Speaking in the Tongue of Evangelicals:Bush speaks to his base-Dog Whistle style
Tuesday, October 19, 2004 at 05:25AM
TheSpook
TO liberal lawyers and history buffs, it was a
head-scratcher. Did President Bush mean to oppose slavery by pledging
in the presidential debates not to appoint the kind of Supreme Court
justices who decided the Dred Scott case, the 1857 decision that upheld
the fugitive slave law? To conservative Christian opponents of
abortion, Mr. Bush's reference was clear as a bell: opposing Dred Scott
is shorthand for opposing Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision
that established abortion rights. One day, many social conservatives
assert, Roe v. Wade, just like Dred Scott, will be overturned as an
erroneous violation of basic human rights. "We have used that
comparison for years and years and years," said Dr. Richard Land,
president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the
Southern Baptist Convention. The potential double meaning rekindled
speculation among Mr. Bush's critics that he communicates with his
conservative Christian base with a dog-whistle of code words and
symbols, deliberately incomprehensible to secular liberals. [more ]
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