This is an alarming poll. The stigma that most Americans evidently associate with the term atheist is alarming. On this blog, I will argue that this sort of behavior is not the product of Christianity. I will argue that if instead of identifying ourselves as Christians, most of us identified ourselves as Star-Belly Americans, a majority of Democrats and/or Republicans would say that they could not vote for Non-Star-Bellies.
That argument will be tough. This graphic fills me with not a little shame.
1 comment:
I think it's encouraging on some level that this graph indicates that being black, Jewish or Catholic harms your chances of being elected, but only within the margin for error of most polls -- the take-home message being that those characteristics will not be enough to make a difference in most elections. Although it is notable that had George Bush been any one of those, we'd almost definitely have had a President Gore right now.
Being a woman or Hispanic is problematic, and is going to turn a lot of elections. This is pretty bad, and terribly discouraging.
Obviously a Morman faces a serious uphil battle in any general election.
Married 3 times and being 72 years-old is defensible in the sense that rightly or wrongly, there are arguments to be made about a person based on those two descriptions.
Homosexuality excluding you from being president is terrible in my mind as well. It's hard to imagine what being homosexual has to do with one's job performance as president.
And then there's the lonely atheist. If you don't profess a belief that there is a conscious prime mover to the universe, if your cosmology just happens to tip in that direction, you get the distinction of being the only subset listed with a minority of support. The question you are taking on is a hard one. I've heard you make the Sneetches argument with regard to Urban vs. Rural / Democratic vs Republican candidates in teh past and I have to admit to being very swayed by it. I think the power of "My Team" is great. But this is an interesting litmus of that conjecture.
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