Catholics share the same views as non-Catholics on the choice and stem cell issues. This isn't a surprise to most mainstream Catholics.
The leaders of the Catholic Church are hypocrites. They always welcomed the war-mongering, death penalty supporting George Bush with open arms. But, some are giving Notre Dame a hard time for inviting Obama. But, Obama shares the views of mainstream Catholics, not the same leaders who protected pedophiles for decades.
From Gallup:
The argument of those who protest the extension of the invitation to Obama is that Catholics have a distinctly conservative position on these moral issues. That is certainly the case as far as official church doctrine is concerned, but not when it comes to average American Catholics. The new Gallup analysis, based on aggregated data from Gallup's 2006-2008 Values and Beliefs surveys, indicates that Catholics in the United States today are actually more liberal than the non-Catholic population on a number of moral issues, and on others, Catholics have generally the same attitudes.
The accompanying chart shows the percentage of Catholics and non-Catholics who find each of nine moral issues morally acceptable. Catholics are at least slightly more liberal than non-Catholics on the issues of gambling (an issue to which the Catholic church is not totally opposed), sex between an unmarried man and woman, homosexual relations, and having a baby out of wedlock. Catholics are essentially tied with non-Catholics on the moral acceptability of abortion, divorce, and stem-cell research using human embryos. Only on the death penalty are Catholics slightly less likely than non-Catholics to find the issue morally acceptable.
This also means the traditional media should never book that bloviating imbecile Bill Donohue, also a homophobe and racist, to speak for Catholics. He doesn't. He's the one out of the mainstream.
