Author: Ed Stoddard

Up until a few days ago Bart Stupak, an unassuming Democratic congressman from Michigan, was a hero among American activists opposed to abortion rights (who refer to themselves as “pro-life”). This was because Stupak had managed to insert strong language in the House of Representatives version of the healthcare bill aimed at preventing any federal tax  funds from being used for abortion.

What a difference a weekend makes. President Barack Obama clinched the votes he needed to win passage for his healthcare overhaul on Sunday by winning over a handful of Democratic abortion rights opponents, led by Stupak, with the pledge of an executive order affirming restrictions on the use of federal funds for the procedure.

Stupak was suddenly a traitor to the cause, with barbs like “Judas” thrown his way on the blogosphere. Randy Neugebauer, a Republican congressman from Texas,  reportedly yelled “Baby killer!,” while Stupak explained why he was finally going to support the bill. Neugebauer was later quoted as saying he was referring to the bill and not Stupak himself, but that is the kind of emotional language one often hears in the shouting matches on this issue.

The Susan B. Anthony List, a conservative group that works to get female opponents of abortion rights elected, said it no longer planned to give Stupak its annual “Defender of Life” Award on Wednesday.

“This Wednesday night is our third annual Campaign for Life Gala, where we were planning to honor Congressman Stupak for his efforts to keep abortion-funding out of health care reform. We will no longer be doing so. By accepting this deal from the most pro-abortion President in American history, Stupak has not only failed to stand strong for unborn children, but also for his constituents and pro-life voters across the country,” its president Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement.

The Family Research Council, an influential evangelical political lobby group, also has Stupak and other anti-abortion Democrats who supported the healthcare bill in its sights.

On the other side of the abortion divide, Stupak was already a political villian before Sunday’s vote and he remains cast in that role.

“Number one on our list is Bart Stupak,” said Elizabeth Shipp, political director of NARAl Pro-Choice America, when asked which candidates her group was targeting,

Stupak has done a lot to stir up this most divisive of political hornet’s nests. Small wonder he’s getting stung from all sides.

Partisan politics and America’s culture wars have been on full display again in Austin at the Texas State Board of Education. According to a Friday report in  The Dallas Morning News, Republicans on the board defeated a Democratic-backed proposal on Thursday to would have required that Texas students be taught the reason behind a prohibition of a state religion in the Bill of Rights. You can see the report here by The Dallas Morning News which has done some fine stuff on this and related subjects.

The seven social conservatives on the panel were joined by three moderate Republicans in rejecting the proposal, which was backed by all five Democrats on the board.

Former U. S. president George W. Bush (C) speaks at a rededication of the National Archives in Washington, September 17, 2003/Larry Downing

The so-called “Establishment Clause” in the U.S. Bill of Rights  — which states that: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — has become one of the many flashpoints in the country’s culture wars which outsiders often find bewildering. U.S. liberals and secular humanists have said this is the basis for America’s separation of church and state; for many religious conservatives, this is a dangerous fiction that has been advanced by activists judges. Battles over it have taken many shapes and have included those over school prayer.

The reaction of U.S. liberals and religious conservatives to such things, I have found, is as predictable as the sunrise and sunset. Sure enough, I got an e-mail Friday from the (liberal leaning and non-partisan) Texas Freedom Network with the following press release. It said among other things that:

“The board rejected a proposed standard requiring students to ‘examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others.’ That means the board opposes teaching students about the most fundamental constitutional protection for religious freedom in America. ”

The board was expected to approve the first draft of its social studies standards on Friday and a final vote is slated for May. The standards adopted will remain in place for a decade and other states often follow the Austin lead because national textbook publishers seek to emulate them, given the size of the Texas market.

This is why commentators say that the partisan battles being waged here over topics that outsiders may find strange — the world’s richest country is concerned about what?! — really matter. They may set the tone  for what millions of American students learn on subjects ranging from evolution to the history of U.S. foreign policy. It really is, in some ways, a battle for the country’s soul.

Karl Rove, the political operative widely credited with the electoral successes of former U.S. President George W. Bush, says in his new book that he did not choose gay marriage as a wedge issue but that circumstances thrust it his way.

Conventional wisdom, at least in some circles, has it that Rove masterminded gay marriage as an issue in the 2004 White House race  in a bid to get conservative evangelicals — a key base for the Republican Party, especially during the Bush years – to the polls. There were ballot initiatives in about a  dozen states that year to ban gay marriage (or, supporters of such measures would argue, to defend traditional marriage).  Many political commentators have said such tactics are in keeping with the “Rovian” strategy of ginning up the base to clinch narrow victories.

Rove, in “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,”  says the ballot initiatives made little difference to the outcome that year and that they were not his idea anyway.

“Gay marriage was an ugly fight we had not asked for but could win if we handled with care. Done right, our response to gay marriage could show it was possible to bring a courteous and caring tone to a divisive issue. The issue also revealed the nuttiness of the Left, which never saw how persistent America’s traditionalism really was. Instead, the Left seemed convinced that Bush and I engineered the issue’s emergence to drive Bush partisans to the polls. But, of course, it was a liberal supreme court that brought the issue to the fore,” he writes.

He was referring to a November 2003, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision that legalized gay marriage in that state. Rove said that development sparked the ballot initiatives and he maintains their impact in the election battle against Democrat John Kerry has been greatly exaggerated. What did matter in his view was that state court decision.

“In the end, whether a state had a marriage ballot measure didn’t affect Bush’s share of the vote: he increased his portion of the vote between 2000 and 2004 by an average of 2.7 points in the states without referenda and by an average of 2.5 points in the eleven states with defense-of-marriage initiatives on the November ballot, a statistically insignificant difference … But the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision did affect the 2004 election by motivating culturally conservative Democrats and independents who might otherwise have voted Democratic to abandon Kerry over his wobbly views on marriage.”

Bush of course opposed same-sex marriage and called for a federal constitutional amendment to bar it, though Rove also notes that the former president supported same-sex partner rights such as hospital visits and health coverage. 

“Neither Bush nor I regret his stand on gay marriage. The issue was thrust upon us and we were perfectly willing to make our case. To overturn the time-honored definition of marriage is a socially revolutionary act. To do so through the courts and against the will of the people makes the attempt even more radical,” Rove writes, giving the standard critique of gay marriage that one hears in conservative Christian circles.

Rove also talks about the allegations that his adopted father was gay — allegations we blogged about the other day when he said in an interview that families should be off limits in politics. He says that the reporters who pushed those allegations were “driven by hatred” and that they wanted to push the angle that Karl Rove, the anti-gay crusader, had a gay father.

For the record, Rove says he does not know to this day and does not care if his late father was gay.

Rove does not have much more to say on the hot-button social issues and religious vote that have been associated with him and Bush. I have only had a chance to read a few sections of the book but according to the index the word abortion is only found on about a dozen of the book’s over 500 pages and some of those references are brief. The word “evangelicalism” is mentioned on only a handful of pages as well.

Rove was widely seen as a hardened warrior in the trenches of America’s culture wars. But he says he was reluctantly dragged into  some of those battles.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has just issued a report that examines issues of faith and culture among Americans between the age of 18 and 29 — a demographic group that has been dubbed the “Millennials” because most came of age around 2000. You can see our story here and the report here.

A couple of things come to mind. One is the finding that Millennials were far more likely than their elders from “Generation X” and the “Baby Boom” to be unaffiliated with a specific faith. In the context of recent American history, Generation X was born between 1965 and 1980, while Baby Boomers flooded the country from 1946 to 1964.

The report found one-in-four American Millennials unaffiliated with any specific faith, compared to 20 percent of Generation Xers at a comparable point in their lives (the late 1990s). Only 13 percent of Baby Boomers were religiously “unaffiliated” in the late 1970s when they were roughly the age Millennials are now.

There are some U.S. religious conservatives who will no doubt sound the alarm and point to these numbers as yet another example of moral decline. But one striking thing about the number is that, as the appendix at the end of the report makes clear, three in four young American adults are affiliated with a religious faith. I would guess that such a figure would be far higher than a comparable one for, say, many countries in western Europe. Such a comparison could be instructive, if the data were available.

The report is also just the latest to highlight the generation chasm that exists on the issue of gay rights. For example, the report said that Pew’s massive 2007 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey found young adults to be almost twice as likely to say homosexuality should be accepted by society as those 65 and older, 63 percent versus 35 percent.

On the issue of abortion rights — the hottest of the hot-button topics in America — the report had some intriguing findings. I think it’s worth quoting the report here:

“Roughly half of young adults (52%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. On this issue, young adults express slightly more permissive views than do adults ages 30 and older. However, the group that truly stands out on this issue is people 65 and older, just 37% of whom say abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Interestingly, this pattern represents a significant change from earlier polling. Previously,people in the middle age categories (i.e., those ages 30-49 and 50-64) tended to be more supportive of legal abortion, while the youngest and oldest age groups were more opposed. In 2009, however, attitudes toward abortion moved in a more conservative direction among most groups in the population, with the notable exception of young people. The result of this conservative turn among those in the 30-49 and 50-64 age brackets means that their views now more closely resemble those of the youngest age group, while those in the 65-and-older group now express the most conservative views on abortion of any age group.”

What do you think this means for this polarizing issue going forward?

The report drew on recent Pew surveys to paint a portrait of emerging generation gaps among Millennials and other demographics. It uses older surveys by Gallup and others to compare the views of age groups at different times in recent history.

(Photo: People pray at the Bella Vista Assembly of God church in Bella Vista, Arkansas, November 8, 2009. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson)

Much of the hype around this year’s Super Bowl pro football championship game focused on an ad by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family that featured college football superstar Tim Tebow and his mother Pam.

Several abortion rights and women’s groups had complained in advance about the reported content of the ad, which they said would have a strong anti-abortion rights message.  Reports suggested that the ad would focus on Pam Tebow’s decision to carry Tim to term despite a recommendation from her doctors that she have an abortion. The Tebow family is deeply evangelical and he was born in the Philippines where his parents were doing missionary work.

Several groups that oppose abortion rights came out in strong support of the ad. None of this is surpring given the highly polarizing nature of the issue in America.

The ad, which you can view below, is subtle, with Pam Tebow speaking of Tim as her “miracle baby.” The polarizing A-word is not mentioned, nor the term “pro life,”  but it directed viewers to a Focus on the Family link where Tebow’s mother does talk of her decision to carry him to term despite a doctor’s warning that doing so could endanger her life. In it her husband Bob talked of “weeping over the loss of millions of babies in America that were never given a chance.”

What do you think of the hype around the ad? Was it overblown or could the link on the Focus on the Family web site  unduly influence women whose lives are seriously at risk because of their pregnancy? And even if you support abortion rights, don’t your opponents have the right to air their views?

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(PHOTO: University of Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow smiles on the sidelines prior to the start of the NFL’s Super Bowl XLIV football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints in Miami, Florida, February 7, 2010. REUTERS/Hans Deryk)

U.S. women’s groups are urging television broadcaster CBS not to air an ad during next month’s Super Bowl football championship final because they say it has a strident anti-abortion rights message.

The plans to air the ad, sponsored by the conservative Christian advocacy group Focus on the Family and featuring college football star Tim Tebow, could see the polarizing issue of abortion rights dropped squarely in the midst of the National Football League’s premier event.

It would be the first time that Focus on the Family, a politically influential evangelical group founded by James Dobson, has bought air time during the Super Bowl — the ultimate prize of the advertising world with 30-second spots going for up to $3.2 million. The Women’s Media Center and over 30 other liberal and women’s advocacy groups sent a letter to CBS, the TV network to air the Super Bowl on February 7, saying: “… we urge you to immediately cancel this ad and refuse any other advertisement promoting Focus on the Family’s agenda.”

Read the whole story here.