Thursday, August 04, 2005

Interesting: The Message Thing

Jim Wallis is in the New York Times today with a blueprint for Democrats to start winning elections. He thinks the most powerful electoral issues are:

1. Fighting poverty
2. Environmental stewardship
3. Fresh ideas on abortion
4. "Pro-family" cultural issues, like violence and sexual content in media
5. Multilateral international leadership as a foreign policy priority

#1, 2 and 5 are winners, 4 is irrelevant, and 3 is a trap.

As we've seen this week, Wisconsin anti-choicers are much more concerned with punishing female college students for having sex than preventing abortions. I had figured that birth control was a done deal in this country, but apparently not. So how on earth are we supposed to find a compromise on abortions when we have to go back and refight whether women have the right to have their prescriptions filled?

And good luck trying to take sex and violence out of video games and movies. If they want to give us more freedom to choose or block out cable channels, that's fine with me. But there are enough choices in media now with video on demand and TiVo that any parent could pretty much program their child's entertainment choices from dawn to dusk. What's the big deal?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense (see sarcasm).
So it's more odd to be pro-life and Pro death penalty? Why don't you follow to the logical question of how can YOU be pro-abortion (taking the life of innocent babies) and yet Anti-death penalty (saving the life of guilty ADULTS). That seems even more absurd. The adult has made a choice and is paying for those decisions where the child hasn't had a chance to do anything wrong. But that seems logical to you somehow? Sounds more like a political choice than some "christian" facade your attempting to throw around.

MK said...

Well, I never expected to get down to basics like this on this blog but I think we can all agree we want less killing.