Think Progress - Former Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush doesn’t want his Catholic faith to inform his politics. Well, except for when he does.
Speaking at a town hall campaign event in New Hampshire, Bush, who converted to Catholicism 20 years ago, all but dismissed the pope’s new encyclical on the environment... In an apparent rejection of the document’s impressively comprehensive, faith-based call for Catholics to help slow the effects of climate change, Bush said that he thinks religion “ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting into the political realm.”
“I hope I’m not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home,” Bush added, “but I don’t get my economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope.”
While Bush seems suddenly eager to distance himself from the pontiff, he was singing a very different tune just last month, when he offered the commencement address at Liberty University. After specifically championing Pope Francis as an exemplar of the Christian faith, Bush pushed back on the idea that a politician should unconditionally cleave their faith from their legislative agenda.
“… I am asked sometimes whether I would ever allow my decisions in government to be influenced by my Christian faith,” he said. “Whenever I hear this, I know what they want me to say. The simple and safe reply is, ‘No. Never. Of course not.’ If the game is political correctness, that’s the answer that moves you to the next round. The endpoint is a certain kind of politician we’ve all heard before – the guy whose moral convictions are so private, so deeply personal, that he refuses even to impose them on himself.”
What’s more, this isn’t even the first time Bush has preached this argument. As Christopher Hale pointed out over at Time, Bush made a similar connection between faith and politics in 2009, when he was speaking to a group of conservative Catholics in Italy. As a public leader, one’s faith should guide you
“As a public leader, one’s faith should guide you,” Bush said. “In the United States, many people think you need to keep your faith, put it in a security box, if you’re an elected official — put it in a safety deposit box until you finish your service as a public servant and then you can go get it back. I never felt that was appropriate.”
2 comments:
The Chinese Communist Government has done more to alleviate human suffering by population control than the Christian Church has done over the entirety of its existence. Goodness is where you find it, not where you wish it to be.
Public officials are sworn to uphold the Constitution. This assumes they can make decisions based on their considered opinion of what the Constitution requires. Their job is to defend democracy. But that system was ruled inessential in Buckley v. Valeo where it is money that now talks, this correlated to the rise of secret government that refuses to talk. It is the S.Ct now that determines by indecipherable calculations what is constitutional, which officials are happy to know permits them plausible deniability. Nothing happens unless the S. Ct. approves. BTW this does not follow the Constitution but overthrows it. Why politicians are uniformly illiterate and innocent of any knowledge about democracy, under this new McCarthyism that replaced celebration of subversives Washington and Lincoln's birthdays with a day for mattress sales.
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