>I'm really not sure what is being denied and what is being claimed here on Jenny's part. Is it
>1) lots of people in Ireland, Poland, and such places aren't really antiabortion, is it 2) even if they are antiabortion, it's not in part because of the role of the Church, or is it 3) religion in general doesn't really play an important role in public opinion (despite what most people think and what the Church itself thinks)
I was objecting to using Catholicism as a primary explanation for public opinion on abortion, just like I objected to using membership in a Baptist Church as explanation for public opinion on gay marriage. Can the church's official position be a factor? Sure, but it depends on the history and what other things are going on. And the institutional opposition by these churches in itself needs to be explained. It's not timeless.
> 'Religion doesn't really play an important role in public opinion.'
The relationship between religion and public opinion is the wrong question, or at least a boring one. Which religious teachings do people who regard themselves as religious adopt and which do they ignore or actually oppose? Why are particular teachings being emphasized at any given moment? What's changed? That might be a bit more interesting.
The main problem is that if you blame 'religion' for public views without taking a deeper look, where does that take you in the practical realm? Attack the public's religiosity? I'll tell you where it takes the abortion rights movement in the U.S.--we shake our heads at the sorry state of the country and condescendingly tut-tut over the stupidity and illogic of the religious. Liberal feminists didn't get what Sarah Palin was about because their explanation stops at shaking their heads at "fundamentalists." That's the main reason there's so little investigation of what Palin was appealing to (except by radicals like Harriet Fraad). We think we already know, it's just religion. This is extremely dangerous because the class element utterly passes the movement by.
Wendy, for abortion/birth control and race/immigration check out Rick Santorum's book "It Takes a Family" and Pat Buchanan's "The Death of the West." Buchanan's a good read because he's mostly not hiding--just substitute 'white' wherever he uses 'Western' or 'culture.' Santorum's a little more circumspect (at the time he was a Pennsylvania Senator) but he launches a broadside against gay marriage, which is quite revealing as a last desperate stand for the 'family.'
Jenny Brown