Eleanor Roosevelt vs. Cardinal Spellman
I finally finished watching Ken Burns' 14-hour documentary "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History" on PBS.
Great stuff, and most DU'ers probably watched it. I remember thinking: "It's a good thing Teddy Roosevelt wasn't in office during the Cold War..."
Religion wasn't mentioned much, except in the last episode. That concerned a 1949 spat between Eleanor Roosevelt and Cardinal Spellman about public funding of parochial schools.
Interesting that Spellman immediately blasted ER as "anti-Catholic" and accused her of harboring discriminatory ideas "unworthy of American motherhood."
That reminds me of Another DU Group where even the mildest criticism of the One True Church always brings out the "anti-Catholic" card.
Googling "Eleanor Roosevelt vs Spellman" turned up all sorts of interesting stuff. e.g., Roosevelt's headmistress at her English boarding school, Madame Souvestre, was an atheist. Souvestre had a huge influence on ER, but ER disagreed with her on that and remained deeply religious all her life.
Now for balance, I need to watch "FDR: American Badass..."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1811315/
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Good so far 
"And God Created Woman" 
On TCM.
It looks pretty humdrum today. But I can see how it ruffled feathers in 1957. Especially moralizing American feathers. It was condemned by the Legion of Decency, which is always a good enough recommendation for me. Some American theater owners were arrested for showing this movie.
But there's more going on here than all the hubbub about sex, immorality and Brigitte Bardot's body. As Simone de Beauvoir noted in her famous essay, calling Brigitte Bardot "the first and most liberated woman in postwar France." Bardot's playing a young woman who lives life on her own terms, which was probably a lot more shocking at the time than her semi-nudity.
