Andrew Greeley on the abortion issue and Catholic voters --

[DeepModem Mom]

Los Angeles Times:

COMMENTARY
The Abortion Issue Has Little, if Any, Effect on the Catholic Vote
Few are swayed by a candidate's pro-choice policy.

By Andrew Greeley

"Will Catholics vote against Gov. Carter, Mr. Mayor, because of his abortion stand?" The mayor of Chicago stared at the reporter with the bemused frown he reserved for silly questions. "They don't vote that way." Twenty-eight years later, they still don't vote that way. Nevertheless, in the run-up to the last seven presidential elections, experts on both sides have predicted that the "Catholic anti-abortion" vote would cause trouble for the Democrats, especially given the drift of Catholics from Democratic alignment. Both these "theories" — a Catholic anti-abortion vote and a Catholic realignment — are urban folk tales that float around in the collective consciousness of the media with very little basis in fact.

The definitive study of religious realignment in presidential elections was written by Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks in the July 1997 issue of the American Journal of Sociology. The two scholars found that when all relevant variables were taken into account, there had been two major religious realignments since 1950, both of them Protestant. Religiously liberal Protestants shifted to the Democrats and religiously conservative Protestants to the Republicans. Even in elections like the 1984 GOP triumph, when a majority of Catholics followed the national trend and voted for Reagan, Catholics didn't move to the right nearly as much as white Protestants did.

In the 2000 election, it would appear from available data (such as the 2002 General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center and the National Election Study of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan) that Catholics were more likely than white Protestants to favor Al Gore, by a margin of about 10 percentage points — a similar margin to that of John Kerry in current polls. Indeed, according Voter News Service exit polls, Gore did well in states with a substantial number of Catholic voters — margins of 30 percentage points among Catholics in Massachusetts, 17 in Illinois, 15 in New York, Maryland and Arizona. So much for the realignment to the Republicans.

But what about the Catholic pro-life vote? According to the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, Catholics and Protestants differ little on a battery of abortion questions; large majorities think that abortion should be available when there is a risk of a defective child, a threat to the mother's health or a pregnancy caused by rape, while similar majorities reject abortion if the woman is unmarried or cannot afford another child or simply doesn't want a child. Only 4% of American Catholics consider themselves pro-life on all seven NORC questions, and a third of those voted for Gore anyway, despite his pro-choice stand. One might argue that Catholics should oppose abortion in all circumstances, but in fact they do not....

Andrew M. Greeley, a priest and sociologist on the staff of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and the sociology department at the University of Arizona, is the author of "Priests: A Calling in Crisis" (University of Chicago Press, 2004).


http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-oe-greeley18jun18,1,4990130.story?coll=la-home-politics

[NMDemDist2]

1. I love Greeley, if the Church was like the one in his novels

I'd be a Catholic