{"id":144,"date":"2008-09-17T10:33:03","date_gmt":"2008-09-17T10:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/progressiverevival\/2008\/09\/abortion-catholics-big-wedgesm.html"},"modified":"2008-09-17T10:33:03","modified_gmt":"2008-09-17T10:33:03","slug":"abortion-catholics-big-wedgesm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2008\/09\/abortion-catholics-big-wedgesm.html","title":{"rendered":"Abortion & Catholics: Big wedge–small impact?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The furious division in Catholicism over abortion and the presidential election grows wider. But to what end? A front-page story in today’s New York Times is titled, “Abortion Issue Again Dividing Catholic Votes,” <\/a>and yet evidence of how that is happening is scant, and evidence that abortion could even be masking issues of race (and other matters) is front and center in Scranton, where David Kirkpatrick reported the piece: <\/p>\n

\n

One parishioner ruled out voting for Mr. Obama explicitly because he is black. “Are they going to make it the Black House?” Ray McCormick asked, to embarrassed hushing from a half dozen others gathered around the rectory kitchen. (Five of the six, all lifelong Democrats who supported Mrs. Clinton in the primary, said they now lean toward Mr. McCain.) Mr. Madonna, the political scientist, said of the Catholic vote in white, working-class Scranton, “This is a tough area for Obama and some of it is race.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The McCain camp and its allies are ramping up inflammatory charges of “infanticide” against Obama because of his votes on a bill in the Illinois legislature that supporters said would give protections to babies born alive during a botched abortion. It’s a tangle, and Obama has dissembled on his record on the legislation. But none of that come closing to supporting the charges against him. Steve Waldman has more, including an excerpt on the topic from Doug Kmiec’s forthcoming book<\/a> on how a conservative, pro-life Catholic can support Obama. Steve also has Kmiec’s painful account of the day he was denied communion<\/a> (and publicly humiliated before a large gathering) for supporting Obama. <\/p>\n

Mark Silk at Spiritual Politics calls the idea that abortion is THE issue a “fairy tale”<\/a>–one recently re-told by Peter Boyer in a New Yorker piece on McCain and the religious right. “Careful targeting of traditionalist Catholics had, relative to the rest of electorate, less than zero effect,” Silk writes of the 2004 vote. And as Silk notes here<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\n

In a recent study of the political behavior of white Catholics–that crucial swing voting bloc–University of Cincinnati political scientist Stephen Mockabee performs the magic of multivariate factor analysis (in the 2007 volume, From Pews to Polling Places, edited by J. Matthew Wilson) and discovers that, in fact, abortion had no statistically significant effect on Catholic presidential vote choice in 2004. That’s right, none. How could this be? Well, one way to help understand it is that while older white Catholics are much more pro-life than younger ones, they are also far more loyal Democratic voters. “Post Vatican II” Catholics–those born after 1960–trend Republican but only seven percent share their Church’s position on abortion. When it came to issues, what pushed white Catholics toward George Bush was their support for capital punishment and their opposition to gay marriage, not John Kerry’s pro-choice position.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Also, Boyer’s article was obsolete as soon as it was printed, because it came out just as Sarah Palin did. And Palin and her ability to galvanize social conservatives is the true wild card. But as Paul Moses points out at dotCommonweal<\/a>, panelists at a Fordham conference last night on religion and politics (which I couldn’t make, unfortunately) reiterated that view: <\/p>\n

\n
\n

Pew pollster Andrew Kohut said Pew’s next poll results will show John McCain moving ahead of Barack Obama in the Catholic vote. But the biggest point I took away was that, as Kohut said, “There’s a tendency … to exaggerate the role religion has on voter behavior.” That was so in analyses of the 2004 presidential campaign, he said. And, he said, poll data show that abortion was even less important an issue to voters this year than it was four years ago – especially among people who are religious. As panelist E.J. Dionne said, there are just other issues on voters’ minds. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Gallup polls also show that abortion barely registers<\/a>, and this Gallup analysis<\/a> show that it cuts both ways–that just13 percent of voters, both abortion foes and abortion rights backers, said in May 2008 that “they vote only for candidates for major offices who share their views on abortion.” <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\"Gallup<\/span>So what are we getting out of all this “eye-for-an-eye” internecine fighting? A blind church. And one with a diminished voice in the public square on this and other issues. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The furious division in Catholicism over abortion and the presidential election grows wider. But to what end? A front-page story in today’s New York Times is titled, “Abortion Issue Again Dividing Catholic Votes,” and yet evidence of how that is happening is scant, and evidence that abortion could even be masking issues of race (and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,12,1,9,3],"tags":[37,68,124,6,5,125],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion","category-catholics","category-election-08","category-religion-in-the-public-square","category-u-s-constitution","tag-abortion-2","tag-communion","tag-kmiec","tag-mccain","tag-obama","tag-polls"],"yoast_head":"\nAbortion & Catholics: Big wedge-small impact? - Progressive Revival<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2008\/09\/abortion-catholics-big-wedgesm.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Abortion & Catholics: Big wedge-small impact? - Progressive Revival\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The furious division in Catholicism over abortion and the presidential election grows wider. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}