I first persuaded myself in 2003 that Catholics would abandon the Democrats at the next election. More of them did indeed vote for President George W. Bush the following year. But nevertheless, it wasn’t one of my most accurate predictions.
The occasion for these thoughts came when Senate Democrats blocked the nomination of William Pryor to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Pryor was then Alabama’s attorney general — he has since made it to the appeals court — and was anathema to Democrats as a conservative Catholic. The party of the Left feared that his jurisprudential eminence would elevate him quickly to the Supreme Court, where he’d hew to the Constitution rather than to their policy agenda.
His chief antagonist was Sen. Russell Feingold, who reacted as though he’d found a smoking gun when Pryor admitted that he and his wife rescheduled a family vacation at Walt Disney World so as to avoid being there on Gay Day. Gay Day involved a level of public lewdness that decent people might naturally find offensive irrespective of whether the participants and actions were heterosexual or gay.
“Are you saying that you actually made that decision on purpose to be away at that time?” the senator asked with feigned shock and incredulity.
Pryor, whose daughters had been aged 6 and 4 at the time, answered, “We made a value judgment and changed our plan and went another weekend.”
It struck me then that Catholics could not support a party that prevented a member of their Church winning a job merely because he exercised his right to choose to shield his children from vulgar public displays of sexual license. Catholics voted 52-47 for Bush over Sen. John Kerry in 2004, but it was no watershed moment. Four years later they voted 54-45 for President Barack Obama against Sen. John McCain.
Our principal feature this week takes the subject up again. As Democrats legalize infanticide, first in New York and then elsewhere, it’s worth asking whether anything will prise Catholics away from the party decisively and en masse. Alas, the answer seems to be no. Catholics spent a century or more trying to convince skeptical Protestant America that they’re just like other voters and as a result appear to have become, er, just like other voters. The Catholic vote is not Catholic; it is a bellwether. It went for Trump in 2016. It always goes for whomever wins.
Other features this week include a profile of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat who is bucking her party and rapidly acquiring the label of “maverick” once the property of McCain. We also examine so-called net neutrality and lay out how it facilitated mission creep for the Federal Communications Commission and the regulatory state.
The last story in the magazine is an obituary of Charles Van Doren, the man at the center of a huge game show cheating scandal in the 1950s. But there are 58 pages of great content before you get to that.
