Marriage, Sexuality, Abortion Issues for Candidates

Is the Presidency really going to be determined by these issues?
Is the "Cultural War" real?
What the hell is going on in this Country?
Issues like should homosexuals be allowed to get married, abortion, and other "moral issues" appear to be of more concern then let's say Human Welfare, Poverty, Education, Civil Rights and Liberties, and the Economy.

Laura Flanders: To Beat the Right, Clinton and Obama Need to Be Clear About Supporting Gay Rights
By Laura Flanders, AlterNet

Democrats will keep getting attacked on sexuality, marriage and abortion for as long as they dodge the discussion. Read more »

The following explains this better than I ever could:

December 2000 & January 2001 TOC
FEATURES:Why There is a Culture War
By John Fonte

As intellectual historians have often had occasion to observe, there are times in a nation’s history when certain ideas are just "in the air." Admittedly, this point seems to fizzle when applied to our particular historical moment. On the surface of American politics, as many have had cause to mention, it appears that the main trends predicted over a decade ago in Francis Fukuyama’s "The End of History?" have come to pass — that ideological (if not partisan) strife has been muted; that there is a general consensus about the most important questions of the day (capitalism, not socialism; democracy, not authoritarianism); and that the contemporary controversies that do exist, while occasionally momentous, are essentially mundane, concerned with practical problem-solving (whether it is better to count ballots by hand or by machine) rather than with great principles.
And yet, I would argue, all that is true only on the surface. For simultaneously in the United States of the past few decades, recurring philosophical concepts have not only remained "in the air," but have proved influential, at times decisive, in cultural and legal and moral arguments about the most important questions facing the nation. Indeed: Prosaic appearances to the contrary, beneath the surface of American politics an intense ideological struggle is being waged between two competing worldviews.
Far from being content with a mere uprising, therefore, Gramsci believed that it was necessary first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups and to create a "counter-hegemony" (i.e., a new system of values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society -- schools, churches, the media, voluntary associations -- civil society itself, he argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the "war of position." From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) — that all life is "political." Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle to achieve societal transformation.

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