Please note that this article was first published in 2004, four years before the current political cycle. While the faces and names have changed, the principles have not.

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Since I live in Washington and my work involves, among other things, following developments in the political arena, my friends and family naturally assumed that I would watch at least parts of the Democratic and Republican national conventions. They were wrong.

That's because I'm a single-issue voter and nothing that took place in either convention was going to change that fact. My issue is abortion, and on that subject I study the records of individual candidates, not the speeches given at party conventions.

There aren't a lot of people like me — not as many as you might think, anyway. Oh, you hear political commentators talk about "single-issue voters," by which they (almost always) mean voters for whom a candidate's position on abortion is the decisive or most important factor in how they will vote. There are plenty of these folk: By most estimates, they're between 5 and 10 percent of the electorate (and strongly favor — by at least a 3-2 margin — pro-life candidates).

But while these people can be fairly described as "strongly pro-life" or something similar, that's not the same thing as being a "single-issue" voter. For starters, "decisive" and "most important" aren't the same things as "sole" or "only." I've spent enough time around pro-life activists to realize that if, by some (please God!) miracle, abortion disappeared tomorrow, many of them would probably vote in much the same way they do now.

That's because abortion isn't the only thing on which they agree with their preferred candidates. They also concur on taxes, regulations, national defense including the war in Iraq, and environmental policy, to name but a few areas. The agreement is often so complete that conservative positions in these areas are sometimes presented as being distinctly Christian — as in deriving from Christian first principles — positions.

Some of us beg to differ, which brings me back to the question of "single issue" voters. True "single issue" voters often vote for people we strongly disagree with on issues of great importance to us, so long as we agree on the issue of greatest importance.

As my use of the first-person plural suggests, I'm one of those people. I grew up in a working-class union household in a neighborhood filled with working-class union households: That is to say, Democratic territory. Graduating from college and law school didn't change my core political convictions. If anything, it strengthened them. I probably disagree with a fairly large number of Boundless writers (and readers) on a fairly large number of issues.

I was reminded of this fact in the days following President Reagan's death. While my friends and colleagues waxed nostalgic about the Reagan years, I was acutely conscious of being the only person in the room who hadn't supported Reagan. (In fact, I voted against him.)

My voting patterns began to change in the late eighties as my position on abortion changed. Previously, I'd been your standard-issue "personally opposed to abortion, but . . ." voter. I gradually came to realize that if I honestly believed that abortion was the taking of an innocent human life then my willingness to support a right to this taking was both logically incoherent and morally indefensible.

What's more, I understood that abortion's impact transcended the purely personal realm and had public consequences: A society that not only countenanced abortion-on-demand but made it a fundamental right would not and could not stop at the killing of unborn children. Eventually, every vulnerable member of that society would be at risk, in what Pope John Paul II calls "the culture of death."

Thus, I realized a candidate's position on abortion had to figure into my voting decisions. But there was still the problem I described above: Many of the candidates I agreed with on abortion held objectionable positions on the other issues I cared about.

I wasn't alone. Around that time, I began to hear about what the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin called the "seamless web of life." What Bernardin meant was that issues such as abortion, capital punishment, nuclear disarmament and poverty all formed part of a "seamless" whole, that "whole" being a proper respect for the sanctity of human life. As Christians — specifically, in his and my case, as Catholics — we didn't get to "pick and choose" which one of these issues we would care about.

Unfortunately, being free to pick and choose is how the media and some other Christians have interpreted the idea. In a recent interview in BeliefNet, Tony Campolo — probably the best-known evangelical "progressive" — complained about how evangelicalism had been "hijacked" by the president's party. Campolo said that "Christians need to be considering other issues beside abortion" and, offered, as examples of "other issues," the most recent round of tax cuts and cuts in the "No Child Left Behind" program.

Of course, Christians need to consider issues besides abortion. And I also have misgivings about the tax cuts. Still, none of this justifies voting for a "pro-choice" candidate. Being alive, even if you're hungry and have a nuke pointed at your head, is infinitely preferable to being killed in utero. Even if you don't believe in the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death, you have to at least allow for the possibility that the hungry person with a nuke pointed at his head might eventually better his situation. The same can't be said about the aborted child.

And if you do believe in the sanctity of human life then denying that the right to life trumps everything else — even very good and important things like social and economic justice — is, to repeat myself, logically incoherent.

There's another problem at work here. A society that enshrines (the word fits particularly well in this context) the right to use private lethal violence against its weakest and most vulnerable members isn't only unjust in this regard, it's likely to be unjust pretty much across the board. The right to an abortion is based on a jurisprudence and an underlying worldview that denies the existence of a common good and holds personal autonomy and self-fulfillment as the highest goods.

If you think that a society based on these values can really care about the poor and oppressed you are sadly mistaken. One of the most frustrating things for this lifelong liberal — there, I said the "L" word — has been watching what I call the "great betrayal" whereby liberalism has come to mean defending the various lifestyles of the well-off instead of solicitude for the poor and working people who, in former President Clinton's words, "work hard and play by the rules."

The sad truth is that, as the liberal Christian group Sojourners' founder Jim Wallis recently wrote, "in America today one can't vote for a consistent ethic of life." While Christians might not be free to pick and choose which issues to care about, parties and candidates are. That doesn't make us free agents in the voting booth. On the contrary, it forces us to decide what's most important and vote accordingly. Nothing is more important than the sanctity of human life which is why, in the America aptly described by Wallis, I'm a single-issue voter.

Note that I say Issue, not party. While each of the two major parties is identified with a particular position regarding abortion, those identifications can be misleading. Arguably the most pro-life featured speaker at this year's GOP convention was a Democrat, Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia. The other featured speakers will nearly all be "pro-choice" as part of an effort to make abortion-rights supporters feel comfortable in the Republican party. Meanwhile, on the other side of aisle, there are pro-life Democrats running for office in at least 24 states.

That means that "single issue" voters like me can't assume anything when we walk into the voting booth. After all, when your decision rests on the answer to a single question, we can't afford to be wrong.