Sir, – Liam Kennedy says that Irish-American Catholics have drifted away from the Democratic Party because they have “become more conservative as they cease to be immigrant outsiders”, that they reject Joe Biden’s “ecumenical liberal Catholicism”, and even that they have suffered a “loss of faith in constitutional democracy” (“Conservative Catholics could swing US election in favour of Trump and Vance”, Opinion & Analysis, September 11th).
Research last April by the respected non-partisan Pew Research Centre showed that US Catholics are no more conservative than Catholics here in Ireland, with broadly liberal views in relation to issues such as contraception, clerical celibacy, and tolerance for gay and lesbian people, even if same-sex marriage remains a divisive issue.
Surely a more obvious explanation of the drift of Catholic voters away from the Democrats is one which Prof Kennedy completely ignores, specifically that party’s dramatic lurch to the left in recent years and away from mainstream Catholic opinion?
For example, as recently as 2008 the then Democrat candidate Barack Obama opposed the introduction of same-sex marriage. For the first 40 years of his political career, Joe Biden maintained that life began at conception, even sponsoring a constitutional amendment in the mid-1990s which would have allowed abortion to be banned across much of the United States. He cynically abandoned his pro-life views in 2019 shortly before launching his presidential campaign. Support for abortion and same-sex marriage are now litmus tests for the Democratic Party, and anyone who opposes either policy would not allowed to stand as a candidate for senior elected office.
The current Democrat presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, has taken matters a step further and has said that members of Catholic charitable groups such as the Knights of Columbus should be barred from judicial office, a position which would represent an extraordinary assault on religious freedom guaranteed by the US constitution.
Each of these positions would have been unthinkable as recently as a decade ago, and yet they are now mainstream Democrat Party dogma promoted by their most senior elected leaders.
An average Catholic voter wouldn’t have had to have moved an inch in their political views over the last two decades to find themselves being now far more conservative on most issues than the Democrats.
Isn’t this a far more likely explanation for the trend which Prof Kennedy identifies, rather than the catch-all excuse of Donald Trump, particularly given that the allegiances of Catholic voters began to shift many years before Mr Trump entered the political fray? – Yours, etc,
BARRY WALSH,
Clontarf,
Dublin 3.