Posted on 11/06/2008 8:30:22 PM PST by Alex Murphy
Large numbers of Catholics and religiously unaffiliated voters heavily contributed to President-elect Barack Obama's huge margin of victory over Republican Sen. John McCain, according to an analysis of exit poll surveys by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
"Obama had a greater appeal for religious people," said John Green, a senior fellow at Pew. "I don't think we would have seen that support had Hillary [Rodham Clinton] been nominated."
Catholics voted for Mr. Obama over Mr. McCain by a nine-point margin (54 percent versus 45 percent), a turnaround from 2004 when Catholics supported President Bush over Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, by a five-point margin (52 percent to 47 percent).
Their votes came despite the warnings from 89 bishops who issued a blizzard of statements in the closing weeks of the election, warning against voting for a pro-choice candidate.
Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, who last month termed Mr. Obama "the most committed 'abortion-rights' presidential candidate of either major party since the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in 1973," led the effort.
His - and other voices from church leaders - went unheeded.
"Six months ago the pundits were predicting that President-elect Obama would not do well with Catholic voters," said Steve Krueger, national director of the Boston-based group Catholic Democrats. "The fact that Senators Obama and [Joseph R.] Biden reversed a trend, since 1996, of white ethnic Catholics defecting to the Republican Party in presidential elections is of historic significance."
Mr. Obama did especially well among Hispanics, who are overwhelmingly Catholic. Two-thirds of them voted for him compared with white Catholics, who voted for Mr. McCain 52 to 47 percent over Mr. Obama.
"Latino Catholics appear to have been decisive in flipping three states from red to blue: New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada," wrote Michael Sean Winters
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
I haven’t even gone to church because my priest is so far left. I couldn’t take him anymore. I attend TV Mass.
It’s a sad state of affairs for anyone claiming to be a Christian who voted for Obama.
This should not be a surprise. Catholics have been concerned for a long, long time with social justice issues and are voting according to their beliefs. The dominant Evangelicals which we have tied ourselves to are a product of the late 19th Century and have (to my Catholic school ears) a strange interpretation of the Bible which borrows a lot from the Old Testament and glosses over a good portion of Jesus’s teachings.
This is what comes of thinking that all Christians believe what Karl Rove’s “base” believes. I always knew it was a mistake to allow the Fundamentalists to hold this much sway over our party. They might have been enough of a population to move the percentage points a bit this way or that but were never going to be enough if the majority of the electorate decided to vote the other way.
I’d just as soon jettison the fundies and court the Catholics and perhaps move the party and Conservatism to a more intellectual grounding.
Pal around with a some snake oil salesman who calls the Catholic Church “The Great Whore” and see what happens.
I didn’t vote for him, and most Catholics I know didn’t either.
if mccain had explained the democrat origins of the subprime crisis properly,
he would have been elected.
people wrongly blamed bush for the economic malaise.
No,
CATHOLIC voters did not vote for Obamanation.
CINOs — Catholics in Name Only voted for him, and in doing so, excommunicated themselves from the Catholic Church.
We need to get out there and catechize them.
You MUST love Archbishop Chaput; he's still in there fighting!
Archbishop Chaput Eager to See Kmiec Deliver a Pro-Life Obama
And this is why we will never, ever, see an American Pope.
I had an ex-coworker who is Catholic go out to lunch with me. We were talking about his new job, and he said that he worked with a Christian who he could not stand. The emphasis was on Christian.
I said, “I thought you were Christian?” He replied, “No, I am Catholic, not a Christian”.
I responded, “Oh.”
It never struck me til then that there still was such a deep schism in Christendom.
Statist authoritarian Catholic thought is no alternative that we should embrace. You see a secularized version of Catholic authoritarianism in folks such as Giuliani and the first Mayor Daley.
What is social justice? Is that related to ‘Redistribution of Wealth’?
I knew a daily communicant in Massachusetts who sadly fits that description. He actually did not regard Ted Kennedy as pro-abortion and was ga-ga over Obama. Its hard to understand that level of delusion.
I’d just as soon jettison the fundies and court the Catholics and perhaps move the party and Conservatism to a more intellectual grounding.
Welcome to Free Republic, LoneApple.
Alex Murphy!—you are like Obama—any criticism of you and you get deleted! You are the moderator of this thread aren’t you!
Rom,
Sort of - I prefer to think of it as compulsory charity-giving.
I’m sickened by fellow “Catholics” who think there are social issues of great enough moral weight to offset the destruction of innocent human life.
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