Catholics, Mormons and immigration

The Deseret News just published http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865675659/How-a-church-transforms-immigrants-and-immigrants-transform-a-church.html which is a fairly good article on Catholics and immigration. Here I will address a few shortcomings, and discuss why the issue of Mormons and immigration is not approached.

The Flaws

To being with the article relies too much on leftists who want to ignore religious freedom and right to life issues.

The article fails to contectualize right to life as the ultimate social justice fight in the minds of many. There is no more vulnerable, more voiceless group than the unborn. Right to life also focuses on the elderly and mentally disabled, other groups the death industry attacks and targets. Even issues like lowering maternal mortality suffer from the false rhetoric  of the pro-abortion lobby overly personalizing policies by one person that impact another.

The religious freedom discussion misses the issues involved. To begin with, the break between Catholic institutions and government funding mandates is almost entirely an Obama administration problem. Before Obamacare we did not see atempts to force religious schools etc. to fund programs they objected to on moral grounds. Since this is not an old fight, it can not be one that people just started not resonating with.

The older issue is the use of the KKK's "seperation of Church and state" to discriminate against Catholics. The history of this needs to be understood in the context of the public schools acting as de facto agents of Protestantism well into the 20th-century. By about 1950 there was a move away from this, and a move to letting government aid to education benefit transportation budgets of Catholic Schools. Then former Alabama KKK grand dragon Hugo White introduced "seperation of Church and stae", the thing he had sworn hundreds of KKK inductees to uphold eternally, into the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.

For the next 50 years the establishment clause was increasingly used to disadvantage religious groups ability to run private schools, to justify huge taxes on religious parents that made it hard for poor religious people to send their children to religious schools of their choice.

On the other hand the Catholic Church only proclaimed religious freedom as a positive good in Vatican 2 in the 1960s.

Lastly, a big part of the religious freedom fight at present focuses on the right of religious people to conduct their business in accordance with their religion. This means Catholic nurses cannot be forced to perform abortions and Catholic pharmacists cannot be forced to perscribe abortion inducing drugs. Considering that half the foriegn trained nurses in the US are Filipinos, and a majority of Filipinos are Catholics, these religious freedom fights impact immigrants more than leftists will admit.