The great pass time of talking past each other has reached fever pitch on television and radio interview programs. The intense debates over illegal immigration, abortion, taxation, economic policy, the war against terrorism, environmentalism, global climate change, unemployment, and you-fill-in-the-blank simply grow more and more hostile and insensitive every day. There is more than one reason for this. I suspect the paramount reason is the need for theater, for after all the entertainment value must be considered so as to ensure the best ratings in the news-entertainment competition. Secondly, there is almost never any discussion regarding the fundamental “world view” positions of the debaters in these heated dialogues for two reasons. First, the sound-bite theater atmosphere that hosts the great portion of these arguments/interviews does not accommodate the amount of time necessary to establish such necessary philosophical landscape. Second, networks and programmers may actually have correctly discerned that viewers and listeners, by and large, are really not prepared to deal with such concrete boundaries as rational thought and principles of logic. People simply want to hear ideas and arguments that reinforce their already established points of view. I expect there must be some form of serotonin released in the brain that provides a sense of well-being when this happens and therefore the experience is sought out as a means of continued happiness or elation.
In the case of the argument over abortion, I would like to examine the two main fundamental world views brought to bear in most of these verbal contests. Both sides like to stake out the terminology of historical winners in this debate by claiming the appreciation for the “rights” of their respective client: for the abortion rights advocate it would be the rights of the mother; for the anti-abortion advocate it would be the rights of the human fetus. Yet, in the contest of rights, the world view of the anti-abortionist would insist that the most fundamental right of all, the right to life, is denied their client in the event of an abortion. However, in the world view of the abortion rights advocate, a lesser right, the right to privacy, is denied their client in the event of an abortion impediment. It would be prosperous to viewers and listeners to be able to hear a full and comprehensive debate on the value of the two views of comparable “rights” and how they are morally equivalent so as to determine a priority in competing virtues. One might argue that there are no “lesser” rights. However, Solomon’s offer to divide the child as the solution to the problem of who would receive the child was simply an execution of wisdom. He knew there was a superior way and so do we. Rights are fundamental and prioritized, and chief among these rights is the right to life. The Supreme Court may have been witness to a plethora of arguments since the abortion debate entered the courts but the viewing American electorate has not had the pleasure. Perhaps the ALCU and the ACLJ should co-produce a mini-series on the Abortion Great Debate for a national television audience.
