Reply #7: I don;t know if Obama is Neville Chamberlain yet

[rinsd]

But your breakdown of what can and cannot be compromised was outstanding!

"What makes these conflicts interminable is that they cannot be resolved through compromise. If they could, we would have dispensed with them long ago. The only way to get past a substantial and interminable political conflict is for one side or the other to lose.

Throwing bags of trash in the street was a 1960s issue that was resolved because the litter-bugs did not have a passionate ideological stance in favor of littering. There was no real divide to be bridged.

Abortion continues to be a hard fought battle today because it involves serious differences and questions of fundamental rights. Senator Obama says he believes that the American people have largely “moved beyond” many of those old 1960s ideological disputes. In the case of abortion, he is somewhat correct. The American people have settled on an uneasy and utterly unprincipled compromise position that is ethically incoherent, that abortion is bad and should be limited somehow as a cultural marker that it is bad, but it shouldn’t be banned… at least not for me and my friends.

The fact that a lot of American people think like that does not, however, mean we have “moved beyond” abortion as an issue. As a constitutional lawyer, Obama should understand that the law can not accommodate that kind of cognitive dissonance. At some point vague feel-good rhetoric must find expression in law. And the abortion divide cannot be casually bridged in law because the law must say one thing or another."

Seriously. Great job.

:applause: