At The Plank, Josh Patashnik responds to my post yesterday on younger evangelicals being more rigidly anti-abortion than their parents and grandparents:
It's too early to say for certain, but gay marriage looks more and more like one of those social issues--like racial and gender equality, contraception, eugenics, Prohibition, and, more recently, perhaps gun control--that within a few decades gets answered definitively one way or the other and fades from the political scene thereafter. Abortion, on the other hand, seems to be that rare social issue in American politics on which a generation of intense public debate has brought us no closer to arriving at anything resembling a consensus.
I certainly hope that gay marriage, within our lifetimes, will become totally accepted. The trend lines certainly do show real progress. But we shouldn't be too optimistic; it's difficult to predict how ideologies will shift and re-shift over time. I have to take umbrage, for example, with Josh's suggestion that contraception is an issue that has "faded from the political scene." What we've actually seen in recent years is a re-politicization of contraception. In part, this is because of new scientific developments that have given us Plan B, which foes of abortion rights have construed as akin to terminating a pregnancy. Then there are the legal battles taking place across the country in which Christian fundamentalist pharmacists are claiming they have the right not to fill prescriptions for ordinary birth control, especially for unmarried women. And don't forget the health insurers whose customers have taken them to court because they covered Viagra, but not hormonal birth control.
I doubt our mothers would have predicted, back in the 70s, that "the pill" would be as controversial in 2008 as it actually is. Living in a major city, we're lucky to be relatively protected from these flair ups of anti-birth control sentiment. But that's not the case for many American women.
--Dana Goldstein