Hilary's Vice-Presidential running mate, Tim Kaine, is a Roman Catholic. She didn't have to choose him, you know. It's true that Senator and Governor Kaine (He's been both) is extremely well qualified and hits some of the right demographic notes. He seems like a great guy. However, he wasn't necessarily an obvious choice.
If Clinton really didn't like Catholics, she could have chosen, just as an example, Terry McAuliffe, a long-time Clinton loyalist who is the current Governor of the same state Kaine was Governor of, and who is, like Kaine, a middle aged white guy. Or she could have made some progressives very happy and chosen someone like Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown.
Clinton clearly has no issues with Catholics. She spoke at length about some of the horrible anti-Catholic discrimination in this country historically when she was at the Al Smith dinner the other day, and cast herself as representing some of the same things he represented (Al Smith was the first Roman Catholic to be nominated by a major US political party- the Democratic Party- for President, and the dinner is held in his honor).
I'll bet if we did a deep examination, we'd find that she's had many Roman Catholic friends and co-workers and so on and so forth. I vaguely remember her husband Bill being in a picture as a young man shaking John Kennedy's (The first and only Catholic to serve as the President of the United States) hand and really being attached to that photo and that moment in his life, also.
That she disagrees with the policy stances of *some* conservative Catholics because she's not a conservative doesn't mean that she hates Catholics or even conservative Catholics. It means she's not a conservative. I don't think anyone ever said she was a conservative.
So, what are we really talking about?
To me, what we are talking about is that Donald Trump took a fun charitable event where he was supposed to give a funny speech and be jovial and bi-partisan and used it as an opportunity to viciously attack his opponent, who was seated one seat over from him, with Cardinal Dolan in between, and say that she hates Catholics at a big formal dinner full of Catholics. It was really uncalled for and I think one of the reasons that many more Americans will be voting for Hillary Clinton than will be voting for Donald Trump on November 8th.
And believe me, the people in the room, who were mostly Catholics, knew that what Trump said was untrue and out of bounds- look at the video, you can hear the loud cascading boos, and this is typically not an event where people boo. They booed because Trump crossed yet another line. All the guy does is cross lines. He's not fit to be President.
