Anchorage Daily News

Let's say President-elect Barack Obama had advocated during his campaign he was going to legally change the crime of rape from a felony to a misdemeanor. Let's assume all his other policies remained identical except for this one issue. How many Americans would have jumped ship on his White House bid based on this single policy?

What if he had vowed that under an Obama administration, all death-row convicts would obtain immediate pardons -- no delays or lengthy appeals? On the streets and coming to a neighborhood near you and your family on Jan. 21 following his swearing-in ceremony.

Might this have been a change that many would have drawn a line in the sand over?

Here's the point. Every person has a cause they are willing to fall on the sword for. A point at which there simply cannot be any compromise.

A few weeks ago, Sen. Gary Stevens, a Republican from Kodiak and the incoming Alaska state Senate president, stated that during the next legislative session, "there are far left and far right issues that really have to be off the table." Now I can't say with certainty what Stevens meant by "far left" issues but in today's political lexicon, "far right" typically translates into abortion and homosexuality.

I could be wrong. Maybe he was referring to school choice or downsizing the growth of our bloated state bureaucracy but I doubt it.

Many of us in the conservative, pro-family, pro-life movement have been told for years to get over our single-minded political template of protecting life and defending the family. There is ample evidence, in fact, that a growing number of evangelical and conservative Catholic voters, tired of being pigeonholed, are expanding their horizons into protecting the environment and ending poverty.

Are these issues worthy of our concern? Certainly. Are there legitimate disputes as to the underlying causes of and solutions to each? Most definitely. There are some policies, however, that simply cannot be reconciled with moral norms that used to be held by most Americans. These are, in my view, the non-negotiables. Today, they are called "fringe" issues.

Is it really that radical for parents to want to know if their teenage daughter might be considering an invasive surgical procedure such as abortion? Are we truly that far out of bounds for simply wanting to define marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman?

During the dark days of slavery in the British Empire, can we agree there were many other pressing matters facing the House of Commons beside the fact that humans were being bought and sold like cattle? Fortunately, though, William Wilburforce, among others, had a clear vision and dogged determination of bringing society along to a place he called the "better hour" where each person would be treated as valuable and worthy of dignity, protection and freedom. Wilburforce would have been considered a single-issue politician today, as most of his three decades in public life were devoted almost exclusively to freeing the slave.

A quick vernacular note here on and how language often skews public dialogue. There were countless British citizens during that era who didn't own slaves themselves and didn't personally agree with the slave trade but were hesitant about forcing their values on others who disagreed. They were not known as being pro-choice. They were simply pro-slavery.

If protecting the sanctity of life and marriage are "far right" issues, how do we explain the fact that although African-Americans voted for Obama in record numbers, they were simultaneously instrumental in constitutional amendment victories in Florida, California and Arizona defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman? How is it that they could have been so wise in ushering in change to the White House and yet so fringe for lifting up and protecting the cornerstone relationship of our culture?

These issues are as mainstream as any other issue, and in fact, Alaskans and Americans on both sides of the political spectrum have demonstrated a remarkable interest in engaging in debates about marriage and the sanctity of life whenever they have an opportunity. You can call them fringe or far right but they should not be relegated to "off the table" simply because they're controversial.

Jim Minnery is president of the Alaska Family Council in Anchorage.

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