Americans are given the runaround on many issues during campaigns. Candidates try to appeal to everyone everywhere, avoiding any kind of firm stance so that they can bobble-head their way to appeasing the "average voter."
This, I suppose, is OK with issues that don't really affect society. Flag burning, for example, is one that I am OK with candidates playing the "well, on the one hand this, but I suppose not" card. However, when an issue like abortion receives the "half on, half off" treatment, we enter a moral quagmire.
There are many politicians, most of whom I'm embarrassed to say are liberal, who use the old chestnut, "Well, I'm personally pro-life, but I don't want to impose my beliefs on others."
This kind of statement is, frankly, absurd. If these people were morally against abortion, they would not be so "meh" about the legality of it.
If you believe that a fetus is a viable, individual life from conception, that there is no difference between a delivered baby and a mini-baby growing inside of a mother's womb, how could you possibly not be fervently and passionately against abortion?
To those who believe in life from conception, an abortion is the equivalent of taking a newborn, placing it on the sidewalk and shooting it through the head. If you believe that an abortion is a murder, how can you be so mundane on the issue?
I support and have a great deal of respect for politicians such as Al Gore. However, Gore is someone who believes that his version of morality should not be pushed onto the whole country. He believes that life begins at conception, that aborting a fetus is killing an individual life, but he thinks people should still be able to choose what they consider to be murder. Positions such as Mr. Gore's represent the biggest moral cop-out of our generation.
This kind of moral neutrality is nothing new to U.S. politics. As Frederick Douglass pointed out in the dedication of the Lincoln Freedman Memorial in 1876, Lincoln himself was not initially against slavery. He just wanted to be sure that slavery did not spread to the new states. To boil it down, Lincoln believed it was immoral to claim ownership of other people, but at the time of his first presidential campaign, was not about to politically commit to freeing the slaves.
I suppose it is important to note, as Douglass later did in his speech, that this stance allowed Lincoln to be elected in the first place, and Lincoln was truly the only leader at the time that would have held the union together and eventually abolish slavery, so it's all a wash.
However, abortion is not slavery. Slavery was the defining issue of the day; Americans were almost evenly split and certainly subdivided on their stances on slavery. Today, 60 percent of Americans are clearly for abortion rights. Relatively very few decide their vote on the basis of a candidate's anti-abortion merits.
So candidates equivocate their own morality in exchange for what? A couple percentage points or evangelical votes? Do you think the religious right is that stupid? These are people who believe abortion is an absolute wrong, that it is murder. Abortion rights candidates are not going to score points for having their hearts in the right place. The people who treat elections as referendums on abortion are not going to care if your support of mass murder keeps you up at night or not.
Yes, yes, candidates have to walk a fine line. They have to try to appeal to everyone. But please don't try to have it both ways with an incredibly challenging moral question. Have the courage to take a stance and stick with it. You can't have everything both ways.
Roddy Flynn is a senior in the School of Public Affairs and a liberal columnist for The Eagle.
