The video clip below by @Awusernameisno1 is from October. But since my friend Vicki @vickiroush reposted it this morning, I thought it worth sharing.
Replies to the TikTok video resurfaced this link to a 2014 Politico Magazine article by Randall Balmer, now the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College. It is worth rereading regularly. Andrew (Awusernameisnotavailable) either read this Politico article or others on the subject. He seems well-versed.
Balmer argues that the anti-abortion movement arose out of opposition to desegregation, not to Roe v. Wade. A 1971 ruling by the U.S. District Court in D.C. in Green v. Connally removed the charity status from religious schools that engaged in racial discrimination. Movement conservatism godfather Paul Weyrich saw an opening for mobilizing religious conservatives as a sizable voting bloc:
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
In abortion, Weyrich found his catalyst. The IRS rescinding the charitable status for Bob Jones University in Greenville, SC over its racially discriminatory practices was key, Balmer writes:
Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.
By the late 1970s, many Americans—not just Roman Catholics—were beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following the 1973 Roe decision. The 1978 Senate races demonstrated to Weyrich and others that abortion might motivate conservatives where it hadn’t in the past. That year in Minnesota, pro-life Republicans captured both Senate seats (one for the unexpired term of Hubert Humphrey) as well as the governor’s mansion. In Iowa, Sen. Dick Clark, the Democratic incumbent, was thought to be a shoo-in: Every poll heading into the election showed him ahead by at least 10 percentage points. On the final weekend of the campaign, however, pro-life activists, primarily Roman Catholics, leafleted church parking lots (as they did in Minnesota), and on Election Day Clark lost to his Republican pro-life challenger.
In the course of my research into Falwell’s archives at Liberty University and Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming, it became very clear that the 1978 election represented a formative step toward galvanizing everyday evangelical voters. Correspondence between Weyrich and evangelical leaders fairly crackles with excitement. In a letter to fellow conservative Daniel B. Hales, Weyrich characterized the triumph of pro-life candidates as “true cause for celebration,” and Robert Billings, a cobelligerent, predicted that opposition to abortion would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’ Christian friends.” Roe v. Wade had been law for more than five years.
Weyrich had found his wedge issue, one for galvanizing voters opposed to civil rights under a less-obviously racial banner. “[T]he real roots of the religious right lie not the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation,” Balmer concludes.
But you knew that.