#Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich

[filosofablogger]

From Then To Now ... The Path To Today

Ever wonder how today’s GOP strayed so far from the original “Party of Lincoln”?  It didn’t happen overnight, wasn’t the result of just one incident or Supreme Court Ruling, but a series of events starting back in 1964.  Political analyst Thom Hartmann tells the story and it is one that is definitely worth your time and effort to read … it was an eye-opener for me. “How Come Everything the…

[odinsblog]

One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.

This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.

Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.

Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of 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.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “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,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.

So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.

In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.

In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.

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.”

Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.

In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”

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.

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.

Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject.

The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.

(continue reading)

[oldshowbiz]

1985.

Evangelical lunatics versus Textbooks.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Peter Montgomery at RWW:

As the aggressive Christian nationalism that infuses the MAGA movement and Republican Party intensifies, journalists and filmmakers are paying closer attention to the threat this political ideology and its adherents pose to freedom in America. A must-watch new documentary, “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy,” will be available for streaming on AppleTV, Amazon Prime, and Google Play beginning Friday, April 26. Directed by Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones and narrated by Peter Coyote, “Bad Faith” makes masterful use of archival and current footage of Christian nationalist religious and political figures, infographics, and interviews with scholars, religious leaders, political analysts, and even a former Trump administration official. The film draws a compelling through line from the scheming power-building of Paul Weyrich, the right-wing operative who recruited Jerry Falwell and other evangelical preachers to create the religious-right as a political movement in the late 1970s, to the institution-destroying antidemocratic ambitions of MAGA insiders like Steve Bannon, as well as Donald Trump’s dominionist “prophets” and “apostles” and the Jan. 6 insurrectionists they inspired.

[...]

“Bad Faith” explains how that transformation happened, documenting the role played by the Council for National Policy, a partnership between anti-regulation, economically libertarian oil barons and the religious-right leaders who intended to remake the Republican Party, take over the Supreme Court, and use their political power to enforce “traditional” views of family, sexuality, and gender on the rest of the nation. The Koch brothers poured tens of millions of dollars into “a state-of-the-art political data platform” that Council for National Policy groups use to collect personal information—including personal mental health, behavioral health, and treatment data—and use that information to micro-target individuals. (In “God & Country,” another documentary released earlier this year, Ralph Reed is shown bragging that his organization tracked “147 different data points” on the conservative Christians they targeted for turnout operations.) [...]

As “Bad Faith” makes clear, religious-right leaders viewed Trump as a powerful blunt weapon in a long-term political and spiritual war against the federal government and institutions dominated by progressive forces. “The Council’s gambit had paid off,” the film notes about Trump’s time in office. “Christian nationalists were firmly embedded at the highest levels of government. The Supreme Court had an absolute majority of justices poised to overturn landmark civil and women’s rights decisions. Paul Weyrich’s vision of a Christian nation was becoming a reality.” That explains why Christian nationalist leaders were willing to dismantle democracy to keep Trump in power. Members of the Council for National Policy and its political action arm went into “full combat mode” to promote Trump’s big lie, and, as Right Wing Watch documented, they supported his efforts to keep power after the 2020 election, portraying it as a holy war between the forces of good and evil. As Samuel Perry notes in the film, viewing politics as spiritual warfare between the forces of God and Satan makes it easy for those who see themselves on God’s side to “justify just about anything.”

The Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy documentary comes out today on streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Google Play today. Bad Faith focuses on the history of Christian Nationalism and its very real threat to democracy.

[steamedtangerine]

Just a reminder...

that Pat Robertson is still dead and buried (and probably burning) along with Tim Lahaye, Jerry Falwell, and Paul Weyrich...

[dankusner]

Rise of Christian nationalism Make America Christian again?

Texas bought in to toxic mix of religion and politics, and the founding fathers would not be amused

Politics and religion at the dinner table?

Never!

So goes the adage.

The very first article in the Bill of Rights enshrines the separation of church and state.

“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or the free exercise thereof.”

Our Constitution was a revolutionary document.

Breaking ground at the time, it declared that power comes from the people, made no mention of God or a monarch, and banned religious tests for public office.

But now religion and politics, a toxic mix, are served up at dinner tables and in pulpits, classrooms and law books throughout the country, driven by the rapidly increasing activism of those who want to establish Christianity as our national religion.

Our own state of Texas is playing an outsize role nationally, led by its most prominent statewide elected officials, high-profile Baptist ministers and West Texas billionaires.

Meanwhile, neighboring Louisiana and Oklahoma are in a race to out-preach Texas, the governments there requiring Bibles and Ten Commandments posters in public schools. Rise of Christian nationalism

During my time as a member of the White House staff under President Richard Nixon, and later in the U.S. Congress, there were few issues that inspired any sort of religion-based activism on the part of Republicans, other than the Roe vs. Wade decision, decided the first year of my first congressional term.

I announced my support of the Roe decision and received little, if any, blowback from my constituents.

The long slippery slope to where we are today began with the formation of the Moral Majority organization by a Virginia-based Baptist minister, Jerry Falwell, who saw an opening with the rightward drift of the party leading to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Aided and abetted by his co-founder, Republican activist Paul Weyrich, he started endorsing and opposing candidates on the basis of their willingness to support a set of issues supported by him and his organization.

Seeing the threat, Billy Graham, a Baptist and arguably the greatest evangelist in American history, said in 1981:

“It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”

All of this mixing of politics and religion is part of the rise of an ideology commonly called Christian nationalism.

As defined by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which notably opposes this movement, Christian nationalism is a cultural construct and political ideology that promotes the idea that America was divinely appointed as a Christian nation, that our founders wanted to establish it as such, that America has a special place in world history and in biblical prophecy, and that there should be no separation between church and state.

Baptists’ surprising role

Growing up Baptist and attending Baylor University, I was schooled in the principle of church-state separation and proud of the role my denomination played in support of this most important of constitutional guarantees.

The authors of our founding documents, especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were influenced by John Leland, a prominent Baptist evangelist of the time.

Leland, Jefferson and Madison were all Virginians, and deliberated on ideas of church and state that became the language of the first amendment.

In fact, the famous phrase “wall of separation between church and state” arose from just such a deliberation with Baptists.

It appeared in a letter from Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802.

“Guard against those men who make a great noise about religion, in choosing representatives,” Leland said that same year.

“If they knew the nature and worth of religion, they would not debauch it to such shameful purposes.”

On the steps of the U.S. Capitol in 1920, George Truett, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, said,

“Indeed, the supreme contribution of the new world to the old is the contribution of religious liberty. This is the chiefest contribution that America has thus far made to civilization. … It is the natural and fundamental and indefeasible right of every human being to worship God or not, according to the dictates of his conscience, and, as long as he does not infringe upon the rights of others, he is to be held accountable alone to God for all religious beliefs and practices.”

It is noteworthy that the current occupant of that pulpit, Robert Jeffress, has written a book titled America Is a Christian Nation and is politically active on a number of partisan fronts.

The founding documents

The Constitution contains no mention of Christianity or Jesus Christ.

It refers to religion only twice:

in the First Amendment, which prohibits state-endorsed religion, and in Article VI, which prohibits religious tests for public office.

The Declaration of Independence recognizes God-given rights of “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” and contains three other mentions: “Nature’s God,” “creator” and “divine Providence.”

The Articles of Confederation discuss the “Great Governor of the World.”

In these papers, the foundation of the Constitution, the only mention of religion is an admonition to keep religion from government, and government from religion.

The Treaty of Tripoli states plainly: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion … it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

The movement today

Today, mainline denominations largely support First Amendment protections.

Some, while supporting the separation, do encourage their members to vote and be active in political and civic affairs.

Support for the Christian nationalist agenda is most pronounced among older Americans who feel threatened by changing demographics and growth of nonwhite and non-Christian populations, cultural and political threats from secular and progressive ideologies, and changing social norms.

In other words, Christian nationalism is more about identity politics than biblical faith.

In her testimony before a U.S. House committee in December 2022, Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, said, “Christian nationalism is anti-democratic and a threat to our constitutional republic.”

The role of Texas

Texas has become a key center of gravity for the national movement.

The governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general are all high-profile supporters, along with Sen. Ted Cruz.

West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks are pouring enormous amounts of dollars into both the national and Texas effort.

Gov. Greg Abbott has enlisted pastors and bishops to endorse his school voucher plan from the pulpit.

On the agenda in Texas and a number of other states are school vouchers for private religious education, mandatory school prayer, teaching creationism, restricting abortion access, opposing LGBTQ rights and enshrining Christian values in law.

Which means the Christian nationalist agenda differs from the one many Texans would prefer: protecting children, educating our workforce, ensuring religious freedom for all and limiting attempts at social engineering from government.

Alan W. Steelman is a former Republican member of Congress who represented Texas’ 5th District from 1973 to 1977.

[moorheadthanyoucanhandle]

MY COUNTRY, 'TIS OF THEOCRACY

Now playing at Harkins Shea:

God & Country--Produced by Rob and Michele Reiner and directed by Dan Partland, this documentary about Christian Nationalism in American politics is impassioned but lucid and not hysterical. Based on Katharine Stewart's book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, the movie is presented as a warning to secular or non-evangelical citizens for whom the propaganda and political agenda of that movement may be largely invisible.

The talking heads here are mostly Christians themselves, ranging from Russell Moore to Reza Aslan to Jemar Tisby to Kristin Kobes du Mez to Sister Simone Campbell to Bishop William J. Barber II to Veggie Tales co-creator Phil Vischer. They speak calmly, even a little sheepishly, but firmly and with an indisputable insider's perspective, and their message is: Christian Nationalism isn't about religious practice; it's about amassing political power.

It's not exactly breaking news when we're informed that Christian Nationalists are terrified of and enraged by feminism, LGBTQ rights, secular education, uncensored libraries and abortion rights, or that the movement is historically connected to racism and segregation. But too many people may not grasp the degree to which Christian Nationalism's ultimate aim is a non-democratic, Christian-supremacist America, and the startling degree to which it's making progress.

In support of this, Partland shows us copious clips of wild-eyed rants by Evangelical heavy hitters stating these aims in no uncertain terms. A comedic highlight comes when, in the midst of one of the movie's many montages of preachers bleating and screeching, we see Robert Jeffress say, with a straight face, "We cannot be silent any longer!"

Partland also works to debunk some of Christian Nationalism's favorite falsehoods, notably that America was intended by the Founders as a "Christian Nation" or that the Separation of Church and State is not found in the Constitution. Attorney and author Andrew Seidel observes here that true religious freedom is impossible without Separation of Church and State.

By way of emphasizing its urgency, the movie also notes that Christian Nationalists were central agents of the January 6 Insurrection, despite the irony of President 45 as the object of their veneration. "When I was a young Evangelical minister," notes Faith and Action founder Rob Schenck, "we used Donald Trump as a sermon illustration for everything a Christian should not be."

God & Country shares a twofold difficulty with many other worthy progressive political documentaries. First, though well-organized and smoothly edited, it's full of unavoidable footage of the likes of Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, Greg Locke, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Kenneth Copeland and Paula White, not to mention 45 himself, that can be painful for many of us to watch no matter how necessary. Secondly, many of the people who most need to see this movie probably won't watch it. To employ a more than usually apt cliché, it's preaching to the choir.

[quakerjoe]

One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.

This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.

Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.

(Read More)

[nebris]

The Harm Done for White Men

The new attacks on Roe v. Wade are about protecting men, not women

Part of President Trump’s new immigration proposal is something called “patriotic assimilation.” It’s a euphemism for an immigrant entry exam that evokes the Jim Crow literacy tests used to disenfranchise black voters. One administration official told the Washington Post that green-card applicants would be required to pass an exam based on such everyday American household dinner topics as Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.

That is a perplexing choice for the administration, given the timing. That letter, dated January 1, 1802, is the foundation of many understandings of the First Amendment when it comes to the separation of church and state. That is anything but what we saw this week, as their Republican allies in statehouses throughout the Midwest and South pushed through unconstitutional, misogynist and pseudoscientific restrictions on abortion.

In my native Ohio, a child who is raped might not even know she is pregnant before she runs out of time to abort her rapist’s fetus. Missouri sent its eight-week restriction to its eager Republican governor for signature on Friday. And Alabama’s law, arguably the most barbaric of them all, criminalizes the procedure from the moment of conception and carries a prison sentence for doctors of up to 99 years. That is a much longer bid than the maximum any rapist in the state could get, all while his victim is forced to bear his child. Each law, in its own way, subjugates women and girls — and since white women statistically have greater access to the procedure, signals a specific attack on women of color. This is a particular issue in Georgia, where noted vote suppressor Brian Kemp is governor. Under the law scheduled to go into effect on January 1st, women who self-terminate their pregnancies can be imprisoned for life or executed, thereby accomplishing two goals: subduing them for their gender, and taking away their ballot. (Men who impregnated them, per the law, suffer no consequence.)

It has been plain for a while now that the anti-abortion cause has nothing to do with actual deities or morality. If it did, it wouldn’t put the lives of doctors, patients and clinic employees in jeopardy to make its argument. States would be more concerned with their terrible infant mortality rates than they would about saving fetuses. Ending reproductive rights in America has never been about anything holy. Anti-abortionists like to remind us of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s statements about eugenics or claim they’re trying to stop a “black genocide,” but their movement was born to keep white patriarchy alive. And it is white men who are the primary beneficiaries of such policies.

As Politico Magazine detailed in 2014, the forced-birth movement, as I term it, got its primary motivation from a ruling three years before Roe v. Wade. A 1970 D.C. District Court decision denied tax-exempt status to “segregation academies” formed to escape the consequences of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education precedent. These academies were connected to churches, and soon the IRS wanted to know whether their institutions too discriminated upon the basis of race. Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich and evangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., over the course of the 1970s, seized upon the opportunity to mobilize a powerful voting bloc out of the disgruntled religious conservatives thwarted in their efforts to discriminate. But even back then, it was impolitic to promote themselves as “the racist caucus,” so they went hunting for an issue. Abortion was it — a political bogeyman ginned up out of a mix of opportunism, misogyny, and a rising religious unease with a spike in abortions after legalization. No scientific expertise in women’s physiology was required. White supremacy had all it needed, its natural symbiote: patriarchy.

The Republican movement behind forced-birth bills is truly ignorance allied with power, as James Baldwin once warned us about. The rhetoric may be more vociferous and reckless now than it was when the religious right was first revving up, but it is no less cynical. Even if it escapes the lips or is written or signed into law by women like Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama, the primary goal of that revanchist talk has always been to take America back to a time when the word of white men went all but unquestioned.

This is a particularly intoxicating prospect for men like Trump, who have grown up with this palatial reality all of their lives. What he sold in all those books and buildings and casinos and steaks was not just wealth, but his brand of white manhood. It is one reason why, despite the fact that his brash trade wars with China and Canada have made life harder for farmers and other American low-wage workers, some of them insist that they won’t leave his side.

Not wealthy enough to benefit the most from GOP tax cuts? Your local hospital going under? Your kids stuck in endless wars? It’s OK: hang with the GOP for the potential benefits of increased race-based stratification. Even if Trump’s policies are making your farm go under or depriving you of the steel you need, the benefits of whiteness await you. Because if something bad happens to you, it’s someone else’s fault. And that someone else is probably black. Or perhaps an immigrant from Mexico.

This is the investment that the Republicans have made in the intoxication of whiteness. It applies to these abhorrent attempts to end abortion as well. Legislation like these bills in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri isn’t merely about trying to get the Supreme Court’s conservatives to overturn Roe. These states, and the (mostly) men behind the bills, are making a point about where women stand in relation to men, and moreover, where white men stand in relation to everyone else. This isn’t about who voted for what, or who signed what bill. It is about what message is sent, and who benefits.

When women are told that their bodies belong to the state at a time when access to health care remains drastically unequal by race and class, it means that rich white men win when abortion restrictions become law. They will all be challenged in court, wasting a lot of taxpayer money that could have been better used improving those health care systems or even educating the children that Republicans claim to care so much about. Then it will come time for those five Justices to decide the future for anyone who will ever possibly carry a fetus to term, or choose not to do so.

It is a mistake to get lost in religious debate around this. Remember, always, that Jesus was the hustle used to get us here. The fight to keep women from getting abortions is really about reinforcing a belief that white men should maintain dominion over this country and the people in it. The only God that matters most to these guys is themselves.

Jamil Smith is a Senior Writer at Rolling Stone, where he covers national affairs and culture. Throughout his career as a journalist and Emmy Award-winning television producer, he has explored the intersection of politics and identity. Follow him on Twitter @JamilSmith.

Originally published at www.rollingstone.com on May 17, 2019.

[principleofplenitude]

But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many Republicans were behind efforts to liberalize and even decriminalize abortion; theirs was the party of reproductive choice, while Democrats, with their large Catholic constituency, were the opposition. So what changed? Why did those pro-choice Republicans repudiate their support for a woman’s right to choose? Why did the 1976 Republican platform support “the efforts” of those calling for a constitutional amendment to protect the “right to life” of the unborn? Why is it, as John Seago, the legislative director of Texas Right to Life, tells the filmmakers, that anyone running for any office in his state must declare their opposition to abortion if they hope to be elected? How is it that between 2011 and 2014, twenty-seven states enacted 231 abortion restrictions? And why did four states—Mississippi, Iowa, Kentucky, and Indiana—pass laws just this year that diminish, if not contravene, the rights established back in 1973? Reversing Roe does an admirable job of teasing apart how the Republican Party used control of women’s bodies as political capital to shift the balance of power their way. We watch politicians like George H.W. Bush and Reagan disavow their earlier pro-choice positions during their presidential campaigns, and organizations like the National Right to Life Committee in the late 1960s, and Operation Rescue two decades later, insinuate themselves into the Republican Party. We see Catholic bishops in the 1960s politicizing their congregations through exhortations from the pulpit and voter registration drives after Mass designed to get parishioners to switch their affiliation from Democrat to Republican. What we don’t see is Richard Nixon, under the sway of Pat Buchanan and Charles Colson, plotting an anti-abortion strategy to lure those Catholic voters away from the Democratic Party, or how Gerald Ford and his advisers furthered that strategy, cynically adding pro-life language to the 1976 Republican platform, assuming that it would be a temporary maneuver. Instead, it turned out to be the opening that enabled religious anti-choice advocates to begin to remake the party. Even more sinister, perhaps, than this ploy by the Republicans were the racist origins of that agenda. As the historian of religion Randall Balmer explains in the film, evangelicals became politically active in the 1970s, when they were thwarted by the courts and the Internal Revenue Service in their efforts to obtain tax-exempt status for “segregation academies” like Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School and Bob Jones University that heeded what they believed to be a biblical mandate to keep the races separate. Around the same time, Paul Weyrich, a Republican strategist, recognized the potential political power evangelical voters would have if they were to vote as a bloc, and tried to pull them into the fold with issues he thought might appeal to their moralism, such as the proliferation of pornography, the Equal Rights Amendment, and even abortion—which, prior to Roe, they were largely sympathetic toward and considered a Catholic issue. Instead, as they began to organize against the government’s refusal to support segregated schools, Weyrich, who in the late 1970s was working on behalf of Reagan, saw his chance, though he understood that he—and they—would need an issue that had more popular appeal than outright racism. As Balmer puts it, “Weyrich says in effect, we’ve found our issue. Abortion is going to work for us as a political issue.”

“How Republicans became anti-choice” from New York Review of Books

[beloved-not-broken]

(Rain Anon) I'M BACK! Sorry I haven't sent anything in a while, just didn't have any questions or thoughts to share so I didn't force it (cause that has the opposite effect). I'm back with the abortion thing, I found 4 videos on why this queer Christian woman believes the Bible doesn't condemn abortion. (I'll link them best I can in the next ask). and what she says makes a lot of sense, and I'm inclined to agree with her... What do you think??

Hey, Rain Anon! Welcome back.

I’ve come across similar videos before so I’m glad you sent them my way. Now I have a chance to actually do some research.

I think it’s important to remember that the Bible was written thousands of years ago for people in cultures that are so different from our own. Although we can certainly gain wisdom from reading the scriptures and apply what God reveals to us in the here and now, we can’t necessarily benefit from a superficial interpretation of the Bible. We have to understand the context of not only the book we’re reading, but the Bible as a whole.

The founder of my church actually talked about abortion in context in a fairly recent episode of her podcast, Kingdom Now. (It’s called “Abortion and the Bible.”) I highly recommend listening to it—the episode covers everything that QueerLadyChurch talked about on TikTok.

It also helps to have an understanding of the history of Christianity in the U.S.

This turned into a long post, so I’ve hidden the rest under a cut.

CNN gives a brief history of abortion starting in the 1700s:

Mid-18th century to 1880: Abortion was commonly practiced and was allowed under common law. Apparently, even the Catholic Church did not condemn abortion in the early stages of pregnancy.

1857: The American Medical Association began pressuring states to make abortion illegal.

1873: Congress passed the Comstock Act, which prevented the U.S. postal service from delivering abortion-inducing drugs.

1880: Due to pressure from the medical community, abortion was criminalized except in cases when it would save the mother’s life.

Late 1960s: The Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, founded by Jewish and Protestant religious leaders, opened an illegal abortion clinic to make the procedure affordable, accessible, and comfortable for more people.

1973: In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution provides a right to privacy that protects a pregnant person’s right to choose to have an abortion.

Obviously, we can’t talk about abortion without talking about Christianity—specifically, evangelical Christianity.

Interestingly, it seems evangelicals weren’t pro-life to begin with. According to the NPR podcast “Thoughtline,” the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1970s agreed that abortion services should be accessible, and that the government shouldn’t interfere in that realm. (The SBC officially denounced those resolutions in 2003.)

The “Thoughtline” podcast hosts also discovered that Republicans leveraged the topic of abortion to get evangelicals on their side. A few factors led to abortion becoming the hot topic that it is today:

The number of abortions increased in the five years after Roe v. Wade, which apparently concerned some evangelicals

During that time, Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell, and other leaders were looking into issues that could unite evangelical voters

The Moral Majority was formed in 1979 and began lobbying for conservative values, taking an anti-abortion stance in the name of promoting Christian morality

I can understand why pro-life folks don’t support abortion. We see time and again in the scriptures that God values human life: We bear the image of God (Genesis 1:27), we have inherent value (Luke 12:6-7), and we’re discouraged from taking the life of another person (Exodus 20:13).

However, the fact that Christians haven’t always been so strongly against abortion leads me to believe that this topic shouldn’t be such a priority. In fact, I’d go as far to say that the issue of abortion has become an idol of American Christianity.

I hope this answers your question, or at least gives you more to think about! 💜

[xtruss]

The Link Between Texas’s New Abortion Law and Its New Voting Laws

For decades, Republican Taliban Strategists have seen exploiting both issues as a way to hang on to power.

— By Sue Halpern | September 3, 2021 | The New Yorker

In Texas and elsewhere in the country, a ligature of racism connects efforts to deny people of color their right to vote and women—disproportionately women of color—their right to terminate a pregnancy.Photograph by Joel Martinez / The Monitor / AP

Just before midnight on Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block a Texas law that restricts most abortions after as early as six weeks of pregnancy, dramatically furthering the illiberal, anti-democratic tendency of the Roberts Court. (Chief Justice John Roberts, himself, dissented.) This decision, to permit the law to go into effect, allows the Court’s most conservative members to claim that they were abiding by the tradition of stare decisis by leaving Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that codified a woman’s right to abortion, nominally intact while enabling that right to be hollowed to a husk. The Texas law, which includes no exception for rape or incest, deputizes citizens to sue both anyone who performs the procedure in violation of the law and anyone who assists the beneficiaries in any way. (Patients themselves may not be sued.) And it incentivizes them to do so with the promise of a ten-thousand-dollar reward if they prevail in court. Insurance companies, taxi-drivers, friends, donors to nonprofits, health-care workers—any and all people with even a minor role in enabling an abortion are potentially liable. The law is not only a radical departure from convention, it’s a repudiation of due process, granting standing to individuals who otherwise wouldn’t have it. A more judicious Court, rather than one with a majority of Justices selected because of their ideological opposition to abortion, would have halted the implementation of the Texas law for this reason alone.

The Roe decision took a calendar approach to abortion, allowing a woman to terminate a pregnancy for almost any reason during the first two trimesters, with some state regulation of abortion allowed after the first trimester, and more after the second trimester, at which point a fetus is viable outside the womb, and a state’s interest in protecting it becomes “compelling.” Even so, anti-abortion activists used the trimester timetable to chip away at Roe. The Court’s 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey upheld a constitutional right to abortion, but eliminated the trimester timetable, which opened the door for states to determine their own standards surrounding fetal viability. Scores of restrictive statutes followed. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice nonprofit, between January, 2011, and July, 2019, states enacted four hundred and eighty-three new abortion restrictions. The Texas law, S.B. 8, is the most recent and extreme iteration of these. At six weeks, many women do not know that they are pregnant, but, according to anti-abortion activists, that is when a fetal heartbeat is first discernible. Medical professionals, though, say that this is misleading, because at six weeks, though the cells that will eventually form a heart may have begun to emit electrical signals, a fetal heart will not fully develop for about another fourteen weeks. Nevertheless, S.B. 8 penalizes health-care providers who fail to search for a signal or who continue to treat the patient if they detect it.

Texas was already one of the most difficult places in the country to obtain an abortion. Guttmacher reports that there was a twenty-five-per-cent decline in the number of abortion clinics in the state between 2014 and 2017. In 2017, ninety-six per cent of Texas counties had no abortion facilities. Last year, Governor Greg Abbott issued a temporary ban on certain health-care procedures, including abortions, ostensibly because of the coronavirus pandemic. If the ban had been long-term or strictly implemented, women in the state would have had to travel an average of four hundred and forty-seven miles, round trip, to obtain abortion services.

What makes the Texas law especially odious is that, by empowering random individuals to enforce it rather than leaving that to officials, the authors of S. B. 8 have complicated the ability of abortion-rights advocates to block the law in court, as there is no state agent to sue. As Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his dissent, “The desired consequence appears to be to insulate the State from responsibility for implementing and enforcing the regulatory regime.” This clever subterfuge gave the Court’s conservatives an opportunity to make the disingenuous claim that they were allowing the law to stand because it was not yet clear that the defendants in the case “can or will seek to enforce the Texas law against the applicants in a manner that might permit our intervention.” The Justices further claimed that they were not ruling on the merits or the constitutionality of the law—though it is unconstitutional, according to the protections afforded by Roe—and suggested that the plaintiffs could, in theory, challenge S.B. 8 going forward. In a stinging dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “Taken together, the act is a breathtaking Act of defiance—of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas.” And what of those women? According to a report in the Texas Tribune, the day before the law went into effect, a clinic in Fort Worth saw more than a hundred women right up to the midnight deadline. The next day, they had to turn away patients who no longer met the new restrictions.

As the challenge to S.B. 8 was working its way through the courts, Republicans in the Texas legislature were busy writing similarly draconian laws to make it harder to vote, especially for people of color. S.B. 1, the bill that inspired Democratic legislators to flee the state earlier this summer in order to deprive their Republican colleagues of a quorum, was finally passed this week, and was sent to Governor Abbott for his signature. Among its provisions, the law requires monthly citizenship checks; entitles partisan poll watchers to move freely within polling sites and makes it a criminal offense to obstruct their observation of election workers; and eliminates twenty-four-hour and drive-through voting. Though the two laws address different domains, they are connected: in Texas and elsewhere in the country, a ligature of racism connects efforts to deny people of color their right to vote and women—disproportionately women of color—their right to terminate a pregnancy.

The Roberts Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, enabled Republican legislatures to pass hundreds of laws, such as S.B. 1, in Texas, to make it harder for people—again, particularly people of color—to vote. (The Voting Rights Act was intended to rectify the long history of denying Black Americans all the benefits of citizenship, including the right to cast a ballot.) Well before Shelby, in the nineteen-eighties, Republican strategists, most notably Paul Weyrich, who famously said that “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down,” understood that to hold on to power Republicans had to do two things: keep Democrats from voting and find new Republican allies. People of color were a suitable target for their first aim, since they tended to vote, overwhelmingly, for Democrats—hence the various attempts to suppress the vote in the years before Holder, such as gerrymandering and the multitude of laws passed in its wake. Meanwhile, some evangelical Christians, who had largely eschewed politics, turned out to be ripe for conversion when they found themselves unable to obtain tax-exempt status for “segregation academies”—schools that followed what they claimed to be a Biblical mandate to keep the races apart. According to the historian Randall Balmer, in 1979, six years after Roe, Weyrich encouraged Jerry Falwell and other evangelical leaders to seize “on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term . . . because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”

It is undeniable that there are sincere people with a deeply held belief in the sanctity of life, which, for them, overrides a woman’s right to control her own body, but that is not the motivation of the authors of S.B. 8. If it were, we would see those legislators apply the same standard to gun control, abolition of the death penalty, enforcement of public-health mandates, and a commitment to the social welfare of children, especially children born into poverty. Instead, those legislators appeal to “the right to life” in the same way that they invoke the term “voter fraud”—in order to consolidate their power and pursue an anti-democratic agenda.

President Biden responded to the Supreme Court majority’s decision to abet this ploy by stating that his Administration would be launching “a whole-of-government effort to respond . . . to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions as protected by Roe, and what legal tools we have to insulate women and providers from the impact of Texas’ bizarre scheme of outsourced enforcement to private parties.” Others reacting to the Court’s dereliction have renewed calls to add more Justices and to end the filibuster. There are also calls for Congress to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act in order to create a federal abortion law to override S.B. 8 and other anti-abortion state statutes. Still, though any of these measures has the potential to reinforce the protections codified by Roe, none of them will help the women who are being turned away from clinics now, and they won’t shield their supporters from the bounty hunters who have been authorized to track them down. And, given the glacial pace of congressional “action,” these measures likely won’t prevent other states from passing copycat anti-abortion statutes. (Within twenty-four hours of the law’s going into effect, the president of the Florida state Senate said that he was considering introducing similar legislation.)

By doing nothing to stop S.B. 8, the Court has effectively sanctioned extortion. Days before the Texas law went into effect, an activist on TikTok posted a computer script designed to overwhelm a Web site created by an anti-abortion group to report those who have violated the law; the script allows users to inundate the site with fake claims. How pathetic that a few lines of code may have temporarily offered the most effective way to protect the rights of Texan women.

— Sue Halpern is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of, most recently, the novel “Summer Hours at the Robbers Library.”

[oldshowbiz]

1982.

The Politics of Jerry Falwell versus the Politics of Ed Asner.

[glittergummicandypeach]

Falwell’s Fall Was Unrelated to the Anti-Science, Racism, and Patriarchy Trifecta that Built Liberty | Religion Dispatches

Four years after he played a key role in shifting white evangelical support from Ted Cruz to Donald Trump Jerry Falwell, Jr. is absent from the Republican Convention and has resigned in disgrace from his powerful position as president of Liberty University. His vertiginous fall began earlier this month with a scandalous yacht party photo posted on Instagram, which required him to take an indefinite leave, but that indiscretion has now been swamped by allegations of a tawdry adulterous affair that lasted for years and involved Falwell’s wife having sex with a pool attendant while he looked on. 

Why, we might ask, did his departure take so long? Why was it kinky sex that took him down when he risked lives to reopen the university in the midst of a pandemic, offended Black alumni with his creation of a blackface face mask, and made a mockery of Christian ethics with his support for a thrice-married president who boasts of sexually predatory behavior? Because Falwell’s worst offenses didn’t violate core fundamentalist principles that define Liberty University’s understanding of the Bible: disbelief of science, racism, and male domination of women—the trifecta on which they’ve bet their future. 

The first core principle was solidified in 1925 by the Scopes trial, when fundamentalist Christians opposed the teaching of evolution, which challenged the bedrock Genesis texts holding up white male supremacy. Then, after the Supreme Court mandated the desegregation of public schools in 1954, white Christians started creating thousands of private religious schools. Fundamentalist Jerry Falwell Sr. founded the whites-only Lynchburg Academy in 1967 (which later became Liberty University) to avoid desegregation. But once segregation carried serious tax penalties for these schools, racist fury was re-routed into the third principle via control of women’s reproduction. In 1980 anti-abortion politics took the trifecta lead in building a loyal Republican voting base that would advance white male supremacy. 

The pressures on Falwell to shift from opposing desegregation to weaponizing abortion began in 1969, when a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, successfully sued the U.S. Treasury about three whites-only religious schools that operated tax free. The Supreme Court affirmed the decision in their favor in Green v. Coit, saying that such schools, having been founded in the wake of the desegregation mandate, “cannot demonstrate that they do not racially discriminate in admissions, employment, scholarships, loan programs, athletics, and extracurricular programs.” 

The Nixon administration demanded information from schools about their race policies for hiring and admissions, using the IRS to force desegregation. Bob Jones University, originally founded to oppose evolution in 1927, remained determinedly segregationist, lost its nonprofit tax status in 1976, and had to pay a million dollars in back taxes. As Falwell himself faced IRS pressures, he furiously whined, “In some states…it’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school,” a telling comparison suggesting that racism was respectable but non-marital sex was not (which may explain his son’s fall from grace). Falwell eventually caved and shifted the rationale for his religious school from defending segregation to religious freedom, arguing that, because the school received no federal funds, federal laws did not apply, omitting the fact that it paid no taxes. 

Other white supremacist leaders such as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Ralph Reed were also apoplectic about desegregation. But it took Paul Weyrich, who was described by admirers as the “Lenin of social conservatism,” to realize he could use segregationist anger as a political opportunity. Weyrich had noticed that in the 1978 election, a few legislators won in the upper Midwest, based on opposition to the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. 

Weyrich seized on abortion as the issue to channel racist rage and reached out to leaders like Falwell while ignoring two politically inconvenient truths: 1) he blamed the last Democratic candidate to receive significant white evangelical votes, Jimmy Carter, for Bob Jones’ fate, even though the Republican Nixon administration was responsible, and 2) virtually all Protestants, including the Southern Baptists, supported Roe v. Wade. 

Weyrich promised the conservative fundamentalist and evangelical groups that if they turned opposition to abortion into a moral issue, their reversal on abortion would lead to political power that “could well exceed our wildest dreams.” To achieve this, the anti-abortion agenda had to be “packaged in non-religious language, propagated throughout the country, [and] defined in moral terms.” If this was accomplished and “political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” In 1979, conservative theologian Frances A. Schaeffer teamed up with pediatrician C. Everett Koop to tour the country with a series of anti-abortion films, while Weyrich and Falwell created the “Moral Majority” to protect white male supremacy, with abortion as the flagship wedge issue. 

For forty years, women have been collateral damage in a well-funded, deliberate war to return the country to the white evangelical trifecta of science-aversion, racism, and male dominance that props up the religious arm of the Trump presidency. Though evangelicals mostly avoided explicit reference to segregation as the original reason for their opposition to abortion, their bet that it would be the winner strategy has not been a secret. According to Randall Balmer’s account of a Religious Right conference in 1990:

Weyrich tried to make a point …Let’s remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision… what got us going as a political movement was … the IRS [decision] to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University [for] its racially discriminatory policies. 

In the face of failed attempts to reverse the Roe decision and despite enduring majority support for it, anti-abortion white supremacists have worked to escalate their efforts using an unscientific concern for women’s safety to deny life-saving reproductive health care to women and to demonize reproductive justice advocates, despite the fact that abortion is medically safer than having a wisdom tooth pulled. They have sought to deny women our religious freedom as moral agents of our own lives and inflicted untold suffering on the colleagues, friends, and families of assassinated doctors and clinic workers, on their harassed patients, and on women without the resources to travel to states or countries that offer abortion services. 

The trifecta that Weyrich, Falwell, and their allies bet on appears headed toward major stumbles this fall. Science-aversion can be fatal in the midst of a pandemic that’s now surging in states that are crucial to the aging, white evangelical Republican base. The country has a good chance of electing an administration and legislators who support reproductive justice and women’s equality. And the murder of George Floyd has convinced a white majority that racism is a serious problem. The Fall of Falwell Jr. at Liberty because of sexual misbehaviors doesn’t address the rotten moral core of their founding trifecta, but the next election may finally enable us to begin to address the decades of harm it has inflicted.

This content was originally published here.

[howprolifeofyou]

The Real Origins of the Religious Pro Life Movement in the U.S

From NPR:

Although various Roman Catholic groups denounced the ruling, and Christianity Today complained that the Roe decision "runs counter to the moral teachings of Christianity through the ages but also to the moral sense of the American people," the vast majority of evangelical leaders said virtually nothing about it; many of those who did comment actually applauded the decision.

[...]

I was invited to attend a conference in Washington sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Religious Right organization (though I didn't realize it at the time). I soon found myself in a conference room with a couple of dozen people, including Ralph Reed, then head of the Christian Coalition; Carl F. H. Henry, an evangelical theologian; Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family; Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Edward G. Dobson, pastor of an evangelical church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and formerly one of Jerry Falwell's acolytes at Moral Majority. Paul M. Weyrich, a longtime conservative activist, head of what is now called the Free Congress Foundation, and one of the architects of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, was also there.

In the course of one of the sessions, Weyrich tried to make a point to his Religious Right brethren (no women attended the conference, as I recall). Let's remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roedecision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.

Weyrich, whose conservative activism dates at least as far back as the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964, had been trying for years to energize evangelical voters over school prayer, abortion, or the proposed equal rights amendment to the Constitution. "I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," he recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

During the meeting in Washington, D.C., Weyrich went on to characterize the leaders of the Religious Right as reluctant to take up the abortion cause even close to a decade after the Roe ruling. "I had discussions with all the leading lights of the movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, post–Roe v. Wade," he said, "and they were all arguing that that decision was one more reason why Christians had to isolate themselves from the rest of the world."

"What caused the movement to surface," Weyrich reiterated,"was the federal government's moves against Christian schools." The IRS threat against segregated schools, he said, "enraged the Christian community." That, not abortion, according to Weyrich, was what galvanized politically conservative evangelicals into the Religious Right and goaded them into action. "It was not the other things," he said.

[science-criticaltheory]

The Harm Done For White Men by Jamil Smith

Alabama Senator Linda Coleman-Madison was one of six Democrats and only two women in leadership to vote against the state's new anti-abortion law. Chris Aluka Berry/REUTERS

The new attacks on Roe v. Wade are about protecting men, not women.  

Part of President Trump’s new immigration proposal is something called “patriotic assimilation.” It’s a euphemism for an immigrant entry exam that evokes that the Jim Crow literacy tests used to disenfranchise black voters. One administration official told the Washington Post that green-card applicants would be required to pass an exam based on such everyday American household dinner topics as Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.

That is a perplexing choice for the administration, given the timing. That letter, dated January 1, 1802, is the foundation of many understandings of the First Amendment when it comes to the separation of church and state. That is anything but what we saw this week, as their Republican allies in statehouses throughout the Midwest and South pushed through unconstitutional, misogynist and pseudoscientific restrictions on abortion.

In my native Ohio, even a child who is raped might not even know she is pregnant before she runs out of time to abort her rapist’s fetus. Missouri sent its eight-week restriction to its eager Republican governor for signature on Friday. And Alabama’s law, arguably the most barbaric of them all, criminalizes the procedure from the moment of conception and carried a prison sentence for doctors of up to 99 years. That is a much longer bid than the maximum any rapists in the state could get, all while his victim is forced to bear his child. Each law, in its own way, subjugates women and girls — and since white women statistically have greater access to the procedure, signals a particular attack on women of color. This is a particular issue in Georgia, where noted vote suppressor Brian Kemp is governor. Under the law scheduled to go into effect on January 1st, women who self-terminate their pregnancies can be imprisoned for life or executed, thereby accomplishing two goals: subduing them for their gender, and taking away their ballot. (Men who impregnated them, per the law, suffer no consequence.)

It has been plain for a while now that the anti-abortion cause has nothing to do with actual deities or morality. If it did, it wouldn’t put the lives of doctors, patients and clinic employees in jeopardy to make its argument. States would be more concerned with their terrible infant mortality rates than they would about saving fetuses. Ending reproductive rights in America has never been about anything holy. Anti-abortionists like to remind us of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s statements about eugenics or claim they’re trying to stop a “black genocide,” but their movement was born to keep white patriarchy alive. And it is white men who are the primary beneficiaries of such policies.

As Politico Magazine detailed in 2014, the forced-birth movement, as I term it, got its primary motivation from a ruling three years before Roe v. Wade. A 1970 D.C. District Court decision denied tax-exempt status to “segregation academies” formed to escape the consequences of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education precedent. These academies were connected to churches, and soon the IRS wanted to know whether their institutions too discriminated upon the basis of race. Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich and evangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., over the course of the 1970s, seized upon the opportunity to mobilize a powerful voting bloc out of the disgruntled religious conservatives thwarted in their efforts to discriminate. But even back then, it was impolitic to promote themselves as “the racist caucus,” so they went hunting for an issue. Abortion was it — a political bogeyman ginned up out of a mix of opportunism, misogyny, and a rising religious unease with a spike in abortions after legalization. No scientific expertise in women’s physiology was required. White supremacy had all it needed, its natural symbiote: patriarchy.

The Republican movement behind forced-birth bills is truly ignorance allied with power, as James Baldwin once warned us about. The rhetoric may be more vociferous and reckless now than it was when the religious right was first revving up, but it is no less cynical. Even if it escapes the lips or is written or signed into law by women like Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama, the primary goal of that revanchist talk has always been to take America back when the word of white men went all but unquestioned.

This is a particularly intoxicating prospect for men like Trump, who have grown up with this palatial reality all of their lives. What he sold in all those books and buildings and casinos and steaks was not just wealth, but his brand of white manhood. It is one reason why, despite the fact that his brash trade wars with China and Canada has made life harder for farmers and other American low-wage workers, some of them insist that they won’t leave his side.

Not wealthy enough to benefit the most from GOP tax cuts? Your local hospital going under? Your kids stuck in endless wars? It’s OK: hang with the GOP for that the potential benefits of increased race-based stratification. Even if Trump’s policies are making your farm go under or depriving you of the steel you need, the benefits of whiteness await you. Because if something bad happens to you, it’s someone else’s fault. And that someone else is probably black. Or perhaps an immigrant from Mexico.

This is the investment that the Republicans have made, in the intoxication of whiteness. It applies to these abhorrent attempts to end abortion as well. Legislation like these bills in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri aren’t merely about trying to get the Supreme Court’s conservatives to overturn Roe. These states, and the (mostly) men behind the bills, are making a point about where women stand in relation to men, and moreover, where white men stand in relation to everyone else. This isn’t about who voted for what, or who signed what bill. It is about what message is sent, and who benefits.

When women are told that their bodies belong to the state at a time when access to health care remains drastically unequal by race and class, it means that rich white men win when abortion restrictions become law. They will all be challenged in court, wasting a lot of taxpayer money that could have been better used improving those health care systems or even educating the children that Republicans claim to care so much about. Then it will come time for those five Justices to decide the future for anyone who will ever be possibly carry a fetus to term, or choose not to do so.

It is a mistake to get lost in religious debate around this. Remember, always, that Jesus was the hustle used to get us here. The fight to keep women from getting abortions is really about reinforcing a belief that white men should maintain dominion over this country and the people in it. The only God that matters most to these guys is themselves.