Why the moral vote doesn’t matter

I like Bush because he’s against gay marriage and likes babies.

– Rachel Hampton (an issue voter)

This is Pro-Life Topia: the possible world in which anti-abortion forces finally criminalize abortion in your particular country.

Now P-LT is just like the actual world: it is just as individualistic and divided in the abortion question. The only difference between our two worlds is that instead of electing presidents who say they’re anti-abortion, P-LT elected a president who actually succeeded in making abortion illegal. He also succeeded in ensuring the passage of all manner of other unrelated legislation.

You are a citizen in P-LT who believes abortion is murder and that allowing abortion has been the equivalent to a holocaust. You support your president because he has managed to outlaw abortion and that was your number one issue. In fact, you had always cast your vote as a ‘moral vote.’ Perhaps you support some of your president’s other legislation, but most likely you do not as there is no real correlation between personal values and economic preferences or international positions.

The pro-choice forces in P-LT go berserk. The following election, pro-abortion voters turn out en mass and elect another candidate to be president.

I believe this world is intuitively plausible to us all. In fact, I think this is the reason many pro-life politicians work slowly to chip away at women’s rights rather than risk the political fallout that would result if they did something drastic.

In fact, I believe we’ve seen this. Recall the 2004 U.S. presidential elections. In late 2003, it seemed certain that George Bush would not be reelected. However, early in 2004, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom legalized gay marriage. The media circus that followed outraged many conservatives and prompted many state legislatures to propose defining marriage as a union ‘between a man and a woman.’ Arguably, one of the results of the newfound surge in conservativism was the reelection of George W. Bush.

My thesis is this: It is useless to cast your vote for any politically charged issue wherein the losing side will respond in force. The moral vote doesn’t matter. The best possible result will be a few years of your desired outcome followed by many more years of your undesired outcome. The worst and most likely result is the passage of other laws you do not support or know about.

Thus this is idiocy at its finest.

p.s. I chose the issues for this post because I don’t care about either of them. I am friends with lots of gay people and aborted feti, but don’t agree with the concept of ‘marriage’ or ‘life’ either.

p.p.s. And you thought my post script would absolve me from controversy!

I like Bush because he’s against gay marriage and likes babies. – Rachel Hampton (an issue voter) This is Pro-Life Topia: the possible world in which anti-abortion forces finally criminalize abortion in your particular country. Now P-LT is just like the actual world: it is just as individualistic and divided in the abortion question. The…