Say this for Al Gore: He is the most relentlessly logical of presidential candidates we've seen in years. Once upon a time he was an opponent of legalized abortion, but sometime in the 1980s he realized that his viability in the Democratic party depended upon his support for Roe v. Wade. Now lots of politicians have made a similarly cynical decision. But few have brought to the task the thoroughgoing focus that Gore has: Nothing can ever impinge in the slightest way upon the logic of his new position; everything that he says must be tailored to it.
Questioned recently in an NBC interview about an obscure federal law that prohibits the execution of pregnant women, Gore asked for time to think -- and, having thought, announced the next day that pregnant women should be able to decide whether to postpone their executions: "The principle of a woman's right to choose," he declared, "governs in that case."
Now, whether you believe the fetus is an unborn child or not, Roe v. Wade can hardly be said to have enshrined at the heart of the American Constitution the right to fry it to death in an electric chair if you choose. But, of course, once a frighteningly consistent man has made his choice for abortion, nothing can stop him: not a distaste for capital punishment, not a tinge of delicacy, not the fact that the (hypothetical) woman concerned would have already forfeited her rights as a condemned criminal, not the most ancient moral sense -- held even in the days of the stern creed demanding "an eye for an eye" -- that we don't execute pregnant women, precisely because of what it does to us when we do it. Give Gore high marks, then, for rigor -- and for creepiness.