Prof. Hadley Arkes, writing in The Catholic Thing, examines the extent to which the polarizing social debates of our time are moral, rather than political in nature. Some excerpts: "The unspoken truth is that the differences engaged here are nothing less than moral differences, but the people who deprecate the presence of these issues speak and write as though 'moral' questions had no proper place in our politics, precisely because they fostered the disagreements about things that truly that ran to the root – most notably, who is that 'human person,' the bearer of rights, the one who elicits our sympathy, our desire to protect and respect? The very term 'social issue' reveals here a prejudice that seems quite unnoticed by the people who use the term." "In our politics today, 'a social issue' seems to be constituted, for example, by the question of 'who is protected by the laws of homicide? Does a baby change his species when he is born, or do the laws on the killing of humans protect all humans, even when they are short and small and still in their mothers’ wombs?' But when did the protection of human life become a 'social issue,' something quite remote from the main business of our politics and laws?" "It takes nothing less than a revolution in thought to produce politicians and pundits who think that these issues of life and marriage are not really 'political' issues, that they are somehow exotic or distant from the main, legitimate issues of politics. And what could they possibly think forms, instead, the proper issues of politics: questions utterly detached from arguments about the things that are truly right or wrong, just or unjust?" Read the whole piece here.