Last week at the Values Voters Summit in Washington D.C., Texas Governor and Presidential candidate Rick Perry introduced his speech with an off-the-cuff comment about how really, we’re all values voters. “The only question,” he said “is whose values are you voting for”?
This is true of course. The belief that abortion is wrong is undeniably a values based position—as is the belief that women have the right to end the life of their child if it happens to be inconvenient to them. There may be factual disagreements about whether or not it is a child, or disagreements over whether mitigating factors are relevant to the rightness or wrongness of the final decision. But ultimately, whatever your conclusion, it is a values based conclusion based on your belief about what is right or wrong, good or bad.
Such is life in all of public policy.
