I am a white Protestant American male, who lives in and is native to Western Pennsylvania. I belong to an evangelical, Presbyterian church. I have a Ph.D. in American history. I am a husband and father of three. And I write this, on a rainy post-election Thursday, to try, as one bewildered aide to John Kerry put it on election night, to "connect" with any Democrats who may still be listening.

		Eric Miller is an assistant professor of American history at Geneva College, where he also directs the Humanities program.

I voted for George W. Bush on Tuesday. As I left the house with my 9-year-old son that afternoon, I told my wife that I was about to cast the "sorriest vote of my life." I am not a Republican; I did not vote Republican in the last presidential election. Twenty years ago as a college freshman, I traipsed across a cornfield to a little elementary school and scored one tiny but ardent vote for the Gipper. But that was a long time ago, believe me. The decision-making two decades later was tedious and tortured right to the end. I knew full well, as I was driving down the hill to vote, that I had no confidence in the ability of the GOP to, in that enduring phrase, "get America going again."

While the young African-American woman working the table at the polling place joked around with my son, I knew that I was about to vote for a party that, whatever its rhetoric, has not distinguished itself on many of the concerns she and her family likely have. I did not enter (or exit) the booth smiling.

The next day the mood was low at the college where I teach, at least among the faculty; many were Kerry supporters, and, more to the point, Bush despisers. As we soaked in the day together, it hit me hard that I, like them, would have preferred (if often not by much) to see a Kerry administration taking the lead on many pivotal issues: race relations, the economy, environmental policy, the deficit, the war, health care, Iraq.

But I could not vote for your side, not this time. And that makes me, in what passes for political parlance in our country, a "moral values" voter, one of the stealth evangelicals who came out of nowhere to turn the election upside down.

A phalanx of strategists, pollsters, social scientists and politicians will be trying to figure out people like me between now and 2008. But it might accomplish just as much if you'll allow me a moment to speak not as an object of "analysis" but as a fellow citizen, maybe even a neighbor.

If you will kindly listen, perhaps my testimony will be of some use.

I believe that all of life finds its source in the divine, and is sustained by the grace of a God who finds pleasure in our guarding and nurturing of this world, his world. He has filled the Earth with gifts beyond our capacity to imagine, gifts that merit our joyous, careful gratitude. Among these gifts are our very lives, and with them our individual and collective ability to respond freely to him and his world. We, his creatures, are free to make choices. But not all of our choices are equal; neither, within the structures of reality, may all choices be sanctioned, let alone celebrated.

Herein lies the heart of my quarrel with the Democratic Party. In the vast arena symbolized by the single word "abortion," your party is not only permitting a category of choice that humans must not sanction, it is intent on enlarging that sphere to permit a kind of experimentation that will only further diminish our experience of being human. To be complicit in such conduct is not just to despise the gifts of the creator. It is to despise him.

"Abortion" and its accompanying cluster of concerns, to put it differently, are not "issues" to me. They are practices, practices whose effects are far from "private." As public and social acts that have to do with the treatment and definition of human life in its most elemental, unprotected forms, they demand the most careful evaluation and judgment of the body politic in whose midst they are taking place.

Such moral and philosophic deliberation lies at the heart of democracy, and of democratic freedom itself, as I understand it. But the Democratic Party has committed itself to stifling any form of deliberation on these matters. We Pennsylvanians know this better than some. When the party rigidly denied our pro-life Democratic governor Robert Casey the opportunity to address these concerns at its 1992 convention, it shut down the very conversation that might have retained many old friends and brought new ones into your midst, including people like me.

You may of course find the perspective I've limned to be beyond embrace. I am no "progressive," to be sure. I do not believe that in the big scheme of things one of the two parties represents the "good guys" and the other the "bad guys." The world is what it is: ever in need of justice and the incarnation of goodness. You, Democrats, have much to offer in helping us to pursue these high ends. You would have much more to offer, I believe, if you took a few steps this way.