Converting Barack Obama

The group 'Catholic Answers Action' took out an ad in today's USA Today newspaper with a message to Barack Obama. The message goes over the 'Five Non-Negotiable Issues' that Catholics in America have. They are as follows:
1) abortion
2) embryonic stem cell research
3) human cloning
4) euthanasia
and

5) homosexual marriage

Then it goes on to basically he was just lucky and didn't deserve to win the election.

I went to their website to see what they were saying about the ad and they don't have a current post about it but I did find their plans from a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that they were planning on running a full page ad. What they ran was just a 1/4 page which still cost them $45,000 if they ran throughout the US.

Apparently part of the plan is also to reach out to Catholics who didn't set a very good example in the last election. One of the big points (on the site and in the ad) is they're against the 'Freedom of Choice Act' which according to them will wipe out all federal and state restrictions regarding abortion. I haven't been keeping up enough to know the details or where it currently stands in the legislature. If that's truly what it is, I don't picture it making it through Congress. I need to learn tactics like that. Note to self: Speak out against something that's not going to pass anyway so that way when it doesn't pass I can claim victory.

There's also the claim that 'Barack Obama did not win in a landslide. He won no mandate. Far from it.' I don't know what they'd call a landslide but he easily trounced anything that W did. I'm guessing they weren't complaining about Bush not having a mandate. That's just one piece of the section where they explain to Obama that he was just lucky.

-Why is it that any one religious group thinks they have the right to dictate policy and tell the president they have 'non-negotiable issues'? Catholics seem to be especially bad about it. Luckily Obama isn't a Catholic otherwise they might, heaven forbid, withhold communion until he straightens up. Isn't that extortion? Then again, they can at least get away with it in Kansas.

-And why does homosexual marriage get thrown in with the rest? The religious right is shooting themselves in the foot by bringing it up so often. All the reasonable people in this country are going to realize that it should be there. The rest of their issues can come down to some sense of morality (not always logically but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt). Being fervently against homosexual marriage is just one of the stupidest, most bigoted things happening in our country today. If anyone can come up with any good, secular reason against gay marriage, let me know.

I'm not going to link to their website or give the full text of the ad because I don't want to boost their pagerank. Anyone that interested in the details should be able to google it and find it just fine.