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

Perhaps you may should call abortion a Human Rights issue

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Except that would be inaccurate since we don't assign the rights of Personhood to pre-sentient cell masses.

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

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

That isn't a universal view. Some people assign the rights of personhood to a person at any stage of development, whether it's sentient or not.

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

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

If you can name a single jurisdiction that assigns legal and civil rights to the pre-born, I'd be interested in knowing that.

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

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

So that means 100% of people believe it?

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

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

People believe in all sorts of wack-ass shit, polling consistently shows that a solid 20% of the population will go along with anything from 9/11 being pre-planned by the W administration to faked moon landings.

It doesn't matter what some rube believes but instead it is the accumulated body of western law dating all the way back to the Code of Hammurabi that establishes rights for born, living humans.

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

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Then we're getting into the argument of whether the law grants rights or merely observes pre-existing ones, but if its the former, then it leaves unanswered the question of the basis for which rights are observed/not-observed, and that seems to be the foundation upon which the disagreement rests. At least, it's a position that insists that one basis is unassailable on the grounds that the basis is the status quo.

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

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

I'd need some evidence if someone wanted to argue the position that there's any kind of pre-existing rights.

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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Excepting felons on death row and soldiers in time of war.

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

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

I'm against those too.

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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

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

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

[russj.livejournal.com]

There was once a time when we did not grant personhood to people with different colored skin. (Well maybe 3/5 of a personhood.)

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

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Nice try, but that was solely for representation purposes in the House.

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

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

Wait, so you're saying that society /did/ consider slaves to be "people" in every other sense, outside of the representation census?

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

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

They were granted Personhood solely for determining representation in the House, not that they had 3/5's the rights of citizens.

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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, and the good Christian libertarians of that time wore the grey and fought under Lee, Bragg, and Taylor.

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

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

You continue to make unjustifiable connections. That the Christians of today resemble the Christians of that era, and that libertarians as a movement today resemble something that didn't exist then to something that doesn't even share intellectual roots with.

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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

On the contrary, having read all the works that rehabilitate the murderous backstabbing treacherous dicks who led the Confederacy's civil and military infrastructure I've noticed they are without a doubt libertarians who gloss over slavery and make Lincoln into proto-Hitler. This is not a statistical coincidence.

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

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Major history fail. Abolitionists were almost entirely Christian.

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

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Which would you say is more human: the mother or the fetus? You would take away a woman's right to control her own sexuality in order to force her to carry a fetus to term. That is a defrauding of a right, not enforcing one.

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

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

"Which would you say is more human: the mother or the fetus?"

This is an impossible question.

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

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

It may seem impossible to you, but I know of a wide range of humanity that also includes inhumanity.

Some rights trump other rights

[russj.livejournal.com]

Some rights are superior to other rights.

Human rights are superior to civil rights.
All people have human rights; only citizens have civil rights.

It is entirely reasonable to assert that the right to life trumps (the penumbra of) the right to privacy, from which the 'right to abort' comes from.

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

[op-tech-glitch.livejournal.com]

Oh, I dunno...Rick Perry seems to have those rights for some reason or other.

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

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Social Security is a ponzi scheme!!

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

[op-tech-glitch.livejournal.com]

I still think that hairpiece is actually a brain slug of some sort that maneuvers him around.