Trends

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

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?

Comments

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

I'm saying that public opinion and legal status-quo is a poor foundation to form an argument around.

As I've said, the sentience argument as well as viability, survivability, and the level of development, as well as any other measure by which others have tried to argue the line of personhood exists, is not relevant from the pro-life side. It's existence. Both the woman, and the fetus exist as observable physical beings with separate genetic identities. That's it. Every other attempt to argue personhood rather than existence is as arbitrary as skin color.

If you doubt this, then how is it that there is some rather significant division even on the pro-choice side when it comes to deciding what should determine personhood and when rights should be granted? I know from personal experience that the line is drawn differently every time I engage in such discussions. Rights from that perspective seem to exist on a sliding scale, of sorts.

[curseangel.livejournal.com]

IMO, the significant division between "person" and "not person" is, um, you've gotta be born. Excuse me for being a little brusque here, but I simply can't get through the argument that women's rights should be trampled until they no longer exist over a parasitic organism that cannot survive if removed from the woman's body. It's not a person at that point. It isn't sentient, it lives as a parasite, etc... no, that's not a person. In my opinion and that of nearly every other pro-choicer I know (which is a lot, as I refuse to associate with anti-choicers), a fetus becomes a person when it is born. Until then, it doesn't get rights.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

I can't say your experience matches my own. And I do occasionally enter into discussions with the 'other side' so to speak because it helps me strengthen my own thoughts on issues.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

You're right, else we would not have had a Civil War in the first place and would have become the Domination of Draka.