Will vs. Dobson

(Play nice in comments, this is an abortion thread.)

Christianity Today has a roundup of various religious right figures arguing that the initial enthusiasm for Rudy Giuliani among evangelical voters is going to fade once they learn more about him. Southern Baptist spokesman Richard Land is typical of this view:

"As they get to know him — not as the hero of 9/11* but as a supporter of tax-funded abortions — his support will decline precipitously."

Columnist George Will doesn't share Land's perspective. His column, "What Voters Want," offers instead a more cynical take on the anti-abortion evangelical voting bloc:

The [Republican] party asserts that one of America's most common surgical procedures is murder. So, last year perhaps a million women and their doctors committed murder. However much a person deplores abortion and embraces that legal logic, nobody believes that either the legislation or the constitutional amendment that Republican platforms have praised will be passed. Hence the sterility of today's abortion debate.

The italics on "nobody" are Will's, underscoring the implication of the first two sentences there — that he suspects much of the GOP's anti-abortion posturing is a disingenuous charade, something they claim without really believing.

Them's fightin' words.

In his typical, bow-tied, elliptical way, Will is calling out the religious right.

Will's larger point seems to be a plea to social conservatives to be willing to accept some compromise on ideology in order to ensure a "competent" Republican nominee capable of winning the general election. But he also strongly suggests that they ought to be willing to make this compromise because they don't really, genuinely believe that "perhaps a million women and their doctors committed murder" last year. He suggests that their claim to believe this is merely a way of providing cover for their unquestioning partisan loyalty, and that in the end their partisan loyalty will — and ought to — trump their alleged anti-abortion concern.

It will be interesting to see how the religious right responds to Will's column.

For my part, I think Will is being somewhat unfair. I think he's confusing deliberate duplicity and cognitive dissonance. The two things may produce similar effects, but they arise from different causes and, thus, require different responses.

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* I shouldn't let this description of Rudy Giuliani as "the hero of 9/11" pass without comment. As mayor on Sept. 11, 2001, Giuliani did help to fill the leadership vacuum created by President Bush's imitation of "Brave Sir Robin." But what Giuliani actually did was this: He held a press conference.

It was a very good press conference. He said much of what needed to be said in much the way it needed to be said. But for all of that, it was still just a press conference.

Describing a press conference — even a well executed one — as "heroic" requires a rather stunted notion of what constitutes heroism. That stunted notion provides almost the entire basis for Giuliani's campaign.