I’m sorry that this has taken so long. As I said, I have a lot on my plate right now. This is a review of the anti-abortion movement as I have witnessed it. I am called to occasionally speak groups on Republican themes. I try to avoid it if I can, heeding my father’s advice of “Don’t do what you don’t do well” but sometimes Republicans need to be reminded of what it means to be Republican. I haven’t done much on abortion for a while so this may be long and rambling. I have omitted a lot but I have included what I think is most important.
Yes, this is very long but we are covering a lot of years and a lot of influences and I want to convey what we are doing now. When I speak I never use notes, I try to fit to the audience and try to talk about what concerns them. I try to put the Republican Party into historical perspective and outline the future of the party. I start winding down when the fight breaks out and I wrap it up when the chairs start flying. This post follows that pattern. I am experimenting with voice to text with a little doctoring. I don’t intend to be drawn into a protracted debate. I haven’t the time. You can take it or leave it. I will answer what I think is important.
There’s ain’t a lot of advantage to gettin’ old. You gotta comb yours ears. You gotta pull your britches up past your belly button. You’re just an old coot. You can also call bullspit on the bullspitters. I’m old enough to remember the Battle of New Orleans. No, not the first one. The big one.
During the 1960’s and 1970’s the abortion fight was completely different that what it is now. Up in farm country even the name was different. We were anti-abortion. The term “Pro-Life” would come later. There wasn’t any “movement”, everyone was against abortion, it was embedded in the culture. When the subject first came up for us it was against a backdrop of enormous social tumult. It wasn’t something that you discussed at the dinner table. The issue would pop up and then fade to background. Sometimes we wouldn’t see a newspaper for weeks at a time and even then the coverage was sporadic.
In 1959 the American Law Institute proposed a reform to modernize state abortion laws. The code advocated legalizing abortion for several reasons including the mental or physical health of the mother, pregnancy due to rape and incest, and fetal deformity. At first glance they seemed like reasonable reforms. John Love in Colorado and Ronald Reagan in California, both good and decent men, signed on to abortion reform based on the ALI recommendations. Governor Docking, trying to be liberal and hip, wrestled it through the Kansas legislature as part of his “reforms”. Alaska, New York, Hawaii and Washington effectively legalized abortion. There wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it but just shrug our shoulders and shake our heads like on a lot of other issues of the day. There was a big kerfuffle in New York led by the Buckleys and the Catholic Church. To a farm boy, New York was somewhere over by Paris, France and just as foreign and I didn’t pay all that much attention.
But then the storm broke.
It rolled down the Eastern Seaboard with Rhode Island, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida adopting ALI standards. Alabama and Mississippi loosened some restrictions and kept others. Our clergy were having a fit. It was no longer somber men of conscience trying to discern God’s will, it was a howling mob and it now had decided religious overtones. Baptists - Southern Baptists – led the fight for abortion. The blood toll by then was more than evident but it was their “Gawd given rhat “ that no government could take away and no Yankee or Catholic better try. The storm picked up Arkansas and headed to Louisiana and Texas.
There it hit a brick wall.
One, and then another, and then another of the Southern Louisiana Parishes stood up and said “Never!”. Catholics all. This was the Second Battle of New Orleans. As I remember it, it began outside of the Church among the laity. Parish officials, corrupt, venal and Democratic led the revolt and the Church followed along. God works in mysterious ways.
I was a kid working up on the Kansas-Nebraska line. I was away from home but I still managed to attend some type of services at least once a week. That had become my custom. I got an invite to go with some folks to a special meeting about the fight and I hopped on board. The meeting was in Salina or Manhattan or Topeka, I disremember which, only that it was a long drive. We were not Catholic but the speaker was. I was unsophisticated in the arguments. To me, if you made a decision to kill another human being, you were committing murder. It was that simple.
Our speaker was a young, soft spoken guy, who outlined in about 30 or 45 minutes the hundreds of years of theological background and the moral considerations involved. In a quiet but passionate manner he appealed for our help. The Church was absolutely quiet during the entire length of his talk. If everyone in America had been able to hear this man speak we would not then, or now, have an abortion problem. No one in the room was rich but we emptied our pockets. We could stand to skip a few lunches, this wasn’t just a Catholic cause, it was a Christian cause.
About the same time as the Louisiana fight there was a shadow war in Texas. Again it was the Baptists against the Catholics as the legislature attempted to liberalize restrictions. Unlike Louisiana, there was little news or headlines from there, just what we could glean from our church bulletins. One thing that I will always remember, though, was that the Texans refused our offer of money. They wrote us to say that they welcomed our prayers and our support but this was their fight and they would see it out on their own. And they did.
I remember that the Louisiana fight lasted for months with the Catholics refusing to give an inch in any way. We had special bulletins mimeographed and waiting in the church vestibule every Sunday. I remember well the early morning sunshine through the stained glass and the smell of those mimeographed pages. It was a knock-down, drag-out fight but the Catholics finally won with the Louisiana legislature giving up completely.
The Catholics also won in Texas but the victory carried the seeds of defeat in it. Resentful of the political defeat at the hands of the Papists and their allies, Texas lawyers began looking for a test case which would overturn the law. They found it in a case which would become known as Roe vs. Wade.
This wasn’t some kind of aberration, both Texas Senators, almost all of the House delegation, and the state legislature were strongly pro-abortion. They were following the lead of the Democratic Party and the Southern Baptist Church. George H.W. Bush, an undistinguished two term congressman rising in the Republican organizational charts, ambitious, Methodist and Republican was strongly pro-abortion. Texas was one of the most pro-abortion states in the union. Life forces were isolated in the newly forming enclaves of suburban Dallas and Houston with a strong but thin thread running through the iconoclastic counties of west Texas.
Why did it have to happen at all? Alaska was Alaska, a frontier state of rough and independent men, in some ways starkly amoral. It was not posed as a moral decision, it was simply frontier practicality. Hawaii and Washington were showing their liberal credentials as was Robert Docking in Kansas, the son of a former governor and trying to make a name for himself. I don’t know the players in New York other than the Catholics put up a hell of a fight. They lost but whoever was on the other side knew that they’d been somewhere. Why did the most backward southern states suddenly decide that they had to reverse a century and a half of legal precedent and jump on a legal reform bandwagon going the wrong direction? In the first place was the religious aspect; if the Cafflics was agin’ it then the Baptists were fer it. Then there was race and class. The cost in lost souls was evident but they were for the most part Black or poor white souls therefore less worthy and they would just be a problem later on. There might have been the worrysome thought of Sis catchin’ the preggers. I don’t know, the whole thing is unfathomable to my Midwestern sensibilities.
Did it make a difference in the Supreme Court’s decision? Possibly. There was a series of decisions that seemed to be headed toward an inevitable Roe vs Wade but by coming from Texas and in the context of Baptist vs. Catholic it was out of the political realm where the court was loath to go and into a rights case. Smug in their victory, the Southern Baptist Convention immediately endorsed Roe vs. Wade. It would be a decade before they reversed that endorsement and it was well into Clinton’s two terms before they apologized. If Roe had originated in New York, some dissident Catholics would likely have been involved but it didn’t – it came out of Texas and was aimed at the Catholics. Those Bible thumpin’, Jesus lovin’ grit eaters had better pray that salvation is by Grace alone, elsewise there is a generation of ‘em rolling, writhing, snapping , clawing at the never consuming fire that surrounds them. They knew. We knew and they knew. We knew and they knew that the law was not being obeyed in good faith and that the compassionate exemptions had become portals of death. They knew that the human toll was soaring. They were drenched in the blood of innocents.
Several years ago I noticed that the rate of abortion in Kansas was abnormally, shockingly high, more than double the national rate. That didn’t square with what I knew of the people and the attitudes there when I was younger. I set out to find out why. When I was there on a business trip I started asking around. After a few dead ends, I was given the name of a lady, an old timer like myself, who might be able to help. It didn’t take long to find her.
She was a tiny little lady, one of those rare people whose eyes fairly glow with intelligence. She was unabashedly liberal, Episcopalian, Democrat and Pro-Life. A conundrum in all respects but there she was. A shouting match broke out when I introduced myself and told her my reason for seeking her out. After a few hot seconds she stopped short and looked at me. I stopped and just looked at her…
“are you saying…?
Yes, are you saying…?
What I had anticipated to be at most an hour or two of light conversation with basic questions answered turned into several days of intense reconstruction of the history of the anti-abortion movement as it had unfolded. We met and then broke to refresh the sequence of events in our memories and put together the interactions of the various groups involved. I frantically canceled meetings and appointments and spent the available time jotting notes and adding my reflections. She filled in with names and events and details things that had only been impressions to me. Hers was a perspective that I had not known existed.
Without Roe the battleground was a lot different. Politically we had them whipped. Look at this map again:
Where were they going to go? The West? They would have run square into the Mormons and western Catholics. The Midwest? North, not one state had wavered. Kansas, after Docking, would have rescinded along with possibly Colorado. It was a “reform” passed blindly with no real purpose. Bob Dole won his 1974 victory over Bill Roy almost solely on the issue. The worm had turned. The Northeast? After New York the Romans were prepared, their arguments coherent and developed, their legions ready and waiting. No sane Democrat was going to push the envelope. Had they done so they would have come out bloodied as they had in New York and turned some elements of their traditional constituency against them. To them it was not worth the candle. It would have been an internal fight in the Catholic Church, one which the real Catholics would have eventually won. The Catholic Church is big and slow and ponderous and prone to internal dissentions given its size and scope but, given time, will almost always find sure footing on the path of the Lord. Abortion supporters would have picked up, at most, a colony or two but they were done, spent, defeated. The South was the only place that full abortion could have come from and after their defeat in the Texas legislature, it had to come in the courts, not the ballot box.
It was my lady’s contention that abortion was nothing more than a convenient issue for the liberals. They had no great vested interest in abortion, it attended no goals, it created no great constituencies it fulfilled no agenda. In her view it was an abrogation of their role as defenders of the poor. Worse, it put them in league with the worst remnants of the Old South. In the face of mounting rejection it would have been dropped and would have disappeared from the national dialogue while they picked a more favorable issue to press. As it turned out, with Roe being the law of the land, they found a way to circumvent the Catholics and the Mormons and the Lutherans with the Baptists as their unwitting allies. That defeat in the Texas legislature and the resulting Roe vs. Wade decision triggered divisions which, carefully played, have sundered the Churches, divided the country and murdered 50 million people.
She gave me her thoughts on a roadmap for reversing Roe vs Wade. In essence it is this: Quit pushing the rope and pull it. Quit chasing your tail. The natural abhorrence of abortion still exists, however latent, and it is a matter of drawing it out quietly and steadily. Life is not sullen and bitter and neither should be the Life movement. The abortion forces have grown complacent, hanging their entire argument on a weak Supreme Court decision. In doing so they have left their flank unguarded. Go for the flank!
She also gave me the answer to why Kansas had such a high abortion rate. The clinics were purposely located in the extreme south and east to draw from Thumperstan, Oklahoma and Missouri. Nearly half of the abortions performed in Kansas were from those states.
Amazing lady, that one.
To understand her perspective let’s back up a moment. What had sparked the initial shouting match when I introduced myself and announced the reason for my visit? She had taken me as just another of an endless line of supplicants adjuring, demanding, her endorsement. But they wanted more than her endorsement, they wanted her acceptance. They wanted complete capitulation on all things religious. She was quite willing to join any anti-abortion movement but she would do it with her background and perspective, not theirs. Her views on abortion were well known and everyone remotely associated with the movement solicited her endorsement which she would give only in careful context. She would support nothing without that history and context. For this reservation she had repeatedly been disparaged and savaged until she wanted nothing more to do with the movement. She had assumed that I was just another yokel who had a revelation from God or the Man on the Radio and wanted a free ride on her reputation. I guess I should have worn shoes.
Let’s look at a little history:
After Roe
In 1972 Nixon had targeted Catholics with a strong anti-abortion message. He swept the country, helped by a hapless opposition. In 1976 abortion had been a minor issue during the primary and pretty much dropped during the general. Shortly thereafter the Catholics had announced a major multidenominational effort to alter the political background in an effort to reverse Roe vs. Wade. They had made the announcement and then strangely gone to ground. Could this have been the reason why?
The Moral Majority was formally initiated as a result of a struggle for control of an American conservative Christian advocacy group known as Christian Voice during 1978. Robert Grant, Christian Voice's acting President, stated in a news conference that the Religious Right was a "sham... controlled by three Catholics and a Jew." Paul Weyrich, Terry Dolan, Richard Viguerie (the Catholics) and Howard Phillips (the Jew) left Christian Voice. During a 1979 meeting, they urged televangelist Jerry Falwell to found Moral Majority (a phrase coined by Weyrich[3 ]). This was also the beginning of the New Christian Right.-wiki
Was this the political arm of the Catholic effort to reverse Roe? Or one of many? Or did it just happen? I don’t know. The timing is right and the effort to put a Baptist face on the effort would make sense. They were going into the most abortion-accepting region in the country where the word “catholic” still triggered the stock responses, “Whore of Babylon” and “mackerel snappers”. There are some awfully smart people in the Catholic leadership and the Catholics have been around long enough to know how to engineer social and political change. If they were going to get the Evangelicals to reject abortion it could not have Catholic fingerprints on it. I would have thought that it would have been much bigger and have come in different form. It very well could have been an independent movement coinciding with others. Whether or not the Catholics were behind it, regardless of the origins, it was indisputably effective – in the South.
Simultaneously, there was a movement within the Southern Baptist Church. Conservative factions had been battling for years as the Church drifted leftward. They bitterly despised the pro-abortion forces but that was not the only issue or even the primary one. There had also been another study circulating that was concerning. In a study of Baptist seminary students it was found the the longer that they stayed in the seminary, the longer that they studied the Bible, the more Baptist that they became the more that they came to doubt or deny the divinity of the Christ. These were the future leaders of the Church and they no longer believed in Christianity! The foundations of Christianity were at risk.
This was a continuation of the ongoing “Baptist Wars” extant since the’60s. Now the conservatives made a focused effort to take over leadership positions from the more liberal members. It was a top down revolt. The goal was to replace the leadership in the Seminaries and the SBC. The general population was split, with the pro-abortions controlling. It was not a groundswell movement, it was a slugging match of the heavyweights.
All of this was culminating in the months just prior to the launch of Reagan’s campaign. The Reagan campaign was heavily culturally themed in the East and South. Reagan’s social conservatism was much broader that the single issue of abortion. As Nixon had done, Reagan targeted the Catholics with a strong, clear anti-abortion message but they were in the North. In the South the Goobers was pissed and Reagan was taking advantage of their pissedness. The economy, busing, crime, and Carter’s incompetence were the themes that he used. Reagan had no illusions about taking the South. He just was not going to beat a Southern Baptist Georgia peanut farmer on his own turf. We targeted Florida, Texas and Virginia. Beyond that, the strategy was to draw Carter into the South and break the Carter coalition.
Reagan aligned himself with the mainline Catholics and the dissident Baptists. Reagan demanded that G. H. W. switch his pro-abortion stance so as to not give the Catholics any reason not to vote Republican. It got confusededer. The insurgent Baptists were centered in Georgia, Carter’s home state and a state we had no chance of winning. The pro-abortion forces were concentrated in Texas, a state which was regarded as a “must have” for Reagan. Even in Baptist Texas, the Reagan Revolution was Catholic. It was by Catholics and aimed at Catholics.
There was a political risk here and a lesser man would have danced and wiggled and squirmed, but Reagan’s stance was clear, clean and unnuanced. He was betting his Texas political fortunes on the suburbs of Houston and Dallas and San Antonio. Those suburbs were the counterweight to the old Texas Democratic / Baptist tradition which had governed Texas for a century and a half. They were newcomers to Texas and they were highly……Catholic. He tempered his rhetoric a bit but the Baptist insurgents were glued to him tighter than a tick.
The evangelicals had no political base. They were growing but they were too new and too fragmented to have much of an impact on the election. The shift away from Carter in the South closely matched the shift in other parts of the country. The vote for Reagan was economic but the evangelicals were quick to claim it as their own.
It wasn’t the supplications of the clergy, it was not Falwell, or Dobson or Robertson who turned the tide in the South. They may have provided theological cover but I believe that it was Jesse Helms who nearly single-handedly did the deed. That SOB was relentless. He made them look at themselves and the contradictions that abortion posed. His blunt and tireless campaign was as effective as any I have seen. He rubbed their nose in it until they saw the light. Helms and a handful of dedicated Baptists opened the South. It would take years, decades, for the full turnaround but after Helms I don’t think that there was any doubt of the outcome.
Out in the hinterlands we heard about the tribulations of the Baptists as they struggled with the issue. We read the newspaper accounts of the dissident Catholic Priests. And yes, we had our doubts. There were things which had to be settled in our own minds. Abortion supporters trotted out horrific pictures of thalidomide babies that shook us to the core. It took little time to realize that we were venturing into the absurd. Thalidomide was a historical anomaly, unlikely to ever be repeated. Rape and incest were tough issues for anyone to handle and people handled them differently. There were lurid tales of coat hangers and back alleys. No one was advocating for abortion. I would liken it to debating the merits and purpose of an existing fence, all the while knowing that the fence was not coming down, that it had been placed there for a reason. We just had to rediscover and reaffirm the purpose of that fence. A then famous quotation, I think from a Nebraska legislator: “We passed the law outlawing abortion in 1904. We should at least let the dust settle before we start thinking about changing it.” Our reasoning was advised strongly by the Catholics but never dictated. They had hundreds of years of theological refinement that we lacked. In the absence of our own, we adopted the Catholic approach.
If there was any pro-abortion movement anywhere near us we hadn’t seen it. Other than for a few itinerant preachers working the lower end Churches and the rarer liberal there was no advocating for abortion. That was the wacko fringe. We weren’t influenced in the least. I don’t think even our Baptists were buying, culturally they were the same as us. We didn’t have any anti-abortion movement because there was nothing to coalesce against, there was no one to fight. The issue had been settled generations before. The Catholics were doing our fighting for us elsewhere. It was a background issue for us, something we saw on the six o‘clock news broadcast from the coasts. Overriding all, for us, was agriculture.
George McGovern could hold whatever beliefs he wanted. By design or luck he had struck a rich vein of Republican ineptitude. McGovern pointed out what everyone already knew. The children of the plains were leaving for Denver and Phoenix and taking the future of South Dakota with them. Puckered-butt Republicans stood and watched them go. When the issues were agriculture and the development of their state McGovern won by default. The Republicans could offer no portrait of the future, only nineteenth century ideas as dry as the commodity futures reported at the top of every hour. The smartest and best educated young people in the country were jack-rabbiting to build other states. McGovern won on what should have been Republican issues. When confronted by Nixon on abortion and his liberal philosophy, McGovern was crushed in his own state.
Opposition to abortion was buried deep in the northern ethos. It was as simple and basic as “Thou shalt not kill”. If they repealed every abortion law on the books I don’t think that the needle on the rate would quiver at all, the laws simply codify what already is engrained in the culture. Abortion is a foreign, alien concept. The voices that commanded were not the same raucous voices coming from the “activists”. They were as soft and quiet and compelling as the Lord’s Prayer. They were whispering from the graveyards in Sweden and Norway and Germany and scattered westward across the northern plains Voices from people long gone but whose lives were inscribed in the family bibles, each birth, each death, registered in impeccable script This is civilization, this is tradition, this is culture, this is life as God ordained it. These are values passed on generationally in the cradle.
The face of the anti-abortion movement became Robertson and Falwell and Dobson while the knife fight went on backstage. In our neck of the woods Robertson was regarded as a well-meaning nutcase. Falwell and Dobson were tolerable but there was dissonance and a dripping condensation in their message. We were grateful to them for their work amoungst the heathen but there was something that did not mesh well culturally in the north. We had our own religious tradition, thank you, one that didn’t require a Road to Damascus conversion.
The Catholics had started this, now they were standing there with their hands in their pockets, whistling while the pro and anti-abortion Baptists duked it out. The Frankenstein that they had created was on the loose and could not be controlled. The false front became a power of its own. Baptists were stomping each other’s heads into the dirt. Then they began the strange Southern dance of being more agin’er and making what they could more illegaler.
After Reagan was elected and the religious turmoil among Southern Baptists began to abate they began filtering out into more civilized areas looking for more heads to stomp. These snaggle-toothed morons with misshapen heads, drooping jaws and six toes, looked to be the same as, or near kin to, their predecessors demanding that we accept abortion. They knowed all about that Jesus stuff. They larned it all down at Joe and Emma’s School of Truck Drivin’ , Mule Shoein’ and Preachin’. Fast on their heels were the political opportunists. Abortion was no longer just an important issue, it was the only issue. Their Jesus was gonna come up thar and whomp our Jesus. We had to vote fer them Republicans ‘cause they was agin’ abortion. Every election became an Inquisition. There were incredulous eye rolls as these yokels demanded that we undo their little gift to the world and that we do it their way. The snake had shed its skin but it was the same damn snake.
We could handle the occasional thumper, they spiced up the religion page in the newspaper but they overplayed their hand. If the purpose of the movement was to raise the hackles and alienate the solid anti-abortion core, they could not have done a better job. With the passion of the newly converted they would attack any who did not immediately join their Conga line and dance to their music. Devotion to the cause was measured in how much spittle flew and how loud you could yell. That may work in the hills and hollers and the mega-churches but to the peoples of the north it was a matador’s red cape. They were as quiet, humble and contemplative as the Goobers were loud, pious and obnoxious.
We had a dilemma. We agreed with them on content if not form. They were organized, we were not. They became the anti-abortion movement by default. We had gotten lost in our own smoke and mirrors. What began as a factional dispute in Gooberland now infected the country. They had cleaned up the Baptist seminaries and made Methodists of the liberals but they brought the same tactics to where they were not welcome or needed.
And then came the kickback. With the anti-abortion movement dominated by the hucksters, rational opposition was overwhelmed . There began a slow, almost imperceptible hardening of attitudes. Attitudes turned from cautious to leery to hostile. We watched the possibilities of a Roe reversal slip away, scuttled by our own side in their misplaced exhuberance. The base began to back away, not from their beliefs but from the snarling. Cohesiveness was lost. The movement was no longer broad and inclusive. Other denominations began to accept or endorse Roe. This fueled more attacks and more defections. The broad front of the people opposed to abortion was becoming narrower and narrower.
Instinctively the liberals played the divisions. We lost a lot more ground than we needed to. I was in Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas and a handful of western states and I don’t recall a single church where the congregation changed one iota. There was a lot of theological ass scratching among those prone to such things but in the pews nothing changed. What we saw was a rejection of a biblical view foreign to us. Turmoil and upheaval have been characteristic of American religion since the Second Great Awakening but us Northern Krauts take a dim view of it. We don’t see a lot of point in whackin’ each other over the head with our bibles.
My lady was not the only one repulsed…
On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism." Barry Goldwater - Speech in the US Senate (16 September 1981)
The occasion for Goldwater’s statement was Reagan’s nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. The objection to her was her sometimes ambiguous position on abortion. It is instructive that Goldwater had objected to the strong arm methods without mention of abortion. He was supporting a Supreme Court nomination from his own party, from his own state, made by Ronald Reagan himself. The demands that he scuttle the nomination served only to raise his ire.
Goldwater’s political base in Arizona contained two highly cohesive religious elements, Mormons and Catholics. With few exceptions the relationship between the two had always been amicable, Mormons was Mormons and Catholics was Catholics. The split, though, allowed Goldwater, an Episcopalian, to be elected, a pattern seen repeatedly all over the west. Episcopalians were the favored compromise candidates between religions, Catholics and Lutherans or Catholics and Mormons. They were elected in numbers far exceeding their population. They were culturally compatible, intelligent and educated, and not religiously contentious.
Goldwater’s views on abortion would not have been hard to discern. He and his first wife had been involved in Planned Parenthood since the ‘30s. He was, at best, ambivalent on the issue. In the west abortion was a settled issue, Arizona was solidly against it. The west was in transition as explosive growth buffeted the old order. The western states had long been adolescents, dependent on the Federal Government as they developed their huge land mass. Now their balls dropped and they were willing to stand alone without being underwritten. They had moved on to other more immediate issues.
With millions of newcomers pouring in there were clashes of culture. It was an enormous sorting process as the burgeoning suburbs replaced orange groves and the old copper, cotton and cattle were pushed back. Women’s rights were ingrained in the western psyche, from suffrage to contract law to the Equal Rights Amendment Politicos advocating the politics of exclusion would be introduced to a piggin’ string.
Goldwater was late to the realization that The Equal Rights Amendment of 1980 was not the Equal Rights Amendment of 1950. It had become an assault on the family, on the fabric of America. Phyllis Schlafly’s Little Miss Homemaker was a discordant note at the other extreme. Schlafly could endorse both Goldwater and Reagan but it was Reagan’s America that she envisioned. At the 1980 convention Reagan rolled over Mary Dent Crisp, a Catholic and a Pennsylvanian and a pro-choice Goldwaterite and co-chair of the RNC. She left to co-chair Anderson’s campaigns. Reagan was insistent on the direction of the party but was conciliatory in the platform. He acknowledged that there were other views.
In Arizona, Frank Brophy was a Catholic’s Catholic, probably Catholicer than the Pope. Brophy was a Catholic and a Bircher and a banker and an influential civic leader. He was a heavy weight in conservative politics. Goldwater learned to tread carefully around Brophy. It took other Catholics to rein Brophy in and they often did. They were Catholics but there were others with seats at the table. Another rising force in 1980 was Charles Keating (soon to be introduced to the world in the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal) who had made his bones in Cincinnati fighting Larry Flynt. Until his fall he was a very vocal supporter of Catholic issues. His later travails roiled the waters but Keating gave the Catholics a sense of focus and direction during the years he was active.
Rick Santorum would not have done well in the West. The religion of the West is an amalgamation of all the peoples who have moved there with an underlayment of the original settlers. Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler, Park City, Salt Lake still show Mormon roots. Foundational precepts in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Denver are Catholic. There are no Baptist roots. We fought a war to keep them out of the western territories. Huckabee would leave town on a rail. The generational continuity and regional exclusivity were broken as Lutherans mixed with Catholics and Methodists and Mormons. We got to peek over each other’s fences and we found out that the Catholics didn’t have horns, the Lutherans weren’t Luthifer and the Baptists got drunk on Saturday night and repented on Sunday morning.
The Mormons are, and always have been, the most consistently anti-abortion religion in the country. They were not subject to the divisions besetting the Catholics or the false prophets of the South. Low key and insular they concentrated on Church, family and community. Their beliefs are not so far off many of the sermons I sat through as a child. I am not Mormon, I am DoC, but I have no problem with Mormons and neither does anyone else in the West. Like it or not, the Mormons are accepted as a fully legitimate religion. Our religions and notions have been diluted and mixed by the constant mix of people and the Interstate Highway System and the Mormons will doubtless see the same.
Goldwater had never been extremely popular in Arizona. His first and his last Senate elections were won by around 5000 votes. He barely won the state in his run for the presidency. Either the Mormons or the Catholics could have ended Goldwater’s career at any election. They did not. They purposely chose not to kick a sleeping dog, after all Goldwater was a compromise consensus candidate. In return Goldwater did nothing to facilitate abortion and, in public, reflected the views of his constituents. If he and his family had dirty laundry, he had chosen not to reveal it and to accede to the wishes of his constituency. That was the way of the west.
When he came out swinging, he didn’t target the Mormons or Catholics who had held him in check for his entire political career. He was clearly fed up with the bully boys and hucksters wandering around looking for the outhouse. In doing so Goldwater was taking direct aim at the few states which had voted for him to be President. Relieved of the political shackles by his retirement, he hit low. Whatever Goldwater’s leanings, his endorsement of abortion and queers had little to do with abortion or queers. When he planted his boot firmly in Doug Wead’s butt, it was asskick by proxy. He was doing as he, himself, had suggested. He was kicking Jerry Falwell right in the ass.
Goldwater would have happily gone to his grave without revealing and glorifying his family’s embarrassing episodes. He had felt the attacks more keenly because he had been the target. He was striking back.
Mormons and Catholics were not surprised. Most knew or suspected his personal abortion views. Both camps squawked their disapproval but fell short of disowning Goldwater. They were uncomfortable with Goldwater’s method but they both had felt the sting of Baptist Past. It was worth two years of Karen English to keep it out of Arizona. Goldwater was a bulwark against an alien culture which thrived on vituperative. Anti-abortion was fine but they didn’t want the rest of the falderal.
Western and Midwestern Republicans are an ornery bunch. They don’t take a lot of pushing. Take your typical Kansas wheat farmer. If you stick him in the butt with a pitchfork, he’s gonna jump. The problem is, you don’t know which way he’s gonna jump. Ten or twelve years ago Time (or Newsweek?) had a story about Republicans in the farm belt who were switching to Democrat. One of the names that they featured was a guy I had known for fifty years. He was as solid a Republican as there could be, anti-abortion from the beginning. His whole family had been Republican as long as mine, back to Lincoln. He jumped to the Democrats. He still was against abortion, all his precepts were still Republican, he had finally just gotten fed up with the yahoos shooting at his feet and telling him to dance. That was Democrat chit; only now the Democrats, who had been Democrats going back to Lincoln, were in the Republican Party. RINOs.
If you run on up to Wyoming, stop at any diner, and the discussion turns to abortion, chances are about 80% that the guy sitting next to you is firmly against it. If you start telling him what he has to think, what he has to say, what he has to do, you’re likely to end up a near twin to a mud puddle. It’s the principle of the thing.
They even went after President Reagan. Before his first term had reached the midway point they were screaming that he had not yet solved the abortion issue, that he wasn’t a “real” conservative. The national problem was not one which could not be solved by replacing the leadership at some seminaries. There was no presidential diktat that could overrule the Supreme Court. Reagan had effected the long, slow process of change but the southern congressional delegations were still 2-1 Democrat and pro-abortion to one degree or another. So were the southern governors and presumably so were the evangelicals who had elected them.
I ain’t no Holy Joe. I drink, I smoke, I cuss and I’ve been known to jaywalk a time or two. I am an unlikely prospect to carry any kind of a religious message but after my discussions with this lady I had an opportuity to think as I drove north to a breakfast meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska. God had granted me an insight few others had. I had seen the west; the people, the Churches. It was possible that my wanderings would have some payback. There were not many who had had the opportunity to cross the thresholds in as many churches scattered over so broad an area. This lady had opened a dimension that I had not considered. As I drove and pondered, a path forward began to take shape. Bits and fragments began to come together. Several times I stopped roadside to watch the twinkling lights in the little towns roadside and consider the people gathered with family and friends beneath those lights. Abortion would not be discussed on that night or any other yet they were as against it as any fire-breathing thumper.
The next morning, at the meeting, there were grimaces as I even brought up the subject, completely irrelevant to the topic at hand but too big for me to contain. The consensus had long been that the well had been poisoned. As I spoke, I opened the possibility that there were dynamics yet to be played. I diagramed maps, I described peoples, and cultures and events, the interplay of religions and ideas. Hostility turned to skepticism turned to curiosity and curiosity turned to interest and interest to plans. There was more fluidity than we had realized. There was a way to slice through the Gordian knot and reclaim the movement.
For several years I have been involved in an effort to build the core of the next generation of the Republican Party. What we have stitched together has become a think tank of sorts as the brightest minds from every state and region plot the future of the Republic. This issue was not something that we would ordinarily be involved in. It was a dead end road, better left to the Churches. With the realization that there was an opening here that no one had anticipated, we condensed it and threw it out for contemplation. Surprisingly they jumped at the chance to take it on. Unsurprisingly it was the Mormons and Catholics again in the lead. We didn’t need those groups, we already had them wrapped and slapped. The challenge was going to be the amorphous middle whose instincts have been subordinated in an endless wave of propaganda. Whether they are Catholic or Baptist or Mormon or Lutheran or Methodist of or just the increasingly popular “spiritual” no decent person can abide a society where abortion has become the accepted norm. No civilized society can murder its next generation.
Here’s where I am working, friendly territory to say the least. I rarely visit the abortion issue anymore. Better men than I am have taken over and my contribution would be marginal. I am concentrating on other issues. I help where I can but I am largely gone from it. Age and health have taken their toll. I am nearing the end of my run and I find that I am having to limit myself. I have a punch list of what the states are going to have to do and I purposely put it seventh or eighth or tenth item on the list to discuss or I leave it off entirely to see if it is brought up. It seems to elicit more contemplative and honest answers than If I have it first on the list.
The issue is not going to be decided in the countryside or small towns. These have been rock solid from the beginning. It is going to be decided in the cities and suburbs. (Can a Catholic take a hint?) We have our heavyweights working there. To reach the persuadable middle we needed something of entirely different tone and tenor politically. We consciously excluded the religious approach. The last thing that we wanted to do was to fall back into the rut we were in before. Our goal was to keep our efforts away from the Churches and go to the underlying culture and ethos. Does this mean anyone should abandon their religious objections to abortion? Not at all. We are not abandoning ours. We would let the Churches do their work, Mormon on Mormon, Catholic on Catholic, Lutheran on Lutheran and Baptist on Baptist. They will find their way. Our aim is to reduce the contention between religions. We are a separate arm of the same movement. We want to pull it out of the shrinking confines of a theological movement and make it a broader, more comprehensive cause. We found others who were doing the same as we were and we found more who had been pushed to the sidelines who were eager to help.
The body of knowledge on how to influence public opinion is increasing exponentially as time passes. The art of public manipulation has become developed but it is not manipulation that we want. We want a solid bedrock movement. The folks in charge cast about looking for someone who could lead the project and rejected one after another for one reason or another. Meanwhile ideas were pouring in from all parts of the country, good solid observations and insights. The question became the answer. We didn’t need a leader, we needed a hundred leaders working anonymously targeting their own special groups. The question we had was whether or not such a project could hold together. So far it seems to be. The goal is the unifying factor. I don’t know all the details except that they are quick to expunge anyone detrimental to the overall movement or perceived to be working for their own self-aggrandizement. They are free to do what they will but we will not be a part of it.
If you talk to people across America it is sometimes astounding what nuttery exists. People tend to get lost wandering around inside their own heads. Idiocy is often matched by certitude. When we run into this little phenomenon we’ve learned to just pat them on their little noggins and move on but it does concern me that Catholics seen at a loss to defend themselves from a Texan on abortion. Catholics have always been at the core of the anti-abortion tradition. Don’t let an internet ignoranus cow you. Just pat his little noggin and move on.
The Imaginary Texas is the one where the state has always been conservative and anti-abortion. It wasn’t.
The Real Texas was the backbone of the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson was not the antithesis of the Texas Democratic tradition, he was its epitome. He broke with them on race but his economic policy was Texan through and through.
Texas had nothing to do with the Reagan Revolution, Nothing, NOTHING, n-o-t-h-i-n-g. Texas was what the Reagan Revolution was revolutin’ against . Texas had no history of conservatism. None. There was no region more hostile to the Reagan agenda than the South, except maybe the Es-ski-mos or High-waiians. In congress the North broke 50 – 50 for and against Reagan. In general the Southern congressional delegations voted two to one against Reagan. For Texas it was three to one.
Reagan’s political philosophy and base was Western Republican (Mormon) buttressed by the traditional Republicans in the mid-west but his key congressional support came from Northern Catholics. The Catholics saved Texas and possibly civilization when they turned back the barbarian hordes at the second battle of Saint Anthony at Bexar, 4 November, A.D., One thousand nine hundred and eighty.
Reagan’s attitude on abortion had been formed and guided by his friend and aide, William P. Clark, Jr. Clark was as Catholic as they come. The last I heard he was still alive but in poor health, tending a small chapel in California. If he is still alive I would appreciate it if you would look him up and drop him a note. The babies Clark saved number in the millions. In my opinion he is a candidate for sainthood.
Here you will find a list of the 100 most Evangelical counties in the country and also a list of the 100 least Evangelical. I had one of our ladies tote them up (Thanks Tracy). Reagan split the Evangelical counties 50-50 with the most inept and incompetent President we had had up to that time. Reagan swept 90% of the least-Evangelicals, often with 70% margins. Evangelicals were never Reagan’s base.
Reagan won the South by between one and two percent. Did the evangelicals campaigning for him contribute that one percent? Maybe. When a race is that close any group can claim the victory margin. The key fact is that Reagan broke century + old Democrat / Baptist, solid South model. In Texas, Florida and Louisiana he did it with the Catholics. In Hogbreath, Arkansas it may have seemed that the Reagan Revolution was a religious revival because that was all they ever saw of it. In reality it had the underpinnings of real-politic with ideas of the future of America pouring out of Cato, Hoover, Heritage and from every university in America.
Anti-Catholic sentiment has always ruled Texas. The two most popular games in Texas are football and Pin the Tail on the Catholics. In 1928 Hoover won Texas because the Democrats nominated a New York Catholic. The Texans had a choice between the hated Republicans and a Catholic. Hoover abandoned the Texas blacks and Texas chose the Republican. That sentiment has faded but there are still remnants.
People will hold whatever views they want but if a candidate chooses to run on that platform in the Republican Party they will find that they are battling the Democrats…and the Republicans. The Texans had fought the Catholics on abortion and won. Then they turned around and attacked the Catholics for losing. Texas killed the Reagan agenda and then turned around and attacked the Reaganites for losing. I think that they call this the Texas Two-Step. It shouldn’t matter much now. We is where we is and we all got here from where we was .
In 1980 Texas had 24 congressional districts. Five were held by Republicans. Of the19 Democrats, we could usually count on 2 to 4 votes on important issues. They were not always the same votes. The high point was the tax cut. We snared 8 Democrats. This put Texas on a rough par with Pennsylvania but for this vote only. We never reached that level again. When he needed to, Reagan knew how to convince Texans by talking to them calmly and rationally. You grab them by the balls and squeeze until you have their attention. Then you calmly and rationally tell them how it’s going to be.
Today, Texas has the possibility of leading the conservative movement. It could also drop back to its Democrat tradition. I’m in the state fairly often and I see red warning lights flashing everywhere but that is the subject of another post.
The South would continue electing pro-abortion candidates for the next twenty years as the issue slowly worked its way up the priority list. Even among Evangelicals, Texas was among the last to turn.
Attend Mass in North Dakota and then witness one in Santa Fe or the Mexican dominated areas of Nevada . They come to the Church from different perspectives but they still come to the Church. As a non-Catholic, I may see the differences maybe more clearly than a Catholic while they have a more complete grounding in the doctrines and traditions. You have to approach different peoples and different cultures in different ways. It will be short halting steps initially but it will come. Just don’t lose sight of the goal and don’t lose your confidence.
Here it is again. Contemplate it. Study it. Memorize it. Think of it, not as geographical lines, but as peoples and cultures within those lines. This is a map of 1973 and it is no longer 1973. A lot has happened and nothing has happened. Contained in this map is a roadmap to the reversal of Roe vs. Wade. Some will see it, some won’t. There is more than one way to skin a cat.
If you have ever been on a western roundup, you need get the lead cows headed in the right direction and the rest will follow. With gentle nudging they will walk themselves out of the brush. If you spook them you will be digging cattle out of the brush for weeks. If you wonder why Mourdock and Akin were immediately rejected by people who agreed with them in principle, you have missed the point of this post. Mourdock and Akin were a throwback threatening to erase the gains we have made.
There is a fresh wind blowing. We are determined to end this dark episode of our nation’s history once and forever. When the timeframe is measured in blood every impulse is to speed. That could be fatal. We are approaching this calmly, carefully, methodically. We don’t want any more missteps. We come from farm country, we know how to sow and how to reap when the time is right.
Still water runs deep. This fight carries a price and that price is complete and absolute anonymity. A light that was sparked by a nameless lady in Johnson County, Kansas, then carried to an early morning meeting of groggy businessmen in Lincoln, Nebraska has spread. We are going to pull the damn rope. For those who would co-opt our efforts or use us for political gain, they are going to get stiff- armed. Hard. We are not Mormon or Baptist or Catholic. We are all of those and more. This movement is for all those who kneel in the shadow of the cross.
It’s no secret what we are doing. We are carefully working every region to put together a grassroots movement. Breakthroughs don’t just happen, they are built through hard work. We have a Supreme Court decision to work around but we have people working to create the situation where it will fall of its own absurdity. We want to end abortion so decisively that no one will ever know it is gone except for a few sputtering liberals from their nursing home. We’re not looking for a fight. We are looking for a win by default.
One day, perhaps sooner than you think, the country will experience a cleansing wave. Liberals will view it as powerful and inevitable as this hapless soul in the path of the tsunami.
Colorado had been the first to adopt the ALI standards but I remember Denver as being at the center of some kind of continuing fight although I can’t recall any names or particulars, only the vague but strong impression. I have absolutely no recollection of New Mexico. There must have news reports but I just don’t remember any. Like I said, it’s tough getting old.
For at least a short duration before Roe, we stopped the march of death. Even now when I hear that Louisiana drawl from a forty-something youngster I stop and wonder…
God bless Catholics with fight in ‘em.
This says it better than I ever could.
AMERICA! RESURGENT!
MM