"OUR VALUES TRAMPLED"? WHAT DOES HUCKABEE MEAN BY THAT?

Earlier today, the Newshoggers posted a new ad about abortion from Mike Huckabee. Here it is:



The script is basically Christian-conservative boilerplate -- except for one odd phrase, which I've highlighted below:

"The pro-life position was the one espoused by our Founding Fathers when they said that all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. The first one they listed was life. Nobody has a greater level of intrinsic worth or value than another person. Being unborn doesn't make you less valuable. Maybe instead of having our values trampled all over every single day and night, we would express to America what those values are: family, life, freedom -- those things matter to us. Always has, always will."

Is the key issue here really abortion -- or is it respect?

I think it's the latter at least as much as the former -- this ad is about cultural conservatives from less sophisticated parts of the country feeling sorry for themselves because their mores don't prevail everywhere in America, and because they think we evil urbane types condescend to them.

I'm reminded of what Rick Perlstein wrote in Sunday's New York Times Magazine about Harry Dent, the Democrat-turned-Republican aide to Strom Thurmond and, later, Richard Nixon who had a great deal to do with winning the South for the GOP:

...Dent claimed his truest passion was healing the South's wounded regional pride: the shame at being condescended to by Yankees....

In his 1978 memoir, "The Prodigal South Returns to Power," Dent wrote that his politics were never racist. "The aim of the Southern strategy," he claimed, was merely "to have the South treated just like any other section of the U.S.A." ...

Dent later acknowledged the racial poison in the Southern strategy, as Perlstein notes -- but that doesn't mean Dent was being purely disingenuous when he invoked regional pride. The Southern/rural side in America's permanent civil war is always worked up about pride, always seething with resentment of us snooty Yankee sophisticates. The issues change, but the battle remains the same.

****

UPDATE: I see that CNN is worried that we might have missed the point:

For the second time in the past two weeks, presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has aired a commercial in which a Christian symbol appears in the background.

In the campaign ad, Huckabee is addressing members of the Iowa Christian Alliance, an organization whose symbol is the ichthys which appears on a banner that is shown prominently at the open and close of the 30 second spot....

Er, Huckabee used to be a religious-right preacher, and the overt content of this ad is a religious-right message. Why does CNN think the important thing to take away is the sinister super-secret coded message in the background -- which, by the way, is hiding in plain sight? (See also Phil on this subject a couple of days ago.)