The Fast and the Spurious

[Commentary] Back when Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was still in the even bloodier videogame called Race for the Presidency, he suggested the Republican Party declare a "truce" on social issues to concentrate instead on economic revival. In reply, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention wrote in these pages that the American people don't want a truce. Both social conservatives and tea partiers, he said, "expect pro-life, pro-family legislation." California's videogame law presumably would qualify. It looks like Gov Daniels wins that argument. There's not much chance of finding a Terry Schiavo in this campaign. The main social issue of the 2012 election is, and should be, finding some 15 million jobs. New York's passage of a gay-marriage law, one of the great battlegrounds in the culture wars, passed through the talk-show fields of fire in a few days. Presumably videogame violence would fall under the no-discuss truce. That's too bad. This is what the culture war is really all about. It's ironic that the only place today one can find serious people discussing something like the effect of extreme video violence on the culture is the Supreme Court, the court whose decisions -- abortion, school discipline, Christmas crèches in the public square -- touched off the culture war.