An old story gets retold this morning. For Gen-whatevers playing catch-up, it needs retelling. When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, the issue made nary a splash among religious conservatives. It took six years for it to become the rallying cry of the religious right. They needed one more palatable than “Stop the tax on segregation.”
With help from Katherine Stewart (“The Power Worshipers), Thomas Edsall explains:
In 1978, the hostile reaction to an I.R.S. proposal to impose taxes on churches running segregated private schools (“seg academies” for the children of white southerners seeking to avoid federally mandated school integration orders) provided the opportunity to mobilize born again and evangelical parishioners through the creation of the Moral Majority. As Stewart argues, Viguerie, Weyrich and others on the right were determined to find an issue that could bring together a much larger constituency:
As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisioned.
After long and contentious debate, conservative strategists came to a consensus, Stewart writes: “They landed upon the one surprising word that would supply the key to the political puzzle of the age: ‘abortion.’ ”
In an email, Stewart expanded on her argument. Abortion opponents
are more likely to be committed to a patriarchal worldview in which the control of reproduction, and female sexuality in particular, is thought to be central in maintaining a gender hierarchy that (as they see it) sustains the family, which they claim is under threat from secular, modern forces.
Even not-so-keen observers of conservative politics know this to be true even if misogyny is hardly limited to the right, religious or otherwise.
Fifty years ago, the Southern Baptist Convention was more liberal on abortion. In 1971, Baptists passed a resolution accepting “abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”
What changed their minds, as Dartmouth religion professor Randall Balmer explained in 2014, was another Supreme Court case (Politico):
On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”
Balmer’s Politico essay continued:
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
When after some back and forth finally the IRS withdrew the tax-exempt status for Bob Jones University in 1976, “That was really the major issue that got us all involved,” a school administrator told Balmer.
Balmer wrote of a 1990 meeting in a Washington hotel conference room featuring a who’s-who of religious right figures: Ralph Reed of Christian Coalition; Donald Wildmon from the American Family Association; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; Ed Dobson, one of Jerry Falwell’s acolytes at Moral Majority; Richard Viguerie, the conservative direct-mail mogul; and Paul Weyrich, cofounder of the Heritage Foundation and architect of the religious right.
Weyrich openly declared that Roe had nothing to do with the formation of the religious right:
No, Weyrich insisted, what got the movement going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies, including a ban on interracial dating that the university maintained until 2000.
Edsall continues:
In an email, Balmer wrote, “Opposition to abortion became a convenient diversion — a godsend, really — to distract from what actually motivated their political activism: the defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.”
The same is true, Ballmer continued, of many politicians who have become adamant foes of abortion:
At a time when open racism was becoming unfashionable, these politicians needed a more high-minded issue, one that would not compel them to surrender their fundamental political orientation. And of course the beauty of defending a fetus is that the fetus demands nothing in return — housing, health care, education — so it’s a fairly low-risk advocacy.
Surging rights-advocacy movements in the 1970s provoked a conservative backlash, one re-energized decades later by the gut punch of 9/11 and the election of the nation’s first Black president.
David Leege, professor emeritus of political science at Notre Dame, has an additional explanation for the process linking racial animosity and abortion. In an email, he wrote:
For the target populations — evangelical Protestants — whom Viguerie, Weyrich, and Falwell sought to mobilize, racial animosity and abortion attitudes are related but mainly in an indirect way, through aversion toward intellectual elites. The people perceived to be pushing government’s role in equal opportunity and racial integration were now the same as those pushing permissive abortion laws, namely, the highly educated from New England, banking, universities, the Northern cities, and elsewhere.
In short, Leege wrote, “although the policy domain may differ, the hated people are the same.”
Conservative Christians needed a wedge issue to mobilize their ranks to push back against evolving social mores that threatened their world view. Conservative leaders fabricated one and for the most part re-wrote the history of how it came about.
Gen-whatevers getting up to speed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on Sept. 1 not to block a Texas law prohibiting most abortions should not buy the right’s preferred narrative. Most of the right’s foot soldiers don’t know the issue’s real history either.
