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

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

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

So, it wasn't that slaves deserved rights that were being denied them, it was out of the kindness and benevolence of the government that they let them in on the game at all.

You don't deserve something that's given or granted. Ergo, unless it's granted, it isn't deserved or to be expected.

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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Plenty of fine upstanding Northerners of the Civil War and all white Southerners would have agreed with this proposition. It was blacks who demanded rights and the ability to wear the Blue that gained their freedom, and all of Latin America save Haiti emancipated slaves without killing over half a million people to do that.

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

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Which part? I'm portraying two views of the nature of rights. Which one are you postulating were held by white southerners and 'upstanding' northerners?

I'm never sure whether you're agreeing with me or disagreeing.

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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That blacks weren't human beings and their rights were not worth protecting. Horatio Seymour, Clement Vallandigham, and Alexander Stephens all agreed that slavery was God-ordained and abolition sought to make equal what the Almighty made unequal.

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

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

And there were those who made the argument that it was self-evident that blacks were no less human than whites. A self-evident basis for a rights based argument is, to my eye, another way of stating that a right is pre-existing, based not on permission but on the observation of what already is true.

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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

All of whom were black and derided in their own time. No white abolitionists thought this.

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

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

So you're saying that if I google for a few minutes, it won't turn up anyone of that description, like say Theodore Weld or James Gillespie Birney. (http://books.google.com/books?id=CgC4WdHv7K0C&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82&dq=James+Gillespie+Birney+%22Natural+Law%22&source=bl&ots=JJbKEfyTYV&sig=5WuK0NyA43eAZsnJLUSiY2-HXRE&hl=en&ei=jjFgTqPON4u2twfm7rQb&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=James%20Gillespie%20Birney%20%22Natural%20Law%22&f=false) So I should just save my time and my breath.

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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, I am indeed saying that. White abolitionists to a man believed in white supremacy, most of them in fact wanted to free slaves to ship them all to Africa.

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

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Unless there is an official manifesto for an organization all white abolitionists belonged to it's impossible to make the claim that to a man they were all white supremacists then your claim remains ridiculous. A statement in these circumstances that allows for zero variation in thought of a large number of people is flawed on the face of it.

Next time, just read the link.

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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, this particular notion is not at all implausible if one has read the source material and is familiar with what they actually argued as opposed to what people 150 years later pretended they argued. The only abolitionists to argue for full equality of white and black were black abolitionists. Even John Brown didn't want full equality, nor did William Lloyd Garrison who made the idiot damn fool statement that slavery and race had nothing to do with each other in the middle of a war all about race.

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

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

"A statement in these circumstances that allows for zero variation in thought of a large number of people is flawed on the face of it."

And here you run into the consistent and oft-used fallacy in Underlankers' arguments. -.- He likes being able to put people in boxes, I think.

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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No more than anyone else. I'm just blunt about it. I don't post one-liners accusing other people of illiteracy and never explaining what literacy looks like despite being asked to do so. I go into entire paragraphs about why people who disagree with me are both wrong and morally defective.

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

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

The thoroughness of your arguments has nothing to do with the fallacy of assuming that everyone in a given group is exactly the same.

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

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

And it's no less fallacious when others do it as when you do. That you do so knowing how fallacious it is apparently, takes it to another level. One can excuse a fool for being blind to the plank in his own eye, but to the one who is aware of it and persists anyway? That's more insidious.