Recently, the Southern Baptist Convention received a special address from President Bush via satellite (click here for the article). He spoke about all the right hot-button topics including abortion, gay marriage (or as the sbc website puts it, gay “marriage”) and human cloning. The president spoke of his desire to help create a “culture of life.”

I applaud this goal. We should create a society where life is affirmed and respected. This includes helping improve the lives of those already out of the womb.

Yet poverty and human rights are causes that fail to “energize the conservative base”. Why is this? Perhaps we don’t want to explore our own complicity in the poverty and abuse going on throughout the world. I’m not saying that abortion, gay marriage and human cloning aren’t important issues. But perhaps these issues are given too much airplay. Certainly this is partly because they are relatively new issues and therefore better suited for a news program than the issue of poverty, for example. Yet there may be another reason. These issues are comfortable. Most of us will never be affected by abortion, gay marriage or human cloning. Thus, it is easy to decide where we stand on these issues because it is unlikely that we will ever actually engage in one of them. Conveniently, if we get worked up enough about these issues in society, we can avoid facing the fact that we compromise our ethics all of the time in the way we live our lives. Consider the outrage displayed over the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast versus the Abu Graib prison torture in Iraq. Are these two incidents anywhere near each other on the ethical spectrum?