Somebody said "it was well-covered," but the only thing I saw was the clip of his remark.
To some, it seems obscure and trivial. I remember at the time the thing that registered with me was the cynical and dismissive tone. And frankly, from my earliest years watching the Truman inauguration to the present, I don't remember hearing or reading anything equivalent. Kennedy had to face various insinuations that his presidency would put the Vatican in the White House.
Instead, it slowly dawned on my some time after my first reaction to the Trump remark that people a lot more devout than I am would pick up on the subtle irreverence of it, or they could interpret it that way.
It's really no different than the farce of Trump speaking to suburban white voters but addressing the "black community" with his condescension and absolute cluelessness that blacks don't all live in the extreme and exaggerated situations that Trump described.
Any normal politician with any sense of it might have avoided the remark the way he made it -- unless their constituency was strictly evangelical. I'm not even sure mainstream Baptists wouldn't be sensitive to it.
But my thoughts about it don't have anything to do with my personal sense of a religious slight or insensitivity.
It's more about Trump revealing a certain cynicism and insincerity, as he's done all along except for his "Build a Wall" promise, which now seems revisited because he's backtracking on his immigration views -- trying to draw away Hispanics who -- like blacks -- are going for Trump in their ~80% of the total.
And I'm also wondering why Kasich backed away from Trump, wouldn't endorse him and wouldn't attend the convention. I would be the first to admit a possibility that Kasich wasn't even consciously thinking about that particular remark, but he -- like the rest of us -- would've heard it over . . . and over . . . . and over . . . as the news moved from one Trump and Trumpism to the next.
So it isn't about some other poster's sense of being protestant in the view that the bread and wine are only symbolic. It is more about how people would take it who never miss a Sunday and who actually fast during Lent. As for a shared belief, there are the Catholics, Anglicans and Episcopalians as well as Greek and Russian Orthodoxy.
On the extreme, I can recount my story about the old disheveled Irish-American woman -- perhaps in her late 60s and a stereotype you may have seen in something like "Boardwalk Empire" or "Studs Lonigan." She came to my desk one day with a blurred color photo of a statue of the BVM (probably in front of a church with flood-lights at night), with the story that the BVM had "appeared" in Patterson, New Jersey.
See, I can joke about this, and the forums aren't the mass electorate audience. I have only more of a right to joke about it, not much different than some say only blacks can use the "N" word. But as much as some Catholic audience might laugh at the story, no astute politician would joke about the possibility that the BVM appeared in Patterson, or the implication that the old crone had a few loose screws.
As for being a limp thread, I actually wondered where it would go with the same thought in mind -- "This is going to be a limp thread." This is post #18. I was merely making an observation -- not an issue.
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