Well said.  I did vote for Kerry and was rather surprised at the result.

PM

At 05:09 PM 6/13/2005, you wrote:
>Cindy, I don't think this is just your impression.
>Very few Republican members of Congress have a good
>voting record on the environment, as measured by
>League of Conservation Voters ratings.
>
>One of the Republicans in Congress with the best
>environmental record, Jim Leach, is also pro-choice. I
>imagine that most of the other relatively "green"
>Republicans are as well, because they tend to
>represent moderate, suburban districts in the
>northeast.
>
>My Rockefeller Republican father was puzzled and
>dismayed by the GOP's radical anti-environmental turn
>in the 1980s and 1990s. As he said, true conservatives
>should be concerned with conserving natural resources.
>Unfortunately, it seems like today's GOP leadership
>goes out of its way to do harm to the environment on
>many fronts.
>
>This is as offensive to my moral standards as abortion
>is to Peggy Murdock's. Many thousands of American
>lives end prematurely every year because of
>environmental contaminants. Others live with
>diminished quality of life (e.g. skyrocketing rates of
>asthma in children). Not to mention the harm done to
>children by mercury pollution. For reasons
>unfathomable to me, GOP leaders who claim to care for
>the lives of unborn children resist basic,
>common-sense policies that would reduce the number of
>miscarriages, birth defects, and neurodevelopmental
>disorders caused by mercury alone.
>
>I don't have an answer regarding how to appeal to
>voters who are against abortion but for the
>environment. It's up to inidividuals to decide which
>issues are deal-breakers for them.
>
>Some Catholics will be unable to vote for a pro-choice
>Democrat. Other Catholics will be unable to vote for a
>Republican who supports the war in Iraq and capital
>punishment while opposing an increase in the minimum
>wage (those are all issues on which the Catholic
>Church's official position contradicts the GOP's).
>
>Yours,
>
>Laura Belin
>
>--- Cindy Hildebrand <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > Perhaps another question that could be asked, if
> > we're discussing this topic,
> > is why there are so few candidates (at least I've
> > heard of few in this part
> > of the country) who say they are pro-life and who
> > also consistently vote in
> > favor of protecting the environment.  Theoretically,
> > one could have
> > pro-environment candidates who are on both sides of
> > the abortion issue.  In practice, I
> > seldom see it, but maybe I'm not paying attention to
> > enough political races
> > outside my immediate area.
> >
> > Cindy Hildebrand
> > [log in to unmask]
> > Ames, IA  50010
> >
> > "Strawbury in the praries ripe and abundant."
> > (Meriwether Lewis)
> >
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> >
>
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