Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Using faith for political ends

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I’ve written a couple posts now on the dangers of what I’ve called “theologized politics,” which may be briefly defined as the appropriation of religion and religious believers by political parties as tools to be used to achieve political ends (chiefly, winning elections).  A good illustration of this would be recent Democratic efforts to draw religious (primarily Christian) voters away from the Republican party. Most such efforts have been rooted in the work of George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at the University of California-Berkeley, and particularly his book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think.

In Dr. Lakoff’s view, the reason for the political success conservatives had been having through 2004 lay not in conservative ideas and policies but rather in conservative manipulation of language. As he put it,

Conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing.

Dr. Lakoff’s response was to found a think tank of his own, the Rockridge Institute. The purpose of this think tank, as he described it, is “to reframe public debate, to create balance from a progressive perspective,” by asking, “What are the central ideas of progressive thought from a moral perspective?”

Dr. Lakoff first published his book in 1997, but his ideas really began to catch on following the 2004 presidential election. Ellen Goodman’s column of November 7, 2004 in the Boston Globe, which explicitly cites his work, provides one example:

This is the time for the losers to go back to basics, to restate their views into a basic simple, straightforward language of values and morals. It’s the time to parse what we believe in. Especially right and wrong.

The title of Goodman’s column, “Taking back ‘values’,” makes the point clear: following Dr. Lakoff, the issue wasn’t Democratic policies, but only the language in which they were presented. Explain to Republican voters that poverty is a moral-values issue, and raising taxes is a moral-values issue, and so on, and they’ll vote Democratic instead. This is the assumption on which the Democrats have been working ever since; thus for instance we have Howard Dean’s complaint that pollsters “have largely missed the story [in the 2008 primaries] because they’re using an outdated script, which leaves the impression that religion and faith matter only to Republicans . . . this bias . . . has in turn shaped news coverage, making it appear that one party has a monopoly on religion in this race.”

There is much that could be said in response to and assessment of this approach; for starters, Dean was certainly correct to point out that there are a lot of Christians in this country who vote Democrat, even if this fact does seem to elude most members of the American media. For present purposes, however, the most important point to note is that this is yet another instance of theologizing politics. Rather than subjecting political positions and platforms to theological scrutiny, this approach seeks to take existing positions and apply a veneer of religious language; rather than reflecting on them theologically and seeking to evaluate them accordingly, it assumes a positive evaluation and simply presents them as positions supported by Christian teaching.

Now, this should not be taken as a partisan criticism, for this is not something of which Democrats alone are guilty. Indeed, Dr. Lakoff has at least this much right: the Democratic Party came late to the game on this one. For all the biblical language used in Republican rhetoric, and for all the identification of American evangelicals with the Republican Party, there’s really very little in the way of meaningful theological engagement with much of the party platform. Some issues, certainly, are grounded in biblical and theological statements (most notably abortion), but the argument at these points tends to be issue-specific, not part of any coherent whole with the rest of the platform; on issues such as tax policy or immigration policy, there has been a strong tendency among evangelical Republicans to baptize conservative positions as the properly Christian thing to believe without really evaluating them.

This set the stage for the Obama backlash among a certain subset of self-identified evangelicals in the 2008 election. He didn’t actually gain many evangelical votes, but the ones he did attract tended to be very loud; he also managed to appear sufficiently unthreatening that many other evangelicals felt it safe to indulge their displeasure with John McCain and stay home instead of voting.  Among both groups, there was the sense that the Republican Party has been happy in years past to pay lip service to evangelical concerns in order to raise money and turnout, but has done little or nothing to actually address those concerns in a meaningful way; party leaders haven’t taken voters’ faith seriously, but have only seen it as something to be used and manipulated to their own ends.  This sense has been growing stronger for some time, and in 2006 and 2008, it manifested in voter defections that returned the Democratic Party to power.

In my view, that sense is entirely fair, and entirely unsurprising.  The thing about theologized politics is that it essentially amounts to the subversion of faith for political ends, leaving the political platform—and party—in the dominant position; religious folk are welcomed at the fundraising counter and the volunteer meeting, but when it comes to the actual making of policy we’re expected to just shut up and soldier.  This is what evangelicals found with the GOP—which is why so many of us are backing away from the party, even if we’re just as conservative as we ever were (or maybe especially so, since the party definitely isn’t)—and it’s what those who bought the rhetoric and voted for the candidate of Hopeychangeyness are now finding with the Democrats as well.  It is, after all, in the nature of political parties to use whatever they can with as little return commitment as they can; anything freely offered will be freely taken, with no sense of reciprocal obligation.

As a matter both of faithful Christian discipleship and of intelligent political engagement, then—and make no mistake about it, the former requires the latter—the critical need at this time is for Christians in America to break out of this pattern and assert a new model for the interaction between faith and politics; and to do that, we must begin with ourselves.  We must begin, as I wrote last time,

to break ourselves of the habit of using the language of Christian faith to support what we have already decided we believe, and to teach ourselves instead to use our faith to critique our politics, and ultimately to rebuild our political convictions on the ground of our faith.

And on that ground and no other we must assert ourselves in the political life of this nation, not as docile sheep to be shorn for the advancement of the agendas and ambitions of politicians and parties, but as independent agents for the glory of God and the advancement of the work of his kingdom.

Getting Trek right from the beginning

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Sara and I finally got the chance to go see the new Star Trek last night, thanks to a couple in the church who took our kids for the evening (and a wonderful time was had by all, too; we have some great folks in this congregation), and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.  In reinventing Trek, J. J. Abrams and his writers managed to make it what it should have been; they did an amazing job of keeping the characters true to themselves while justifying the reinvention of the series through the story they told.  In a way, the plot exists to explain and validate the creation of a whole new version of the same crew, and it succeeds fully in that.  Of course, that’s an ulterior purpose; The Phantom Menace succeeded in its ulterior purpose, too, but failed dismally as an actual movie.  Star Trek, by contrast, is a smashing success.

I’ve read some complaints about the plot being full of holes and overly dependent on coincidence, but I don’t agree; by and large, I’d say that the necessary coincidences arise logically out of the agency of the plot.  The one ringing exception to that is the coincidence of Montgomery Scott’s introduction into the movie, which is implausible to the point of indefensibility; I’m not sure it quite rises (or sinks, if you prefer) to the level of deus ex machina, but it’s pretty close.  For the rest, though—sure, there are coincidences, but they’re reasonable consequences of past events, and as McAndrew would say, “The laws of probability not only permit coincidences, they insist on them.”

I saw someone complain that what the old Spock tells Kirk doesn’t square with what he tells young Spock, but it doesn’t seem to me there’s cause for criticism there; he explains that himself in admitting that he misled Kirk in order to assure that Kirk did not only what he wanted, but in the way that he wanted it, as a way of trying to repair the breach between the two.  As for Eli’s comment that “the villain’s method of attack is very creative, but basically requires that planetary defense systems are non-existent”—point taken, but that’s Trek.  As a fan of the military SF of folks like David Weber and John Ringo, the idea of an interstellar power without extensive planetary defenses sounds ludicrous to me, too, but Trek never has had them.

In other ways, though, Abrams and company have made Starfleet, and the crew of the Enterprise, a lot more believable.  Everybody has a job that actually means something, and everybody gets to contribute.  Sulu isn’t just turning the wheel, and Uhura doesn’t just answer the phone; in fact, the changes in the character of Nyota Uhura are the biggest improvement in the whole movie.  Not only is she introduced as a genuinely impressive human being—a tough, intelligent, independent woman who needs that intelligence and independence to do her job—but her specialty, communications, is finally shown to be a real specialty of real and critical importance, one that needs a good xenolinguist (scholar in alien languages—which she is) if it’s to be done well.  They’ve set up the crew as a true ensemble in a way that the original never was.

Roger Ebert, in his review, complained that “the Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action,” and I’ll grant that there’s some justice to his charge; as a practical matter, he provides the defense himself when he notes that “the movie deals with narrative housekeeping,” setting up the new cast for sequels, but that doesn’t change the fact that this movie has things happen which implicitly raise huge issues that are never addressed on-screen.  A bit more introspection along Roddenberry’s lines, I think, would be a good thing, and I do hope we’ll see some thoughtfulness as the sequels come along.

On the other hand, the movie is a cracking good adventure yarn, which has always been the core of Trek, and it does this a lot better in some ways than Roddenberry did, too.  For one thing, while the scripts Roddenberry oversaw “might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy,” they never put anything really at risk; there were never any long-term negative consequences for any of the permanent cast.  (The one exception to that I can think of might be “The City on the Edge of Forever.”)  The same cannot be said of the new Trek, which inflicts staggering losses on its version of the Federation. I admire Abrams’ guts, because I don’t think I would have had the nerve to have the Federation suffer that badly.

I’m no movie reviewer, but I enjoyed Abrams’ Star Trek immensely; I won’t call it great art, but for what it is, it’s excellent—I think it’s clearly the best version of Trek yet—and I look forward to seeing what the folks behind it have for us next.

The American self-help legalist’s Bible

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You may not know this, but Thomas Nelson recently produced something called The American Patriot’s Bible:  The Word of God and the Shaping of America.  I wouldn’t have known it except that my wife recently signed up as a book-review blogger and ended up reviewing it.  This appears to be a product much akin to the recent Green Bible from HarperCollins, except that where the Green Bible pushes environmental dogma, the APB pushes a politically conservative form of what Christian Smith dubbed “moralistic therapeutic deism.”  As my wife wrote,

There is plenty to encourage the idea that what God wants from us is to work harder. There is nothing here for the broken, repentant sinner, aware of his own inadequacy, whose desperate hope is to fall at the foot of the cross and find grace.

When Jared Wilson writes about “the weird modern desire for legalism,” well, this appears to be the Bible to support that desire.  Thomas Nelson has not blessed the American church by producing it.

Dick Cheney’s ratings rising

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According to a recent CNN poll, the number of Americans with a favorable opinion of Dick Cheney has risen eight percent since he left office; his ratings are still lower than NBC’s, but they have at least improved significantly.  The obvious explanation for this is his media tour; now that he, freed from the Bush administration’s shackles, has begun publicly defending himself and the administration and pleading the case for its policies and actions (as in the speech he gave this week at the American Enterprise Institute), people are listening.  Now that someone is actually presenting the defense for the Bush administration—something President Bush never did, and doesn’t seem to have wanted anyone else to do—it’s having an effect.  In particular, I suspect he’s giving people reason to see the distinction between himself (and President Bush) and Barack Obama in a different light.

Of course, the media don’t want to admit this.  CNN polling director Keating Holland said (and you can almost hear the sniff),

Is Cheney’s uptick due to his visibility as one of the most outspoken critics of the Obama administration? Almost certainly not. Former President George W. Bush’s favorable rating rose 6 points in that same time period, and Bush has not given a single public speech since he left office.

As a response, this is, quite frankly, pathetic.  If Vice President Cheney were defending himself to the exclusion of President Bush, this would be logical; as it is, it doesn’t pass the smell test.  A far likelier explanation is that the vice president’s media tour is the cause of the rise in both their favorable ratings, because he’s addressing a major cause for the negative view of both of them.

Brand perception of the New York Times

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I ran across, courtesy of Chris Forbes, an interesting site called brand tags, which describes itself as “A collective experiment in brand perception. . . . The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, a brand is whatever they say it is.”  The mechanism is simple:  the site displays a logo, and you enter the first word or phrase that comes to mind.  It then adds that tag to the tag cloud on that logo.  Once you’ve tagged enough brands, you can look at the tag clouds and see what people associate with various logos and brands.

One that I found particularly interesting was the tag cloud on the New York Times.  Among the largest ones, representing those most often entered, were some obvious ones like “newspaper,” and some positive ones like “authoritative,” “intelligent,” “reliable,” and “serious”; one of the largest was “crossword,” which probably shouldn’t have surprised me.  Along with “paper” and “newspaper,” though, the largest single one was “liberal,” and there were a number of other prominent ones associating liberal bias with the Grey Lady.  This isn’t surprising, but I did think it was interesting, and I don’t imagine it’s anything the folks at the NYT are happy about.  Click the link and see for yourself.

The politics of personal destruction, intra-GOP edition: take 2

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R. A. Mansour, explaining the reason and purpose for the founding of Conservatives4Palin, wrote,

Sarah Palin wasn’t able to return home from the campaign. The campaign continues, and she is forced to fight a war on two fronts—the local and the national. As long as the campaign continues, we’ll be here to watch her back.

This continues to be true; and the most frustrating part is that each of these fronts in turn has two fronts, as she is assailed both by liberals, from whom one would expect no better, and also by other conservatives.  I have to think that Reagan would be infuriated by the way in which his Eleventh Commandment (“Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican”) is routinely ignored when it comes to Gov. Palin; I also think that he would have no trouble diagnosing the reason.  President Reagan famously had a plaque on his desk that read, “There is no limit to what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit”; these people who are attacking her, and cloaking their attacks in the language of conservatism, aren’t doing so for reasons of principle, but because they care who gets the credit.  They care very much, and they don’t want it to be her.

What they fail to understand is that when you care who gets the credit, that sharply limits what you can accomplish—and the more you care, the more limited you are.  Hurting Gov. Palin may well increase the chance that Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush or Tim Pawlenty wins the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, but even more, it increases the chance that Barack Obama wins the 2012 general election.  The only politicians who profit from attacks on Sarah Palin are Democrats, and the only party that is helped is the Democratic Party.  Republicans of influence, be they in office or in the conservative media, need to grow up, shut up, and stop trying to run down Gov. Palin, because not only is it wrong, it’s only going to hurt them and their preferred causes, not help them; the knife they plant in her back is the knife in their own.  Republicans acting like Democrats only profits Democrats.

Barack Obama’s Achilles heel

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I commented earlier today on the latest attempt by the OSM (Obama-stream media), in the person of New York Times gossip columnist Maureen Dowd, to pre-emptively defend their adored idol, Barack Obama, by asserting that any terrorist attack during his time in office won’t be his fault, it will be Dick Cheney’s fault. This is, as I noted, not an isolated thing, but part of a broader campaign to ensure that any bad event or outcome is blamed on the Republicans, and primarily on the Bush administration; though a superficially appealing approach, I argued that it infantilizes President Obama and renders him unworthy of respect, because it essentially says that he can’t be held to the same standard as other presidents.  It makes him less effectual, powerful, influential, and important than his predecessor (and even his predecessor’s VP!), and thereby makes him a lesser figure.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I also don’t think people will buy it; we’re too accustomed to the Harry S Truman (“The buck stops here”) approach for many people to swallow “It’s not my fault” coming from our president.  We’ll take a lot of things, but I don’t believe avoidance of responsibility will be one of them.  However, let’s suppose for a moment that I’m wrong.  Let’s suppose that when the first batch of folks the Obama administration releases from Gitmo turn around and help nuke the World Series, or turn a superbug loose on the Washington Mall on the Fourth of July, or whatever they do, that the American public in fact exonerates the president and buys the line that it’s all Dick Cheney’s fault.  Let’s suppose that a year from now, the voters still pin the problems in our banking system on the Bush administration and hold Barack Obama blameless for the failure of his programs.  Let’s suppose that the polls reveal the attitude that if things are getting worse, it’s just because George W. Bush did such a lousy job.

There’s still one thing that the president won’t be able to duck, and it’s something no one seems to be thinking about:  gas prices.  For whatever reason, all the prognostications I’ve seen are ignoring them, effectively assuming that they’ll remain where they were at the beginning of the year—and they won’t.  Indeed, they already haven’t.  Three or four weeks ago, gas prices here were below $1.90 a gallon; right now, they’re sitting at $2.459, and they’re only going to keep going up.  It won’t be long before they’re back over $3 a gallon, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them back over $4 a gallon by Labor Day.

Why?  Because gas prices were driven up in large part by speculation in oil futures, and the biggest thing that drove the price of futures down was Congress’ action in letting the offshore-drilling ban expire.  The prospect of a dramatic expansion in American domestic oil production exerted considerable downward pressure on oil futures, which brought down the price of oil, and thus the price of gas.  That prospect is no longer in place, thanks to the policies of the new administration, which is resolutely opposed to any sort of energy development except for those forms which are supposedly “green.”  That means that the conditions are back in place for oil and gas prices to rise, which they’re already doing; that in turn means that speculating in futures, betting on them to continue to rise, will once again be a profitable activity.  With so many people who are now a lot poorer than they used to be and so few means available for them to correct that situation, it seems likely to me that we’ll once again see speculation start to drive up the price of oil futures, and that the price of gas will once again follow suit.

And if I’m right, there will be no earthly way for Barack Obama or any of his media stooges to blame George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or anyone on the Republican side of the aisle for that—but there will be a great many Republicans, led by Sarah Palin, to say “I told you so.”  It will be all on him, and Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and the rest of the Democratic cabal now running this country, and no way for them to avoid the blame.

My new second-favorite politician

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This is Marco Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants, candidate for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate from Florida, giving his farewell address to the Florida House of Representatives.  It’s a powerful evocation of why the United States is a great country, combined with a remarkable mini-sermon on the love and grace of God.  If he ever wants to leave politics, this man could make a real contribution preaching the gospel.

HT:  Robert Stacy McCain

The OSM (Obama-stream media) theme song

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Consequence Free

Wouldn’t it be great if no one ever got offended?
Wouldn’t it be great to say what’s really on your mind?
I have always said all the rules are made for bending;
And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?

Chorus:
I wanna be consequence-free;
I wanna be where nothing needs to matter.
I wanna be consequence-free,
Just sing Na Na Na Na Na Na Ya Na Na.

I could really use to lose my Catholic conscience,
‘Cause I’m getting sick of feeling guilty all the time.
I won’t abuse it, yeah, I’ve got the best intentions
For a little bit of anarchy, but not the hurting kind.

Chorus

I couldn’t sleep at all last night
‘Cause I had so much on my mind.
I’d like to leave it all behind,
But you know it’s not that easy

Chorus

Wouldn’t it be great if the band just never ended?
We could stay out late and we would never hear last call.
We wouldn’t need to worry about approval or permission;
We could slip off the edge and never worry about the fall.

Chorus out

It’s a catchy song, and the video (which is below, if you’re interested) is the sort of fun, goofy piece that Great Big Sea likes to do.  It’s also, as I’ve said somewhere, one of the stupidest song lyrics I’ve ever run across.  What does it mean when our actions are consequence-free?  When our actions have no consequences, we say they’re inconsequential; that means they don’t matter, which is why inconsequential is a synonym for unimportant or insignificant.  If nothing we ever did had consequences, if none of it ever mattered, then we wouldn’t matter; if all our actions were insignificant, it would mean that we would be insignificant, our lives would be meaningless.  As I wrote last fall,

The key is that our actions matter because we matter. Indeed, we matter enough to God that he was willing to pay an infinite price for our salvation; and so our actions matter greatly to him, both for their effect on others (who matter to him as much as we do) and for their effect on us. Our actions have eternal consequence because we are beings of eternal consequence; it could not be otherwise.

Only a fool could wish for insignificance; it’s profoundly foolish even to feign a wish for such a thing.

Now, it’s hardly a new or shocking idea to suggest that our media establishment is composed largely of fools, but they’re so far in the tank for Barack Obama that it’s taking them to new and surprising depths of folly.  We see this particularly in the ongoing effort by the MSM—who would be better called the OSM, the Obama-stream media; they’re so deep in his pocket, they’re nothing more than pocket lint at this point—to render the president consequence-free, at least when it comes to negative consequences:  if anything bad happens, it’s all that evil Bush’s fault, or that evil Cheney’s fault, or the fault of some other evil Republican.  The deepest depths of this drivel (so far) have been plumbed by Maureen Dowd, who wrote in the New York Times,

No matter if or when terrorists attack here, and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan, red/blue state timetable, Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.

In other words, it doesn’t matter when it happens, or what happens, or how it happens, or what could have happened, or what the president and his administration have done, or what they haven’t done, or what they could have done, or what they should have done—according to Maureen Dowd, if terrorists ever do anything here again, no matter what, it’s Dick Cheney’s fault.

Now, to a superficial mind, I can see the appeal of this:  it preserves the “blame everything on the GOP” strategy that got the Democratic Party to power, wherein it is asserted that only the GOP can do or cause bad things, while all good things are solely to the credit of the donkeys.  What Dowd apparently fails to see, however, is the way in which her assertion completely emasculates President Obama and his administration.  What she’s essentially saying is that Barack Obama is fundamentally inconsequential and ineffectual, at least by comparison to the previous administration.  George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are the ones with the real power, the ones who really matter; Barack Obama just can’t be expected to compare, or to have the same kind of effect on the world.  He can’t be held responsible if al’Qaeda or somebody else attacks us, because, um, it can’t possibly be his fault, because, uh, well, he just can’t be; there has to be someone else to blame.  The buck doesn’t stop at his desk; that’s above his pay grade, or something.

I’m sorry, but when people start saying things like that about the President of the United States, that’s just pathetic.  But hey, at least he can dance around and look cool, like these guys:

 

Gov. Palin and the abortion shift

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About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed
from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship.”

—Ephesians 19:23-27 (ESV)

Recent polling on American opinions on abortion has shown some interesting results.  According to American Thinker,

In [August] 2008, overall support for keeping abortion legal in all or most cases, was at 54%, a clear majority. This year, however, Pew polling found that support for legal abortion is down to 46%, while support for making the procedure illegal in most or all cases rose from 41% to 44%. . . .

Support for keeping abortion legal in most or all cases among the 18-29 year olds has fallen a full 5% since last August. In August 2008, legal abortion support among 18-29 year olds stood at 52%; this April it’s down to 47%. Support for making abortion illegal in most or all cases has risen 3% and is now at 48%. . . .

The most notable decline in the support for legal abortion has been among those highly-cherished, sought after Independent voters. As Pew notes:

There has been notable decline in the proportion of independents saying abortion should be legal in most or all cases; majorities of independents favored legal abortion in August and the two October surveys, but just 44% do so today. In addition, the proportion of moderate and liberal Republicans saying abortion should be legal declined between August and late October (from 67% to 57%). In the current survey, just 43% of moderate and liberal Republicans say abortion should legal in most or all cases.

The most recent Gallup polling backs up this shift:

A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.

The new results, obtained from Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a significant shift from a year ago, when 50% were pro-choice and 44% pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage identifying as pro-life was 46%, in both August 2001 and May 2002.

The May 2009 survey documents comparable changes in public views about the legality of abortion. In answer to a question providing three options for the extent to which abortion should be legal, about as many Americans now say the procedure should be illegal in all circumstances (23%) as say it should be legal under any circumstances (22%). This contrasts with the last four years, when Gallup found a strong tilt of public attitudes in favor of unrestricted abortion.

Americans’ recent shift toward the pro-life position is confirmed in two other surveys. The same three abortion questions asked on the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey were included in Gallup Poll Daily tracking from May 12-13, with nearly identical results, including a 50% to 43% pro-life versus pro-choice split on the self-identification question. . . .

The source of the shift in abortion views is clear in the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey. The percentage of Republicans (including independents who lean Republican) calling themselves “pro-life” rose by 10 points over the past year, from 60% to 70%, while there has been essentially no change in the views of Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Clearly, there has been a significant shift in the electorate on this issue—not overwhelming, but significant—since last August.  R. A. Mansour offers, I believe, the key explanation for this shift:

A sharp decline since last August? Hmmm, what happened last August?

Oh, yes. Hurricane Sarah happened. And she introduced the nation to her beautiful and perfect son Trig.

It seems to me that the pro-abortion lobby depends for its success on people not looking too closely at abortion or thinking about it too deeply; that’s why they fight tooth and nail any effort to require doctors to give women considering abortion any information about what will be done to them (beyond of course the minimum:  “You will no longer be pregnant at the end of it”).  With any other surgical procedure, the law requires that patients be fully informed so as to be able to give appropriate consent—but not with abortion, because giving women more information might cause them to change their mind and choose not to have one after all.  The pro-abortion lobby doesn’t want them to make that choice, and so it seeks to keep them uninformed.

Gov. Palin’s abrupt appearance on the national scene, however, got a lot of people thinking about abortion in a way they hadn’t before; Pew and Gallup are now showing us the consequences of that fact.  It’s no surprise, then, that the likes of Demetrius in our own day are stirring up a riot;  you can almost hear them talking amongst themselves:

“Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Alaska but across America this Palin has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that Abortion is not really good. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Abortion may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Hollywood and the world worship.”

For all their sneers and smears, it’s really Gov. Palin’s opponents who are on the side of ignorance, because they’re the ones who profit from it.