Dems consistently win the Catholic vote.
Two things. First, that has changed, and you are out of date. See below.
Second, even had you been correct, that would not prove they are pro-abortion. Most people aren’t single issue voters, and many Catholics voted democratic, despite being pro-life, because of other issues. I strongly disagree with that mentality, but it was very clearly out there.
Exit polls have shown that Catholics voted mostly for Bill Clinton in ’92 and ’96, and Al Gore by the slight margin of 2 percentage points over Republican George W. Bush (49% to 47%) in 2000.
First, Is there some reason you don’t quote the last election? I would have thought that since you were claiming that Catholics are presently “by and large pro abortion” that you would want to be quoting the most recent polls. The polls in the last election prove Catholics are rather clearly for President Bush, even up against a catholic candidate, which would seem to indicate that
by the standard of measurement you chose to rely on to prove your claim, Catholics are in fact pro-life.
Second, those polls include people who never go to Church and don’t believe anything the Church teaches. If you limit it to actual weekly churchgoers, the Catholics have been voting pro-life for quite some time.
Many blue states have large pockets of catholics (Mass, NY, IL) and local politics there are not notably conservative at all. Clearly many nominal catholics support democrats in office, and that means pursuing a pro-choice agenda.
CINOs hardly prove your point. Relying on folks who largely left the Church because it was pro-life and they weren’t really doesn’t prove that those of us who are still in the Church are pro-abortion. I've lived in some of the pockets you name (born in IL, lived in MA), and I can tell you that a great deal of the so called "catholic" population left the Church some time ago.
I really hope you can see the logical fallacy in your arguement here.
Many Catholics are quietly pro choice and think it's no big deal. I think they are wrong, but I don't think that makes the phenomenon untrue.
No, it’s the facts that make the “phenomenon” untrue.
patent
Pro abortion candidates Clinton and Gore won the Catholic vote. Bush won it in 2004 42-47.
I agree that most people are not single issue voters. That being said, opinion polls show that a significant number of Catholics are cavalier about abortion.
In one poll cited in on the Crisis Magazine website, only 36 percent of inactive Catholics would favor "enacting legal restrictions on abortion in order to reduce the number of abortions being performed," compared with 55 percent of active Catholics.
That means that for inactive but self-identified Catholics, 64% either have no opinion of the matter or are against legal restrictions on abortions. For active Catholics, it seems that an alarming 45% have no opinion of the matter or are against legal restrictions on abortions.
Those are large numbers. The reason you don't see abortion as terribly determinative of the Catholic vote is because it is clearly not very important to many (and maybe most) self identified Catholics.
As for the election, I did cite it in another post on this thread - Bush won the Catholic vote in 2004. As for your thought that the polls include many self identified, nonpracticing Catholics, you are right - but they still self-identify as Catholics. I said that I think most Catholics are quietly pro-choice and I think that it true - the fact that they are not churchgoing is peripheral: they still self-identify as Catholics even if you and I can agree they are not serious Catholics.
CINOs do prove my point - you need to rely on dismissing them to get to your conclusion. I am counting them because they count themselves - anything less is silly: if you discounted people as 'real' Catholics by their opinions, then you get wildly skewed results. In other words, we are trying to guage the opinion of people who identify themselves as Catholics, NOT trying to identify the Catholics based on their opinion.
There is no fallacy: I am trying to see what self-identified Catholics think. You are using what they think to identify them as Catholic or not. My approach gives us an idea of what self-identified catholics are thinking.
Your approach discards Catholics with inconvenient opinions. That doesn't tell us much, except how many Catholics with inconvenient opinions might exist.