Single Issue Voting

[Heathen57]

Gay Rights, Abortion, Marijuana, Sexism, Racism, Right to Die, Gun Control, these are all single issues that many people are passionate about. Hell, I am passionate on these issues myself, and that is a great thing to care about these things.

However voting for (or against) a candidate just on one issue can be taking a chance that it will be detrimental to the country.

It can be, and already has been harmful to the country. In 2004, the Roman Catholic Bishops across the country put out letters to their faithful threatening them with loss of communion or excommunication if they voted for Kerry. The single issue was abortion, and Kerry, himself a Catholic, wanted to follow the law and keep it legal. Who knows how many voters that may have lost him.

On the flip side, Bush was thought to be against Gay Rights and Abortion. This earned him the endorsement of the Religious Reich and the votes of their followers.

As everyone knows, we ended up with the worst pResident in the country's history and his policies have almost ruined the nation. Yet people voted for his second term, knowing just how evil he was. It was those damned single issues that helped it along.

And if you really look at what has to happen with these issues, they are not going to be decided by the President. Most of them will eventually be decided by the Courts. There are just too many GOP pols who think the country is a Christian one to be able to get Gay Rights, Abortion, or any of the others through. It will come down to having the courts declare the issue unconstitutional or not.

Yes our Supreme court is packed with conservatives. But we need to replace them with more forward thinking people. If a candidate is not totally behind what you want don't discard them completely. They may have the ideas that will start to heal the country. And by deciding your vote on just that one issue you could lose that chance. Worse yet, if you ignore everything about a candidate except for their view on your issue, we could end up with something akin to what we have now.

So please look at your candidate's position on all the issues. Don't decide on one based on just the one thing you feel passionate about. While you might win on that one issue, you could lose a whole lot more.

[Raven]

1. Before the 2004 election, while canvassing in NH, I spoke

with a woman who was a super conservative Catholic who had voted for Bush in 2000 solely based on his anti-abortion stance. This was a good woman who took in disabled kids as a foster mother...she was not a hater. She told me that she deeply regretted her vote and had realized that voting on one issue only was very dangerous. She felt that she had traded the lives of unborn children for the lives of young American soldiers in Iraq. I have often thought of that conversation.