Mr. Monahan:
After reading your entry today, “The New Pope And Big Bill; Not A Heavenly Match” (see http://joemonahansnewmexico.blogspot.com/), I wanted to respond with information that should help shed some light on this issue.
You cannot simply assume that Catholics or the choice issue were to blame for Kerry’s defeat in New Mexico just because, as you write in your article, “…Some church leaders urged Catholics here not to vote for Kerry because of his position (pro choice) on abortion…”. In fact, in a New York Times story today, Robin Toner writes that “…many Catholic voters…dislike the idea of having their clerics weigh in too heavily on how they should vote, particularly since polls indicate that many American Catholics disagree with church teaching on a range of issues, including birth control and the legality of abortion.” (the full story is at Pope May Color Debate in U.S. Over 'Life' Issues Like Abortion By Robin Toner).
Here in New Mexico, we were very pleased to pick up three pro-choice seats in the state legislature: Rep. Balderas, Rep. Gutierrez, and Senator Grubesic.
Unquestionably, the far right conducted a major campaign built on scare tactics, which mostly fell below the radar of the mainstream media. The Republican National Committee went so far as to send rural voters in West Virginia and Arkansas a mailer asserting that if John Kerry won, he would ban the Bible. Leaders of the religious right, from the Christian Coalition to the Rev. Rick Warren to Dr. James Dobson, spoke directly to their constituencies loudly and often.
Post-election, these leaders are taking pains to claim public credit for these efforts, with Dobson, for example, granting his first mainstream media interview in years. But a thorough analysis of the election results suggests that their claims are more rhetoric than reality.
Comparing voters’ position on choice based on exit polling, the shift between voters’ positions from 2000 to 2004 was negligible and well within the margin of error. The majority of voters in 2004 believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases by a 55% to 42% margin. In 2000 exit polls, voters held this position by a 56% to 40% margin.
No doubt, Karl Rove and the Bush-Cheney campaign used the politics of fear to motivate turnout among social conservatives, but this election was not decided on a new sense of “moral values” in Americans. Instead, it was decided by the intense focus on the Iraq war and terrorism, which overshadowed issues such as choice – along with health care and other related concerns. It was, as we knew from the outset, going to be difficult to defeat a sitting president in wartime.
The point here is that pro-choice New Mexicans and pro-choice Americans, both religious and secular, ARE the mainstream.
Giovanna H. Rossi
Executive Director
NARAL Pro-Choice New Mexico
www.prochoicenewmexico.org
