{"id":7042,"date":"2004-07-10T08:19:14","date_gmt":"2004-07-10T08:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/the_religious_left.html"},"modified":"2004-07-10T08:19:14","modified_gmt":"2004-07-10T08:19:14","slug":"the_religious_left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/the_religious_left.html","title":{"rendered":"The Religious Left"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Steinfels today in the NYTimes<\/a><\/p>\n

\nThere may be a bloc of religiously traditional voters – many Catholics and at least some evangelicals – who find the Bush foreign policy and especially the war in Iraq morally unsettling but also look askance at the Democrats on abortion. Perhaps some surrogate might quietly remind them that Senator Kerry will have a much freer hand in the area of foreign policy than in appointing judges. But this is hardly a case Democrats can make openly without seeming to backtrack on their commitment to abortion rights. <\/p>\n

On the other hand, they might address a further question apparently of concern to those voters: Should the Democratic Party’s unyielding stance on access to legal abortion be seen as limited to that single issue? Or is the party’s abortion position also a marker for a Kerry presidency’s stance on a whole host of issues still at play in the courts and public opinion, among them, doctor-assisted suicide and euthanasia, stem-cell research, cloning and same-sex marriage? <\/p>\n

Religious believers are not, in fact, agreed about many of these issues. But at least some of them worry about a secular tendency to treat religion as irrelevant to thinking about such questions. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Steinfels today in the NYTimes There may be a bloc of religiously traditional voters – many Catholics and at least some evangelicals – who find the Bush foreign policy and especially the war in Iraq morally unsettling but also look askance at the Democrats on abortion. Perhaps some surrogate might quietly remind them that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Religious Left - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2004\/07\/the_religious_left.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Religious Left - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Peter Steinfels today in the NYTimes There may be a bloc of religiously traditional voters – many Catholics and at least some evangelicals – who find the Bush foreign policy and especially the war in Iraq morally unsettling but also look askance at the Democrats on abortion. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}