Every topic
discussed in election cycles can be broken down into one of three
categories: economic issues, foreign
policy issues, or social issues. While
many of these will inevitably overlap, the fundamental “elements” are always
present within political stories of any kind.
However, the three topics vary in intensity of emotions they
elicit. Economic issues, while arguably
the most important of the elements, are abstract and complicated to a degree
where most of the electorate, although they will have opinions, do not fully
understand them. For a clear
illustration of this, view my previous post about national debt. Foreign policy, especially in the age of
American predominance on the international stage, also carries significant
political weight; although this is tempered by a certain degree of unity within
the American populace. While differing
ideologies certainly vary on priorities, there is a certain sense of
unification “at the water’s edge.” Social
issues are a completely different story.
Social issues divide American
society far more than anything else.
Often referred to as a “culture war,” a phrase popularized by Pat
Buchanan at the 1992 Republican National Convention, liberals and conservatives
fiercely and fierily contest each other over topics often associated with
religion and family values. It is likely
for this reason that we see what I believe is an interesting trend: the social
issues discussed in this election season, for the most part only in Congressional
races, as the presidential campaign has focused on economic issues primarily,
are in no means new. In fact, American
society has been struggling over the same societal problems for the past three
decades, at least.
One of these issues appears as
though it could be lurching to the finality.
Recently the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Defense of
Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional.
This law has been the primary institutional roadblock to equal rights
for the homosexual population of the United States. The gay movement currently focuses on
marriage rights and the spousal rights which come along with them, and the
right to adopt children, but by no means are these new struggles. Gay Americans were discriminated against most
notably in the past two decades by the military’s unofficial Don’t Ask Don’t
Tell policy, which came into effect under President Clinton and ended under
current President Obama.
Most historians pin the start-date
of the gay rights movement at 1969, when the Stonewall riots launched the issue
into the national spotlight. Since then,
the movement has slowly chipped away at the discriminatory establishment in the
United States. Statutes which permitted
employers to fire homosexual individuals without cause have fallen, laws which
prohibit sexual acts between homosexuals have been ruled unconstitutional by
the Supreme Court, and the public stigma of homosexuality has largely
diminished. While it likely will take
several more years to reach completion, the finish line for gay rights is at
the very least within eyesight.
While the forty-odd years that the
gay rights movement has existed may seem like a long time, the women’s rights
movement is over a century and a half old.
Commonly considered to have begun at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848,
this movement is similar to that of the gay rights movement. Have been many different facets which the
movement has sought to obtain; suffrage, property rights, ability to hold
public office, equal pay, and reproductive rights are just some of the goals
the Feminist movement has sought. While
suffrage, property rights, and the ability to hold public office have all been
resolved, the latter two continue to elude many women.
While this may seem contradictory,
equal pay for women is one of the few non-economic domestic issues which has
come up in this presidential election, thanks to a question in the town hall
style debate. Women, according to the
National Women’s Law Center, on average make only 77 cents to every dollar that
a man makes, despite the 1963 Equal Pay Act which required employers to pay all
workers the same regardless of gender.
While many bills have been proposed in Congress to rectify the income
gap, none have passed. The Lilly
Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which President Obama has been championing his signing
of, does nothing to close the gap; instead, it simply gives women workers more
time to file a wage-discrimination suit against their employer. While nearly all proponents of a social issue
believe that their viewpoint is unquestionably the correct one, equal pay for
women is the only one for which there is not a single credible argument
against. There is no conceivable way a
right-thinking individual can believe that women do not deserve equal pay.
The other women’s issue, however, is
much more heated and debatable. The reproductive
rights of women, particularly abortion, are arguably the most passionate social
debate which our nation has experienced since the African-American Civil Rights
Movement in the 1960s. I say this
because, unlike the other issues discussed in this post, abortion directly
involves death. I am not going to
discuss Roe v. Wade here, lest I
accidentally end up writing a book instead of a blog post, but I would like to
start a few years prior to the seminal court case on the issue. Before the Supreme Court took the issue,
thirty states banned abortion in every scenario while only four (Alaska,
Hawaii, New York, and Washington) permitted it simply upon request. What is interesting about this data is that seven
of the sixteen states which allowed exceptions to the abortion ban were
southern states, typically more conservative (Virginia, North and South
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas). While these states once allowed abortions,
they now all have received grades ranging from “D+” to “F” by the National
Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws.
The grades reflect how hostilely the state treats those who seek an
abortion.
In Roe the Court held that some abortion bans were unconstitutional,
but some were legal, creating what in affect is a non-ruling on the issue. Despite this, the evangelical wing of the
Republican Party, the wing which essentially runs the party at the present,
took up arms against abortion, claiming it violated the sanctity of life. The argument is not particularly hard to
agree with, as abortion is unquestionably the removal of the capacity to life
from a fetus before it is rightfully born.
However, the fringe element of the evangelical faction of the Republican
Party has taken an extremist opposition to abortion, going so far as murdering
abortion doctors and bombing abortion clinics.
There is not even the slightest sense of justification for such actions
which can almost undeniably be termed as terrorism. The radical anti-abortion organizations
conduct themselves no better than the Ku Klux Klan did during the 1960s African-American
Civil Rights Movement. While the
violence has slowed down a bit since the 90s, the debate itself is as alive as
ever. Republican presidential candidate
Mitt Romney has vowed to appoint justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate public funding
for Planned Parenthood, a maternal healthcare provider which happens to conduct
some abortions, should he win the election.
While these two movements have been
on the national agenda for decades, this is by no means a new trend. Social issues in America have always been
divisive because they often involve religious beliefs or deeply held person
ideologies. There are two crystal clear
examples of this in American history:
slavery, along with the later civil rights movement, and the temperance
movement.
Slavery is unquestionably the most
heinous social wrong that the United States has ever committed, as well as the
social issue which invoked the most passionate argument. Slavery was the cause of the Civil War, plain
and simple. You may hear that the true
cause was states’ rights versus national policy norming, but the topic at issue
between the states and the national government was slavery. Nearly every intellectual knew that slavery
was so divisive the only way it could be resolved was through a war; it was for
that reason the Founding Fathers prohibited Thomas Jefferson from including anti-slavery
statements in the Declaration of Independence and allowed for the inclusion for
the Three-Fifths Compromise in the Constitution.
The debate over slavery continued
until 1865, where in the aftermath of the Union’s victory in the Civil War,
Congress passed the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery once and for
all in the newly “re-United States.” After
approximately ninety years, the nation had overcome its first substantial
social issue debate. The victory was
short-lived, however, for instantly the South, as well as many northern states
and cities, began to discriminate against the newly freed slaves and their
progeny. This issue, while never
spilling out into a war, divided the country for a century and cost the lives
of many activists and innocent citizens.
The temperance movement also has its
roots in the pre-independence days. Long
held as a Christian virtue, the Massachusetts colonial assembly banned the
consumption of liquor in 1657. The first
truly organized group to espouse the temperance position was the American
Temperance Society, which was formed in 1827.
The Society reached a membership of 1.5 million in 1835, an astonishing
number when one considers the American population at the time was just over 12
million. To put that rate of membership
into perspective, if the Sierra Club, an environmentalist group, had that rate
of membership today, nearly 44 million Americans would be members.
The temperance movement followed the
ebb and flow of American society throughout the nineteenth century, dropping in
popularity in times of crisis such as the Civil War, but increasing in
peacetime. Finally, the movement came to
a head with Congress’ passage of the Volstead Act in 1919. The act gave the government the ability to
enforce the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the sale and possession of
alcohol in any form. Once again, a
social issue nearly an entire century old came to a closer; or would have, if
Prohibition was sustainable, which it was not.
When the American people passed the 21st Amendment, bringing
the “noble experiment” to a close, the temperance movement ended as well,
although not the way its proponents would have preferred.
Due to the personal and religious
lines that social issues cross, the speed of policy change is not fast. Instead, we often see a generational shift in
views on such policies, as each passing generation usually results in a
slightly more liberal outlook. Whereas sixty
years ago the gender roles were strictly rigid, such assignments have largely
faded in favor of a more egalitarian perspective. This is not to suggest that Father Time is
the only individual capable of effecting social change, but to simply state
that time is a key factor in any social issue campaign.
While social issues have deferred to
economic matters in this presidential campaign, regardless of which political
party takes the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, these topics
will surely come up in the coming four years.
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