In spite of the nearly unprecedented velocity of change in American attitudes on the legality and acceptance of same-sex marriage, according to the Gallup Poll — from 68 percent-27 percent opposition during the Bill Clinton years to 53 percent-46 support after Barack Obama's re-election (a swing of 48 percent of the population in favor of same-sex marriage in just 16 years) — American voters have not undergone a mass conversion to liberalism on the so-called "social issues. "
You want evidence for that assertion? Consider the following: Twenty years ago, when Americans were asked, "In general, do you feel that laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, less strict or kept as they are now?" a full 70 percent of respondents in 1993 supported "more strict " gun laws, and just 24 percent opted for no changes in the existing gun laws.
With only impermanent spikes in support after mass shootings following Columbine and Tucson, public backing for "more strict" gun control has dropped during the Obama presidency to an average of 44 percent (until a 14 point jump following the slaughter of the innocents in Newtown) endorsing tougher gun laws.
Over the last generation, Americans, always unpredictable, can be said to have moved dramatically to the left on gays and steadily to the right on guns.
But what about abortion? No liberal groundswell on this relentlessly divisive issue, either. When asked, "With respect to the abortion issue, would you consider yourself to be 'pro-choice' or 'pro-life'?" just 44 percent of Americans on average during the Obama years have described themselves as "pro-choice" to Gallup, while 48 percent chose the "pro-life" label. This represents a consistent drop in the "pro-choice" number from that found during the George W. Bush White House years.
When asked, irrespective of their attitudes on the legality of abortion, whether they personally "believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong, " the split in 2004 when the strongly pro-life George W.
Bush was re-elected was 50 percent "morally wrong " and 40 percent "morally acceptable."
By 2012, when the strongly pro-choice Barack Obama was winning re-election, the results were basically unchanged — 51 percent "morally wrong " and 38 percent "morally acceptable."
Why, some 40 years after the milestone Roe v. Wade case that legalized the medical procedure nationwide, does abortion remain an open wound in the body politic? Obviously, because of the unresolved (maybe unresolvable) debate over the legal and philosophical status of the pre-born.
Is its value determined only by the subjective opinion of the woman who is carrying him or her? No happy mother-to-be has ever joyfully announced: "Congratulate me! We're having a fetus." That fetus, with her own heartbeat, represents either life or potential life.
And what about the competing rights of the pregnant woman? Do the circumstances of her impregnation not endow her with greater rights than the potential son or daughter growing within her?
Whatever the answers to these and all the other painful questions surrounding pregnancy and birth, we do know that an abortion is not anything like, as some have argued, an appendectomy. A mass of protoplasm does not have its own unique DNA. We also know that Americans have no intention of arresting and convicting any woman who, after consulting her conscience, her confessor and her physician, chooses to abort.
On abortion, Americans in practice remain simultaneously pro-choice and anti-abortion. On the issue of same-sex marriage, Americans are accepting and even welcoming. This must be shaped by the report from the December Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll that 65 percent of Americans "personally know or work with someone who is gay or lesbian."
In that same survey, 51 percent overall favored allowing same-sex marriages and 40 percent opposed. But among those with a family member who is gay or lesbian (read, Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman), 64 percent back same-sex marriage, and just 27 percent do not.
However you analyze it, same-sex marriage and abortion are totally different questions.
To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
COPYRIGHT 2013 MARK SHIELDS
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4 Comments | Post Comment
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Sir;... You are seeing the power of PR in the names people choose... Who is not for rights... Who is against life???
If you can control the vocabulary, you can control the argument... It is in the results that people find offense, and no one wants to be shot, and no one want to be responsible for a back alley butcher abortion...
Volatire said: If you would dispute with me, define your terms... How often do we ask for a definition of terms because they are most often argments in themselves... We have all had conversations over the meaning of moral terms where people have run to a Websters looking for an authority on morality... If a grown person has to go to a dictionary for a definition of love, they have never been in it...Nor have they born love as the obligation of caring for one little able to return the sacrifice...
The pro life people win the superficial argument; but they do not win the hard game... I am pro life, but more than that, I am pro rights, and we must admit that our rights flow out of our individual being and not out of the actions of government... Those people who use privilages granted out of the rights of individuals, and do so in order to attack the rights of individuals while maintaining that their rights are God given are living in another universe completely... They are cutting of the moral branch of individual rights upon which their privilages stand... Why was it necessary for the people in their constitution to grant freedom of religion if it was not their rights also to deny the same??? So when they attack rights, the right to love and marriage, the right to equal treatment under the law, the right to privacy, and if necessary, treatment of an unwanted condition, then they attack their own privilage to organize and believe and preach as they see fit with respect and with a tax deferment in addition...
If churches do not do charity, but bend all their efforts to attack individual rights, the churches have lost their privilages...If the people become pro-rights; they will attack all privilage which is forcing hard decisions upon people and government alike... The privilages we have so long sacrificed for are destroying our liberty as they have long destroyed justice...
While I can understand the fear of the people in regard to a government so in the power of the churches and banks; guns are as useless against it as a fly swatter against a goose... Yet; by turning their backs on their government the people might have a new one tomorrow without the least need of violence... In fact; more and more people are turning against government simply because they must go to such extremes to have basic equal rights and opportunities... If anyone finds they are making a stand for rights they are in fact making a stand against privilage, and that it the true nature of their cause...
Violence is not the solution, and it is a part of the problem; but look at the issue and you will see a people afraid of their neighbors, afraid of losing all they have, afraid of the inability to make a stand... When it comes down to it; they will sell out, and join the ranks of the poor because morality demands it, and as all people everywhere, our true government is our morality...
Thanks...Sweeney
Comment: #1
Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Fri Mar 29, 2013 8:08 AM
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Sir;... Abortion and same sex marriage are not in the least different questions; but the same question: Is it out of individual rights that people grant government its power, and out of individual rights that privilages are granted by government such as the privilages of religion and property???...
These privilages are neither necessary or equal as all other rights are... They can be maintained even in the face of obvious injury to individuals usually with the excuse of some greater good; but that greater good is specious... Sir, even the issue of gun rights is the same; whether it it the people who have rights that are powers; or whether churches, or property, or government have these powers as things in themselves...
Even the most cursery examination will reveal that governments are created by people for good, and to achieve and defend rights, and that good is freedom as a general virtue that makes all other virtue possible, and that freedom as good cannot be limited until its practice reaches the point of injury; and this cannot be said of the privlages granted constitutionally since they cannot be limited except constitutionally -where they people are at a disadvantage... The churches are in the wrong here as are the banks and businesses; but the people are forced to accomodate them and endure their injury, or else over throw the government that allows that injury to continue...
Thanks....Sweeney
Comment: #2
Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Fri Mar 29, 2013 8:22 AM
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Mark, Great article. I was surprised to see USA is moving right on guns. Has the question of gun safety been properly asked? My favorite memories of my Dad are weekend hunting trips. But we never used AR15s to shoot rabbits and quail. And it was no hassle to fill out a form before buying my rifle. As for abortion, I've never quite understood why it is the same people who are opposed to abortion that want bigger personally owned guns, fewer seat belts and helmets, and always more wars.
Comment: #3
Posted by: Mike Ohr
Sun Mar 31, 2013 6:13 AM
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Re: Mike Ohr... The simple explanation is that the gun fanatics are an endangered species... Social living demands that we deny, or at minimum control our desire to kill our fellow human beings while the gun people anticipate with joy the legal opportunity to do so...
Insane women, or at least, women insane in that particular direction are rare indeed... Without some means to compel women to bear their children they will go extinct... What woman could say with pride that she just gave birth to a future meat eating, gun totin, beer drinking, futball watching, fartin in public, church going, obsessed with violence -maniac???
You have to wonder how drunk or without alternatives a woman might have to be to end up with one of those sorts of men, and I here use the term -men- loosely... I have lived on the edge of brutality for most of my life, and it is the first situation people with any sense escape...Some people have no sense... They have been given the answers most of their lives, and don't know how to think for themselves...For example; One may easily consider government as the means by which we can have the larger conversation, resolve our differences, achieve a measure of justice, and bring good into our futures as we banish discord... Others consider the government as the means to deny rights, and reduce other people to the same mean persective they share with their fellows...
It don't matter how much they loved that woman; the brutality they experience as life they give back to life, to wives, sons, daughters- indescriminantly... Preparing for a break in, or preparing for armageddon takes the same attention to detail... It is remarkable to what lengths they will go to defend what they have when they have so little...Once they have accepted the conception of government existing to deny rights rather than to defend rights they have made it useless as a device designed to make all good things possible...
Existentially, if any one of them should pull away at the veil of meaning that covers all they do, and ask after the point of it, they would at once be considered a madman, or a criminal...The meaning they find is a collective hallucination...
When you have worked through the brutality of your life to the end, and you have found your place in the grave; then the only source of meaning you have is the brutal people you left behind to live in turn their brutal pointless lives...It is not unusual that such people would have to conspire and collude to get their women to breed... I think it is strange that more of them cannot see the pale death lurking behind the gauze of meaning, and turn their weapons on themselves... Perhaps they hope another generation will find the sense of it all that has eluded them, the American Dream, the unfilled promise... If they accept less from life than life demands of them, and demand that others accept less, it is because they know in their souls what meaness they are possessed of, and they have reconciled with the unfairness of life...
One thing is certain: If their women were happy with them, and happy with their lives they would not have to be forced to have children... But they are not happy, and what sort of woman would be; and so they need to be compelled...Most of America is no place for a sensitive spirit to reside, even if it is certain that most people are born that way...
There is a point where the happiness goes out of a society along with the hope and promise of a better future, and then by common consent, people just die out... It happened with the Greeks and Romans and it is happening with us, and those who think to stem the progress of this national disease with their guns and laws really do not get what is going on...
Thanks... Sweeney
Comment: #4
Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Mon Apr 1, 2013 5:06 AM
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