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Stalking the anti-fundamentalist voter

Any Top 10 list of slogans for abortion-rights signs would include "Curb
your dogma" and "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a
sacrament."

At the recent March for Women's Lives, one nurse weighed the tensions
between Sen. John Kerry and the Vatican and proclaimed: "I'm a Catholic, I
take Communion … and I'm Pro-Choice." She could have added: "And I vote."

George W. Bush will receive few votes from these voters. They're not fond
of Pope John Paul II, Jerry Falwell and other conservative religious
leaders, either.

Political scientists Gerald De Maio and Louis Bolce call them
"anti-fundamentalist voters" and their rise has been a crucial -- yet
untold -- story in U.S. politics. Many are true secularists, such as
atheists, agnostics and those who answer "none" when asked to pick a
faith. Others think of themselves as progressive believers. The tie that
binds is their disgust for Christian conservatives.

"This trend represents a big change, because 40 or 50 years ago all the
divisive religious issues in American politics rotated around the
Catholics. People argued about money for Catholic schools or whether the
Vatican was trying to control American politics," said Bolce, who, with De
Maio, teaches at Baruch College in the City University of New York.

"That remains a concern for some people. But today, they worry about all
those fundamentalists and evangelicals. That's where the real animus is."

In fact, Bolce and De Maio argue that historians must dig back to the
bitter pre-Great Depression battles rooted in ethnic and religious
prejudices -- battles about immigration, public education, prohibition and
"blue laws" -- to find a time when voting patterns were influenced to the
same degree by antipathy toward a specific religious group....