Civil Liberties in 2006
Wednesday January 3, 2007
Full Coverage: Civil Liberties in 2006
My first year as your friendly neighborhood About.com Guide to Civil Liberties was an eventful one. Abortion, immigration reform, and same-sex marriage were all central to the national debate in this major election year, and we ended the year with a national electoral and public opinion shift to the center-left.
Now there's an obvious question: What next? Soon, the new Congress will go into session. The Supreme Court will issue a flurry of 2006-2007 rulings. Life will go on in a country increasingly marked by ideological diversity, and what seems to media observers to be a clash between worldviews, one secular and cosmopolitan, the other religious and provincial--but it isn't that simple. In a country where 90% of evangelicals want a social policy geared towards fighting poverty and the AIDS pandemic but only 43% of evangelicals support a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, where conservatives propose foreign intervention and liberals isolationism, where liberals have become deficit hawks and conservatives believe in a larger government, there is no accounting for traditional political distinctions. If there is one New Year's sentiment we should cling to, it is "Let auld acquaintance be forgot / and never brought to mind"--because our political auld acquaintance, what we think we have learned about this country's beliefs and attitudes, is in the process of radically changing.
Welcome to 2007, my friends. It's already weird--and it's only going to get weirder.
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Now there's an obvious question: What next? Soon, the new Congress will go into session. The Supreme Court will issue a flurry of 2006-2007 rulings. Life will go on in a country increasingly marked by ideological diversity, and what seems to media observers to be a clash between worldviews, one secular and cosmopolitan, the other religious and provincial--but it isn't that simple. In a country where 90% of evangelicals want a social policy geared towards fighting poverty and the AIDS pandemic but only 43% of evangelicals support a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, where conservatives propose foreign intervention and liberals isolationism, where liberals have become deficit hawks and conservatives believe in a larger government, there is no accounting for traditional political distinctions. If there is one New Year's sentiment we should cling to, it is "Let auld acquaintance be forgot / and never brought to mind"--because our political auld acquaintance, what we think we have learned about this country's beliefs and attitudes, is in the process of radically changing.
Welcome to 2007, my friends. It's already weird--and it's only going to get weirder.
Zoom to:
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