What would you say about someone who called themselves a Catholic but chose to be a slave owner in a country where slavery is still tolerated?  To promote and fight against a critical  tenet of your alleged faith is hypocritical. Sellibus should be excommunicated and be freed to be who she is, and promote whatever she wants, but without hiding behind the Catholic appellate.  She is a very public and official hypocrite.

  Would NOW allow Phyllis Schaffly to join, and then stand quietly and idly by while she advocated against the tenets of the organization?  Not likely. 

"Do you think the Catholic Church’s position that Catholic legislatures have an obligation to be pro-life is reasonable?"

Yes.  It is wholly reasonable as the Catholic Church has always condemned abortion as a grave evil.  Wouldn’t it be odd for any religion to turn a blind eye to acts by member legislators who enact/support laws that subvert its core beliefs?  Religion can not be customized to suit members through cherry picking only those core beliefs which your constituency finds apppealing.

Carol,

I agree with you.  How many children are abused, neglected or in foster care, if the ones picketing would put their money and time where there mouth is and put their beliefs into action things would be far better for children.

As far as the Catholics go the Pope and bishops etc. don’t believe in birth control either  but I would venture a guess that most of  us on WOW regardless of politics have used or would have used the pill or condoms to prevent pregnancy.

The old Catholic joke around here is "What do you call people who practice natural family planning?  PARENTS.  Now that is the type of birth control that the Pope wants people to practice.

PS.  I was confused by the question:  Do you think the Catholic Church’s position that Catholic legislatures have an obligation to be pro-life is reasonable?

If you meant legislators - the politicians - then the question makes more sense. There is no such thing as  Catholic legislatures unless maybe in Italy where an entire legislative body is Catholic.

Despite the lack of scientific or historical evidence, and despite the doubts of biblical scholars, America is so pious that not only do 91% of Christians believe, for instance, in the Virgin Birth, but so do an astonishing 47% of U.S. non-Christians. Religion remains central to American life, and seems to be getting more so, in a way that is true of no other industrialized country, with the possible exception of South Korea. I don’t pretend to know why America is so much more infused with religious faith than the rest of the world. But I do think that while this may bring some kind of spiritual comfort to many, it also means a growing polarization within our society. Some time ago Nicholas Kristof––he of the New York Times who is the writer of endless articles of girls being bought into sexual slavery–––said this:

…I’m troubled by the way the great intellectual traditions of Catholic and Protestant churches alike are withering, leaving the scholarly and religious worlds increasingly antagonistic. I worry partly because of the time I’ve spent with self-satisfied and unquestioning mullahs and imams, for the Islamic world is in crisis today in large part because of a similar drift away from a rich intellectual tradition and toward the mystical. The heart is a wonderful organ, but so is the brain. 

My mother was raised a Catholic, and I’ve noticed it seems to be a total indoctrination process that begins at birth and continues throughout childhood and on into adulthood.  She was steeped in it, to the point that she didn’t even understand that Catholic schools are NOT public schools!  She didn’t know she had a parochial education, she thought it was the norm!  She shook herself free of it in her adult life, and today she is a Methodist.  But throughout my childhood, I remember her telling everyone who asked that she was a Catholic, even though she hadn’t set foot in a church in years.  It was just that soaked into her, that it took her entire adult life to stop defining herself that way.  I suspect that if you have not lived it, you can’t understand it.

What I can’t understand are the two biggest welfare suckers in our county, the Catholic families, one with a dozen kids, one with fourteen, who keep on reproducing and holding their hands out for anything, any government or private sector donation or freebie they can get, while they smile their dopey smiles and tell you how what they are doing is "God’s will".  See, that’s MY liberal tax dollars at work, supporting their useless conservative right-wing worn-out butts, because I believe in birth control and abortion rights and I quit having kids when I knew I had all I could support.  But they, sure and smug in how correct they are, look down their noses at all the other welfare recipients who are "cheats" and bemoan how they take away from the ones like them, who are "deserving".  THEY aren’t cheats, they are "saved".  Sure do fit Marjorie’s description of having another one to bump up the welfare payments, don’t they?