Jeb Bush and John F. Kennedy

In this New York Times piece, Andrew Rosenthal discusses former Gov. Jeb Bush's recent statement that:

“But I love … first of all, Pope Francis is an extraordinary leader,” he said. “He speaks with such clarity,” Mr. Bush said. “He speaks so differently and he’s drawing people back into the faith, all of which as a converted Catholic now of 25 years I think is really cool.”

But, Mr. Bush said, “I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or from my pope.” He added that “religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting into the political realm.”

Although I admire a lot about Gov. Bush's views and record, I had been preparing to do a post, along the line of Rod Dreher's, criticizing Bush's statement for it's wrongheaded sharp distinction between "making us better people" and "the political realm."  As Dreher says, "Catholic Christianity is not focused only on personal piety, but has a broad social dimension as well[.]"  But then along came the Rosenthal piece, which manages, at the same time, to (a) hold up the JFK speech as a model of the right way to think about religion-and-politics while (b) blaming Bush for not being more like JFK.  As I see it, Bush's mis-step was precisely in echoing JFK (on this particular point).  According to Rosenthal:

Mr. Bush is perfectly O.K. with government imposing the religious values he shares on women who make the difficult decision to have an abortion, or simply to get prenatal care or contraceptive services. He doesn’t want to hear from “his cardinals” on economic issues, but apparently thinks the right wing’s religious views should dominate on the civil rights issue of allowing people to marry whomever they choose, regardless of gender. He’s O.K. with laws that allow discrimination against same-sex couples based on the religious beliefs of business owners.

And he had no problem when he was governor of Florida acting on his personal religious views to thrust himself into the agonizing decision of Terri Schiavo’s family to disconnect her feeding tube after she had been in a persistent vegetative state for over a decade.

Well, there's a lot of question-begging going on here, I think, involving the distinction between "acting on . . . personal religious views" or "imposing . . . religious values" and . . . supporting and executing laws in accord with one's understanding of the common good, human dignity, and political morality?  It's an old point, but it's also always worth making:  The equality norm that Rosenthal (and others) fault Bush (and others) for disregarding in, say, the abortion context is, at the end of the day, inextricably indebted to "religious views" and "religious values."