A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on August 25th, 2008 in Progressive Faith

In response to Pastor Dan’s post about Jim Wallis‘ response to the response to his crowing over fuzzing up the pro-choice plank in the Democratic platform, I ran across this misleading statement:

Whatever your or Jim Wallis‘ personal positions are on abortion, the fact remains, and will always remain, that abortion policy is a highly controversial moral gray area on which Americans, including women and progressives, will always disagree. As Pew research polls have always shown, only a very small minority of people, including women, believe that abortion is a morally correct choice for any woman– just 12% in this 2006 Pew survey.

Link to Pew research.

If you read this comment, it would lead you to believe that only twelve percent of people can think of any reason why any woman could come up with a defensible reason to have an abortion. You’d be wrong. Pew actually found that twelve percent think abortion is morally acceptable no matter what. That’s a much different position, don’t you think?

Another eleven percent said that it “depends on circumstances” as to whether abortion was moral or not. If you’re keeping track, that means a total of twenty-three percent disagree with the extreme view that no abortions are acceptable. A whopping twenty-three percent said that abortion is simply not a moral issue whatsoever. It isn’t moral, it isn’t immoral – it is ammoral, living outside the boundaries of moral decisions. So that’s 46% who disagree with the extreme illegal position.

To be fair, the 52% who said that abortion is morally wrong are a majority – but it is a small majority and well within the margin of error. That doesn’t make it less statistically significant, but it gives it political doubt.

Especially when the Pew poll found that 43% of Democrats and 43% of Independents think abortion is morally wrong. I find that hard to believe. The poll is also two years old.

A more recent poll found that an identical 17% think abortion should be either always legal or always illegal. When shading their gray area, Americans are nine points more likely to err on the side of caution – 35% say most abortions should be legal compared to 26% who say it should be mostly illegal.

To totally refute the ignoramus at Street Prophets (the commenter):

The poll finds that a majority (52%) of Americans express support for legalized abortion in most (35%) or all (17%) cases, while 43% oppose legalized abortion in most (26%) or all (17%) circumstances. These findings are consistent with the results from other surveys over the past few years.

Again, a 2% nudge over the majority mark isn’t huge. But it is a nine point margin over those who oppose abortion.

Politically, only Conservative Republicans have an internal majority position against abortion. Moderate Republicans come down in favor of legalized abortion 54-42. Independents come down in favor of legalized abortion 54-40. Conservative Dems favor legalized abortion 58-37. And 85% of liberal Dems favor legalized abortion.

Evangelical Protestants are the only religious group to have a majority against legalized abortion.

I can’t, for the life of me, understand why anyone interested in building a winning political coalition would want to abandon the position that the majority of Americans favor.

And, while I’m on the topic, I don’t think the actual change in the platform does anything at all. It is simply a slightly more long-winded explanation of the party’s position – and platforms are made to be long-winded. What I object to is people like Wallis and the SP commenter crowing about how we need to change somehow. That hard core of 26% or so conservative Evangelicals are not going to even consider switching so long as anything other than a total ban is being discussed. This is what has boxed the Republican Party into a corner so effectively – that’s a majority of their partisans.

Democrats should be willing to compromise on policy specifics, but not on core values. We shouldn’t be running around blowing smoke about some great change that isn’t. We surely shouldn’t be spinning statistics to support the radical right-wing point of view. I am glad to see that Democrats across the board have a diverse opinion on abortion – diversity, by definition, defeats extremism. But the idea of choice is that people should be able to make a choice – and then they should be able to live with the consequences either way it goes. As caring and compassionate people, we should be open and available to help people come to grips with those consequences, because if one thing is certain, it is that people will always have problems.

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