WASHINGTON (ABP) — With a handful of exceptions, candidates and causes backed by religious conservatives went down to defeat in unusually prominent off-year elections Nov. 8.
Other than Texas voters' passage of a state constitutional amendment banning marriage and similar legal arrangements for gays, progressive candidates and causes prevailed over conservative ones on ballots in Virginia, New Jersey, Kansas, Maine and California.
In Virginia, a Catholic Democrat who talked regularly about his faith on the campaign trail defeated a conservative Republican Baptist who had attacked the Democrat for his personal belief that the death penalty is wrong.
According to exit polls of voters, the tactic apparently backfired for the Virginia's former Attorney General Jerry Kilgore (R). He lost to Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine 52 percent to 46 percent. Kaine had said that, while his Catholic beliefs led him to personally oppose both the death penalty and abortion, he would separate that belief from his duty to enforce the legality of both.
In New Jersey, U.S. Sen. John Corzine (D), who is a member of a congregation dually aligned with the American Baptist Churches USA and the United Church of Christ, handily defeated his Republican opponent, fellow multimillionaire Douglas Forrester.
Maine voters solidly defeated an attempt to repeal the state's new gay-rights law, which its legislature passed earlier this year. According to the Portland Press-Herald, with 88 percent of precincts reporting, voters embraced the law by a 55-45 percent margin. It bars discrimination in employment and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation. The law makes Maine the last New England state to include sexual orientation as one of the protected categories in its anti-discrimination laws.
Gay-rights groups pointed to the Maine results as a counterbalance to Texas, which overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the state's charter that bans same-sex marriage as well as “civil unions” or other marriage-like legal arrangements for gays.
California voters, meanwhile, rejected all of the eight ballot initiatives placed before them — including an attempt to require minor girls to notify their parents before obtaining an abortion. With all precincts reporting Nov. 9, Proposition 73 lost 53-47 percent, according to the California Secretary of State's website.
In Dover, Pa., voters ejected all eight members of the school board, who had stoked national fires of controversy last year by voting to require the district's biology teachers to mention a controversial theory about the origins of life. The theory, called “intelligent design,” posits that Darwinian evolution cannot by itself explain some complexities of life on earth, which point to the guiding hand of some intelligent force.
The eight Republican board members who supported the policy were roundly defeated by a slate of Democrats. Some of them said that they do not oppose intelligent design, but do oppose teaching it in a science class. Their view reflects that of most mainstream scientific and educational organizations, who say that intelligent design is a matter of faith that cannot be scientifically tested, and thus does not belong in a public-school science class.
Despite the day's outcomes, one observer of the national political scene cautioned against seeing a nationwide anti-conservative trend.
“I think it's very hard to take a sort of a national lesson from elections that are widely scattered; we recognize that many elections are influenced by local considerations,” said Jack Fleer, professor emeritus of political science at Wake Forest University.
Fleer noted that the two gubernatorial contests featured very different kinds of Democrats and Republicans. In Virginia, Democrat Kaine is widely viewed as a moderate, like his Democratic predecessor, Mark Warner. Meanwhile, Kilgore is a conservative Republican strongly supported by the Religious Right.
But in New Jersey, Corzine is more toward the liberal end of the spectrum, and Forrester is a moderate.
Fleer also pointed to the use of faith in the Virginia election — and said that Kaine's open and regular discussion of his Christian faith on the campaign trail pointed to a lesson Democrats learned from the 2004 national elections.
“In Virginia, you had a very strong use of 'moral values' as a kind of Democratic candidate appeal, which might suggest that this is a sort of area where Republicans have gotten a lot of mileage,” he said.
“I think this whole issue of … 'moral values' continues to be a very prominent part of the political landscape. And insofar as it continues to be a prominent part of the political landscape, I think you have to give some credit to Republicans for injecting it into the debate,” Fleer continued.