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ELECTIONS 2008
Your Faith, The Issues, The Candidates and Your Vote
This election season the Connecticut Catholic Conference will be surveying candidates to establish where they stand on several issues that span the pro-life to social justice spectrum. Watch this page for more information as the November elections get closer. The Connecticut Catholic Conference does not endorse a particular candidate or party.
Survey Results
The Connecticut Catholic Conference surveyed all candidates running for the State Senate and House of Representatives, along with candidates for Congress. This is the first year the Conference has conducted and published such a survey. The survey is scheduled to distributed in parishes on the weekend of October 11-12th. Many candidates did not respond to the survey by the deadline for publication. Any late responses will be added to the website.
If your candidate did not respond please attempt to find out how they stand on the issues raised in the survey.
(Note: Voting districts and candidate information for parishoniers of the Ukrainian Diocese of Stamford are included in the listings above)
Key Votes
The following votes were taken in 2007 and 2008 on several items of specific interest to many people in the Catholic community and were not reported in the press.
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Your Faith: Catholics are called to see political life through the eyes of faith and to bring their moral convictions to public life. We should approach political questions not as Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, but as Catholics, because we should never try to separate our public life from our faith life. Christ calls us to be faithful disciples in all the different aspects of our lives.
The Issues: When examining the issues, we should begin by seeking a well-formed conscience. The conscience is like an inner voice which helps us distinguish right from wrong. To properly form our conscience, we should determine what the Church teaches on issues and learn the facts about those issues. We should make every effort to understand the issues from a faith-filled perspective.
Listed below are some of the major moral questions facing our state and nation. Some concern policies, like attacks on innocent human life, and same-sex “marriage”, which a Catholic with a well-formed conscience should never support. These acts directly violate Catholic moral principles. Some of the issues are those that Catholics can legitimately disagree about how to address, such as immigration and universal health care. Catholics must embrace the moral principles behind these issues, but can debate the best way to implement those principles. All of the issues, however, have a moral component and reflect our responsibility as Catholics toward the common good.
The Candidates: Our moral responsibility does not rest with informing our consciences and taking positions. We must also investigate the positions of candidates and vote on election day. When so doing, we should see beyond party politics, analyze campaign rhetoric critically, and choose political leaders according to the principles of faith. When a clear choice does not exist between candidates on critical issues of faith, a Catholic voter should cast their ballot for the one they feel would best benefit the common good.
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