Religious groups & voter's guides

[jenk]

It's not just Focus on the Family distributing voter's guides this year.

Sojourners: Voting Issues Guide (PDF); Election Action Guide (PDF); more resources are here

Catholics United For the Common Good: Catholic Voter Guide

Focus on the Family: "I Vote Values" site

As The NY Times notes,

Focus on the Family’s state affiliates plan to register voters and distribute voters’ guides in churches this year in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Minnesota, Montana and Tennessee: all states where Republican candidates favored by religious conservatives are on the ballot. [...]

“We’re not doing candidates,” [said Jim Wallis of Sojourners]. He added: “The principle comes from Martin Luther King Jr., who never endorsed a candidate, not once. He made them endorse his agenda. We want to create an agenda with a social movement behind it that holds politicians accountable.”

Catholics United for the Common Good, which is affiliated with the Catholics in Alliance group, is compiling “candidate evaluations” for many of the senate races, using 25 criteria important to Catholic voters, said Chris Korzen, the group’s director. But they do not plan to distribute paper copies, only to post it on the Web.

I think it's good that more than just FotF is doing this...from skimming the Sojourners' stuff, they appear to be saying (I'm paraphrasing) "Christians care about:

• reducing or ending: poverty, violence, unplanned pregnancies, capital punishment, genocide, and torture;
  
• increasing: human rights, justice, election reform, clean air & water, and clean & renewable energy."

I can't even disagree too much with their stuff on strengthing marriage & family. I DO suppose they have to have something in there about THAT. I can grouse about how "Our society should commit to policies that promote education and action on reducing teen pregnancy, strengthening marriage and family formation, in-home parenting coaching and support" could be abused in all sorts of ways. But it's harder to disagree with "encouraging responsible fatherhood, preventing the abuse and neglect of children, and reducing and preventing domestic violence"? And while I'm not sure that "Strengthening families must become a personal and national priority" I do think it should be done "without scapegoating gays and lesbians for the breakdown of the family." (Tangent: has the family "broken down" or is it merely continuing to evolve?)