Moral Values
Silver lining department: Everybody is saying that the religious right and “moral values” won the election for Bush and now he owes them all his Supreme Court appointments, and a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to boot. Good. Let them think that.
If he does it, and Roe v. Wade is overturned, that could well work to our electoral advantage. We Democrats have paid a huge price for Roe. It peeled off 4-5% of the vote from one of our strongest constituencies—Catholics—and allowed the conservatives to claim the moral high ground. (They can wax eloquent about the “unborn,” but don’t seem to care much for the “born.”) If he doesn’t do it, even after controlling Congress and packing the Court, the religious right can’t help but be somewhat de-energized and deflated.
Besides, conservatives actually have a point. Abortion should have been argued and debated publicly, and, at some point, people who had actually been elected to office should have voted on it. If Roe is overturned, we will have that public discussion in the state legislatures, and conservatives will discover that most people want abortion to be, as Bill Clinton put it, “safe, legal, and rare.” (The number of abortions declined every year of Clinton’s presidency, and has risen every year in Bush’s.)
On the principle of “if you could pick your enemies,” we could hardly do better than to have the religious right as our opponents. Sure, they’re a big voting block—about a third—but the other two-thirds can’t stand them. They were strong enough to get Clinton impeached, but not strong enough to remove him from office. (A good portion of Clinton’s high level of public support was reaction against his opponents. They didn’t like him particularly, but they thought his opponents were nuts.)
This is why the Bush campaign kept conservative evangelical efforts somewhat out of sight. Most of the religious right organizing was done “under the radar” through mailings, the internet, and person-to-person contact. Five days before the election, for example, I received a CD from some outfit in Colorado Springs titled: “Faith in the White House.” If I got one, they must have been sending them out to everybody.
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I'm skittish about the revocation of rights once granted, so I'm in no rush to see Roe repealed. But you make an important point I want to hijack momentarily for the argument of my blog:
If Roe is overturned, we will have that public discussion in the state legislatures, and conservatives will discover that most people want abortion to be, as Bill Clinton put it, “safe, legal, and rare.” (The number of abortions declined every year of Clinton’s presidency, and has risen every year in Bush’s.)
If we can get beyond dueling "group rights" -- in this case, Christians and Women, as if they don't (a) overlap and (b) have internal disagreements -- we can make an argument that Democratic policies create results that these folks would embrace. That's a politics of policy, not identity.
It won't get the hard-core ideologues, but it provides others reasons to peel away.
Back to you ...
June 10, 2005 11:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with abortion rights also, but also believe that Roe short-circuited the political process, and full-fledged public debate, that would have given abortion rights greater legitimacy in the eyes of the public. If Bush gets to appoint a Supreme Court justice to replace O'Connor or Stevens--highly likely--then Roe is probably doomed.
I say "probably" because the Republicans really don't want abortion off the table. The Catholic vote they've managed to peel off based on abortion might go back Democratic. Plus, they would lose the single biggest issue that energizes the religious right.
Most of the blue states will probably legalize abortion anyway, leaving the red states to deal with the back-alley crowd. (In effect, that's what's going on right now.)
You and I know that Bush's policies increase abortions, and Clinton's policies decreased them, but that argument won't work with the righteous crowd. The Democrats are the spawn of Satan, dontcha know.
June 11, 2005 9:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is it a moral value to accept money from pornographers and have dinner with them? I wonder how all those bible belt GOP voters feel about Bush dining with Mary Cary?
June 11, 2005 11:39 AM | Reply | Permalink