Mark Kleiman explains the problem of abortion in American politics (Bill Hicks: “Yeah, I’m gonna win you all back with this one”) in two paragraphs of this post:
Jane Galt is right that the country would be better off if the abortion debate sparked less hatred on both sides. Moreover, she’s right that one key to reducing the ferocity of the debate would be for the pro-choice folks to admit that ending a pregnancy does pose what can plausibly be considered a moral problem, and that therefore it’s possible to support limits on abortion for reasons other than hateful or dim-witted anti-feminism. (…)
But I think Jane misses one reason why many pro-choicers believe what they believe about the “pro-lifers:” the institutional leadership of the “pro-life” movement is indeed dim-wittedly anti-feminist, with a fixation on sexual purity. That’s true of the Catholic bishops, of the Protestant Christian-right folks such as Focus on the Family, and of the more-or-less secular conservatives such as Phillis Schlafly.
Of course, you can easily extend this argument to, well, the entire modern Republican platform. There are, in principle, good reasons to support Republican Party positions on just about everything, that do not require one to be dim-wittedly anti-feminist, hopelessly corrupt, corrosively cynical, or just plain barking mad. As far as I can tell, that’s what Asymmetrical Information and the Volokh Conspiracy are for– they’re the Jesuits of the Republican Party.
The problem is, those good reasons are kind of a moot point as long as the Bush-Rove-DeLay crowd are calling the shots. There may be good intellectual reasons for the general policies they propose, but that’s not why they propose them. Either that, or they’re so hopelessly incompetent at the execution of their favored policies as to make no difference.
There’s a serious debate to be had about a lot of the major issues in American society today. These are not the people to have it with, though.