Una campaña dirigida a crear apoyo para reducir la cantidad de inmigración a Estados Unidos y que funda su preocupacón en los efectos perjudiciales del crecimiento de la población en la calidad de vida y en el medio ambiente de California, ha sido recientemente objeto de ridículo en los noticieros nacionales vespertinos de Univisión y de MundoFox.

Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change. Last week’s Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and same-sex marriage. California’s new mandatory-vaccination law. What all these have in common, according to Michael Specter, isn’t merely that they’re correct, but that they’re manifestations of “rational thought.”

Three of those events, of course, were highly unpopular on the right (the vaccination issue is less ideologically clearcut) so it’s fair to say that Specter also sees them as defeats for the conservative movement, though he opines that the SCOTUS is “governed largely by conservatives” and that the pope certainly has some right-wing tendencies (“in many areas,” Specter snipes, Francis “adheres to tenth-century notions of justice”).

There's a major opinion gap between white Catholics and Latino Catholics in the U.S. regarding climate change. A recent poll found that by margins of approximately 20 percent, Latino Catholics are likelier than white Catholics to believe that there is such a thing as global warming; that it’s “due to human activity”; and that it “constitutes a crisis or a major problem.” What’s causing this discrepancy? A false god, suggests writer Patricia Miller.

“White Catholics don’t accept the scientific consensus on climate change because it clashes with their other god: the free market,” declared Miller in a Thursday piece for Salon. “Over the last 15 years…much of institutional American Catholicism has become hopeless[ly] intertwined with a conservative, liberation [sic] ideology that has trickled down to Catholics in the pews.”

Though such instances are quite rare, especially from conservative and Republican office-holding politicians and bureaucrats, we've been told time and again by the left that it's people on the right who demonize and dehumanize their opponents.

Well, I don't recall George W. Bush, anyone in his administration, or any Republican congressman or senator serving at the time of his tax cuts or during the Iraq War characterizing their political opposition as not being "normal people." (Considering the out-of-control conduct of and statements made by many opponents, the temptation to do so must have been nearly overwhelming.) Readers can be sure that if they had, outfits like the Hill and the Assocated Press would have reported it. So why did those two news organizations ignore what they heard from EPA head Gina McCarthy at a White House climate change summit earlier this week?

The Cardinal couldn't have been more polite, but it didn't take much reading between the lines to get what he was asserting: that when it comes to the encyclical on the environment, Rush Limbaugh doesn't understand what the Pope was saying.

On today's Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace played a clip of Rush saying that the encyclical "is suggesting is that everyone should vote for the Democrat party. How in the hell else do you interpret it when the Pope sounds like Al Gore on global warming and climate change?" Responded Cardinal Donald Wuerl: "one of the great blessings of America" is that "we're all allowed to speak our mind even if we don't have all the facts. Even if we don't have a clear view of what the other person is saying."