Issue Portraits

All the moral issues we consider share a more or less common meaning in Canada and the United States. This shared meaning is an indicator of the relative ease with which these issues are understood and one of their defining characteristics. Whether talking about abortion, capital punishment, gun control, marijuana, pornography, or same-sex relations, publics in both countries immediately understand their content and do so in similar ways. This does not mean that they necessarily feel the same way about an issue or draw the same conclusions about how it should be handled. It is, instead, the shared understandings of