Sheesh, Mark, I was only opening the thing for discussion.
And where, exactly, was my failure to apprehend the unempirical nature of the Left? Half Sigma, the blogger I quoted, isn’t even on the Left. Among his last 20-odd posts I note:
Nov. 4: “The elites who control the Democratic Party strongly support gay marriage even though it’s not uniformly supported among Democratic voters …”Nov. 3: “Good news for people who hate liberals and Democrats …”Nov. 3: “All of the other institutions which tell people how to think, such as Hollywood, the mainstream media, colleges and universities, the public education bureaucracy, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, etc., are all controlled by liberals …”Nov. 2: “The fact that Scozzafava has endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens, shows us that she was no good. No real Republican would ever endorse a Democrat …”Oct. 29: “The NY Times Magazine preview demonstrates that the MSM still loves the Obamas …”
Some Leftie. As to your assertion that:
The notion that abortion is pro-family because it reduces single motherhood is hard to reconcile with the fact that demographic groups with the highest rates of abortion — such as, say, the African-American community — also have the highest rates of single-parent households …
It seems to me rather easy to reconcile. A high-abortion-rate community with high rates of single-family households, would presumably have even more such households but for abortion. There’s your reconciliation right there. Was it really so hard?
The guy is pointing up a conflict between two conservative values: the pro-family one, and the anti-abortion one. He thinks the pro-family one should have more weight. People who think abortion is a profound wrong will of course disagree, duh, but they might still acknowledge the conflict. And other conservatives might, like Half Sigma come down on the other side, for pragmatic reasons, there being at least some possibility of progress there. Thirty years of railing against abortion hasn’t accomplished much, has it?