This is the third post about Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland. You can surmise three things from that. One is that it is really long (over 1000 pages). More importantly, several things stuck in my mind as I read.
The one that I want to write about today is the rise of the religious right. Sure there was the whole Monkey Trial evolution saga in the 1920s, but the religious right had been pretty quiet. In the 1940s and the 1950s, they united with politicians and corporations in the face of the communist threat. Still, this didn’t go a whole lot further than purely symbolic things like throwing ‘under God’ into the Pledge of Allegiance. I’m not aware of huge voting initiatives or movements to elect politicians that held to a very strict set of religious beliefs. If anything, during the 1960s, what relatively minor political activity there was was in protest of the Vietnam War.
I mentioned him briefly in an earlier post, but Richard Viguerie played a key role. With a background in mass mailings, he understood the heretofore untapped potential of all of those millions of peoples sitting in church pews in congregations all across the US. Using his organization and marketing skills, he was able to create mailings lists numbering in the millions. He could then send message blasts full of red hot hate about the latest things that liberal politicians were doing to destroy the fabric of our great country.
Much better known are Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly, the leader in the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment, and Anita Bryant, there to protect all of us from the scourge of all of those gay people out trying to recruit our children into their satanic ways.
Here’s the thing, it worked.
The ERA was just a state or two from passing. It looked inevitable. Hell, it’d been in the Republican party platform since 1940 (it was only removed in 1980 with the Reagan revolution). By the time Schlafly was going around telling everyone how passing the ERA was going to result in same sex bathrooms, women serving in the army, and compulsory day care, the ERA seemed to be some insidious piece of Trotskyite propaganda designed to turn men into women and vice versa. The ERA stalled under the onslaught.
Miami was one of the most gay friendly cities in the country in the 1970s. A nondiscrimination ordinance against sexuality was passed by the council. It was broadly supported and considered noncontroversial. Former Miss America Anita Bryant, the face for Florida oranges, saw this as a dire threat. She thundered that if gays got their way, that there’d be gay teachers in school teaching from gay text books. Next, they might want to even marry. The thinking was that since gay people can’t reproduce, the only way that they can get more gay people is by recruiting them. The initiative to repeal the ordinance was successful. A movement was born that shut down gay rights advances across the country. There was even attempt to repeal a similar ordinance in that most gay friendly of all cities, San Francisco. That failed but it showed that they were out for blood everywhere.
The most important and emotional issue to the religious right was abortion. If you were (and even now, are) supportive of a woman’s right to choose, you were a child murdering sinner. It really was as simple as that.
This was one of the issues that Jimmy Carter was hammered with. Even though he himself was a fervent, Sunday school teaching, evangelical Christian, the fact that he respected Roe v Wade was damning. This was true even when running against the divorced, non church attending Ronald Reagan. Similarly there were some great liberal legends that had spent their political life serving the needs of their community that went down in flames on this issue. During the Democratic bloodbath of 1980, Senate institutions such as George McGovern and Frank Church lost reelection.
The religious right swung hard at the fences. They proposed a Human Rights Amendment to overturn Roe v Wade. They proposed another to allow prayer in school. They fought to bring religious instruction back into public schools. They were out to change the fabric of our society back to some simpler non-existent time in our history where the Ten Commandments were all the law that our country needed.
Here’s the thing, despite all of their victories, they failed.
First of all, let’s talk about the easy one. One of the things that they wanted to abolish was pornography. How do you think that effort’s gone over the last forty years? Here, let me just start up a new tab in my browser and give me five seconds.
Gay marriage is now legal in all states. Gay teachers openly teach in public schools. In school curricula, you can read about nonstandard families that yes, sometimes have two moms or two dads. In most states, people can choose the bathroom that matches their own self assigned gender.
Women can serve in the military. Women can even serve in combat. Check out Senator Tammy Duckworth. Millions of women place their children in day care. Most women choose a career if given the option. It’s not compulsory. Women that want to be married and stay at home with their children certainly still have that option. You know, it’s a woman’s right to choose?
Those much ballyhooed constitutional amendments came nowhere near passing. I don’t know anyone that is still complaining about not allowing prayer in schools. All of the brouhaha about teaching Intelligent Design alongside evolution seems to have faded away.
Sure, there are states that, as we speak, are chipping away at abortion rights. They might even be successful. However, all that does is to force women of limited economic means to carry their pregnancy to term. Women of even modest means will be able to travel to another state. I see no real national initiative to ban abortion coming to pass anytime.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s bad that poor women might not have the choice that they deserve. If that is all the religious right accomplish, then that falls far short of their goals of the late 1970s.
So, while I was reading about all of their horrors and fears of the looming moral collapse that they were so valiantly fighting against, I have to say that they pretty much failed on all fronts. Considering the fairly dramatic drop in church attendance rates over the last 40 years, it’s hard for me to see how they’re going to reverse that.
Despite the fact that gays are out of the closet and are getting married, that for the most part women still have the right to choose, that the Ten Commandments are not being taught in schools but evolution is, our country seems to be still standing.
dorkenstein 