talkpolitics | Trends

An interesting finding in recent polling on social issues. I'll let this piece give the details:

Americans are now evenly split on same-sex marriage: 47 percent support marriage rights for gays and lesbians, and 47 percent oppose them. That stalemate won't last long—critics of gay unions are dying off. According to a new report from the Public Religion Research Institute, only 31 percent of Americans over age 65 support gays getting hitched, compared to 62 percent of Americans under 30.

But strong millennial support for gay marriage has not translated into an uptick in acceptance of other sexual freedoms, like the right to an abortion. The Public Religion Research Institute notes that popular support for keeping abortion legal has dipped a percentage point since 1999, and young Americans are not swelling the ranks of abortion rights supporters. Today, while 57 percent of people under 30 see gay sex as "morally acceptable," only 46 percent of them would say the same thing about having an abortion.

The institute calls this a "decoupling of attitudes." Support for same-sex marriage and abortion rights have traditionally gone hand-in-hand, and that's changing. Though young people today are "more educated, more liberal, and more likely to be religiously unaffiliated" than their parents—all factors traditionally correlated with support of abortion rights—they are not actually more likely to support abortion.

The article goes on to give some reasons as to why this decoupling is occurring, but I believe the issue is much more simple than that - gay marriage, as it is, has been a reality for millennials (folks ages 19-29) for most of their politically/socially aware lives now, and they see quite clearly how the issue really doesn't matter - gay people getting married doesn't impact their straight marriages, or their lives at all, really. There's no harm involved. The difference with abortion is that the harm involved remains self-evident - at the end of the day, we know how many abortions occur, and such "decoupling," as it were, likely reflects that difference. I also speculate that many do not see the abortion issue as one of "rights," but rather one of life. That those who self-identify as pro-life remains competitive ideologically with those who self-identify as pro-choice for the first time in a while may be a sign of that.

Why do you think these issues are separating? Should they truly be falling under the same social umbrella? What am I missing here?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Good for you. The ones who bomb abortion clinics by virtue of taking the ideology very seriously indeed do not.

What are the statistics on those anyway? I don't exactly find many other bombers in my pro-life clique.

They aren't very numerous, terrorists never are. They, like all extremists with moderate fellow-travelers are never denounced by said fellow-travelers.

Then there are always those who like to play up their significance for their own ends or to justify their own beliefs, of course, like the last administration, and a few others whose notoriety only extends to LJ discussions...

Of course there are those as well. John Brown was one.

"They, like all extremists with moderate fellow-travelers are never denounced by said fellow-travelers."

I'm going to take the liberty of calling complete bullshit on this.

Just browse any thread where Right-Wingers are shown Right-wing extremism and they excuse or the threads where Lefties claim the USSR never did anything wrong in the history of ever. It's a human trait.

Not all pro-lifers are right-wing, or even conservative.

Just because those vocal, extreme conservatives apologize for terrorist behavior doesn't mean all conservatives do.

Seriously though why am I taking this line of logic with you. It's like beating my head on a wall. >.>

Just the ones convinced enough about it to gun people down in cold blood and bomb buildings with intent to kill and maim.

that's half a sentence.

That's a full sentence in response to the first, a response that invalidates the rest of your comment.

In response to which one, my assertion that not all pro-lifers are right-wingers or conservatives?

Yes, that one. None of the atheist leftists pro-lifers gun down people in cold blood in churches. Only the representatives of Christ's love, mercy, and grace in defense of the unborn do.

So in other words, there are some crazies.

What's the overall significance of this again? (It's getting harder to keep track of this conversation, even looking at the whole thread...)

Simple: moderate Christians, the ones that admire the ones financing death camps but would never do so themselves, do not condemn Christians who set up death camps and give money in other countries to do that but devote time to criticizing random individual Muslims as existential threats to a Western civilization that made it through both world wars and the Cold War.

Yes, SOME Christians are like that. Good job.

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Re: Perhaps you may should call abortion a Human Rights issue

Re: Perhaps you may should call abortion a Human Rights issue

Re: Perhaps you may should call abortion a Human Rights issue

Re: Perhaps you may should call abortion a Human Rights issue