Peter Steinfels today in the NYTimes

There may be a bloc of religiously traditional voters – many Catholics and at least some evangelicals – who find the Bush foreign policy and especially the war in Iraq morally unsettling but also look askance at the Democrats on abortion. Perhaps some surrogate might quietly remind them that Senator Kerry will have a much freer hand in the area of foreign policy than in appointing judges. But this is hardly a case Democrats can make openly without seeming to backtrack on their commitment to abortion rights.

On the other hand, they might address a further question apparently of concern to those voters: Should the Democratic Party’s unyielding stance on access to legal abortion be seen as limited to that single issue? Or is the party’s abortion position also a marker for a Kerry presidency’s stance on a whole host of issues still at play in the courts and public opinion, among them, doctor-assisted suicide and euthanasia, stem-cell research, cloning and same-sex marriage?

Religious believers are not, in fact, agreed about many of these issues. But at least some of them worry about a secular tendency to treat religion as irrelevant to thinking about such questions.