Not long ago, notes Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, “opposition to abortion and opposition to homosexual rights seemed to overlap entirely.” But public opinion is diverging on the two issues, with recent polls indicating that majorities of Americans consider themselves “pro-life” and homosexuality “not a moral issue.” Two-thirds also favor civil unions for gay couples. Gerson concludes: “So far the gay rights movement has succeeded for many of the same reasons that the pro-life movement (to a lesser extent) has succeeded. Both have taken sometimes abstract, theoretical arguments and humanized them. Both have moved away from extreme-sounding moralism (or anti-moralism) and placed their cause in the context of civil rights progress. Whatever your view on the application of these arguments, this is the way social movements advance in America.”
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