When the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade in 1973, a giant anti-choice movement did not spring, fully-armed, from the aching head of Jerry Falwell. Rather it took the better part of a decade to channel already-existing anger and zealotry in the direction of women's right to choose, a direction that proved fruitful in dividing the country and ultimately, provoking violence.
Abortion wasn't always a culture-war issue. Writes The Nation's Max Blumenthal in a piece about Falwell, "While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the 'pre-born.'" In fact, the issue didn't have the rigid party divide that it does today--there were plenty of Republicans, particularly on the local level, who approved of the decision.
Catholic hierarchy opposed abortion and Roe from the get-go (although Catholic doctrine on abortion had earlier accepted abortion prior to "quickening"), but as Blumenthal notes, many Southern evangelicals did not pick its legalization up as a problem initially. In fact, many Southern Baptists had held pre-Roe that abortion should be legalized in a variety of cases, from fetal abnormality, to rape and incest, to extreme mental or physical threats to the mother. W.A. Criswell, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said, "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." Other evangelical leaders called the decision a "victory" while many were merely silent.
So it was, and so it might have remained. But in 1972, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that institutions segregating based on race were not charitable, and therefore should not receive tax-free status. The case was Green v. Connally, and several of the affected institutions were evangelical. In 1975, in particular the IRS tried to revoke that special status from Bob Jones University, which imposed a notorious ban on interracial dating among other discriminatory practices.
And it was only when the government actually began to regulate these segregated religious institutions that the anti-choice Religious Right as we really know it took hold. In his book "Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament," Randall Balmer describes going to a Religious Right conference and realizing the truth about the origins of the movement. These origins were revealed quite openly and unapologetically in a speech by Moral Majority and Heritage Foundation pillar Paul Weyrich (recently deceased). Balmer was so flabbergasted that he had to hear it a second time:
I cornered Weyrich to make sure I had heard him correctly. He was adamant that, yes, the 1975 action by the IRS against Bob Jones University was responsible for the genesis of the Religious Right in the late 1970s. What about abortion? After mobilizing to defend Bob Jones University and its racially discriminatory policies, Weyrich said, these evangelical leaders held a conference call to discuss strategy. He recalled that someone suggested that they had the makings of a broader political movement - something that Weyrich had been pushing for all along - and asked what other issues they might address. Several callers made suggestions, and then, according to Weyrich, a voice on the end of one of the lines said, "How about abortion?" And that is how abortion was cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right.
Blumenthal writes that the Christian Right, many of whose members had staunchly
opposed civil rights, "gradually transmuted its racial resentment into
sexual politics." The movement's leaders seemed to be able to
capitalize on residual anger and resentment from the number one issue (besides
the war in Vietnam, one assumes) that had divided the country and in fact
splintered the Democratic Party: desegregation and race relations. Just as
civil rights for African-Americans were going to undermine the so-called moral
foundations of American society, so were upstart feminists, loose women and
gays in the post sexual revolution-era. Indeed, that "us vs. them"
mentality, the idea that the rights of the dominant majority were being usurped
by a minority, flowed quite well into the sexual panic about abortion and
homosexuality that marked the new culture wars--not that there isn't a healthy
dose of racism still lingering, as the recent flap over Sotomayor demonstrates.
(Indeed, former "segregation forever" governor George Wallace saw
this early on, and
sought out the Catholic anti-abortion vote in his 1976 primary run.
Although this was after Wallace had softened his stance on segregation, his
tenacious grasp of "wedge issues" was scarily prescient).
As blogger Digby notes in typically succinct and cutting terms:
It should always be remembered that abortion only became the cause de jour on the right once legal segregation lost its organizing clout. It's all part of the same mosaic of civil rights, which has animated certain people on the right side of the spectrum from the beginning. And it's served them very, very well....Racial discrimination flowed directly into the anti-abortion movement.
Pointing out the link is not to condemn all abortion opponents--or even religiously orthodox abortion opponents--as racists, but rather to illustrate the way one hatred neatly replaced the other in our cultural fabric, and the way escalating rhetoric leading to violence and intimidation have been markers of the extreme factions of both movements. It puts Scott Roeder on a continuum with assassins like James Earl Ray and even John Wilkes Booth, which I personally believe is appropriate.
Another former evangelical, Frank Schaeffer, wrote a memoir describing the founding of the Moral Majority, and said that he believes the movement's leaders were fully cognizant of the way their language could be used to incite violence--or at the very least, incite inflamed clashes with the other side. On the Rachel Maddow Show (transcript), Schaeffer claimed that leaders were used a twofold approach towards their goals: influencing politics, but also stirring up localized anger.
I know that this is the case because of the fact that I was part of the movement, but also understood very well what we were doing back then was to attack the political issue when we talked to people like Ronald Reagan and the Bush family ... But on a private side, we also were egging people on to first pick at abortion clinics, then chain themselves to fences, then go to jail.
We knew full well that in a country that had seen the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, two Kennedy brothers and others, that what we were also doing was opening a gate here. And I think there‘s no way to duck this. We live in a country in which guns are all over the place. We have plenty of people with a screw loose, plenty of people on the edge. It only takes one.
Schaeffer has also made
the connection between anti-choice violence and the kind of threats that
have been leveled at Barack Obama since the heated days of the campaign, and
he's absolutely correct. It's no coincidence that fringe right-wingers are
calling Obama a "Muslim" and other racist slurs in the same breath as
"abortionist" and "baby-killer."
The founders of the Moral Majority were on the wrong side of the segregation
issue in the 1960s, as Randal Balmer notes,
and to let them get away with the lie that their movement sprung up from pure
altruistic pity for fetuses--as the media largely has--is unconscionable. We
are in fact facing the same anti-progress, anti-rights fringe that has plagued
every movement for social justice in this nation's history and they hate all of
us "renders of the moral fabric" with equal fervor.
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