My Morals Should Be Your Morals

Rev. Jim Wallis who is an friend/adviser/defender of Obama's has apparently been recommending that the Dems reach out to the young evangelicals by dialing back the support for abortion and making "reducing abortion" a central plank in the party platform. He's been taken to task at TAPPED for missing the fact that this is already pretty much the mainstream Dem position on abortion, and Scott at LGM wonders what might happen to the support from women who have had abortions if the Dems were to start publicly questioning their morals.

I take issue with Wallis from a slightly different angle. Here's his quote:

“Taking abortion seriously as a moral issue would help Democrats a great deal with a constituency that is already leaning in their direction on poverty and the environment,” said Wallis. “There are literally millions of votes at stake.”

He seems to presuppose that Dems, because they support abortion rights, aren't taking it "seriously" (alarm! alarm!) as a moral issue. Yes, because the only "moral" position to take is in line with a conservative Christian definition of morality. There is no morality in the argument that the state has no business telling a woman what she can do with her body. There's no morality in keeping the state out of medical decisions. There's no morality in trying to keep a legal medical procedure viable for poor women. There's no morality in protecting young pregnant women who don't feel safe discussing the issue with their parents. Nope, this is all just wacky liberal anti-morality for the sake of being shocking and anti-Christian.

Thanks Rev. Wallis, but I think we'd do best to keep our slopes as non-slippery as possible on this one.