Can Chuck Norris, icon of stoic manliness, save the Republican Party?

26 comments May 17th, 2009

 

 The heroic persona created by actor Chuck Norris in his work on television and in movies has such appeal among certain Republican men that they see him as a serious political thinker.

 That’s just one of the reasons why the GOP is in such trouble, according to Paul Waldman in THIS PIECE.

Vatican gives silent assent to Obama appearance today at Notre Dame?

4 comments May 17th, 2009

 

 If Pope Benedict XVI were opposed to President Obama’s appearance at today’s commencement exercises at the University of Notre Dame, wouldn’t he have said so?

 But the pontiff HASN’T UTTERED A PEEP about the matter. The only word from Rome about Obama of late has been an ARTICLE in the Vatican newspaper that was generally favorable to the president.

 Nor have most Catholic bishops or most of the American laity objected to Notre Dame inviting Obama to speak, although the dissenters have been noisily self-righteous.

 I’ve argued all along that this controversy involves more than disagreement with Obama over abortion.  Rather, it seems to have loosed pent-up enmities between the church’s left and right wings across a broad front of issues. The right seems especially eager to do battle — the better to purge so-called cafeteria Catholics from the ranks.

 It is galling, perhaps even embarrassing, to the right-wingers that a solid majority of Catholic voters supported Obama in last year’s election and that American Catholics generally are more liberal than non-Catholics on certain moral issues.

 As the Gallup organization put it in a report issued last month:

The argument of those who protest the extension of the invitation to Obama is that Catholics have a distinctly conservative position on these moral issues [abortion and embryonic stem cell research].  That is certainly the case as far as official church doctrine is concerned, but not when it comes to average American Catholics. The new Gallup analysis, based on aggregated data from Gallup’s 2006-2008 Values and Beliefs surveys, indicates that Catholics in the United States today are actually more liberal than the non-Catholic population on a number of moral issues, and on others, Catholics have generally the same attitudes.

So, the stage is set for who-knows-what at Notre Dame today. I’ll post periodic updates as I am able amid the other demands on my time and attention on this nice spring day.

UPDATE: James Carroll, a former priest, ARGUES that this controversy is of greater importance than some people suspect:

In fact, the crucial question that underlies the flap at Notre Dame has enormous importance for the unfolding twenty-first century: Will Roman Catholicism, with its global reach, including more than a billion people crossing every boundary of race, class, education, geography and culture, be swept into the rising tide of religious fundamentalism?

 UPDATE II: Retired Archbishop John R. Quinn SAYS Obama should look beyond the “strident outcries” against his visit to Notre Dame.

 UPDATE III: Some of the same folks who’ve been stirring this Notre Dame controversy aren’t going to like the news that “Angels & Demons,” the Ron Howard/Tom Hanks religious-thriller flick, which has been denounced by orthodox Catholics, is a BIG HIT at the box office this weekend.

 UPDATE IV: Obama’s speech was well-received and came off with only a few MINOR HITCHES.