, covering the Pope’s visit in my unique way.

This will be very different coverage. Readers of this blog know that I am an outspoken atheist, progressive and democratic socialist. I won’t just be covering the Pope, I’ll be covering the people I meet. There will be protesters, critics and supporters. I’ve never done anything like this before, so I expect my coverage to be unlike anything I’ve done before as well.

Consider donating, and let’s see what I can pull off.

Correction: After this piece was published I received the following communication from Carolyn Cronin, Director of Communications for the Diocese of Providence:

“The article you are referencing in your piece was an editorial in the RI Catholic newspaper.  Bishop Tobin is the publisher, but he does not write or review the editorials. It is a separate opinion of the paper. So to attribute those quotes to him are not accurate. I would appreciate the clarification.”

When I asked Cronin what Bishop Tobin’s views on payday lending are, I received this reply:

“The Bishop supports the traditional teaching of the Church, but has not made any specific statements about pending legislation. Father Healey represents the diocese on this and other issues at the Statehouse.”

The piece below has been modified to reflect the fact that the statements made in Rhode Island Catholic should not be attributed to Bishop Tobin.

I regret the error.

The Rhode Island Catholic newspaper came out against payday loans in an editorial.

After referring to such loans as “heresy” Rhode Island Catholic said, “Usury, the charging of extreme interest, is condemned by Catholic doctrine. Recently Pope Benedict XVI explicitly condemned usury in his encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate. St. John Paul II called usury ‘a scourge that is also a reality in our time and that has a stranglehold on many people’s lives.’”

“Rhode Islanders,” continued Rhode Island Catholic, “especially R.I. Catholics, should stand up against payday lending, the usury of our time. The extremely poor need protections from what appears their only option in a challenging economy. Extreme rates of interests, with little chance of payment in a timely fashion, are not the way to grow a healthy economy. Instead, the poor need regulations against financial charlatans who seek the economic ruin of those on the margins.”

That usurious lending is ideologically opposed in Catholic theology should come as no surprise to Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello, a lifelong Catholic, who continues to oppose reform.

“The case has not been made to me to terminate an industry in our state,” said Mattiello last month, “The arguments against payday lending tend to be ideological in nature.”

This would not be the first time that Mattiello has found himself politically at odds with his putative faith. A Providence Journal report, published shortly after his accession to speaker, says, “A Roman Catholic who for half his life had been a lector at Immaculate Conception Church, in Cranston, Mattiello opposed gay marriage. His view changed, he says, as society became more accepting and the issue became one of equality. Today, Mattiello says his vote to legalize gay marriage is one ‘that I am proud of,’ even though it cost him his lector position.”

Mattiello’s recent statement on payday loans is no different than the view he expressed back in March 2014, when he said, “Payday lending is a hot button issue, but the consumer likes the product. It’s an ideological approach. I will make my decisions based on evidence and how it actually impacts people and our economy. I’ve asked for evidence on that issue in the past in my position as House majority leader and I’ve been promised a dozen times over, and I’ve never gotten evidence on that.”

What evidence Mattiello is looking for is hard to imagine, given that year after year the House Finance Committee hears testimony from the AARP, the Economic Progress Institute, Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless, Rhode Island AFL-CIO and the Rhode Island Payday Lending Coalition. These groups present reams of evidence detailing the harmful effects of payday loans to both individuals the state’s economy.

To some, Mattiello’s willful ignorance about the plain evils of payday loans seems predicated on the special relationship he has with the payday loan industry’s paid lobbyist. According to RI Monthly, former Speaker of the House William Murphy, who is the paid lobbyist for the payday loan company Advance America Cash Advance Centers, is “like a brother” to Mattiello. “In 1994, Mattiello ushered at Murphy’s wedding.” In 2006 Murphy encouraged Mattiello to go into politics, starting him on his path to speaker of the house.

One of Speaker Mattiello’s favorite words is “outlier” in that he claims he doesn’t want Rhode Island to be one. “Rhode Island is one of only 13 states with an income tax on Social Security,” said Mattiello, “and I am tired of our state being an outlier.”

Sam Wroblewski, at WPRO, writes, “Mattiello said not assessing fees to out-of-state trucking operations makes Rhode Island an outlier in the northeast.”

One way that Rhode Island is an outlier that doesn’t seem to bother Mattiello is payday loans.

“Rhode Island payday loans are authorized to carry charges as high as 260% APR,” says the Economic Policy Institute, “Payday lenders can charge this rate in Rhode Island because in 2001, payday lenders received a special exemption from the state’s usury laws, making RI the only state in the Northeast to do so. The exemption enables licensed check cashers to make payday loans as at 260% rather than complying with the state’s small loan laws.”

Apparently, being an outlier is okay if one of your best friends is making $50,000 a year.

It seems clear that the day Nicholas Mattiello will allow a vote on the abolition or restructuring of payday lending laws here in Rhode Island is the day that Advance America decides to stop employing Mattiello’s friend Bill Murphy as a lobbyist. Until that day, the poor will continue to be exploited and money will continue to be sucked out of Rhode Island communities.

Catholic ideology be damned.

Tobin has a history of making strong political statements about contentious issues such as abortion, marriage equality and separation of church and state. He is never shy about his opinions of atheism and homosexuality. His political involvement even extends to elections, as when he advised Catholics to vote for Mother Teresa for governor rather than Raimondo or Fung.

This is, of course, his right. And to the extent that Tobin involves himself in the political discourse, he opens himself up to critiques (which I am happy to provide).

When asked by interviewer Michael O’Loughlin about his rhetoric, Tobin explained that his outspoken statements are “an expression of my own style. I don’t use a lot of filters. I just try to speak candidly and openly and personally, but hopefully never in a way that’s offensive.”

Still, the timing of this interview is interesting. The interview seems to have been conducted last Thursday, just days before the high profile and expected demotion of American Cardinal Raymond Burke. Burke famously said that the Catholic Church under Pope Francis “is like a ship without a rudder.”

Tobin’s criticism of the Pope – he once said Francis is fond of “creating a mess” – doesn’t seem much different in substance or style from Cardinal Burke’s statement. Could Tobin’s interview be seen as laying the groundwork for a preemptive defense? Note that the Crux piece never mentions Tobin’s most contentious and direct criticism of Pope Francis.

Tobin claims to be surprised that his words were perceived as critical of Francis, saying, “I guess when I offer these comments, I’m doing what I think the Holy Father himself has encouraged us to do, which is to be open, to be candid, to be transparent, to share our thoughts and our feelings without fear of any retribution or strong reaction.” [emphasis mine] In other words, Tobin really doesn’t want to be demoted like Burke was.

One wonders if Tobin is equally open to the idea of the people he supervises being publicly critical of his leadership.

Bishop Tobin, despite a lengthy career of advocating against abortion and marriage equality, has said that in the event of a constitutional convention being held in Rhode Island, he didn’t “think it would or should deal with cultural/moral/religious issues. These particular, discrete issues are better dealt with in the normal legislative process.”

The Bishop’s statement stands in stark contrast to his earlier statements regarding marriage equality, which he said should be placed on the ballot for a popular vote, “We will continue to oppose efforts to redefine the institution of marriage in Rhode Island… The citizens of Rhode Island have a right to vote on this crucial issue.’’

One wonders if Bishop Tobin’s backing off on the issue of abortion, as pertains to a ConCon, represents “an inexcusable lack of moral courage” and an abandonment of “teaching of the Church on the dignity of human life for the sake of self-serving political gain” as he recently said of Gina Raimondo when she announced her position on abortion.

Why would Tobin, so dedicated to changing the laws regarding abortion (and marriage equality) give up a potentially powerful tool that might help him accomplish his task? Does Tobin intend to go so far as to oppose any potential resolutions passed by a ConCon that sought to deal with “cultural/moral/religious” issues in a way the church favors? Can you imagine the Bishop taking a stand against an amendment limiting reproductive of LGBTQ rights if one were to make it through the ConCon?

I can’t.

Meanwhile, Mike Stenhouse, of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a group devoted to crank economics, has pledged to not “support any amendment in a convention that would infringe on individual rights,” despite a line in the Center’s own report that said a ConCon could, “Resolve some thorny cultural issues – one way or another – through the mechanism that most clearly represents the will of the people.” (page six)

Stenhouse’s attack on Jim Vincent of the NAACP and Steve Brown of the ACLU for pointing out the actual words found in the Center’s report rings false. Stenhouse maintains that, “Any honest reading of this section clearly shows that the Center was not taking a position on those topics. Nor is the Center aware that any pro convention organization has publicly suggested that social or cultural issues should be a convention topic.”

So what does “resolve thorny cultural issues” mean to Stenhouse? It’s hard to know, but Stenhouse defender Justin Katz, in a piece entitled, If not on the Ballot, Where? attacks Vincent and defends the Center’s statement by saying, “Look, cultural issues have to be resolved.” In other words, thorny cultural issues are up for discussion in a ConCon, no matter what Stenhouse says.

Maybe the Center should get its messaging straight.

Whereas Tobin serves the Catholic God, Stenhouse serves the God of the Free Market, whose invisible hand makes the rich richer by picking the pockets of the poor. Stenhouse pledges not to support any amendments that might infringe on individual rights, but the term “individual rights” does not equate to civil rights or human rights. The term “individual rights” is much narrower than that.

Individual rights are not group rights. Individual rights are not environmental rights. Under this narrow conception of rights, corporations are individuals, unions are not. The concept of individual rights is often advanced as a way of avoiding the obligations our rights impose on us. Under this view, everybody is responsible for their own rights, not the rights of others.

Human rights, on the other hand, are understood to be “interrelated, interdependent and indivisible” and to apply to “individuals or groups.”  Stenhouse and the center are cautious to avoid terms like human rights and civil rights because these terms carry a moral, ethical and historical weight that is bigger and more expansive than the narrow limits the narcissistic, Objectivist term “individual rights” allow for.

Human rights are both rights and obligations. When we talk in terms of human rights, we call on the power of states to enforce and enhance those rights. Stenhouse and the Center prefer a world of limited government that is unconcerned with human rights and is concerned only with the narrow limits of individual rights. Civil rights legislation that forces bigoted shopkeepers to serve hated minorities are not allowed under this formulation.

Finally, it’s easy for Bishop Tobin, Mike Stenhouse and the members of Renew RI to pinky swear that they will not go after what they call “thorny cultural issues” because they don’t control all the forces in and out of Rhode Island that may involve themselves in the process. Further, their promise to not involve themselves in such issues are limited and conditional.

So it all comes down to this: Do you trust them?

Thus, Tobin slyly implies that atheists are intolerant.

Put aside, for a moment, the idea that atheists may be more or less intolerant than a conservative, Republican, Catholic Bishop and ponder a moment what Tobin’s words would sound like if he were talking about group of people other than atheists.

“But I wonder if a Jewish mayor would be in a position to respect the sincere convictions of Christians (of all denominations) and to encourage and support the many contributions the Christian community makes in our city and state.”

“But I wonder if an Asian mayor would be in a position to respect the sincere convictions of citizens (of all races) and to encourage and support the many contributions non-Asian communities make in our city and state.”

“But I wonder if a woman mayor would be in a position to respect the sincere convictions of men and to encourage and support the many contributions men make in our city and state.”

“But I wonder if a Catholic mayor would be in a position to respect the sincere convictions of Protestants and to encourage and support the many contributions Protestants make in our city and state.”

A candidate’s religious convictions (or lack thereof) are not relevant to their fitness for office, unless those beliefs run contrary to the Constitution of the United States. Article VI, paragraph 3 of the Constitution reads, “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

If your religious beliefs run counter to the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, and you attempt to act on those beliefs in your official capacity as an elected official or judge, then you are unfit for office. Unless one has good reason to suspect that a candidate will not uphold the Constitution, questioning their fitness for office on the basis of religious belief or unbelief is bigotry, pure and simple.

San Francisco Archbishop Cordileone’s decision to speak at the “March for Marriage” an anti-gay marriage rally organized by NOM (National Organization for Marriage) on June 19 has caused quite a stir in Catholic circles. Many are imploring the Archbishop to reconsider his decision to speak at the event, citing Pope Francis’s “Who am I to judge?” attitude towards homosexuality, though it is doubtful that the Pope’s words marked a new understanding in the Catholic Church on the issue.  Cordileone’s willingness to ignore liberal trends in the church and to partner with more extreme anti-gay groups such as the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) should not come as a surprise to those following the Catholic Church’s involvement in the marriage equality battle here in Rhode Island.

Bishop Thomas Tobin trailblazed these efforts over a year ago.

Back in January 2013 I reported that the Providence Diocese made the unfortunate decision to partner with NOM and MassResistance as part of a group calling itself the Faith Alliance to Preserve the Sanctity of Marriage as Established by God. At the time, I was surprised to see the Catholic Church openly aligning itself with MassResistance, a Southern Poverty Law Center certified hate group.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center told me “In our experience, it is highly unusual for the Catholic Church to work with groups like MassResistance, which has repeatedly, and utterly falsely, linked homosexuality to pedophilia, among other things. This is a group that lumps homosexuality in with criminal behaviors like bestiality, claims gay people are dangerous to children, and says, again falsely, that no gay people were murdered in the Holocaust. I should add, however, that we’ve not seen any real history of the Catholic Church working with hate groups. It may be that in this case they’ve simply failed to look into the background of the group they’re allying themselves with. At least I hope so.”

Whether or not NOM is a hate group on par with MassResistance is an open question to some, (though I am of the opinion that they are just sneakier in broadcasting their hate and intolerance, constantly skirting the line.) The one unifying presence in both the Rhode Island and San Francisco cases is NOM operative Christopher Plante, who led the coalition in a failed bid to prevent marriage equality in Rhode Island, and said to the Christian Post in April, that the March on Marriage event is aimed at showing ‘the world, the media, members of Congress and the Supreme Court that the marriage debate is not over. There is a huge groundswell of popular support, popular belief in traditional marriage. And despite what the polls may say, the reality is the majority of Americans believe marriage is between one man and one woman.”

Cordileone, defending his decision to attend the march in Washington, weakly claims that the event is “not ‘anti-LGBT’ … it is not anti-anyone or anti-anything,” but if the history here in Rhode Island is any indication, NOM operatives like Christopher Plante seek the endorsement of institutions like the Catholic Church to provide cover for their alliances with hate groups like MassResistance and other groups that spread ugly smears and lies about our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. Cordileone should weigh the political consequences of selling his status as a church leader so cheaply.

This weekend, as Rhode Island celebrates Pride, we should continue to encourage tolerance and acceptance rather than bigotry and hate, and we can only hope that in the future the Catholic Church will be on the right side of that equation.