The Kennedy Religious Speech Revisionism
You can check this off as another one that falls under the heading that the good old days were never what they used to be. Nobody was ever prouder to be from County Kerry than we Houlihans the day John F. Kennedy became president, but all this profiles in courage nonsense surrounding the speech he gave back then about how all those paranoid Baptists down in Texas thought the Catholics would move the White House to Rome was just that and it had to be addressed not in defense of the separation of church and state but because without addressing it an Irish Catholic did not have half a spit worth of chance to ride down Pennsylvania Avenue on a cold day in January 1961.
JFK went to Texas for the very same reason he and Bobby chose Johnson (whom they both viscerally disliked) for Vice President: without Texas no democrat could get into the White House at the time. The Kennedys were a collection of bootleggers for Christ sake, do you think they cared what was on the mind of the pope. It is said that back in the late 20s when Al Smith ran for president the big concern was some recent encyclicals about infallibility that had all these protestants in a twit. During the whole fiasco Al Smith turned to one of his advisors and asked if one of them would please explain what the hell an encyclical is. My father always liked to say, Frankie, the pope is always right, except for when he's wrong.
Given this cultural backdrop of American Catholicism of the time, as opposed to the cult behavior these days, it didn't take any courage at all for Kennedy to go down there and say what he said.
Personally, the fact that Romney is a Mormon or a Hindu doesn't make a wit of difference for me. He's a Republican and therefore his political carreer will have to go somewhere other than my house for sustanance religious or otherwise.
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