Abortion Green Lanternism
By What was especially maddening about Saletan-esque arguments over the years, aside from their clear wrongness, was that he seemed to truly believe that if only pro-choice people would admit it was all so icky and horrible then anti-abortion people would just surrender and go home. It was the position that only a High Priest Of Punditry could take, that the discourse was more important than the policy.
There were a lot of pathologies in the general pundit discourse about abortion in the preceding decade (which, thankfully, seem to be a little less common now.) But one of the strangest is the idea that there was some rhetorical strategy that could end the underlying conflict. And it’s particularly odd in the context of abortion, where public opinion has been remarkably stable since the issue became politically salient in the mid-60s, all the clever rhetorical strategies of both sides aside. Framing and messaging are overrated in general, and abortion is a particularly strong case in point even though it’s an issue where people seem to be particularly obsessed with it.