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" E.J. Dionne, perhaps the most fundamentally humane and decent of our pundits, pointed us to this CNN piece today about what a serious whupping was dealt out to the Clan of the Red Beanie in the elections just passed. It long has been my opinion that the huffing and blowing from the Clan over ladyparts medicine fundamentally was an attempt by the hierarchical Church to regain the secular political influence that first began to diminish when Holy Mother Church was eclipsed in our politics by the rise of the evangelical religious right \u2014 which rose while many of its superstars were still maintaining that the pope was the whore of Babylon \u2014 and which it lost, finally and conclusively, when it decided to operate as an international conspiracy to obstruct justice. Therefore, the notion that the hierarchy&amp;#039;s authority is &amp;quot;threatened&amp;quot; by the election results is very much a case of locking the barn after the magisterium is stolen. But, while I agree with Mr. Miller as far as he goes, the hierarchy&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;authority&amp;quot; on the very issues under discussion \u2014 sex, contraception, and all the rest of it \u2014 was destroyed in 1968, when, against the advice of his own commission on the subject, Pope Paul VI promulgated the anti-human and wrongheaded Humanae Vitae, and Catholic laypeople all over the world, but especially in America, realized they could, in their own informed consciences, ignore the pope himself, let alone the fulminations of the hierarchy, and go on having sexytime without the possibility of the transmission of life. This also goes a long way toward explaining why, for all practical purposes, there is no &amp;quot;Catholic vote&amp;quot; any more. There is a rump faction of ultramontane social-issue types that has attached itself to the rest of the Christian right and, therefore, to the Republican party. But they are a shrinking minority. The exit polls show that the Latino vote, which long was the hope of conservative Catholic politicians, broke down on the social issues pretty much along the lines of the way it voted in the presidential election. There are Catholics who vote, but there is no Catholic vote, and that&amp;#039;s why any talk about the &amp;quot;authority&amp;quot; of the bishops in our secular politics is as vain as speculating whether or not the Whigs could have propelled Willard Romney into the White House. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16669/catholic-vote-2012-110812/>