There are candidates out there who promise to support a woman's right to choose, but whose commitment is compromised by their willingness to accept more government intrusion into private medical decisions.
I know from having worked with him as a researcher (specifically on the Guildford Four campaign) more than 20 years ago, that Jeremy is a kind, compassionate, principled, generous man whose commitment is not to society's winners but to those who are battered and brutalised by capitalism.
Because the family is split over what to do, it takes the matter to the local pastor; ultimately, the hollow is saved from the logger's chainsaw not by the college protesters, whose commitment is as skinny as their jeans, but by the pastor's counsel that these are the "Lord's trees," and to saw them for money is greedy and wicked.
"The commission's decision is not a defeat for the mayor, whose commitment was simply to establish a process to review the issue," Jacqueline Salit, a spokeswoman for the Independence Party, said in a news release sent to members of the political press.
In the final stage of the narrative, New Traditionalists offer proposals of various sorts for how traditionally religious believers should cope with being citizens of a political system whose fundamental commitments are at odds with their own.
This, of course, is not true of Romney, whose political commitments are limited to his own personal success.
By clamping down on power plant emissions, Obama is also working to increase his leverage and credibility with other nations whose commitments he's seeking for a global climate treaty to be finalized later this year in Paris.
So, too, Rob Bell is articulating the concerns of a generation of Christians schooled in toleration, whose neighbors and coworkers and siblings are Muslim or Buddhist or agnostic, a generation whose pluralist social commitments are at odds with theological commitments to limited salvation.
It's just one more harsh reality they have to face, on a show whose commitment to being rooted in reality makes it one of the best on TV.
