Show of hands, please. How many of you think that the most recent incarnation of the religious right wrong began with Roe v Wade? Hatred and bigotry toward gays?
OK, you can put your hands down. You're all wrong.
As recently as 1979 the Southern Baptist Convention supported a woman's right to "the full range of medical services and personal counseling for the preservation of life and health."
Hatred of and bigotry towards gays has risen to the top of the evangelical agenda more recently, but it got it's (modern) start in 1972 with the ordination of William Johnson, a self-declared homosexual, for the ministry by the United Church of Christ.
Now check this out:
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
In Green v. Connally, 330 F.Supp. 1150 (D.D.C.) aff'd sub nom. Coit v. Green, 404 U.S. 997 (1971), the court declared that neither IRC 501(c)(3) nor IRC 170 provided for tax-exempt status or deductible contributions to any organization operating a private school that discriminates in admissions on the basis of race.
Bob Jones University v. United States, No. 81-3 Argued: October 12, 1982 --- Decided: May 24, 1983
We granted certiorari to decide whether petitioners, nonprofit private schools that prescribe and enforce racially discriminatory admissions standards on the basis of religious doctrine, qualify as tax-exempt organizations under § 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954.
Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right wrong declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church ... Indeed, it was race--not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues--that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism ... Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"
"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."
Falwell "founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy, an institution described by the Lynchburg News in 1966 as "a private school for white students." It was one among many so-called "seg academies" created in the South to avoid integrated public schools."
For Falwell and his brethren, private Christian schools were the last redoubt. Rather than continue a hopeless struggle against the inevitable, through their schools they could circumvent the integration entirely. Five years later, Falwell christened Liberty University, a college that today funnels a steady stream of dedicated young cadres into Republican Congressional offices and conservative think tanks.
snip
While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."
This is the "judicial activism" the religious right wrong is talking about. This is why the religious right wrong is working so diligently to siphon public school funds to their private schools. This is why "the Wallace states" of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia vote unfailingly GOP.
Follow the pattern of "red states" and religion. Compare it to the last bastions of racism.
Look at the religious makeup of the reddest of the red states, Utah, which was the only state in the union to vote for Bush at above the 70% level. Wanna know why the fundies are so insistent that Mitt Romney be McCain's choice for VP? Mormonism finally allowed blacks to enter the Mormon priesthood in 1978.
BRIGHAM YOUNG
Journal of Discourses
Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African Race? If the White man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.
Vol. 7, pg. 290-291
Cain slew his brother. . . and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin.
One last link. Don't click on it! Trust me, it's the KKK's site with a banner proclaiming that they're "Bringing a Message of Hope and Deliverance to White Christian America!".
The GOP "base" is racist to the core and still angry about 1964. This is what they're talking about when they wave the confederate flag and speak of "Southern Pride".
(Disclaimer. I'm a pasty old white, happily married heterosexual who happens to think that "For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses or forfeits his own self?" means something and has lots of friends in "red states". Even Texas.)