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odinsblog · 3 months

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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.

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sohotthateveryonedied · 1 month

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Do you think Wally and Artemis settled for each other? They both seemed interested in M’gann and Conner until they found out those two were dating - makes it seem like they were each other’s second choices if they only got together because they realised that they couldn’t date their crushes

No, I wouldn't say that at all. Actually, I fully believe that if Wally or Artemis had had a chance with M'gann or Conner, it wouldn't have worked out anyway, and I'm not sure that either of them would have expected it to. You know when you walk into the first day of school and you go around deciding who your crush is going to be for the year? That's how I interpreted their crushes on M'gann and Conner. It wasn't serious, and very clearly wasn't reciprocated by either of them, which is exactly why Wally and Artemis chose to pursue them because it ran no real risk of being fulfilled.

In Wally's case, we watched him spend the entire first season flirting with practically every single woman he came into contact with, regardless of their age/availability/lack of interest in him. Wally's flirtatious behavior wasn't out of genuine attraction or any expectation of his advances being accepted, but was rather a habit he'd developed as a method of covering up his own insecurities. We know Wally was impulsive and often immature, and he played that persona up purposefully throughout the entire first season. He encouraged people to view him as the flirt and the class clown because it was easier than letting them in on his true feelings. Wally lacked confidence in himself and felt constantly overshadowed by everyone around him, hence him taking on the role of the easygoing jokester in the group so everyone would be too distracted to notice how insecure he really was. It's literally said in the show multiple times that a big part of Wally's personality is his denial in anything he doesn't want to confront.

Wally's crush on M'gann, just like his thing for Black Canary and every other woman he meets, is just a front for him. The only reason M'gann was the main target for his flirting was because she was the only girl on the team for a while, and because she was nice enough to not have a real problem with it or tell him to stop. She never took it seriously, and I don't think Wally wanted her to. If M'gann and Conner had never gotten together, that wouldn't have given Wally any more of a chance with her because his "feelings" for M'gann were more of a habit he'd developed than any kind of genuine romantic feelings. (Not to suggest that they aren't close and don't love each other as friends, because they definitely do, but that's as far as it goes.) Wally's crush on M'gann was all about Wally putting up a facade to cover up his inner insecurities and had very little to do with M'gann herself.

In that same vein, Artemis' crush on Conner was never fully about Conner, but more about Artemis' own (surprise, surprise) insecurities during her first few months on the team. When Artemis first encountered the team, it was because she saw Superboy get smashed through a window in the fight against Amazo and followed him to discover the rest of the team. That was Artemis' first interaction with them, being led in by her "white rabbit," so from the beginning she had a connection with Conner in particular. She viewed the encounter as her way out of her old life and into her new one as a proper hero.

Like Wally, Artemis spent the entire first season covering up her real self with a "badass cool girl"-type persona, both to hide the secret about who she really was, and to keep the others from getting a whiff of how insecure she felt about her place on the team. These are teenagers we're talking about, after all. Everything is about convincing the people around you that you belong. During Artemis' very first mission with the team, she came off as brash and overly confident, and she purposely made a remark about Conner's attractiveness through the mind link where everybody could hear it. She wanted them to see the connection she'd made, as if it would cement her place as part of the group. She and Wally have the exact same coping mechanisms, and Artemis spends all that time criticizing Wally for it without realizing that she has been doing the same thing to Conner that he does to M'gann.

It's also made clear to the audience even before Conner and M'gann are established as a couple that Wally and Artemis had developed feelings for each other that were stronger than their crushes on M'gann and Conner. The obvious example would be in "Bereft" when Wally and Artemis had chemistry and showed genuine attraction to each other straight from the get-go once they didn't have the baggage of their old memories forcing them to hide behind their respective personas. When they met M'gann, Wally didn't show an ounce of interest in her until he'd regained his memories and began to act accordingly again. Then "Failsafe" happened, and Wally revealed how deeply he cared for Artemis after her death, becoming more fixated on saving her over anyone else who had been killed. Artemis showed signs of attraction towards Wally early on as well, as shown in her reactions to Wally flirting with M'gann in "Denial," and her jealousy when M'gann kissed Wally on his birthday. In the comics, she even got back at Wally for flirting with M'gann by asking out Conner right in front of him:

And a good amount of these incidents happened before either of them knew about M'gann and Conner becoming a couple; the ball was already rolling whether their crushes were available or not.

Tldr; Wally and Artemis would have ended up together whether M'gann and Conner stayed single or not because the "crushes" they had on both of them were never that deep in the first place