Rick Herrick Central - Hi there.

A very interesting article on the topic by Jonathon Rauch.  The basic point, and I've long thought that this is very true, is that opposition to same-sex marriage is driven in some cases by homophobia, but not in all or even most cases.  Instead, same-sex marriage is the logical conclusion of the changes that began with the sexual revolution, and the institutionalization of same-sex marriage would essentially mean the end of the fight to reverse the sexual revolution.

I think a similar dynamic is at work in the anti-abortion/pro-choice conflict.^* The common perception amongst many on the pro-choice side is that anti-abortion crusaders are motivated by, among other things, the desire to control women and antipathy towards independent women.  There is some of that, certainly and to some extent there's an overlap between people who plainly want to roll back the clock on women's liberation (an anachronistic term in and of itself) and those who see the issue in broader cultural terms.  But there's also a discomfort with the effects of the sexual revolution and general cultural liberalization.  Gone are the days when men were men and women were women and everyone knew their place.  That uncertainty leads to a desire to return to a more well-defined (and conservative in the narrow sense, i.e. more limited) social structure leads to opposition to the mechanisms by which women have achieved at least a semblance of the independence from biological and social strictures on behavior, including legal and relatively widely available abortion.

As a caveat to that, some people just believe that abortion kills a living person with all the moral freight that carries.  I don't agree with that, but I'm sympathetic to it: if you think it's murder, just the same as if you walked out onto the street and killed a random person, there's really no space for compromise.

* I use anti-abortion and pro-choice very pointedly as the terms I use to characterize these two factions, in spite of the fact that the

• I use anti-abortion instead of pro-life because, with a few notable exceptions such as the Catholic Church, most people on that side of things are not consistently pro-life, which I would argue must include opposition to the death penalty.
• I use pro-choice instead of pro-abortion because most people who are pro-choice are at best ambivalent about abortion, seeing it as a necessary but undesirable procedure.  Many pro-choice people are actively opposed to abortion personally, i.e. they would not have one themselves, but don't believe that they have the moral authority to dictate this to others, especially in the case of procedures that are less clear-cut that simple terminations of convenience (i.e. dilation and extraction procedures to terminate problematic pregnancies: what does "health of the mother" encompass?).