Thursday, June 4, 2009

Guns, Gays and Abortion

Guns, Gays and Abortion
By David Brooks and Gail Collins
Copyright by The New York Times
June 3, 2009, 12:56 pm
http://theconversation.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/guns-gays-and-abortion/?ref=opinion


Gail Collins: David, can we talk hot-button social issues for a second? I know this is not really an area where you fly the conservative colors, but you’re the go-to guy on how America lives, and I’d like to hear your thoughts even if we can’t work up a fight.

If you think of abortion, gay rights and gun control as the Big Three, it seems to me the nation is moving in very different directions.

Gay rights is just a matter of time. Look at the polls. Worrying about gay marriage, let alone gay civil unions or gay employment rights, is a middle-age issue. Young people just can’t see the problem. At worst, gays are going to win this one just by waiting until the opposition dies off. (In dark moods, I sometimes envision that sea-to-sea gay rights will arrive at the exact same time the last newspaper disappears.) The only fight is whether this should be worked out through state-by-state gradualism or be settled by the courts.

Gun control currently feels like a lost cause. If a big Democratic majority doesn’t have the will to stop an amendment to the credit card bill permitting people to carry concealed loaded weapons in national parks, I don’t have much hope. This drives me crazy because I am completely sure that if all the politicians who believe in effective gun control laws mounted a full-throated campaign to close the loopholes and make this work, we’d have a sane, effective system that protects rational gun owners rather than shielding the rogue gun dealers and nutballs who think the Founding Fathers guaranteed the right to carry assault weapons in church. But it’s become one of those issues where politicians believe that even if their constituents care about ending gun violence, they don’t care enough to punish them for doing the wrong thing. And of course they’re scared to death of the N.R.A. This isn’t about waiting for the public to change its mind, it’s about waiting for politicians to get brave. Which means, of course, not in my lifetime.

That brings us to abortion, which everybody has been thinking about since the terrible murder in Wichita. There’s been a lot of talk about polls that show support for abortion rights has been sliding, but this is an issue where people’s level of discomfort is so high I think it’s very difficult to read much into specific poll results. The general sentiment seems to be pretty consistent: Most people don’t want to think about it. They leap with relief to any option that suggests it’s something that should be left between a woman and her doctor. Or options that say it should be legal “some of the time” or “under some circumstances.” They want somebody else to figure out what those circumstances should be.

But if you do pin them down, they tend to say that abortion should be permitted during the first three months, but not after that unless the mother is in danger. And since the vast number of abortions occur during that period, you’d think that we could work out a system that makes it very easy for women to end pregnancies early, but then very hard to impossible as time goes on. But the intensity of feeling on the issue, particularly on the part of the people who feel that it’s murder from the moment of conception, is so fierce that we wind up instead with vast stretches of the country where it’s almost impossible for a woman to get an abortion, creating more late-term unwanted pregnancies.

President Obama, who’s totally fixated on the economy, health care and energy, has made it pretty clear that he intends to: A) support abortion rights, but only when it actually matters, not the symbolic stuff; B) avoid gun control like the plague; and C) embrace the gay community while trying to avoid having to spend any political capital on the subject.

The Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, haven’t seemed all that eager to fight about gay rights (perhaps because it’s been driven home to them how many of their friends, relatives and colleagues are affected) or even abortion (perhaps because they suspect their constituents’ discomfort with the issue extends to elected officials who keep bringing it up all the time). Individual members have been holding up Obama appointees who favor gay or abortion rights, but when the G.O.P. wants to score points by making a totally irrelevant, distracting suggestion aimed at driving their opposition nuts, they’ve mainly been sticking to undermining gun laws.

All of this could change but I suspect the murder in Wichita is going to make abortion opponents in Congress even more reluctant to take up the issue, while the president’s reluctance to be distracted from his big agenda will dissuade many in the pro-choice camp from bringing it up. So we’ll continue on the current path of ridiculous fights over idiotic gun amendments and skirting the rest of the social agenda until the economy improves or the next elections are closer.

I can’t decide if that’s heartening or deeply depressing.

David Brooks: Gail, I confess I do shy away from these issues, not because I don’t have views but because I find the tenor of the debates so unpleasant. For example, I have the impression that we’re in the middle of their weird battle of the murders. Liberal media outlets play up the murder of the abortion doctor by a pro-life extremist. Conservative outlets play up the murder of the Army recruiter by a Muslim extremist. Some people on both sides seem to feel that their view of the world has been affirmed by the atrocities of a certain set of extremists, and so seem to feel a sense of vindication from these crimes.

Those are the activists. Most people of course don’t see even these issues through an ideological lens. They see social issues through a more fundamental prism. They are aware that they live their lives amid a web of relationships, which they treasure. They seek to preserve the sense of civic order that gives security to their lives — not some abstract thing called community, but the specific community they inhabit.

I think there is a consistency to how most Americans view these Big Three social issues. People are seeking the positions that will help them reserve the invisible bonds of community.

Americans increasingly see gay relationships as just another part of the fabric of connections that make up their communities. As a result Americans are becoming more accepting of civil unions and gay marriage.

People also treasure the specific subcultures they inhabit. Guns are an essential part of life for people who live in rural communities. Well, it’s not the guns per se. Rather the threat to limit gun ownership is seen as an assault by urban people on rural life and rural communities. That is the reason gun rights are defended so fiercely and why it is politically dangerous for anybody to challenge them.

Finally, on the subject of abortion, Americans are pulled by conflicting communitarian impulses. On the one hand, I think most people sense viscerally that somehow an abortion is a tear in the moral fabric — whether they are pro-life or pro-choice. On the other hand, they don’t feel communities can be formed on the basis of compulsion and they are uncomfortable imposing such complex and uncomfortable moral decisions on one another. So they seek out some mushy middle ground, while oscillating, sometimes in a more “liberal” direction and sometimes in a more “conservative” one, as now.

I’m not sure I’m expressing myself very clearly, but what I’m trying to say is that people seek to preserve the orderly bonds around them. Most people, even on these hot button issues, gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings. As a result, I don’t expect sharp change on any of these subjects. There is a gradual acceptance of gay and lesbian rights, but I think progress will take longer than people anticipate. On gun control and abortion, I don’t see much change of any sort.

There are fewer and fewer culture warriors in America. Most people want order and peace.

No comments: