A current of racial politics has run through the Republican Party for decades, exemplified by Ronald Reagan starting his 1980 campaign cheering on "States Rights" (code word for letting the South discriminate) at the very site when three civil rights workers were murdered not sixteen years before. It continues through Reagan's "welfare queen" speech, through Bush Senior's Willie Horton ads, rolls in Jesse Helms's entire career like a pig in mud, gloried in keeping 80000 black voters from the Florida polls in 2000 by claiming they were felons, and continues to this day in bogus voter-ID schemes.
Yet, somehow, a Republican main ally has stayed above the fray, saying they were about religious freedom and preventing the destruction of human life. Follow me over the hedgerow to find the lie.
Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while, and in this case Politico published an article showing Jerry Falwell and his foul ilk didn't come together on abortion, as they claimed, but rather over private religious schools claiming the right to discriminate while keeping their tax-exempt status.
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.
[...]
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.
The whole article is here:
http://www.politico.com/...
Knowing this history is important even after several decades. For example, one wonders whether black pastors, who were the turning point for Prop 8 and other anti-gay measures, would be quite as accepting of their white brethren's obsessions should they learn the movement's true origins.
These old racists, there is no other word for it, should be hung around the Republican Party's neck like an albatross. Not for the Fox News addicts -- those people will never learn so long as Rupert Murdoch fouls the earth -- but for the young folks who have to live every day with the consequences of decades-long failed economic, environmental, and education policies. It would be instructive to show new voters where the opposition drew its strength, and why the Tea Party still yammers on about sending the President back to Kenya: because the through line of discrimination runs through the Republicans directly from Nixon's Southern Strategy all the way to the present.