THE NEWS that former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver have separated is not surprising. The couple never considered their marriage important enough for them to have the same name. They both have celebrity egos. He has a history of infidelity. She speaks and writes about women’s empowerment. Finally, neither of them takes the faith they profess seriously.

In 2008, Shriver told The Washington Post that she likes the “compassion and justice of Jesus Christ,” but can’t abide the Catholic Church’s positions on homosexuals, divorce and abortion. In other words, she’s a typical American Catholic at a serve-yourself buffet. “I’m a cafeteria Catholic,” she said.

She also said, “I consider myself a Catholic in good standing [even though] I don’t spend a lot of time squaring my own daily life with the institutional church.”

Both Shriver and the former governor were raised as Roman Catholics. In 2007, Schwarzenegger told The Toronto Star, “I always said that you should not have your religion interfere with government policies or with the policies of the people.” He approved embryonic stem cell research and signed into law a measure denying funds to religious schools and universities that disapprove of homosexuality.

Last year, Time magazine ran a special issue on “The State of the American Woman. Shriver wrote:

While there’s much to cheer about these days on the equality front, we still have a long way to go. Women still don’t make as much as men do for the same jobs. The U.S. still is the only industrialized nation without a child-care policy. Women are still being punished by a tax code designed when men were the sole breadwinners and women the sole caregivers. Sexual violence against women still is a huge issue. Women still are disproportionately affected by a lack of health-care services. And lesbian couples and older women are among the poorest segments of our society.

She is likely to remain a fixture of women’s conventions, such as the Women in the World summit organized by Tina Brown in New York this spring, and a popular figure among women “in transition.”

Please follow and like us: