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Over at GetReligion, Mark Stricherz asserts that "[William F.] Buckley was not a conservative Catholic, in the religious, doctrinal sense of the term." Rather, he was a "idiosyncratic Catholic" because he "favored decriminalizing drugs and wrote for Playboy" among other sins crying out to heaven for vengeance. Also, "He called himself a Catholic and a libertarian. Go figure."

Oh please. Buckley was a Latin Mass-attending, abortion opposing, Vatican II-doubting Catholic. Yes, he opposed some assertions about the Church's social teachings, because he thought Catholicism and socialism were not synonyms.

And, yes, Buckley wasn't overly fond of "going there" when it came to talking about some types of birth control, because he understood, correctly, that the Supreme Court had seized on the Catholic-Protestant divide over contraceptives in the first place to create an unlimited warrant for legal abortion.

topics:
Religion, Catholicism, Abortion, Supreme Court, Socialism