Santorum’s Catholicism is the new ‘redneck’ religion

[jaxx]

Santorum’s Catholicism is the new ‘redneck’ religion
By Bernie Quigley - 03/09/12 11:25 AM ET

In our times the sacred mysteries abound. “Would you like to become Catholic, Johnny?” Don Rickles once asked Johnny Carson. “It might mean a free drink for you.” Once again we have entered an Age of “Plastic Jesus” (Janis Joplin’s phrase); an age of conspicuous piety like that coarsely displayed in the '50s by “flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark,” on the Buick dashboard. Of which Bob Dylan said, when he first rose to moment, “It's easy to see without looking too far, that not much is really sacred.”

And we enter today a phase of acrimony between North and South, extended now to red and blue states, and it is starting to wear a Catholic mask. I’m beginning to long for the days when the South was anti-Catholic and would pillory guys like Rick Santorum. Historian Dan Carter well describes the origins of red and blue in his provocative and brilliant book, Politics of Rage, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, a political biography of George Wallace.

<..> Wallace invoked images of a nation in crisis, Carter wrote, a country in which thugs roamed the streets with impunity, anti-war demonstrators embraced the hated communist Viet Cong and brazen youth flaunted their taste for “dirty” books and movies. “And while America disintegrated, cowardly politicians, bureaucrats and distant federal judges capitulated to these loathsome forces."

Somehow, after Ronald Reagan, Catholicism somehow seemed a better national fit for the Wallace movement: Picture Alabama’s four-term Gov. George Wallace between 1963 and 1987 as a Catholic and you get Rick Santorum.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/pr...qo.twitter

Santorum as Wallace. Hmmmmmmmm

[sandnsea]

The evangelicals are currently anti-Mormon. Since Gingrich and Santorum are both Catholic, it only makes sense for them to choose the craziest of the two. In their closets and under their hoods, they are as bigoted against Catholics as they are racist against African-Americans.

[Hekate]

The tone of this election cycle is nakedly racist and sexist -- this time around these yokels see that not only blacks but women just don't know their proper places in the scheme of things. Attitudes and behavior that I thought our society had outgrown have returned -- there was always some hiding out, I knew that, but it was socially unacceptable and I thought it was dying out.

However, it now feels like Europe's hidden strain of anti-Semitism just waiting for a chance to return in virulent and society-destroying form. This (i.e. racism and sexism) is our version, and we should stop pretending it's only a few nuts; according to NPR, there are now 1300 militia groups in the US, in all states.