The Irreligious Left.

Very interesting, if brief, Weekly Standard article about a recent study finding that (quelle surprise!) the Democratic Party has become the party of unbelief. The study offers valuable statistics about the power of this unreported voting bloc:

"As secularists have grown more numerous, they have become an important Democratic voting bloc. In 1992, three out of four voted for Clinton, while religious conservatives chose Bush by two to one. Today, say Bolce and De Maio, secularists are as large and loyal a Democratic constituency as organized labor: In 2000, both 'comprised about 16 percent of the white electorate, and both backed Gore with two-thirds of their votes.'

Another striking finding is the intensity of many secularists' dislike of conservative Christians--vastly greater than any dislike of Jews or Catholics discernible in the survey data from the University of Michigan that the authors analyze. 'One has to reach back to pre-New Deal America,' they write, 'when political divisions between Catholics and Protestants encapsulated local ethno-cultural cleavages over prohibition, immigration, public education, and blue laws, to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group.'"

Also noteworthy is the media blackout on this phenomenon:

"The New York Times and Washington Post ran 682 stories about the GOP and evangelical or fundamentalist Christians between 1990 and 2000. During the same period, they ran 43 stories identifying secularists with the Democratic party."

But there's no media bias or anything. That's just conservative paranoia.