Amy Sullivan has a new book out about religion and politics. It's called The Party Faithful, and she just did an interview with Salon.com about it a few days ago (which you can read here).
While I would generally not label myself an "evangelical" Christian, for all the baggage that term carries, I am largely in agreement with Amy on the need for Democrats to find a genuine way to court the evangelical vote. And no doubt it's true that the abortion issue is a huge hurddle to overcome in that effort.
Kevin Drum, linking to the interview, calls attention to this point, and some of the backlash that it has gotten (there is, it seems, an entire subculture of the internet dedicated solely to hating Amy Sullivan!):
Well, I don't like the [pro-choice] label. I guess the reason I wrote about abortion the way I did in the book is because I have serious moral concerns about abortion, but I don't believe that it should be illegal. And that puts me in the vast majority of Americans. But unfortunately, there's no label for us.
Kevin's interpretation of what Amy is getting at here, and througout her book, is exactly right:
about 60% of the evangelical community is politically conservative and won't ever vote for a Democrat. But the other 40% will, and those 40% are worth trying to appeal to. And one way to appeal to them is to acknowledge their moral qualms about abortion even if you don't happen to share them yourself.
As a bonus, Kevin then goes onto note that this is precisely the approach that Barack Obama has taken, as in the following:
I think that the American people struggle with two principles: There's the principle that a fetus is not just an appendage, it's potential life. I think people recognize that there's a moral element to that. They also believe that women should have some control over their bodies and themselves and there is a privacy element to making those decisions.
I don't think people take the issue lightly. A lot of people have arrived in the view that I've arrived at, which is that there is a moral implication to these issues, but that the women involved are in the best position to make that determination. And I don't think they make it lightly.
The problem, of course, is that this has been the Democratic orthodoxy for at least 15 years, but it doesn't get any play. Some of Amy's critics rightly point out that, by framing the discussion of the Democrats and religion in terms of the Democrats' shortcomings, particularly on this issue, she often fails to accent as strongly as she should just what the mainstream of the Democratic party has actually been advocating. Since 1992, most Democrats have advocated the "Safe, Legal, and Rare" doctrine on abortion. Obama's comments are a further elaboration on what that principle means.
The concern then, it seems to me, is not that the Democrats have to change some fundamental part of their identity on this issue, but that they have to draw attention to what their position actually is, rather than how its characterized by their opponents.
The big problem, then, for Democrats is the same one we face on every front, namely, how to avoid our traditional battle formation of a circular firing squad.
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