Christian Right Failed to Sway Voters on Issues

[cbayer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/us/politics/christian-conservatives-failed-to-sway-voters.html


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“Those voters turned out, and they voted overwhelmingly against Obama,” said Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, of evangelical Christians.

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: November 9, 2012

Christian conservatives, for more than two decades a pivotal force in American politics, are grappling with Election Day results that repudiated their influence and suggested that the cultural tide — especially on gay issues — has shifted against them.

They are reeling not only from the loss of the presidency, but from what many of them see as a rejection of their agenda. They lost fights against same-sex marriage in all four states where it was on the ballot, and saw anti-abortion-rights Senate candidates defeated and two states vote to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

It is not as though they did not put up a fight; they went all out as never before: The Rev. Billy Graham dropped any pretense of nonpartisanship and all but endorsed Mitt Romney for president. Roman Catholic bishops denounced President Obama’s policies as a threat to life, religious liberty and the traditional nuclear family. Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition distributed more voter guides in churches and contacted more homes by mail and phone than ever before.

“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.

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[dimbear]

1. Here's the Biblical precedent for what comes next:

Leviticus 16:10

But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD to be used for making atonement by sending it into the desert.

The strange thing is that coming out the scapegoat is luckier than coming out the bullock in the next verse.