Notre Dame/Obama uproar marginalizes bishops & right-wing activists

Uproar over President Obama's upcoming commencement address at Notre Dame is, Gallup Poll data suggests, a right-wing organizing ploy.

Most Catholics don't share the views of the angry Catholic bishops and right-wing activists who created and are sustaining this apparent confligration, as Gallup explains:

The argument of those who protest the extension of the invitation to Obama is that Catholics have a distinctly conservative position on these moral issues. That is certainly the case as far as official church doctrine is concerned, but not when it comes to average American Catholics. The new Gallup analysis, based on aggregated data from Gallup's 2006-2008 Values and Beliefs surveys, indicates that Catholics in the United States today are actually more liberal than the non-Catholic population on a number of moral issues, and on others, Catholics have generally the same attitudes.

Frequency of church attendance is an almost unerring predictor of American political conservatism. Yet even Catholics who regularly attend church are more liberal than non-Catholics who go to church regularly:

Regular churchgoers who are Catholic are significantly more liberal than churchgoing non-Catholics on gambling, sex before marriage, homosexual relations, having a baby out of wedlock, and divorce. Committed Catholics are at least slightly more likely than devout non-Catholics to say that abortion and embryonic stem-cell research -- the two key issues highlighted by those protesting Obama's appearance at Notre Dame -- are morally acceptable. Only on the death penalty are committed Catholics more conservative than regular churchgoers who are not Catholic.

Lacking sufficient support among those for whom they speak, Bishops who in the name of being prophetic seek to call down fire on Notre Dame's invitation to Obama, and right wing activists who seek to energize and add to the number of their followers, are both further dividing themselves from the majority of U.S. Catholics.

They can expect to see themselves less well-heeded after this conflict than before. The opposite of their intentions.