The attempt by this White House to court devoutly religious voters is getting more and more direct. John Allen is a great reporter so I doubt he’s wrong that president Bush lobbied the Vatican to support the Constitutional Amendment to strip gay couples of any rights under the law. The Rove strategy is to use hostility to marriage rights for gays to unite a hoped-for “Popular Front” of conservative Catholics, evangelicals and fundamentalists. Call it the Mel Gibson strategy, or The Last Temptation of Dubya. The president’s problem is that the grass roots aren’t exactly playing their part. They don’t seem to believe that fusing politics and religion is what evangelicalism is all about; and Catholics – even highly traditional ones – are leery of seeing their Church turned into a branch of the Republican party. So, whatever their views on marriage rights, they have been luke-warm about the president’s attempt to write gay couples out of the Constitution. Even the president has conceded this. “I will tell you the prairie fire necessary to get an amendment passed is simmering at best,” he told Christianity Today. “I think it’s an accurate way of describing it.” So he’s trying to start a brush-fire from above. But how weird that a president of the US would try to persuade the Roman pontiff to take a position on an American constitutional amendment. Sometimes, he is a strict multilateralist, after all.
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “[Bush] is not another Hitler. Yet there is a certain parallelism. They have in common a demagogic appeal to the worst side of a country’s heritage in a crisis. Bush is doubtless sincere in his vision of what is best for America. So too was Hitler. The crew around the president — Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Karl Rove, the ‘neo-cons’ like Paul Wolfowitz — are not as crazy perhaps as Himmler and Goering and Goebbels. Yet like them, they are practitioners of the Big Lie — weapons of mass destruction, Iraq democracy, only a few ‘bad apples’.” – Andrew Greeley, Chicago Tribune, as cited by Arthur Chrenkoff.
The Dish 