DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

Last Friday, there was a bipartisan decision in the Nevada Legislature's budget committees on whether to go ahead with drastic cuts in public employee benefits -- including health benefits for retired workers -- that had been recommended by Gov. Jim Gibbons and a state commission stacked with businesspeople.

On the Assembly Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, every Republican but one and every Democrat voted to ignore the governor's plan.

During the debate in committee, there was a comment by Senate Democratic floor leader Steven Horsford.

"They deserve to know their retirement is secure," he said. "The proposal to take that security away from these individuals, it's not fair, not moral."

The term "moral" jumped out at me. Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1990, all kind of things, from taxes to school curriculum, have been treated by the evangelical right as moral issues. Since morality involves not what is correct or mistaken but what is good or evil, our politics naturally became polarized and vicious.

The campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain, both of whom are reluctant to characterize adversaries as enemies, gave some hope that (whoever won) the nation could move beyond the kind of language combat that drives civility out of politics.

Obviously, given the unanimity of opinion on the state worker benefits, Horsford and his colleagues had a good case to make. Government, like business, must be competitive for the services of good people. Public administrators and workers are a special breed and Nevada needs them. Gibbons' changes would not only have made the state less able to attract good workers but could have cut retirees off from their health care. "You can't change the rules after they no longer have the ability to go back to work to pay for health benefits," said Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley.

Unfair? Sure. Immoral? Whoa.

Horsford, who has shown a deft and capable hand at guiding the Nevada Senate, didn't need to bring the question of morality into the debate to make his case.

There's no question that Democrats have a more difficult time than Republicans in using language that makes emotional appeals to the public. The value subtleties and nuance. It has become a cliché in politics that Republicans talk about law while Democrats talk about doing justice.

But that's a different thing from raising the political ante by treating a programmatic issue as a battle between right and wrong. Using a term like "moral" means that Horsford is describing those with whom he disagrees not just as mistaken but as evil. In this case, that was Assembly GOP floor leader Heidi Gansert, the lone vote for Gibbons' program and a leader who has given the Democrats plenty of cooperation this session.

There are certainly moral issues in politics from time to time. Battles over slavery, the Philippine conquest, civil rights and Vietnam have brought out the best in our nation as we struggled our way to higher ground.

But not every education program and street widening project is a moral issue, and framing them that way can only take us back to that bleak and harsh political landscape that has plagued us since 1980.