After arguing with another poster here at the Dkos on gun rights and gun control the other week, a thought bubbled up from the increasingly acerbic way the debate went. Compromise is a hard thing! Finding common ground on issues is difficult. And that's with someone who agrees with a lot of what we who are Dkos regulars believe. Even with our supposed 'Left Wing' group, there is a lot of heterogeneity of beliefs about different issues throughout the community. There are issues we probably all mostly agree about 90 to 95%. Global Warming is real. The Iraq War was begun on false pretensions and the Bush Administration probably lied about some of their 'facts' about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Tax Cuts are not the miracle panacea of Job Creation. Every other Republican Congressman has a strange sexual fetish...well ok ok...that's just a personal belief. I digress...I was going to talk about compromise.
When we were listening to the country as the Democrats in Congress debated with the Republicans over the stimulus passage, it suddenly came to me that compromise is really three things. First, it can be when a party in power holds sway over the weaker party and forces them to compromise on their core beliefs or be crushed (think Democrats in 2002 and how they caved on almost anything). The second is when a weaker party decides it will disrupt the party in power's abilities to do anything if the stronger party doesn't cow to their needs (think the Religious Right and the Republican Party during the Terri Schiavo debacle). Finally there is a unanimous compromise where both sides give up a little about what they want and agree on the more common themes that are important (Think of Northern Republicans and the Democratic Party during the signing of the Civil Rights act). And yet...it seems like sometimes there can be no compromise.
With the President and the Congress in recent years more and more apt to debate social policy the spotlight on these issues shines more and more brightly. Sometimes, issues of the heart and body should not be left to the court of world and political opinion to decide, its too personal a thing and in the end one side is never happy with the results. And yet that is the role the government has taken. It has decided to engineer social policy towards different groups: it gives tax incentives to get married and have kids, it helps ethnic groups and women recover from decades of discrimination with equal opportunity, it discriminates against gay men and women as second class citizens, it provides people with disabilities the chance to succeed in a world that has given them little assistance throughout history.
Each of these is a glaringly necessary or hateful abomination depending on where on the political spectrum you stand. And yet, these things are debated and demonstrated on, voted and vetoed over, celebrated and protested in the end. Can there really be compromise on issue that is close to the heart, that tears the soul? Look to New York, the issue of Gun Rights for Carolyn McCarthy will be enough to push her to take on an incumbent in New York. In this case the personal reason of her husband being killed by gunfire. The ability to compromise on what you hold most dearest is very difficult. So I'd like to ask a question...what issue or belief do you hold most dear, and would you ever be willing to compromise on it?