Speaking in the Tongue of Evangelicals:Bush speaks to his base-Dog Whistle style

TO liberal lawyers and history buffs, it was a head-scratcher. Did President Bush mean to oppose slavery by pledging in the presidential debates not to appoint the kind of Supreme Court justices who decided the Dred Scott case, the 1857 decision that upheld the fugitive slave law? To conservative Christian opponents of abortion, Mr. Bush's reference was clear as a bell: opposing Dred Scott is shorthand for opposing Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established abortion rights. One day, many social conservatives assert, Roe v. Wade, just like Dred Scott, will be overturned as an erroneous violation of basic human rights. "We have used that comparison for years and years and years," said Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. The potential double meaning rekindled speculation among Mr. Bush's critics that he communicates with his conservative Christian base with a dog-whistle of code words and symbols, deliberately incomprehensible to secular liberals. [more ]