From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject It’s the Christian Right’s Court. They Want More.
Date June 28, 2022 12:05 AM
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[Understood in the context of the movement that created the
Supreme Court in its current incarnation, there is nothing surprising
about their overturning Roe. In fact, it marks the beginning rather
than the endpoint of their agenda.]
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IT’S THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT’S COURT. THEY WANT MORE.  
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Katherine Stewart
June 25, 2022
The Guardian
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_ Understood in the context of the movement that created the Supreme
Court in its current incarnation, there is nothing surprising about
their overturning Roe. In fact, it marks the beginning rather than the
endpoint of their agenda. _

, Counselman Collection (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

The supreme court decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health
Organization, which reverses the constitutional abortion rights that
American women have enjoyed over the past 50 years, has come as a
surprise to many voters. A majority, after all, support reproductive
rights and regard their abolition as regressive and barbaric.

Understood in the context of the movement that created the supreme
court in its current incarnation, however, there is nothing surprising
about it. In fact, it marks the beginning rather than the endpoint of
the agenda this movement has in mind.

At the core of the Dobbs decision lies the conviction that the power
of government can and should be used to impose a certain moral and
religious vision – a supposedly biblical and regressive
understanding of the Christian religion – on the population at
large.

How did this conviction come to have such influence in the courts,
given America’s longstanding principle of church-state separation?
To understand why this is happening now, it’s important to know
something about the Christian nationalist movement’s history, how
its leaders chose the issue of abortion as a means of creating
single-issue voters, and how they united conservatives across
denominational barriers by, in effect, inventing a new form of
intensely political religion.

Christian nationalists often claim their movement got its start as a
grassroots reaction to Roe v Wade
[[link removed]] in 1973. But the
movement actually gelled several years later with a crucial assist
from a group calling itself the “New Right”.

Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Phyllis Schlafly and other leaders of
this movement were dissatisfied with the direction of the Republican
party and the culture at large. “We are radicals who want to change
the existing power structure. We are not conservatives in the sense
that conservative means accepting the status quo,” Paul Weyrich
said. “We want change – we _are _the forces of change.”

They were angry at liberals, who they believed threatened to undermine
national security with their softness on communism. They were angry at
establishment conservatives – the “Rockefeller Republicans” –
for siding with the liberals; they were angry about the rising tide of
feminism, which they saw as a menace to the social order, and about
the civil rights movement and the danger it posed to segregation. One
thing that they were _not _particularly angry about, at least
initially, was the matter of abortion rights.

New Right leaders formed common cause with a handful of conservative
Catholics, including George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus, who
shared their concerns, and drew in powerful conservative preachers
such as Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones Sr. They were determined to ignite
a hyper-conservative counter-revolution. All they needed now was an
issue that could be used to unify its disparate elements and draw in
the rank and file.

Among their core concerns was the fear that the supreme court might
end tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools. Jerry Falwell and
many of his fellow southern, white, conservative pastors were closely
involved with segregated schools and universities – Jones went so
far as to call segregation “God’s established order” and
referred to desegregationists as “Satanic propagandists” who were
“leading colored Christians astray”. As far as these pastors were
concerned, they had the right not just to separate people on the basis
of race but to also receive federal money for the purpose.

They knew, however, that “Stop the tax on segregation!” wasn’t
going to be an effective rallying cry for their new movement. As the
historian and author Randall Balmer wrote
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“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.”

In many respects abortion was an unlikely choice, because when the Roe
v Wade decision was issued, most Protestant Republicans supported it.
The Southern Baptist Convention passed resolutions in 1971 and 1974
expressing support for the liberalization of abortion law, and
an editorial
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their wire service hailed the passage of Roe v Wade, declaring that
“religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the
Supreme Court abortion decision.” As governor of California, Ronald
Reagan passed the most liberal abortion law in the country in 1967.
Conservative icon Barry Goldwater supported abortion law
liberalization too, at least early in his career, and his wife Peggy
was a cofounder of Planned Parenthood in Arizona.

Yet abortion turned out to be the critical unifying issue for two
fundamentally political reasons. First, it brought together
conservative Catholics who supplied much of the intellectual
leadership of the movement with conservative Protestants and
evangelicals. Second, by tying abortion to the perceived social ills
of the age – the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, and
women’s liberation – the issue became a focal point for the
anxieties about social change welling up from the base.

Over time, pro-choice voices were purged from the Republican party. In
her 2016 book, How the Republican Party Became Pro-Life, Phyllis
Schlafly details the considerable effort it took, over several
decades, to force the Republican party to change its views on the
issue. What her book and the history shows is that the “pro-life
religion” that we see today, which cuts across denominational
boundaries on the political right, is a modern creation.

In recent decades, the religious right has invested many hundreds of
millions of dollars developing a complex and coordinated
infrastructure, whose features include rightwing policy groups,
networking organizations, data initiatives
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media. A critical component of this infrastructure is its
sophisticated legal sphere.

Movement leaders understood very well that if you can capture the
courts, you can change society. Leading organizations include the
Alliance Defending Freedom, which is involved in many of the recent
cases intended to degrade the principle of church-state separation;
First Liberty; Becket, formerly known as the Becket Fund for Religious
Liberty; and the Federalist Society, a networking and support
organization for rightwing jurists and their allies whose leader,
Leonard Leo, has directed hundreds of millions of dollars to a network
of affiliated organizations. This infrastructure has created a
pipeline to funnel ideologues to important judicial positions at the
national and federal level. Nearly 90% of Trump’s appellate court
nominees were or are Federalist Society members, according
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and all six conservative justices on the
supreme court are current or former members.

The rightwing legal movement has spent several decades establishing a
new regime in which “religious liberty” is reframed as an
exemption from the law, one enjoyed by a certain preferred category of
religion. LGBT advocacy groups are concerned that the supreme
court’s willingness, in the next session, to hear the case of a
Colorado website designer who wishes to refuse services to same-sex
couples is a critical step to overturning a broad range of
anti-discrimination laws that protect LGBT Americans along with women,
members of religious minority groups and others.

The legal powerhouses of the Christian right have also recognized that
their efforts can be turned into a gravy train of public money. That
is one of the reasons a recent supreme court decision, which ruled
Maine must fund religious schools as part of a state tuition program,
was predicted by observers of this movement. This decision forces the
state to fund religious schools no matter how discriminatory their
practices and sectarian their teachings. “This court continues to
dismantle the wall of separation between church and state,” Justice
Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.

This supreme court has already made clear how swiftly our Christian
nationalist judiciary will change the law to suit this vision of a
society ruled by a reactionary elite, a society with a preferred
religion and a prescribed code of sexual behavior, all backed by the
coercive power of the state. The idea that they will stop with
overturning Roe v Wade is a delusion.

_Katherine Stewart is a journalist and author
[[link removed]]. She has written for the New
York Times, Reuters and Marie Claire, and her new book is The Good
News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children
[[link removed]] (2012)_

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* Supreme Court
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* Christian right
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* anti-abortion
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* Christian nationalists
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* History
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