Newsweek‘s Lisa Miller notes the lack of an abortion debate in the 2008 presidential campaign:
With a real war abroad and recessionary anxiety at home, abortion rhetoric has been unusually quiet in this election season. Denver’s Archbishop Charles Chaput made some news in August when he told the Associated Press that he hoped pro-choice Democratic vice presidential pick (and observant Roman Catholic) Joe Biden would “refrain from presenting himself at communion.” But that was nothing compared to the small war a group of bishops waged on Sen. John Kerry in 2004 when they said he should not be given communion—an assault that put the Democrat on the defensive and, in the end, led to his Fort Lauderdale, Fla., religion speech, an awkward maneuver that the senator himself has said was too little, too late. News channels have played no b-roll of abortion supporters or protesters holding up their obligatory offensive placards, showing perfect fetuses on the one hand and coat hangers on the other. As I’ve written in previous columns, the silence of Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren on the subject of abortion in this election has been notable. In 2004, Warren sent an e-mail around listing the five “non-negotiables” for any evangelical voter, and abortion was of course high on that list. This year, he has made no such pronouncement.
This relative silence on the part of religious conservatives, along with the well-documented broadening of the evangelical agenda to include issues like poverty and the environment, has led some to speculate that conservative Christians don’t care about abortion the way they used to. This assumption is not true.
Read the full article here.