By Tony Perkins, Family Research Council
Although the identified born again evangelical population in America is roughly 38% of the voting population, according to Barna Research they represented 53% of voters in the November 2nd election when “values voters” carried the day. However, the evangelicals identified with the Republican Party were not the only “values voters.” To the dismay of the media and Hollywood that have derisively ascribed moral values to the “religious right” of the GOP, they have found that those values of honesty, integrity, along with policy issues like same-sex “marriage” and abortion are shared by a much larger segment of the American family. The Pew Research Center found that 27% of voters cast their ballots based upon moral values. 44% of those voters did so based upon social policy such as abortion and same-sex “marriage.”
The New York Times highlighted the “values voter” in an interview with two Puerto Rican women living in the Bronx who were staunch Democrats but voted for Bush based on the moral issues. Jeanmarie Salazar, a mother of four, cited her support for Bush based on the “immorality that is destroying our country.” It may very well be that the media’s focus on Iraq and terrorism in an effort to shake the confidence of the American people in President Bush caused Americans to respond in a historically predictable way to external crisis – an introspective look at who we are. The result was in a politically polarized nation, an overwhelming block of voters voted traditional American values.