The Bishop of Scranton - Division is Godly

The Bishop of Scranton (a man who needs a serious dose of Shut The Fuck Up) announced yesterday that:

Bishop Joseph Martino said his fellow bishops should be more outspoken in condemning public officials who are both Catholic and "stridently anti-life."

Martino is bishop in Scranton, Pa., which –- if you haven’t heard –- is where Vice President-elect Joe Biden spent his childhood years.

"I cannot have the vice president coming to Scranton and saying he learned his values there when those values are utterly against those of the Catholic Church," Martino said.

Of course everyone in the nation would have assumed that Joe Biden learned his prochoice values in the Catholic Church. Everyone in the nation who has an IQ of 25 and has been living under a rock for their entire lives. I'm sure all of those people were in great danger of making that mistake.

Several Bishops have stated that Catholics who support Obama should not receive holy communion. I know, your argument will be that the Catholic Church has the right to set its own rules and that individual Catholics have an equal right to follow or disobey those rules.

True, but not really the point. The point is, whether you support Obama or not, he is our next president. There's no changing that. Come January, Obama will be the "commander guy" whether any individual, group, church, political party, etc. likes it or not. We are in bad times in this country. The economy is down, unemployment is up, health care is imploding, soldiers are dying, citizens are losing their homes, citizens are choosing between medicine, heat and food every day.

We don't need more division. We need unity. Division makes every step of the process towards change and progress that much harder. Should everyone in this country just drink the Kool-Aid and love Obama no matter how they feel? No. But in this case, Bush is actually acting like the leader he was supposed to be all along. You know damn well Bush doesn't like a thing about Obama. Hell, Obama won the election by linking McCain to Bush. (That first meeting with Bush must have been awwwwwwkward!)

Is Bush holding it against him? Not at all. He's doing everything in his power to make sure the transition goes as easily as possible. I don't like Bush and I don't pretend to understand his motivations. My immediate cynical reaction is that he doesn't want to be remembered as the president who fucked up the country for 8 years and then fucked it up some more by making the transition unnecessarily hard.

Be that as it may, Bush is working towards unity, never mind his motivations. We all should be. That doesn't mean give up your opinions or your rights. It means, Obama is everyone's president. Feel free to use your voice and remind him of that as often as you want, but creating division and promoting anger will not help us get out of this mess. It will make it harder.