Black Lives Matter riot damage in Kenosha. According to ACMC's poll over 83 percent of Catholics do not support BLM.
Black Lives Matter's arguments aren't convincing Wisconsin Catholics, according to the results of an American Catholic Media Company (ACMC) poll.
Conducted on Facebook from Aug. 24 through Sept. 2, the poll queried 1,615 Catholics in five key swing states-- Wisconsin, Minnesota, Florida, Arizona and Michigan, asking their opinions on the core principles and policy changes espoused by the activist group Black Lives Matter (BLM).
Poll respondents overwhelmingly passed on the Black Lives Matter proposals.
Opal Tometi (right), co-founder of Black Lives Matter, with dispiuted Venzuela President Nicolás Maduro (center).
A central theme of the Black Lives Matter movement is that defunding local police departments will make communities safer. BLM rioters have damaged police buildings and property in Kenosha and elsewhere, calling for their defunding and dismantling. Some even have argued looting and property damage is justified.
"We demand acknowledgment and accountability for the devaluation and dehumanization of Black life at the hands of the police," the organization declares on a web page titled "#DefundThePolice."
ACMC asked swing state Catholics whether they believed "police departments (should) be replaced with social workers, who would reform lawbreakers by counseling them?" But by a margin of four to one, respondents rejected the BLM idea.
Of 1,615 responses 1,349, or 83.5 percent answered “no” and 266, or 16.5 percent answered “yes.”
BLM was founded by self-described "trained Marxists" who haven't shied away from advocating for the replacement of the U.S. capitalist economic system with a more totalitarian state.
To be sure, collectivist ideology has seen a resurgence in the Democratic Party coming off the failed but considerable second presidential campaign of self-described democratic socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Sanders, like BLM, has offered public admiration of Marxist and communist regimes around the world.
ACMC asked swing state Catholics whether "America’s capitalist economic system be replaced with a collectivist one like that of Venezuela, or that of the former Soviet Union?" But only 11.8 percent said “yes," while 88.2 percent said they would oppose the move.
Venezuela's economy shrunk 26 percent in 2019 and has shrunk by 62 percent since 2013. Its president, Nicolas Maduro, has offered public support of the BLM movement and has even met with its co-founder, Opal Tometi.
Tometi has emphasized that BLM's goals transcend race, ending police protection and capitalist economics but are just as focused upon transforming family life in the United States and promoting "transgenderism" as an alternative to biology..
The group has called for ending the traditional "nuclear family," centered around a monogamous mother and father.
Some 87 percent of swing state Catholics polled by ACMC said they would oppose BLM's proposal to replace traditional family life with something more state-oriented, while 13 percent said they would support it.
BLM has also proposed legislation for "dismantling.. privilege" for non-transgender Americans who accept their biological sex.
Of swing state Catholics polled by ACMC, some three in four-- or 74 percent, disagreed with BLM's argument that sex isn't biological and should be open to change.
The embrace of transgender issues has become a more prominent aspect of the Democratic Party platform.
According to the Pew Research Center Catholics skew towards the Democratic Party.
See the charts below with all responses to poll questions.
Founded in 2019, Chicago-based American Catholic Media Company is a publisher of Catholic parish news around the United States.
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