More than a month after the raucous presidential election, the nation still reverberates with both joy and anger over the so-called moral issues that helped decide the outcome.

People who call themselves social conservatives raised at least three such issues to prominence – same-sex marriage, abortion and embryonic stem-cell research. Each carries with it profound social policy questions. And each is laden with religious overtones that politicians ignore at their own peril.

But as important as those matters are, it’s simply preposterous to suggest that these are the only moral issues confronting us.

All political issues carry moral dimensions, of course, and we should talk about that more than we do. But to say that is to say very little if we also don’t talk about a sense of proportionality.

For instance, since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that abortion was legal, tens of millions of fetuses have been destroyed. By contrast, since the court reinstated the death penalty a few years later, the number of people executed is approaching – but hasn’t yet reached – 1,000.

I’m a longtime opponent of the death penalty, and I wish religious leaders who place so much emphasis on abortion would express more disdain for politicians who support capital punishment. But I also recognize that just in terms of numbers, abortion, which I believe should remain legal for those rare times when it’s the least evil of a series of evil choices, has been more destructive.

So if people who think of themselves as religious moderates or liberals want to be taken more seriously in the moral-issues debate, they must acknowledge that conservatives occupy some solid ground when discussing such matters as abortion. But they also must find ways to broaden the debate.

For instance, progressives, or liberals, can legitimately make the case that poverty and war are moral issues that do huge damage to all kinds of lives. I’m no pacifist. I believe there are times when war can be justified, but even in those cases it’s crucial to recognize the human failures that led to war and to do all we can to minimize, and then repair, the damage.

War kills innocent lives every day somewhere in the world, and people who profess to be living by religious standards should be much more vocal about peace than many are.

Similarly if poverty in the United States is an outrage – as surely it is – then poverty around the globe is even more so. It is hard for me to imagine why so many people get so worked up over the desire of gays and lesbians to live in legally sanctioned committed relationships but at the same time are essentially silent about the hundreds of millions of people in the world who subsist on $1 a day or less.

Which of those matters constitutes the real moral outrage? For me, it’s a no-brainer. And it’s time for religious moderates and liberals to find ways to make that and other moral cases persuasively – but not arrogantly.

How? I think it requires an appeal to the standards of morality that nearly all religions, and even nonreligious systems of ethics, preach. Because most Americans still are Christian, that necessarily means casting a good deal of the moral-issues discussion in the light of the Bible.

Now, I admit that people come to blows over how to read the Bible, but there is some common ground, and a lot of that ground is in the area of moral action. Biblical morality, for instance, stands with and for the poor and against those who would keep people in poverty. Biblical morality raises peace as a prime goal. It promotes the dignity and worth of all individuals no matter who they are. It values mercy over justice but justice over arrogant power.

It may be that people on opposite ends of the political spectrum will never agree on same-sex marriage or whether a 100-cell blastocyst from which stem cells could be drawn constitutes a full human being.

But surely they can root themselves in common ethical and moral principles to say we must find ways to rescue children trapped in poverty who aren’t getting health care or good educations or simple love from a community that cares.

Social conservatives who view this election as God’s imprimatur on their politics have it wrong. But so do moderates and liberals who can’t imagine they share any common ground with the conservatives and don’t need to listen to them.

Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star. His e-mail address is: [email protected].