Ter-AY-za on the Catholic bishops

Thank God for the Red States that we were spared the spectacle of this woman saying this as First Lady. Ter-AY-za Heinz Kerry deigned to provide her opinion on how some bishops spoke up during the presidential campaign last year. Obviously she didn’t like some bishops saying that voting for a pro-abortion, dissenting Catholic would be objectively evil.

“You cannot have bishops in the pulpit—long before or the Sunday before the election—as they did in Catholic churches, saying it was a mortal sin to vote for John Kerry,” she said.

Evidently she didn’t see the irony when she later said:

“The church has a right and obligation to teach values,” Heinz Kerry declared. “They don’t have a right to restrict freedom of expression, which they did.”

Who freedom of expression is being limited here? She wants to limit the ability of bishops and priests to speak out on moral issues. But where is the converse true? How is a bishop giving his opinion limiting Kerry’s freedom of expression? How does it limit the voter’s freedom of expression? The Church doesn’t have stormtroopers standing outside of polling places taking down the names of Catholics who vote for Kerry (and how would they know anyway) and then carting them away later under the cover of darkness. The reality is that all the bishop is saying is that God knows who they are voting for and the moral law says we must not provide support for the intentional murder of innocents, that God knows what we are doing and that our actions, including our votes, have moral consequences.