Here’s an interesting piece of data from Tuesday’s exit polls, which Joseph Knippenberg discusses below: President Obama won the Catholic vote. The margin was narrow–50 percent to 48 percent, which more or less mirrors the President’s popular-vote victory–but, still, he won. Now, you might say, this isn’t surprising. Catholics have traditionally leaned Democratic, and President Obama’s campaign stressed social justice concerns that resonate with Catholic teaching. One should remember, though, that the Obama Administration imposed the contraception mandate, and that, as Katherine Infantine writes below, Catholic bishops made the mandate a salient issue. Requiring Catholic institutions to provide contraceptives and abortifacients to employees, the bishops said, seriously threatens Catholics’ religious freedom.
Apparently, the majority of Catholic voters disagreed. Or thought that the threat to religious freedom, if it existed, was not as important as other issues, like increasing taxes on wealthy Americans and leaving entitlement programs untouched. Perhaps Latino Catholics voted “ethnicity” rather than “religion.” Who knows? The point is, the majority of Catholic voters apparently did not accept the bishops’ understanding of the importance of the issue.
Leaving aside whether voters who disregard their bishops’ views on the contraception mandate are erring as Catholics–a question on which I’m not qualified to state an opinion–I wonder what implications this vote has for the future of the mandate. Legally, the lawsuits under RFRA will go forward, and I think they have a fair shot at success. But the atmosphere may have changed. It won’t show up expressly in judicial opinions, of course, but I wonder whether judges who support the mandate won’t feel more emboldened to find that the mandate doesn’t “substantially burden” Catholic institutions. And I wonder whether the Obama Administration won’t feel more comfortable taking a hard line on whatever “accommodation” they are preparing for the final regulations, due before August 2013. The courts may or may not follow the election returns, but politicians surely do.
Mark Movsesian is Director of the Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s University.
November 8th, 2012 | 2:03 pm
I know everyone knows this already, but asking someone their religion doesn’t necessarily reflect actual practice. My nieces and nephews would say they are Catholic to a pollster, even though they’ve never been baptized and attend a church service no more than once or twice a year. So would their parents, since they were “raised Catholic”. If you look at the breakdown of Catholics who actually practice their faith, Obama lost the Catholic vote by a large margin.
Hispanic Catholics did favor Obama and I am not certain whether there are figures breaking out “practicing” and “non-practicing.
November 8th, 2012 | 2:21 pm
How about the possibility that people aren’t even aware that the bishops have done any such raising of the issue? The priest where I go to church, has never made a single reference to the religious freedom issue, and has made explicit his contempt for NFP/contraception matters. However, (and like Dave Barry, I’m not making this up), for the last two Sundays, the words “seamless garment” have been specifically mentioned in the prayers of the faithful, which are written by our priest. If some priests are on board with the health care law, and people aren’t naturally inclined to seek out alternate sources of information, my guess is that many folks simply have no idea that their own hierarchy is finally getting around to some saber-rattling.
November 8th, 2012 | 2:30 pm
It is not unusual for “conservative” Catholics to raise the question of why the bishops do not take a harder line on the use of contraceptives by Catholics. It is no secret that the vast majority of Catholic couples who are avoiding or postponing pregnancy are using artificial contraception. Why don’t the bishops issue stern decrees? Why are there few if any Sunday sermons condemning the use of contraception as mortally sinful. Why is there no massive informational campaign to tell Catholics that if they use contraceptives, they must refrain from receiving communion?
It has struck me recently, with all the protests over the contraceptive mandate, that it almost appears as if allowing coverage of contraceptives in an insurance policy for one’s employees is a worse sin than actually using them.
I think it also must be asked why, if allowing contraceptives to be covered in employer-provided insurance is cooperation with evil, Catholic owners of non-religious businesses were not exhorted to keep contraceptive coverage out of the insurance they provided, Catholic pharmacists and Catholic owners of pharmacies were not warned that they were directly involved in evil, Catholics in the insurance business were not told never to sell policies with contraceptive coverage, Catholic employees of insurance companies who process claims were not told to refuse to pay out claims with reimbursement for contraception, and so on.
The bishops have sent a mixed message on this issue, but if providing contraceptives or contraceptive coverage is cooperating with evil, it should not merely be a matter of religious exemption. Nobody should be doing it.
As I have said many times, I understand why this is an important case to Catholics, but I don’t understand the apparent lack of faith in the democratic system and particularly the courts (and above all, the Supreme Court) to decide the matter fairly.
November 8th, 2012 | 2:56 pm
If you look at the breakdown of Catholics who actually practice their faith, Obama lost the Catholic vote by a large margin.
First, I don’t think it is fair to claim that those and only those Catholics who attend church weekly are “Catholics who actually practice their faith.” The poll did not ask the Catholics who attended Church weekly whether, for example, they used (or approved of) artificial birth control. For the purposes of this survey, it would have been a more interesting breakdown. I know it distresses traditional Catholics, but not all contemporary Catholics would use weekly mass attendance as the most important measure of how committed they were to their faith.
Catholics who attended church weekly accounted for 11% of the vote and voted 42% for Obama and 57% for Romney. Catholics who did not attend church weekly accounted for 13% of the vote and voted 56% for Obama and 42% for Romney.
So slightly more Catholics don’t attend mass weekly than do. (Actually, the figures I have seen suggest that only about 25% of Catholics attend mass every week, so it is strange that the two groups in the survey seem roughly equal.)
Given the intense campaign by the Catholic bishops against the Obama administration on the contraceptive mandate and abortion, it seems to me that 42% for Obama (among weekly church attendees) is a rather large percentage.
November 8th, 2012 | 3:31 pm
Romney won the white Catholic vote 59-40 and the weekly attending Catholic vote 57-42. Like other numbers in the exit polls, the “Catholic vote” numbers have to be broken down before we can truly make sense of them.
November 8th, 2012 | 3:43 pm
Among Catholics who regularly attend Mass, Romney beat Obama.
November 8th, 2012 | 3:48 pm
“The point is, the majority of Catholic voters apparently did not accept the bishops’ understanding of the importance of the issue.”
I don’t know that this statement is true. To accept the bishops’ understanding, the majority of Catholics would need to hear and think about the importance of religious liberty. Despite the USCCB’s efforts, I don’t think many Catholics have heard clearly what the bishops have taught (clearly and thoughtfully).
Unfortunately, the Catholic vote mirrors the popular vote too precisely. Catholics needs to be far more counter-cultural than we are at the moment. It is most likely true that economic issues prevailed in the minds of most voters as their chief concern, not religious liberty (which was not thoroughly discussed in the debates).
It is clear to my mind that the Obama Administration will lose in the courts because the HHS Mandate violates the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. What’s sad and tragic is that the Obama Administration has chosen to trample on the religious freedom of Catholics and others when this fight was totally unnecessary from the start, given the wide availability of contraceptives in our society.
November 8th, 2012 | 6:16 pm
I can say anecdotally that I heard quite a bit about the contraception mandate and religious freedom. I attend Mass usually at a parish in Chicago that is heavily Democratic and about half Hispanic. There were numerous long sermons devoted to the topic, as well as essays printed in the weekly bulletin. I also occasionally go to Holy Name Cathedral (the cathedral church of the Archdiocese of Chicago) and there too there was a lot made of the issue. I don’t know, however, how much this actually resonated with the parishioners.
I’m actually preparing for marriage at the moment, and have had the good fortune of working with a young, orthodox priest. He has developed a new curriculum for marriage preparation, which examines at length the Catholic doctrine on issues such as contraception, premarital sex, and cohabitation, and explicitly contrasts them with the prevailing moral attitudes of popular culture. I can say that it has helped me grow personally in my faith.
I hope it is of a piece with the emphasis on greater reverence in the liturgy, etc. and is indicative of a wider trend. I went to Catholic school for 13 years and don’t recall ever hearing about these topics there. It’s a shame, although I understand there was considerable internal disagreement on them.
I’m not a member of SSPX, and I think Vatican II was pretty brilliant in many ways, but on the other hand, I think it’s probably not a bad idea to de-emphasize it at the moment, or at least view it as one council among many, all of which demand adherence. The negative effects of contraception, premarital sex, and cohabitation have become much more clear in recent years, and now is an excellent time for the Church to explain her doctrine in those areas in greater detail and with greater emphasis.
November 8th, 2012 | 6:36 pm
David Nichol: The Church has through time accepted the inescapable fact that Catholics are at least as weak and flawed as are all human persons, some more so than others.
The Church proclaims the Faith, in season and out. As with the ancient Hebrews, a lament rises to God within the Church from those who have failed and desire to try again – “a clean heart create for me, O God, and a steadfast spirit renew with me”. Some translators render that a “new heart”. The Church accepts that many are in need of such a transformation.
Living the Catholic faith is, like other great strivings of human persons, more a journey than a definitive arrival. The goal is always ahead.
You often express puzzlement, rightfully so, at the presence of weakness and sinfulness within the Church. No claim that any other state of affairs exists has been made. To be a Catholic is to be humble before God.
The Church offers sacramental grace and forgiveness of sins, through the power of the Holy Spirit. She offers God’s healing to the penitent sinner. Within the Church, it is never too late to begin again.
November 8th, 2012 | 6:55 pm
“but I don’t understand the apparent lack of faith in the democratic system and particularly the courts (and above all, the Supreme Court) to decide the matter fairly.”
Are you serious, or are you kidding? I’ll assume the former.
I’m going to skip some more recent writs (abominations) and focus on something completely noncontroversial.
In 1869, in Paul v. Virginia, Virginia enacted a premium tax on insurance. Mr. Paul brought suit to assert that insurance was “commerce” and properly regulated only by the federal government as interstate commerce. The Court held that it WAS NOT commerce and the states regulated insurance.
in 1944, in the Southeastern Underwriters case, a decidedly different court-that was largely shaped by Federal, er I mean Franklin D. Roosevelt, held the exact opposite, dropping a new regulatory requirement on Congress when they were a little preoccupied-so the system of state regulation continues today-despite the best efforts of one John Dingell.
A 180 degree turn, on a dime with no change in the underlying facts. Insurance didn’t change, the Interstate Commerce clause wasn’t amended, but political winds changed, so “stare decisis” was ignored.
To quote the late Justice Jackson “We are not final because we are infallible, we are infallible because we are final”.
Samuel Johnson had a briefer commentary on the law, one I prefer, but I’ll let you look it up.
November 8th, 2012 | 7:15 pm
These election results serve only to reenforce my conviction, which I have held for over 35 years, that the best thing that the Catholic Church, and specifically its bishops, in America and elsewhere, could do would be to proclaim, in sermons and otherwise, the binding and “irreformable” nature of the Church’s teaching on contraception, abortion and same-sex pseudogamy, and proceed to excommunicate all those Catholics who openly and publicly reject and oppose Catholic doctrine on these subjects.
November 8th, 2012 | 7:15 pm
The wheat and the tares are growing together until harvest. We may as well learn to recognize it.
November 8th, 2012 | 7:29 pm
I doubt that First Things readers are fans of John Cale, the Welsh-born and classically trained member of the old Velvet Underground. He recently returned to Wales to do a documentary on the drug addiction epidemic in Cardiff. It’s on YouTube for those interested. It begins with Cale watching one of his late seventies on-stage performances on his MacBook at a time when he was addicted heroin. It’s not pretty as he himself admits.
He visits a rehab clinic and talks to several addicts and former addicts. One is a young man barely in his twenties. He talks about his progress from marijuana to heroin. Looking constantly for that drug that gets him higher faster and longer. He admits that the first is essentially the best time. The clinic administrator is also a former addict and insists that marijuana is not an innocent recreational drug for many. The young man relapses and has already lost most of his teeth. Another young man testifies to the three things that helped him out of the hell of addiction. His wife, a coming baby, and God. John Cale nods in agreement. No longer the hipster doofus of his New York days. It’s a powerful if short video on an ugly and no longer sub culture. Little has changed since the mid-twentieth century. What has changed is that from the very top of society there is a nod of assent to anything goes — abortion, promiscuity, drugs, the premature sexualization of the young, and their total indocrination in government/union schools.
If Obama did not share the values of the various Jackson, Dunham, and Moore ads, he would repudiate them. He didn’t and he hasn’t and he won’t. What an ugly, bigoted, intolerant and unthinking country we are leaving for the children now in elementary school. Seventy percent of the young voters put this man back into office. They feel everything. They know nothing.
We’ve blown it and for all practical purposes, permanently. How is tobacco bad, and every other drug good? The incoherence of leftism is all pervasive into every aspect of endeavor. No Catholic can justify voting for this cultural gestalt of nihilism and narcissicism and its spokesman. As with marriage, the comfortable middle and upper class liberal sees no harm in the lower classes destroying themselves. We’re no better than those morally numb 18th century Brits and Americans we so casually bash.
November 9th, 2012 | 12:58 am
As a former Catholic, I can tell you that most Catholics in America do not agree with all the doctrines of the Church. Especially on Birth Control. Most feel that is a private matter. The Bishops of course follow the church doctrine but they do not have to support a family. I do not see many Catholics picking their candidate on this one issue.
November 9th, 2012 | 1:07 am
William Tighe, I completely agree! Excommunicate them all. Based on the votes for Obama, that’s 42% of weekly mass-goers, 56% of the Christmas-and-Easter crowd, and all of their children who can’t vote yet.
I left the Church because I understood the Catholic Church’s teachings on birth control–Catholics who use birth control are latae sententiae excommunicated. I knew it was the height of dishonesty to God and the Church to take communion and while taking the Pill. Did I struggle with it? Yes. But I respected the Church’s edicts and accepted my excommunication. There but for the Grace of God go I.
November 9th, 2012 | 8:56 am
[...] The Catholic Vote and the Contraception Mandate – Mark Movsesian, First Thoughts Can't Find What You're Looking For? [...]
November 9th, 2012 | 9:07 am
You mean the Bishops have finally started to speak out and teach? When was the last time that this has happened … in the 1930′s? Our priest is more Episcopalian than Catholic and would never mention contraception, abortion, euthanasia, etc. because he believes the culture of death is a good thing to limit global warming and a woman’s right to kill. I think the majority of Bishop’s should try building some credibility first.
November 9th, 2012 | 9:31 am
What is this hurry to excommunicate mass numbers of people? How would that make the Church better? We’re a hospital for sinners not a club for saints. We’re a bunch of wannabes who should know they aren’t, not yet. And getting there is something we need to accept not something we win. The more we accept, the more we’ll want to bring others with us but recognize they must individually make the decision.
November 9th, 2012 | 9:47 am
I must point out, Graham, that such a thing suffers from selection bias.
November 9th, 2012 | 10:02 am
Isn’t it really about “social justice”, aka, “free stuff”!
November 9th, 2012 | 10:52 am
“…the majority of Catholic voters apparently did not accept the bishops’ understanding of the importance of the issue.”
“Did not accept” is very charitably put, but ignored/rejected more accurate. We need specific, concrete, loving teaching from our bishops – a few newspaper ads a week before the election can’t fix decades of silence on key voting issues. Way too little, way too late. If HHS didn’t happen to arrive this election cycle, I suspect the silence would have been deafening. Whether they knew it or it, Catholics got mowed down by the Dem culture machine – we needed teachers, didn’t get them. Shameful.
November 9th, 2012 | 11:11 am
Joseph Knippenberg writes:
“Romney won the white Catholic vote 59-40 and the weekly attending Catholic vote 57-42. Like other numbers in the exit polls, the “Catholic vote” numbers have to be broken down before we can truly make sense of them.”
I’m surprised no one else has noticed this. But it’s true: Mitt Romney did quite well with white Catholics, without even taking into account frequency of mass attendance – where the numbers among whites are certainly even more lopsided (4 out of 5, at least).
Weigel is partially right: There *IS* no Catholic vote. But it’s bifurcated not just along lines of faithfulness, but also race. The Hispanic Catholic community clearly thinks and votes differently than the White Catholic community – and yes, there are subgroups within each that have distinctions as well – Cuban Catholics are very distinct from Central American Catholics, for example.
What this suggests is not only that Republicans have their work cut out for them among Hispanics, but so do our bishops and clergy. Which is to say, the point is not to make them good little Republicans, but to better understand their cultural premises, and catechize them better.
But we should refrain from being too critical of Hispanics, who are hardly the only American Catholics to weigh secular considerations more than Catholic ones in how they vote and live.
November 9th, 2012 | 11:12 am
Adam Baum
To give some more examples from the 1940s, , in Jones v Opelika [319 US 584 (1942] one finds Roberts J complaining that, in some six years, the Supreme Court had fourteen times reversed one or more of its earlier decisions, many of them recent. He observed that such decisions tended “to bring adjudications of this tribunal into the same class as a restricted railroad ticket, good for this day and train only. I have no assurance, in view of current decisions, that he opinion announced today may not shortly be repudiated and overruled by justices who deem they have new light on the subject.”
As one particularly egregious example, a case, Minersville School District v Gobitis [310 US 586 (1940)] that was decided by a majority of eight to one, was overruled three years later in West Virginia School Board of Education v Barnette [319 US 624 (1943) by a majority of six to three. Of the six, three of the Justices (Black, Douglas & Murphy JJ) had changed their minds, two (Jackson & Ritledge JJ) were new appointments and one was the former lone dissident (Stone CJ, formerly Stone J)
November 9th, 2012 | 11:15 am
Hello David Nickol,
“So slightly more Catholics don’t attend mass weekly than do. (Actually, the figures I have seen suggest that only about 25% of Catholics attend mass every week, so it is strange that the two groups in the survey seem roughly equal.)”
Most likely, some Catholics are overstating their mass attendance rate to the exit poll takers, to avoid any moral judgment on them. The 25% figure is the one most commonly accepted.
November 9th, 2012 | 11:54 am
[...] Mark Movsesian is a keener political and legal observer than I, but I’m not sure he’s right to suggest that bishops’ highlighting of religious freedom had no effect in the election. The University of Akron’s John Green, a noted scholar of religion and politics, believes that the bishops’ highlighting of the HHS mandate helped push white Catholics’ seven-point swing against the Democratic ticket. From the Denver Post: Green believes the religious liberty issue played a part in Obama’s significant drop in support among white Catholics (it fell from 47 percent in 2008 to 40 percent in 2012). [...]
November 9th, 2012 | 10:46 pm
@ Michael PS.
Thank you, I appreciate the additional examples of the variability of judicial positions. I live not far from Minersville and had heard how that case was reversed over 3 years, but forgot.
@ Richard M.
“What this suggests is not only that Republicans have their work cut out for them among Hispanics, but so do our bishops and clergy”
Google Univision and Obama. Even without this influence, do you really expect people leaving countries with much more limited views of civil liberties to suddenly find appeals to traditional American themes resonant?
I would find the insistence on open borders much more acceptable if Mexican Bishops were critical of their country’s far more restrictive immigration laws.
I still find the idea that the Catholic left -the ones that kept telling us that Paul Ryan’s reading of Ayn Rand so detestable, sharing a position with the libertarians that consider her ‘Objectivism” among their guiding principles ironic. Both insist that national borders are irrational, invidious and oppressive and refer to transgressors as “undocumented immigrants”.
November 10th, 2012 | 4:29 am
There is a strong economic argument for saying that the free movement of capital and labour should be the default position, which is very different from saying that restrictions cannot be justified on other (non-economic) grounds.
November 10th, 2012 | 7:34 am
I agree with those who noted there is no ‘Catholic vote’. But there is a ‘heresy vote’ among Catholics. I believe Gary R explained why. Bottom line: it’s the bishops’ fault.
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