I have read and heard lots of comments saying that President Obama “won” the Catholic vote. This is misleading.
President Obama won the Hispanic vote heavily. Far more than half of Hispanics are Catholics. Based on the Hispanic people I know, they are devout, church-going, family-oriented people.
I have also witnessed and fought against the repeated, racist attacks on hispanics by Republican politicians here in Oklahoma. The Republican Party used the issue of illegal immigration as a wedge issue in at least three of the elections in the past 10 years. They referred to “illegals” as if they were insects rather than people. They passed laws here in Oklahoma that tried to deny hispanic people access to basic services and their civil rights.
They did all this despite the fact that there were plenty of laws on the books already to handle illegal immigration. These laws just weren’t being enforced. The main reason they weren’t being enforced was because the business interests that pay for Republican campaigns did not want them enforced.
Hispanic people are not stupid. They know all this. So when they voted heavily to re-elect President Obama, they were not voting against their church. They were voting against the discrimination and racism which the Republican Party had callously directed against them to win elections earlier in this century.
Now, we are faced with pundits and commenters who keep saying that “Catholics voted for Obama” as if this was a repudiation of the Church by its own people. In truth, for the Catholic vote to have been as close as it was, and for hispanics to have voted for President Obama in the percentages they did, most other Catholics must have voted heavily for Governor Romney.
Before you go off condemning your fellow Catholics for deserting the Church, remember that statistics can be used to lie. At the very least these statistics are not be used to represent the facts in a way that would lead anyone who reads them to draw accurate conclusions.
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