Star Parker could have never guessed that she would kickoff a classic FR 'Civil War/Lincoln was a tyrant' thread with this article.
Ignoring the thread hi-jacking and with an attempt at getting back to Star's point, I think 2012 'looks like' 1860 with Lincoln rejecting submitting slavery to the vote. In 2012, the winning Party will be the one that rejects putting abortion to a vote. As Ronald Maximus put it ....
Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation [By President Ronald Reagan, 1983]
Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.
Ignoring the thread hi-jacking and with an attempt at getting back to Star's point, I think 2012 'looks like' 1860 with Lincoln rejecting submitting slavery to the vote. In 2012, the winning Party will be the one that rejects putting abortion to a vote. Slavery and abortion resemble one another only in that they are moral issues to some people and not to others.
Lincoln made slavery a moral issue, as did the Abolitionists of his day, while claiming to be not an Abolitionist (I think for tactical reasons, to avoid a label he might have deserved).
Whereas modern abortion opponents do indeed oppose abortion on strictly moral grounds, much as the Israelites condemned Jezebel for her institution of a tophet (a sacrifice of children) in the holy city of Jerusalem, it will continue to mystify historians whether the secretive Lincoln was in fact a moralist, or even a deist. Some suspect he was neither, and that his use of the slavery issue (and its "cure", civil war) was pragmatic and drily instrumental, and that his real motive in argument -- his motive -- was to implement the American System of Henry Clay, a strictly economic agenda that needed some sort of left-handed way of being implemented in the agrarian United States of his day.
In other words, the Civil War may have been all about instituting high tariffs and subsidies for manufacturers and better business conditions, and subsidies, for railroads -- remember, Lincoln was a railroad and patent lawyer.
It might all have been about the money, and all the rest, window dressing for a dark victory of the money power.