In this year’s election, voters went against nearly all of the ballot initiatives backed by Catholic leaders and advocates, except referendums on minimum wage increases and gun control measures in four states. They voted in favor of legalized recreational marijuana in four states and against it in one. In Colorado, voters passed a measure to legalize assisted suicide, making the state the sixth in the nation with a so-called right-to-die law, joining Washington, Oregon, California, Vermont and Montana. Three death penalty referendums all ended in favor of capital punishment. Oklahoma voters re-approved the use of the death penalty after the state’s attorney general had suspended executions last year. Nebraska voters also reinstated the death penalty, which had been banned by state lawmakers last year. In California, voters defeated a ballot measure to repeal the death penalty and narrowly passed an initiative aiming to speed up executions of death row convictions.
Ballot initiatives backed by Catholic leaders lose in several states
Show Comments ()
1
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
Henry George
8 years 8 months ago
One can wonder if our society has decisively and finally passed the point of no return in its secularisation.
Likewise, given the actual number of Catholics in America, the passage of these referendums makes you wonder
if the Church has failed in its duty to teach Catholic/Christian morality to its members.
I remain now, even more convinced, that Vatican II, as understood by liberals, choose the wrong time and wrong
world view to place at its secondary stones in the construction of a "Modern Church" the secular views of the
60's.
The latest from america
Perhaps it is the hard-won wisdom that comes with age, but the Catholic rituals and practices I once scorned are the same rituals and practices that now usher me into God's presence, time and time again.
"Only through patient and inclusive dialogue" can "a just and lasting conflict resolution can be achieved" in the long-running conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, said the Holy See's permanent observer to the United Nations.
The ”Bad Guys” films ask, how do we determine who the “bad guys” are? And if you’re marked as “bad” from the start, can you ever make good?
In these dark times, surrounded by death and destruction in Gaza, we hear the command in the first reading, “Choose life.” What are the ways we can do this in a world that seems to have gone mad?