Catholic "criminals"

[ButterflyBlood]

91. The Catholic vote isn't a Democratic voting block, or even a voting block at all

Obama won Catholics 50-48, slightly below his national numbers. However there is no Catholic voting block. Catholics are so diverse politically it's kind of meaningless to try to measure they vote. Fun fact: If you Google "There is no Catholic vote", the first two hits are from the Weekly Standard the American Prospect, who certainly don't sit on the same side of the political spectrum. This is pretty well agreed upon. The Prospect article: http://prospect.org/article/there-no-catholic-vote#13612109203631&action=collapse_widget&id=8862030

And I know religion is a choice and one can quit Catholicism because as stated many times, I did it myself. Your argument above is also difficulty to apply to someone like me who has both Catholic and Protestant family and ancestry. And that's not something odd or unusual, it's very common here in the Midwest. About half of Jews marry someone non-Jewish today, what about their kids? If converting is shafting culture and your family, then a substantial chunk of the population has to do that for SOME section of their background. Or maybe people can just be themselves and their own person.

And the idea that conversion is something you only find in some sort of Western capitalist culture is kind of comical, look at how common conversion is in places like India and Brazil. Hell a couple years ago I was reading about how of all things ISLAM was becoming popular in parts of Mexico and gaining lots of converts. In India in fact, conversion is so common that it outraged the right-wing nationalist (some might say fascist) Bharatiya Janata Party and they have actually proposed and supported BANNING religious conversion and throwing freedom of religion out the window. And that's the logical conclusion of holding that religion is not a choice.

Finally, people have been converting for a long, long time. If they didn't, we wouldn't be seeing any new religious movements until recently. I don't think it was contemporary capitalist culture that encouraged Martin Luther to nail his theses to a church door.