Politics
The 9 Groups of Latter-day Saint Voters
What motivates Latter-day Saints’ votes? Faith, morality, and pragmatism drive choices across political lines.
C.D. Cunningham
November 1, 2024
What motivates Latter-day Saints’ votes? Faith, morality, and pragmatism drive choices across political lines.
How can we bridge gaps in women’s healthcare? Save the Storks uses a variety of tools to help create comprehensive care.
Nearly 2/3 of Americans support legal abortion, This even includes religious Americans. The outliers are white evangelicals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter-day Saints and Hispanic Protestants.
In the ongoing debate about religion, politics, and abortion, far less attention has gone to how the desire to do whatever people want sexually shapes the entire conversation.
Far from violating basic constitutional freedoms, the recent abortion ruling at the U.S Supreme Court powerfully reinstituted crucial and inspired principles designed for the protection of “all flesh.”
The Supreme Court’s decision did not establish religion or violate the religious freedom rights of pro-choice Americans. Instead, it created space in the public square for the pro-life convictions of people of faith.
Especially when reality is deeply uncomfortable, a word like this has a way of sanitizing and obscuring the full and brutal picture of what’s actually taking place.
The nationwide experiment in widespread elective abortion is coming to an end. As we try to newly establish a pro-life culture, we will need to expect more from both mothers and fathers.
Some have accused American faith communities of rising in opposition to abortion only in recent decades—and largely as a political ploy. No one can honestly make that claim about Latter-day Saints.
This week Fr. Thomas Reese called on US Catholic bishops to start supporting the Democratic party if they do end up victorious on the issue of abortion. Reese argues that while ending abortion is an important priority for these bishops, once that goal has been passed they may find themselves more generally aligned with Democrats. Reese’s article got me thinking about how a major change in abortion law may affect Latter-day Saints’ political leanings. This will likely depend in part on how abortion law is settled. Whether a national legislative compromise can be reached or it does go to the states. But if the Supreme Court rules in Dobbs that there is no constitutional right to an abortion and the matter returns to the states, we may see Latter-day Saints shift significantly. There are currently ten states that, in this scenario, would outlaw abortion without exceptions for rape or incest. While the Church’s position emphasizes opposition to elective abortion for convenience, it does allow exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or incest. To be clear, the Church itself does not favor or oppose specific legislative proposals. And yet if the large question on abortion shifts from whether or not elective abortion should be legal to whether or not there should be exceptions to allow abortion for rape or incest, Latter-day Saints may find their sympathies on the opposite side of the abortion debate. Just as not all Latter-day Saints today advocate that the law match the Church’s position today, some Latter-day Saints might argue that while the Church’s position is for the whole world, not every country needs to allow those exceptions. So I certainly don’t mean to suggest that every Latter-day Saint must shift, but it’s certainly worth noting as a potential future trend.
A spate of vandalism is targetting Catholic churches in the wake of the leaked opinion reversing Roe v. Wade. https://kdvr.com/news/local/boulder-church-vandalized-for-2nd-time/ This occurs at a time when hate crimes on the basis of religion are on the rise across the country. And most of this violence seems to be based on a mistaken idea about what the actual impact of a Supreme Court Ruling in the Dobbs case would actually mean.
Although the final draft is uncertain, the leaked Supreme Court majority opinion can be celebrated as a step towards a culture celebrating all life—both the precious unborn and the equally precious mothers who need all of our support.