You’ve heard me talk before about the perennial (quadrennial, I guess) stories about religion and politics that always pop up in presidential campaign years: things like “Democrats must reach out to centrist People of Faith to win this election,” “Do Democrats have a religion problem?” or “Is this the end of the Religious Right?” There is an awful lot of nonsense that gets dusted off and used again, cycle after cycle.
Of course, this stuff picks up when the conventions come around. Just in the last day, I’ve spotted no less than four “zombie lies”—demonstrably untrue narratives that never seem to die—about Democrats and religion. I should really start tracking iterations of these stories and when they appear before the 2020 elections.
Anyway, here’s what we’ve got so far, on day one of the convention:
Being Pro-Choice Is Bad
By far the biggest, hardest-hitting head-thumper to date is the idea that Democrats are alienating millions of voters with a pro-choice platform. Despite anything you might hear from your father or your grandmother, this is simply, empirically wrong. Abortion routinely rates quite low on the list of voter priorities, anti-choice votes are mostly concentrated in Republican-friendly states that weren’t going to go for Democrats anyway, and, well, Democrats seem to have done quite well in recent presidential cycles.
Two things about this particular version of the argument stand out to me.
Sixty-four Democrats voted for the antiabortion Stupak amendment to the Affordable Care Act; 88% of those seats went to Republicans after Democrats were tied to the assertion that Obamacare funded abortion. Former Democratic Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, who lost his bid for reelection, noted that antiabortion voters didn’t stop sending people to Congress: “They just stopped sending Democrats.”
This takes completely the wrong lesson from the history. For one thing, the Republicans didn’t sweep the 2010 Congressional election on abortion; they rode a tide of economic dissatisfaction, which they successfully directed at Obamacare as the “greatest jobs killing legislation in history.” Much of that dissatisfaction was thinly-coated racial bias as well.
Second (and enough), Stupak, Oberstar and others didn’t lose because of Democratic perfidy on abortion. Stupak in fact believed that offering his would insulate him from attacks on the abortion question. Just the opposite happened: he was savaged by the pro-life movement and the Tea Party for accepting a compromise with Pres. Obama that barred federal money being used to pay for abortions through the ACA. Many others (such as Oberstar) sat in conservative seats where they would have faced relentless pressure for voting for Obamacare regardless of their position on the Stupak amendment. The lesson to be drawn, then, is that there was simply no margin in voting against choice in the ACA. Being pro-life didn’t shield vulnerable incumbents a bit from attacks that were again primarily based on jobs and racial resentment.
Good Catholics Can’t Be Democrats, 1
No, dammit, Bob Casey, Sr. was not denied a speaking slot at the 1992 convention because he was pro-life. It was because refused to endorse the Clinton-Gore ticket. There have been many pro-life speakers at Democratic conventions in the intervening years, including last night Robert P. Casey, Jr., himself no slouch in the pro-life department.
Good Catholics Can’t Be Democrats, 2
Or so says Bishop Tobin of Providence about Tim Kaine. I did not know that supporting the ordination of women was a “grave sin” demanding excommunication just like abortion. In any case, it seems unlikely that Kaine will face anywhere near as rough a road at John Kerry did in 2004 when Abp. Burke threatened to withhold communion from him. The current pope shows no stomach for exacerbating the culture war, and probably will not support bishops making statements like Tobin’s.
Last but certainly not least!
Being non-religious is a problem for a candidate
That seems to be what some staffers in the DNC thought about Bernie Sanders, anyway. I’ll let Jack Jenkins on Twitter explain why this is a not-intelligent line of thinking.
