Voting Catholic?

As I promised, I will as a matter of course avoid politics like the plague on this site, but on this occasion, the faith matters. If you want to read it, click on

I just wrote the following letter to the people in charge of the quiz at votecatholic.org:

Hi,

I took your online quiz. It is nice insofar as my faith conforms with the bishops' on matters of faith, and usually on matters of practice as well.

However, the scoring is extremely deceptive. There isn't a chance in hell (pun intended) that I agree more with Kerry than with Bush on protecting human life, or on family life in general, but the scoring tells me that I do. I have research the candidates' positions, and listened to their statements on the radio, on television; I have read them in the newspaper. How is this possible?!?

On stem cell research, John Kerry is on record as supporting new embryonic stem cell lines. However, the statement with which I clicked "Strongly Agree" does not actually say that: it says only "new and adult stem cell lines". Now, if I'd known when I took the quiz that this was Kerry's position, I'd have interpreted "new" in precisely the way he means it: "new [embryonic] stem cell lines." Instead, I interpreted the statement as, "new [and existing] adult stem cell lines." Both the bishops' statement and President Bush's statements explicitly exclude the possibility of embryonic stem cell research; President Kerry's statement does not. Talk about an oversight of immense proportions!

I notice further that there are no questions on partial-birth abortion, none on whether religious charities should be forced to provide coverage for contraception in their health insurance policies, none on the subject matter of how we should teach sex education (or whether)... In other words, on a number of issues where the President adheres more closely with the bishops (and with me) than the Senator does.

jack perry

It's a shame: the quiz really is good, since it allows me to compare where I am with the bishop (or where I'm not, as the case may be). But the goof on Senator Kerry is a terrible, terrible goof, especially considering how Senator Edwards has been using it to great effect by promising (literally) that the crippled will walk (I am not exaggerating) if Senator Kerry is elected president, and we can finally do this research that the president has banned.