The other day, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown took to the Senate floor to point out the difference between Christian teaching as he understands it and what is being practiced in the governors office of his own state (that's Gov. John Kasich) and in Trenton (Christie) and Wisconsin (Scott Walker).
We actually picked up the video from a scandalized (presumably) right-winger, who thinks Brown is "slandering the religious faith" of those men. Actually he's discussing what that faith actually teaches.
Brown talks about the Rerum Novarum, the words of Pope Leo XIII in 1891. This is Catholic social teaching at its most fundamental, the foundation of doctrine developed by the Catholic Church over decades on matters of poverty, wealth, economics, social organization and the state. It was no wild-eyed lefty document; it abhorred communism (but also unrestricted capitalism) and supported the right to private property. But it also talked about how the free market cannot escape moral responsibility:
Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.
Poverty. Fairness. Equality. Egalitarianism. This is the bible Sen. Brown wants to remind our governor about; as he targets workers on behalf of the wealthy. Increasingly, particularly in Christie role as Mitt Romney's traveling pitbull, you will see our booming governor as the hero of the wealthy against the rest of us, and model for lesser GOP leaders. Brown nails the tensions Christie should be feeling, but probably is not. Watch:
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