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Originally posted by Terraceth
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Referring to the Southern Baptist Convention's more liberal position on abortion before and even a bit after Roe v. Wade isn't that uncommon by people who try to argue that it was fine with abortion, but it ignores the fact that even this more liberal position still stops far short of what Roe v. Wade commanded. It would be like if an organization was urging the government to make immigration much easier, and then the Supreme Court suddenly announced that the Constitution prohibited any restrictions on immigration by whatsoever.
But what's interesting about the article is that, even if we accept everything in it is accurate--and some parts seem rather speculative--it doesn't contradict my statement at all.
So the thesis of the article, essentially, is that the political "religious right" was made by some people (one it particularly concentrates on is Jerry Falwell) who wanted to be able to segregate their private universities but were encountering governmental opposition. But since that's not really a great rallying cry ("let us segregate our schools!") they seized upon abortion as something to unite evangelicals in politics for conservative values which would include greater freedom for the private universities, conveniently including ability to segregate if they wanted. Basically a case of "come to stop abortion, stay for freedom of private universities that just so happens to aid us in racial segregation!" (as the article is forced to concede, this plan ended up not working so well, and the schools ended up having to integrate).
But as the article admits, opposition to abortion legalization, particularly in religious quarters, was already happening. At most guys like Jerry Falwell were able to jump onto a movement that was already happening. As the article notes:
So as the article admits, there was considerable and growing opposition to abortion growing that was noticeably affecting election results before the time it alleges that Falwell and the others it blames made any use of the movement for their own purposes.
Not only that, we run into another problem. Even if we accept that it was all Falwell/Weyrich/etc. that was behind opposition to abortion, the fact remains that they were only able to muster this because of Roe v. Wade. Indeed, various pro-choicers have criticized Roe v. Wade, saying that by going as far as it did (rather than merely invalidating the law in question on grounds on vagueness, which would strike it down but on more narrow grounds), only created far more opposition to abortion as a result. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, hardly an opponent to abortion rights, wrote the following in 1985 (before joining the Supreme Court):
"I earlier observed that, in my judgment, Roe ventured too far in the change it ordered. The sweep and detail of the opinion stimulated the mobilization of a right-to-life movement and an attendant reaction in Congress and state legislatures. In place of the trend "toward liberalization of abortion statutes" noted in Roe, legislatures adopted measures aimed at minimizing the impact of the 1973 rulings, including notification and consent requirements, prescriptions for the protection of fetal life, and bans on public expenditures for poor women's abortions."
But what's interesting about the article is that, even if we accept everything in it is accurate--and some parts seem rather speculative--it doesn't contradict my statement at all.
So the thesis of the article, essentially, is that the political "religious right" was made by some people (one it particularly concentrates on is Jerry Falwell) who wanted to be able to segregate their private universities but were encountering governmental opposition. But since that's not really a great rallying cry ("let us segregate our schools!") they seized upon abortion as something to unite evangelicals in politics for conservative values which would include greater freedom for the private universities, conveniently including ability to segregate if they wanted. Basically a case of "come to stop abortion, stay for freedom of private universities that just so happens to aid us in racial segregation!" (as the article is forced to concede, this plan ended up not working so well, and the schools ended up having to integrate).
But as the article admits, opposition to abortion legalization, particularly in religious quarters, was already happening. At most guys like Jerry Falwell were able to jump onto a movement that was already happening. As the article notes:
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, Falwell and leaders of the emerging religious right enlisted an unlikely ally in their quest to advance abortion as a political issue: Francis A. Schaeffer—a goateed, knickers-wearing theologian who was warning about the eclipse of Christian values and the advance of something he called “secular humanism.” Schaeffer, considered by many the intellectual godfather of the religious right, was not known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s he decided that legalized abortion would lead inevitably to infanticide and euthanasia, and he was eager to sound the alarm. Schaeffer teamed with a pediatric surgeon, C. Everett Koop, to produce a series of films entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? In the early months of 1979, Schaeffer and Koop, targeting an evangelical audience, toured the country with these films, which depicted the scourge of abortion in graphic terms—most memorably with a scene of plastic baby dolls strewn along the shores of the Dead Sea. Schaeffer and Koop argued that any society that countenanced abortion was captive to “secular humanism” and therefore caught in a vortex of moral decay.
Between Weyrich’s machinations and Schaeffer’s jeremiad, evangelicals were slowly coming around on the abortion issue. At the conclusion of the film tour in March 1979, Schaeffer reported that Protestants, especially evangelicals, “have been so sluggish on this issue of human life, and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? is causing real waves, among church people and governmental people too.”
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, Falwell and leaders of the emerging religious right enlisted an unlikely ally in their quest to advance abortion as a political issue: Francis A. Schaeffer—a goateed, knickers-wearing theologian who was warning about the eclipse of Christian values and the advance of something he called “secular humanism.” Schaeffer, considered by many the intellectual godfather of the religious right, was not known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s he decided that legalized abortion would lead inevitably to infanticide and euthanasia, and he was eager to sound the alarm. Schaeffer teamed with a pediatric surgeon, C. Everett Koop, to produce a series of films entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? In the early months of 1979, Schaeffer and Koop, targeting an evangelical audience, toured the country with these films, which depicted the scourge of abortion in graphic terms—most memorably with a scene of plastic baby dolls strewn along the shores of the Dead Sea. Schaeffer and Koop argued that any society that countenanced abortion was captive to “secular humanism” and therefore caught in a vortex of moral decay.
Between Weyrich’s machinations and Schaeffer’s jeremiad, evangelicals were slowly coming around on the abortion issue. At the conclusion of the film tour in March 1979, Schaeffer reported that Protestants, especially evangelicals, “have been so sluggish on this issue of human life, and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? is causing real waves, among church people and governmental people too.”
So as the article admits, there was considerable and growing opposition to abortion growing that was noticeably affecting election results before the time it alleges that Falwell and the others it blames made any use of the movement for their own purposes.
Not only that, we run into another problem. Even if we accept that it was all Falwell/Weyrich/etc. that was behind opposition to abortion, the fact remains that they were only able to muster this because of Roe v. Wade. Indeed, various pro-choicers have criticized Roe v. Wade, saying that by going as far as it did (rather than merely invalidating the law in question on grounds on vagueness, which would strike it down but on more narrow grounds), only created far more opposition to abortion as a result. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, hardly an opponent to abortion rights, wrote the following in 1985 (before joining the Supreme Court):
"I earlier observed that, in my judgment, Roe ventured too far in the change it ordered. The sweep and detail of the opinion stimulated the mobilization of a right-to-life movement and an attendant reaction in Congress and state legislatures. In place of the trend "toward liberalization of abortion statutes" noted in Roe, legislatures adopted measures aimed at minimizing the impact of the 1973 rulings, including notification and consent requirements, prescriptions for the protection of fetal life, and bans on public expenditures for poor women's abortions."
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