Thread by @SpockResists

The truth about abortion rights in America. In 1979, Paul Weyrich wanted to change the Republican Party. The New Right. They wanted ultimate power at any cost. The aim was to gain ultimate power by 2032. How could they do this. They needed to actually change religion in America.

#RoeVsWade was passed with little opposition. It was supported by Republicans and Democrats. However, there were small factions of anti-abortion groups. However, today the religious right would have younger Americans believe that it was #RowVsWade that mobilized apolitical

Christians. The story is very, very different. Although leaders of the religious right would have us believe that the Roe decision was the catalyst for their political mobilization in the 1970s, that claim does not withstand historical scrutiny.

What prompted evangelical interest in politics, in fact, was a defense of racial segregation.

Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” through most of the 1970s, and there is little in the history of evangelicalism to suggest that abortion would become a point

of interest. Paul Weyrich was the cofounder of the Heritage Foundation and architect of the religious right. A conference in November 1990 enlightened how this all came about at a Washington hotel. A closed door event with no women in attendance. Weyrich himself stated at this

conference that the religious right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. what got the movement 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, including a ban on interracial dating that the university maintained until 2000.
Weyrich was emphatic that abortion had nothing whatsoever to do with the genesis of the religious right.

he’d been trying since the Goldwater campaign in 1964 to interest evangelicals in politics. Nothing caught their attention, he insisted – school prayer, pornography, equal rights for women, abortion until the IRS began to challenge the tax exemption of Bob Jones University

and other whites-only segregation academies.

Indeed, in 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention had passed a resolution calling to legalize abortion. When the Roe decision was handed down, some evangelicals applauded the ruling as marking an appropriate distinction between

personal morality and public policy.
Although he later, 14 years later, claimed that opposition to abortion was the catalyst for his political activism, Jerry Falwell did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until February 1978, more than five years after Roe.

Falwell, who had founded his own segregation academy in 1967, was eager to join forces with Weyrich and others to mount a defense against the IRS and its attempts to enforce the Brown v Board of Education decision of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“In some states,” Falwell famously groused, “it’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”

So how did evangelicals become interested in abortion?

Weyrich, during a conference call with Falwell and other evangelicals strategizing about how to retain their tax

exemptions, someone suggested that they might have the makings of a political movement and wondered what other issues would work for them. Several suggestions followed, and then a voice on the line said, “How about abortion?”

Still, it took some time for opposition to abortion to take hold among evangelicals. According to Frank Schaeffer – who produced a series of anti-abortion films called Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, featuring his father, Francis Schaeffer, and C Everett Koop, who later

became Ronald Reagan’s surgeon general, the evangelical response was at best tepid when the films appeared early in 1979.

And when Reagan addressed 20,000 cheering evangelicals in August 1980, he mentioned his support for creationism and criticized the IRS for its supposed

vendetta against evangelical schools. He said nothing whatsoever about abortion.

Only in the early 1980s did opposition to abortion finally become an evangelical battle cry.

The beauty of the religious right’s embrace of abortion as a political issue is that it allowed

leaders to camouflage the real origins of their movement: the defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.

Here is an article that might explain it better than me.

The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth.

politico.com/news/magazine/…