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Wednesday, October 03, 2007

An Inconvenient Truth

The FRC, looking at new polling data on the political affiliations of young White evangelicals, notes that while this generation of evangelicals is less likely to identify as Republican, they are in some ways more conservative than their older peers (I imagine they are less so in other ways--the war in Iraq, I suspect, has soured a great many on the GOP foreign policy ideology). But the FRC seems peeved about the way one question on abortion was phrased:
For example, 70% of young evangelicals favor "making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion" (by the way, this is a particularly noxious phrasing of the issue as it frames a pro-life position as creating difficulty for women), whereas only 55% of older white evangelicals have the same view.

Umm...the "pro-life" position does create a "difficulty for women" -- it makes it more difficult for them to get abortions. To be sure, this is a burden that the FRC wants to impose on women, but that doesn't make it any less accurate. There is simply no way to characterize this phraseology as "noxious" without a hyper-developed victim complex (which, to be fair, is something we already knew the FRC possessed in abundance).
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1 comment:

  1. PG12:45 PM

    The funny thing is that they could be at least internally consistent by saying, "of course, making an abortion more difficult to obtain helps women avoid depression," or whatever the Abortion-Evil-of-the-Week is. I find it both incorrect and paternalistic to claim that an uncoerced abortion generally harms the recipient more than being forced to complete the pregnancy does, but that's the new position that the abortion prohibitionists have hung their hat on lately: we're doing this for women's own good!

    That they're whining about how "making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion" sounds to them like "creating difficulty for women" betrays just how shallow their new rationale is.

    (There are many people, including women who regret their own abortions, who do sincerely believe that abortion should be banned because it is a harm to women, but I doubt those people would squeal over the poll question like the FRC does.)

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