Before leaving for August recess, the House Energy and Commerce Committee adopted an amendment to proposed health care reform legislation that raises hopes of a detente in ongoing tensions over abortion funding. The amendment, put forth by California Democrat Lois Capps, clearly states that federal funds cannot be used to...

This piece originally appeared on RHRealityCheck.org's OnCommonGround forum.

In early seventies, the Democratic Party made a fateful decision to begin building a new coalition, as one commentator put it, of "young people, college-educated suburbanites, and feminists." This might not have been a bad idea had the party not...

The propensity of U.S. Catholics to mix metaphors of football and theology explains in part why one of the most fabled plays in sports is known as a "Hail Mary" pass. The quintessentially Catholic prayer is so apt a description of quarterback Roger Staubach's impossible 1975 game-winning bomb that...

Catholics account for 1 in 4 voters nationwide and have sided with the popular vote winner in the last nine presidential elections. They tend to be heavily concentrated in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio - in fact, many believe Catholics gave Bush the edge he needed to win Ohio...

Right wing Catholic groups celebrated earlier this month when Scranton bishop Joseph Martino ordered his priests to read a letter at Mass tacitly proclaiming that it was immoral for Catholics to vote for Obama. Things have been going south for them ever since.

These organizations - groups like Bill Donohue's...

Wednesday's announcement that abortion rights supporter Rudy Giuliani will deliver the keynote address at this year's Republican National Convention should have provoked an angry backlash from the Catholic far right. But many of these activists - despite having been hard at work painting the Democratic Party as a harborer of...

Today, former general counsel to the Navy Alberto Mora joined with torture survivors, former cabinet officials, and members of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture to ask that the next president of the United States issue an executive order explicitly requiring all government agencies, including the CIA,...

A radical arm of the pro-life movement attacked the Catholic Church this week. As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) gathered in Orlando for its bi-annual meeting, a group called the "Society for Truth and Justice" launched an ad campaign encouraging the bishops to deny Communion to "pro-abortion...

Douglas Belkin's story in Thursday's Wall Street Journal proclaims that "Conservative Catholics May Be in Play" in November's presidential election. For a mainstream media that long ago bought into the far right's wistful notion that churchgoing Catholics subscribe first and foremost to a narrow conservative agenda, this may seem...

Senator John McCain is still defending his acceptance of an endorsement from megachurch pastor John Hagee -- who has called the Catholic Church "the Great Whore," and accused it of inspiring Adolf Hitler to initiate the Holocaust.

But the presumptive Republican nominee's continued intransigence is revealing a new design...

John McCain's refusal to distance himself from a controversial endorsement by Catholic-bashing pastor John Hagee received widespread coverage last week. But despite the GOP frontrunner's astounding decision not to rescind his acceptance of the endorsement, the media is letting the story drop.

This story highlights a double standard of epic...

Republican frontrunner John McCain is facing mounting pressure to rescind his embrace of an endorsement from controversial Texas pastor John Hagee. Hagee, as Catholic League president and conservative darling Bill Donohue charged yesterday, "has waged an unrelenting war against the Catholic Church," having calling it "the Great Whore" and other...