With the recent demons possessing Louisiana politicians like Democratic Rep. William Jefferson, Republican Sen. David Vitter and New Orleans Councilman Oliver Thomas, Louisiana should not elect an ordinary governor in 2007. We must move past the usual cast of politicians and businessmen if we want to cleanse Louisiana’s soul of political corruption. We need an exorcist as governor.
Bobby Jindal might not be able to cleanse Louisiana, but his role as exorcist is attracting attention. As a college student in 1994, he wrote an article for the New Oxford Review titled, “The Physical Manifestations of Spiritual Warfare.” In it, Jindal discusses a time of spiritual struggle culminating with an experience in which a female friend was seemingly possessed by an evil spirit.
Things of this nature are certainly rare, but they are not unheard of among Christians. In the Gospel of Mark, it is described that Christ expelled demons from a man into pigs. Christ later gives his Apostles authority over demons. The Catholic Church reaffirmed the practice of exorcism as recently as 1999.
This should not surprise anyone. Catholics believe in angels, a virgin birth, a trinitarian God and redemptive suffering, all of which make the belief in demons look mundane.
However, atheists and some Protestant sects find these Catholic views bizarre, which has made Jindal’s article political ammunition for his opponents. The Daily Kos is a liberal blog influential enough to host its own Democratic presidential debate. It has mocked Jindal several times since 2003 on the matter, including posting the original article. The most recent post from the Kos on the “exorcism” is followed the next day by a post on how vulnerable Jindal is in the election.
In Louisiana, the Democrats are using this article and others to portray Jindal as being anti-Protestant. They’ve launched a Web site, jindalonreligion.com, with quotes from the New Oxford Review articles. These quotes are taken out of context. For instance, the site claims that “Jindal states non-Catholics are burdened with ‘utterly depraved minds.'” Jindal actually uses the phrase as a quote from John Calvin, a Protestant, in reference to all people, including Catholics, as a justification for the Church’s rejection of personal interpretation of Scripture.
It doesn’t take a genius to see what the Democrats are doing. Nationally, they’re playing the story that Jindal is a religious fanatic. Locally, they are trying to make Jindal appear to Protestant voters in north Louisiana as an enemy to their beliefs. This obvious ploy, in conjunction with the Democrats’ insistence on referring to Jindal by his given name of “Piyush,” leaves no doubt that the Democrats think very little of Louisiana voters.
They have had no qualms about trashing Jindal’s race and religion. Unfortunately, they’re not the only party doing it. The Republicans have also had their fair share of good ole Catholic-bashing.
In the Republican presidential campaign, an evangelical pastor in Iowa associated with the campaign of former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark., publicly questioned the Christianity of Catholic presidential candidate Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan. Huckabee refused to apologize for the remarks. Instead, his campaign manager dismissed Brownback as “whining” in a press statement. Additionally, the Minutemen Project organized a protest against the Catholic Church’s stance on immigration in San Diego. It featured an effigy of a priest with a devil’s mask.
Anti-Catholicism enjoys a long and storied history in this country, but we have been led to believe that those days were gone. Anti-Catholicism was supposed to be grouped with other intolerances like racism and sexism so that any candidate who promoted anti-Catholicism would be shunned.
Both parties eagerly court the Catholic vote. Catholics on both sides of the aisle hold prominent positions throughout government, including the Speaker of the House and five of the seats on the Supreme Court. The Democrats ran Catholic John Kerry for president in 2004 while another Catholic, Ed Gillespie, ran the Republican National Committee’s effort to defeat him.
Despite this, both parties have assumed that most Christians share the bigotry of anti-Catholicism. Both parties have been willing to use the prejudice as a tool to win elections, and both parties have let it happen.
The University has such a large Catholic population that you are probably either Catholic yourself or know many Catholics. Considering how many Catholics at the University are being slurred by all this, perhaps the exorcist that Louisiana and the rest of the nation needs is not a single politician. Perhaps we should be compelled to act as the exorcist. But we won’t need an ancient ritual, just a ballot.
—-Contact Michael Denton at [email protected]