Abortion became just one potent weapon in the arsenal of a movement, years in the making, that is ready to flex its power in ever larger and more audacious ways, writes Liz Theoharis.
“Handmaids at U.S. Capitol” supporting abortion rights on May 8. (Miki Jourdan, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By Liz Theoharis
TomDispatch.com
In the 1989 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Missouri law restricting the use of state funds and facilities for abortion, an early attempt to eat away at Roe v. Wade.
Since then, the agenda of right-wing U.S. leaders, of which abortion is only a part, has become clear: slashing school food programs; denial of Medicaid expansion in states that need it most; attacks on Black, Brown and Native people by the police and border patrol; Supreme Court decisions to put fossil-fuel companies ahead of the rest of society; as well as the rights of gun manufacturers; denial of sovereignty to indigenous people and tribes and failure to protect voting rights and ending the constitutional right to abortion.
The Dobbs v. Jackson decision on abortion, overturning Roe v. Wade, has made life in America distinctly more dangerous. The seismic aftershocks of that ruling are already being felt across the country: 22 states have laws or constitutional amendments on the books now poised to severely limit access to abortion or ban it outright. Even before the Supreme Court issued its decision, states with more restrictive abortion laws had higher maternal-mortality and infant-mortality rates. Now, experts are predicting at least a 21 percent increase in pregnancy-related deaths across the country.
As is always the case with public-health crises in America — the only industrialized country without some form of universal healthcare — it’s the poor who suffer the most. Survey data shows that nearly 50 percent of women who seek abortions live under the federal poverty line, while many more hover precariously above it.
In states that limit or ban abortion, poor women and others face an immediate threat of heightened health complications, as well as the long-term damage associated with abortion restrictions.
Indeed, data collected by economists in the decades after Roe v. Wade indicates that the greater the limits on abortion, the more poverty for parents and the less education for their children. Worse yet, the 13 states that had trigger laws designed to outlaw abortion in the event of a Roe reversal were already among the poorest in the country. Now, poor people in poor states will be on the punishing spear tip of our post-Roe world.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 2006. (Jason Rene Fournier, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
While the Supreme Court’s grim decision means more pain and hardship for women, transgender and gender non-confirming people, it signals even more: the validation of a half-century-old strategy by Christian nationalists to remake the very fabric of this nation. For the businessmen, pastors and politicians who laid the foundations for the Dobbs ruling, this was never just about abortion.
The multi-decade campaign to reverse Roe v. Wade has always been about building a political movement to seize and wield political power. For decades, it’s championed a vision of “family values” grounded in the nuclear family and a version of community life meant to tightly control sex and sexuality, while sanctioning attacks on women and LGBTQIA people.
Thanks to its militant and disciplined fight to bring down Roe, this Christian nationalist movement has positioned itself to advance a full-spectrum extremist agenda that is not only patriarchal and sexist, but racist, anti-poor and anti-democratic. Consider the Dobbs decision the crown jewel in a power-building strategy years in the making. Consider it as well the coronation of a movement ready to flex its power in ever larger, more violent, and more audacious ways.
In that context, bear in mind that, in his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that the Dobbs decision gives the Supreme Court legal precedent to strike down other previously settled landmark civil rights jurisprudence, including Griswold v. Connecticut (access to contraception), Lawrence v. Texas (protection of same-sex relationships), and Obergefell v. Hodges (protection of same-sex marriage).
1868
President Donald J. Trump, left, with Justice Clarence Thomas during the swearing in ceremony for Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Oct. 26, 2020. (White House, Tia Dufour)
Whether or not these fundamental protections ultimately fall, the Supreme Court majority’s justification for Dobbs certainly raises the possibility that any due-process rights not guaranteed by and included in the Constitution before the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868 could be called into question.
The Christian nationalist movement long ago identified control of the Supreme Court as decisive for its agenda of rolling back all the twentieth-century progressive reforms from the New Deal of the 1930s through the Great Society of the 1960s. Less than a week after the Dobbs decision, in fact, that court overturned Massachusetts v. EPA, the 2007 ruling that set a precedent when it came to the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions by polluting industries. May Boeve, head of the environmental group 350.org, put it this way:
“Overturning Roe v. Wade means the Supreme Court isn’t just coming for abortion — they’re coming for the right to privacy and other legal precedents that Roe rests on, even the United States government’s ability to tackle the climate crisis.”
To fully grasp the meaning of this moment, it’s important to recognize just how inextricably the assault on abortion is connected to a larger urge: to assault democracy itself, including the rights of citizens to vote and to have decent healthcare and housing, a public-school education, living wages, and a clean environment. And it’s no less important to grasp just how a movement of Christian nationalists used the issue of abortion to begin rolling back the hard-won gains of the Second Reconstruction era of the 1950s and 1960s and achieve political power that found its clearest and most extreme expression in the Trump years and has no interest in turning back now.
Abortion & the Architecture of a Movement
Protest at the Supreme Court on May 2, the day the draft opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked. (Miki Jourdan, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Throughout American history, a current of anti-abortion sentiment, especially on religious grounds, has been apparent. Some traditional Roman Catholics, for instance, long resisted the advance of abortion rights, including a church-led dissent during the Great Depression, when economic disaster doubled the number of abortions (then still illegal in every state). Some rank-and-file evangelicals were also against it in the pre-Roe years, their opposition baked into a theological and moral understanding of life and death that ran deeper than politics.
Before all this, however, abortion was legal in the United States. As a scholar of the subject has explained, in the 1800s, “Protestant clergy were notably resistant to denouncing abortion — they feared losing congregants if they came out against the common practice.” In fact, the Victorian-era campaign to make abortion illegal was driven as much by physicians and the American Medical Association — then intent on exerting its professional power over midwives (mainly women who regularly and safely carried out abortions) — as by the Catholic Church.
Moreover, even in the middle decades of the 20th century, anti-abortionism was not a consensus position in evangelical Protestantism. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention, evangelicalism’s most significant denomination, took moderate positions on abortion in the 1950s and 1960s, while leading Baptist pastors and theologians rarely preached or wrote on the issue. In fact, a 1970 poll by the Baptist Sunday School Board found that “70 percent of Southern Baptist pastors supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the mother, 64 percent supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity, and 71 percent in cases of rape.”
So, what changed for those who became the power-brokers of a more extremist America? For one thing, the fight for the right to abortion in the years leading up to Roe was deeply intertwined with an upsurge of progressive gender, racial, and class politics.
At the time, the Black freedom struggle was breaking the iron grip of Jim Crow in the South, as well as segregation and discrimination across the country; new movements of women and LGBTQ people were fighting for expanded legal protection, while challenging the bounds of repressive gender and sexual norms; the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam had catalyzed a robust antiwar movement; organized labor retained a tenuous but important seat at the economic bargaining table; and new movements of the poor were forcing Washington to turn once again to the issues of poverty and economic inequality.
Phyllis Schafly at an anti-E.R.A. protest in front of the White House, Feb. 4, 1977. (Warren K. Leffler, Wikimedia Commons)
For a group of reactionary clergy and well-funded right-wing political activists, the essence of what it was to be American seemed under attack. Well-known figures like Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, who would found the Moral Majority (alongside Jerry Falwell, Sr.), began decrying the supposed rising threat of communism and the dissolution of American capitalism, as well as what they saw as the rupture of the nuclear family and of white Christian community life through forced desegregation. (Note that Falwell didn’t preach his first anti-abortion sermon until six years after the Roe decision.)
Such leaders would form the core of what came to be called the “New Right.” They began working closely with influential Christian pastors and the apostles of neoliberal economics to build a new political movement that could “take back the country.” Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, often cites this Weyrich quote about the movement’s goals:
“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. We want change — we are the forces of change.”
Indeed, what united these reactionaries above all else was their opposition to desegregation. Later, they would conveniently change their origin story from overt racism to a more palatable anti-abortion, anti-choice struggle. As historian Randall Balmer put it:
“Opposition to abortion, therefore, was a godsend for leaders of the Religious Right because it allowed them to distract attention from the real genesis of their movement: defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.”
Many of the movement’s leaders first converged around their fear that segregated Christian schools would be stripped of public vouchers. As Balmer points out, however, they soon recognized that championing racial segregation was not a winning strategy when it came to building a movement with a mass base.
So, they looked elsewhere. What they discovered was that, in the wake of the Roe decision, a dislike of legalized abortion had unsettled some Protestant and Catholic evangelicals. In other words, these operatives didn’t actually manufacture a growing evangelical hostility to abortion, but harnessed and encouraged it as a political vehicle for radical change.
Looking back in the wake of the recent Dobbs decision obliterating Roe v. Wade, Katherine Stewart put it this way:
“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.”
What this movement and its allies also discovered was that they could build and exert tremendous power through a long-term political strategy that initially focused on Southern elections and then their ability to take over the courts, including most recently the Supreme Court. Abortion became just one potent weapon in an arsenal whose impact we’re feeling in a devastating fashion today.
A Fusion Movement from Below?
Rev. William Barber at a “Healthcare not Wealth Care” rally in Philadelphia, June 22, 2017. (Joe Piete, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
As Reverend William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, has pointed out, check out a map of the states in the U.S. that have banned abortion and you’ll find that you’re dealing with the same legislators and courts denying voting rights, refusing to raise municipal minimum wages, and failing to protect immigrants, LGBTQIA people, and the planet itself.
As the Economic Policy Institute described the situation after Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion on abortion hit the news in May:
“It is no coincidence that the states that will ban abortion first are also largely the states with the lowest minimum wages, states less likely to have expanded Medicaid, states more likely to be anti-union ‘Right-to-Work’ states, and states with higher-than-average incarceration rates. … Environments in which abortion is legal and accessible have lower rates of teen first births and marriages. Abortion legalization has also been associated with reduced maternal mortality for Black women. The ability to delay having a child has been found to translate to significantly increased wages and labor earnings, especially among Black women, as well as increased likelihood of educational attainment.”
Indeed, the right to abortion should be considered a bellwether issue when judging the health of American democracy, one that guarantees equal protection under the law for everyone.
The most recent Supreme Court rulings, including Dobbs, are being met with growing resistance and organizing. Weeks ago, thousands of protestors came together on Pennsylvania Avenue for a Mass Poor People and Low Wage Worker’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. On the very day of the Dobbs decision and ever since, protests against that ruling, including acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, have been growing.
In a similar fashion, there is mobilization against gun violence and the climate crisis. There is an apparent rise of a new labor movement with workers organizing at Starbucks, Dollar General stores and Walmart, among other workplaces.
The Christian nationalist movement relies on a divide-and-conquer strategy and single-issue organizing.
As a Christian theologian and pastor myself, I’ve been deeply disturbed by the growth of the Christian nationalist movement. It is valuable to heed its focus and its fury. Their leaders were clear about the necessity, if they were to gain power in the U.S., to build a national political movement.
In response, the 140 million poor and low-wealth Americans, pro-choice and pro-earth activists, and those concerned about the future of democracy can also build a moral movement from below to confront it.
Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poorand We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo.
This article is from TomDispatch.com.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The mental gymnastics required to ignore the elephant in the room is mind boggling. Over the last year and a half a good percentage of Americans have been advocating for and supporting the antithesis of bodily autonomy in the form of a mandated experimental medical intervention. Many Americans lost their jobs over this insanity. Some supporters of the mandates even went so far as to argue that those who rejected the mandates should not receive medical care and/or have to pay more for medical insurance. Ok, so in the space of six months they went from “healthcare is a human right” to “but only if you take state mandated medical interventions.” Now they want us to take them seriously as defenders of bodily autonomy? Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. It seems that both sides of the political spectrum are totalitarian scum or bootlickers of totalitarian scum.
Why does anyone fall for this distraction & division stuff?….Endless us & them stuff?…& while crooks steal America from under your feet & put you (& so much of the planet) under “surveilance” & Technocratic & medical tyranny?… It’s a trick…it;’s so obvious…just ignore it & tell others “mans humanity to man” is the only real issue…& it’s not humane for anyone, let alone an irrefutably corrupt state, or religion, to TELL any person they “must not” & “can not” have an abortion. Anyways, it’s an obvious lot of political distractiuon,…& most any woman can obviously go to a place where they can legally have an abortion,…there are countries nearby & many, many states nearby one can do this.
Women again being used by the self-righteous as pawns.
A movement needs to start to drive the IRS to investigate the non-profit status of every church in the country.
It’s a “money is speech thing”. Money like , “GOD” needs to be driven from politics.
Few things frustrate me more than “war”, that said one issue runs war a close second. Why the democrats seem to have never figured out that while they sat on their hands, some even voting for certain SCOTUS justices, as republicans chose to pack the court they were committing political suicide I’ll never know.
Everyone needs to wake the hell up because “Christian Nationalism” is plenty fascist and always has been. Just ask the indigenous peoples of North America and the slaves of the white Europeans.
Great to hear a minister speak out for women’s reproductive rights, the earth, and poor people!
“Indeed, the right to abortion should be considered a bellwether issue when judging the health of American democracy, one that guarantees equal protection under the law for everyone,” these few words, must surely, constitute an oxymoron. It is surprising that a Christian theologian and pastor would judge that the health of a democracy is dependent on the negation of rights for the unborn.
Modern moral relativism puts forward the idea that there are no absolute rules to determine whether something is right or wrong and these rules are determined by culture, society and historical context.
Moral relativism also says that only some humans are persons and are given rights by those in power and they can depersonalise any group they wish, people of colour, political enemies, enemy combatants and
unfortunately, unborn babies, which constitute the most vulnerable group of all.
Progressives don’t have to be reminded that in the first half of the 20th century it was progressives that embraced the eugenical improvement of the human race via scientific breeding.
Many states in the Union that had “enlightened” governments passed mandatory sterilisation laws to weed out those born with congenital handicaps and also the “feeble minded” which allegedly possessed low I.Qs and low morals.
The issue came before the US Supreme Court in 1927 Buck V Bell. The defendant, Carrie Buck, along with her mother and daughter, were alleged to be feeble-minded. Revered Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld not just the legality but also the desirability of sterilization. “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Eugenics fell into disfavour and the verdict of history is clear, the “progressives” were wrong and the “regressives” were right.
It was the “progressives” that supported eugenics then and support abortion now.
History’s view on the acceptance of abortion now, may well be as harsh as our current attitude to eugenics in the first half of the last century.
I do not see Jesus and His Father in this movement, I see a parallel to the Jewish Hierarchy from the time of Jesus, the ones who crucified Jesus. What I see in this movement is not Christianity. Christianity needs a revival, a return to where Christians know their Savior because He is integral to their eternal lives, to the point where the Law is not what drives their lives but belief in and love of Jesus.
What we need is a dismissal of all religion from the Constitution. Freedom of (and from) Religion is paramount to real freedom.
Jesus was a person of love and forgiveness. His Father – not so much. “Thou shalt not kill,” unless that bitch isn’t a virgin on her wedding night! Then she should be stoned to death. But He LOVES you!!
I don’t understand how the Supreme Court can make legal decisions based on religion when the Constitution states unequivocally that no law can be made establishing a religion and no law can be made prohibiting a religion. Thus, people whose religion does not allow them to have an abortion are not required to have one and people whose religion allows them to make such a choice, the law allows them to do that. What are the citizens of this country to do when the Supreme Court – the highest legal authority in the land – breaks the law set forth in the Constitution by essentially establishing a particular religious sect that a large majority of the citizens of this country do not worship or obey? And why is no one talking about that?!!!
Good point. These institutions couldn’t care less about the constitution. They use it when it’s convenient.
Sounds like a great question to me.
One group’s imposing personal religious beliefs on others who might not agree has to an issue here.
Money, now viewed as speech by the SCOTUS, has become the big weapon used by these groups to influence politicians.
I have to wonder when I see hundreds of rental storage units on Church properties. As just one example.
A possible scenario for ya:
The Repubs sweep into both houses of Congress. They appoint D.J. Trump Speaker of the House (totally legal and constitutional). They impeach and remove Biden and Harris. As the Speaker in third in line, Trump becomes President.
AND the shit hits the fan:
Contraception will be made partly or completely illegal (in the works now). A national database of all PERSONS who ever had a now-illegal abortion is compiled. Added to it is all PERSONS who had or used then-legal contraceptives (all such records already exist in the states).
THEN: A law is passed that any such PERSON does NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE.
And you all thought women’s right to vote was a done deal? Ha!
And we’re back to 1919.
USA! USA!
This is why I loathe religion in general and christianity in particular. As an atheist, I regard all religion as primitive superstition that should have disappeared as soon as the Enlightenment and the beginnings of modern science. These christian fanatics are throwbacks to a barbaric time, the dime of the Dark Ages and witchfinders. Religion has no place in the 21st century. NONE. And somebody needs to chop down those crosses in Baton Rouge. They are an affront to society.
Human beings come in sexes, not genders. “Gender” outside linguistics is a made-up term that its advocates have never defined so as to make the concept falsifiable or verifiable. It’s just an Orwellian piece of deception brought out in order to spread confusion and distraction.
All identity politics are a waste of time. They do nothing to change a system based upon the oppression of the majority by a ruling class minority. Identity politics divides the working class when the workers need to be joining together to get rid of the ruling class.
Hear, hear.
“‘Gender’ is a made-up term.”
You make it sound like the best antidote is to make it even more confusing still.
What load of liberal socialist propaganda. You want a socialist Marxist free for all. You want public funding for everything. Tax tax tax and govt agencies to run it. Moral decline is a scourge on this country. You misrepresent so much of what the Christian right stands for. You forget what Christians have done and do for others and this country. You fabricate and lie and ignore the good to accomplish your goals of tearing down the Constitution. Patriotism is not evil. Communism, Socialism and Marxism are. If you like how other industrialized countries are run……why do you live here? You love the benefits of what religious moralality created, yet you fight to modify it in ways that will destroy the very things you enjoy. That is the raw definition of foolishness.
I find your trite and banal attack on Marxism to be extremely offensive. You are a part of what is wrong with the world. “Religious morality” created NOTHING. You and your “love it or leave it” nonsense belong in the dustbin of history.
What?….You sound like an extremely unhappy person who hates people who don’t agree with you….I actually feel sorry for you.
“Freedom,”
Among the “benefits” Christianity has brought to the world is the close alliance between Christians, particularly Catholics, and fascist regimes: Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, Argentina’s General Videla, Guatemala’s Rios Montt, Bolivia’s deposed Janine Anez, Honduras’s deposed Juan Hernandez, Brazil’s Bolsenaro, etc.
Brown University’s David Kertzer’s new book, “The Pope at War,” explores the newly opened Catholic Archives that, as the National Catholic Reporter put it, “highlights Pius XII’s moral failures” during World War II. And I say that as someone who was raised in a large conservative, Catholic family.
“You forget what Christians have done and do for others and this country.”
Well, they done the Spanish Inquisition, and then the Spanish took that gospel to the rest of the New World. And then Christians used the Bible to propagate their natural right to continue slavery. So if the proof is in the pudding, Communism, Socialism and Marxism have about as bad a record as Christianity – that is, anytime they became nationalistic causes. Which seems to be your main argument for Christianity’s existence. Better to elucidate than to obfuscate.
Like i said you ignore….You just proved my point. Has evil been done in the name of Christ. Yes. Thats what your focus is on. How many Christ followers WHITE ones objected even suffered…Many. Many stood with the oppressed and still do. You ignore it to prop up your narrative.
Oh, phlueeze, “Freedom!” Pining for the moral rectitude of a bygone era, are you, perhaps that of the Founding Fathers?
Right!
It was the slave-owning, Christian Founding Fathers that that demonstrated their “morality” by boosting the slave trade. The wheeze, “But everybody was doing it,” was no more justified then than it was when my son would traduce and offer that same rationale.
It was the conservative Christian American colonists that, as historian Gerald Horn showed from the record (“Counter Revolution of 1776”), sought to kick England out because England was doing two things American colonists would not abide: they were moving to end slavery, and were demanding colonists respect the treaties England had signed with the Native Americans. The early Americans could be damned if they were going to be forced to end odious slavery. And they could be damned if they were going to stop stealing Native lands. So our forefathers – immigrant “patriots” don’t ya know – kicked out the Brits and expanded slavery and stole more native lands. And I say that as the son of a Daughter of the American Revolution whose family owned slaves in Missouri in the 18th century. Is that the “morality” you miss, “Freedom?”
Or perhaps you long for the morality of bygone Jim Crow laws, or the morality of the “dirty wars” our Christian-guided intelligence/military has waged all over the world, or the morality of anti-democratic coups we’ve orchestrated all over the world, even the morality of the mass-murdering “wars of aggression” we’ve waged under an endless sea of lies?
Trembling at the word “socialism,” you ignore that one’s chances of rising from poverty to prosperity are worse here in capitalist America than it is in any of the many “socialist” First World countries in the world – Scandinavia, Canada, Germany, Australia, etc. – as documented by David Wessel in the Wall St. Journal (hxxps://alt.politics.economics.narkive.com/qOl5i8aM/as-rich-poor-gap-widens-in-the-u-s-class-mobility-stalls) And I say that as one of the lucky few who started out poor and have mightily prospered here. Moreover, the USA ranks well below First World socialist countries in childhood poverty (hxxps://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/these-rich-countries-have-high-levels-of-child-poverty/) See also, “Science Magazine” (hxxps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aan3264), and “Scientific American” (hxxps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/economic-inequality-it-s-far-worse-than-you-think/).
With one exception, New Jersey, the states with the highest maternal mortality rates are ALL southern/midwestern, conservative, Republican, pro-free market, states: hxxps://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/maternal-mortality-rate-by-state
Louisiana (58.1 per 100k)
Georgia (48.4 per 100k)
Indiana (43.6 per 100k)
New Jersey (38.1 per 100k) (principally because of its appalling rate of mortality rate among black women in NJ)
Arkansas (37.5 per 100k)
Alabama (36.4 per 100k)
Missouri (34.6 per 100k)
Texas (34.5 per 100k)
South Carolina (27.9 per 100k)
Arizona (27.3 per 100k)
And compared with the rest of the world, only Columbia, Latvia, Mexico and Costa Rica have worse overall maternal mortality rates than America, with our private health care system. And I say that as a private practicing physician. hxxps://www.statista.com/statistics/1240400/maternal-mortality-rates-worldwide-by-country/
Among the “benefits” Christianity has brought to the world is the close alliance between Christians, particularly Catholics, and fascist regimes: Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, Argentina’s General Videla, Guatemala’s Rios Montt, Bolivia’s deposed Janine Anez, Honduras’s deposed Juan Hernandez, Brazil’s Bolsenaro, etc. Brown University’s David Kertzer’s new book, “The Pope at War,” explores the newly opened Catholic Archives that, as the National Catholic Reporter put it, “highlights Pius XII’s moral failures” during World War II. And I say that as someone who was raised in a large conservative, Catholic family.
“Freedom’s” most notable attribute is that he’s swallowed so much pro-corporate, pro-church, and pro-state rubbish and propaganda.
Oh stop. If you can’t see the fascistic tendencies in this current wave of fundamentalist, religious fanaticism, you’re willfully blind
Yeah that’s right! (sarcasm) Dismiss anything that disagrees with YOUR thinking and YOUR beliefs and YOUR point of view as being propaganda.
Of course nothing that YOU think or believe could be influenced by propaganda.
Truth wins. Absolutely fed propaganda in the organized Church. Its one reason I stepped away from it. But Christ and Christianity is what im speaking of. This article is garbage and filled with anti Christian bias.
Only conservatives seem not to remember much of what “Christians have done and do for others and this country.”
It was the slave-owning, Christian Founding Fathers that that demonstrated their “morality” by boosting the slave trade. The wheeze, “But everybody was doing it,” was no more justified then than it was when my son would traduce and offer that same rationale.
It was the conservative Christian American colonists that, as historian Gerald Horn showed from the record (“Counter Revolution of 1776”), sought to kick England out because England was doing two things American colonists would not abide: they were moving to end slavery, and were demanding colonists respect the treaties England had signed with the Native Americans. The early Americans could be damned if they were going to be forced to end odious slavery. And they could be damned if they were going to stop stealing Native lands. So our forefathers – immigrant “patriots” don’t ya know – kicked out the Brits and expanded slavery and stole more native lands. And I say that as the son of a Daughter of the American Revolution whose Christian family owned slaves in Missouri in the 18th century. Is that the “morality” you miss, “Freedom?”
Or perhaps you long for the morality of bygone Jim Crow laws, or the morality of the “dirty wars” our Christian-guided intelligence/military has waged all over the world, or the morality of anti-democratic coups we’ve orchestrated all over the world, even the morality of the mass-murdering “wars of aggression” we’ve waged under an endless sea of lies?
I’m perplexed that PPC has added
“To the polls” in their movement.
Our vote is our only real bargaining chip. Manufacturing consent for another election based on keeping the monsters at bay. People are done with the okeydoke. These times call for radical change.
Wow, who knew that having children was so dangerous to society? How did we ever manage to survive all those years prior to abortion becoming legalized?
Women didn’t survive. They died by the thousands in childbirth and still do in the poorer nations. This planet is overpopulated and the situation is not sustainable. We are not wild animals.
YOU survived but millions of girls/women suffered….But I get the impression from your tone, that you couldn’t care less.
Having children in America today may be as bad for society as it is for poor parents, inasmuch as we don’t help our poor with healtcare, child care, college costs, etc.
As Theoharis pointed out, “… data collected by economists in the decades after Roe v. Wade indicates that the greater the limits on abortion, the more poverty for parents and the less education for their children. Worse yet, the 13 states that had trigger laws designed to outlaw abortion in the event of a Roe reversal were already among the poorest in the country. Now, poor people in poor states will be on the punishing spear tip of our post-Roe world.”
Is it a benefit to society to force more poor children into the world and onto our scantily-funded welfare rolls?
Well written & cogently presented. So called Christian extremism works in lockstep with reactionary politics’ effort to undo or to roll back whatever gains have been made for workers, the poor, common people & the environment since what, the 1930’s?
Kind of helps explain things like locating pollution generating industries in the poorest neighborhoods and poisonous mining tailings left on native lands doesn’t it? Once you get started it’s an almost never ending list of policies & practices & rewriting of laws as much to advantage the already advantaged as to further disadvantage those with disadvantages.
Reminds me of something a truly progressive U.S. senator once said, that it was the job of Congress to afflict the comfortable & to comfort the afflicted. We’re in opposite land to that idea now. Paul Wellstone never made it to old age. Keep your eye on those politicians who have.
Instead, we have Mitt Romney caught talking openly to wealthy donors, claiming 47% of the people in this country are “useless eaters”. The implication: so why not lop-off government support for them (more for us) & in fact, let’s just lop them off, period, for as long as it takes to rid ourselves of them.
That was 10 years ago. It appears the top tiers of deciders and a generous portion of the population (including some to be lopped-off) are more openly warmed-up to that idea today.
An excellent article and overview of the New Right, evangelical movement. In the end, the Christian Nationalists only gained a foothold because, in a time of nihilism, they offered the palliative of certainty. Neither of the two parties, both ossified by greed and the hunger for domination, believed in democracy anymore anyway. Like the late Roman Empire, why not have our Caesars declare themselves gods and set up altars of worship and veneration for us? We have proven ourselves only too willing to go along. Should it be a surprise to anyone that Christianity has come full circle? When consecrated bread and wine no longer suffice, every future moment will have to do. We only await a Justinian to encapsulate the way forward.
I’ve been an atheist all my life. My parents raised us children without religion and I thank them for it every day. The American empire is rotten and decaying. All empires fall, and the American empire is overdue for elimination. There is a world outside of the United States and most people in the rest of the world despise the American empire, an empire that has brought them nothing but death.
I am not sure what is so “Christian” about this movement?
Yes AA, by using the word “Christian” Liz confuses the Hitlerian ideology
of religious nationalism with its exact opposite, and she should know better.
Such a contradiction and you are exactly correct, an authentic Christian
would see nothing in common with Nazi ideology. The historically
accurate term she should use is religious socialism (see Paul Tillich),
to describe a Christian belief system. But both belief systems are
religious as expressing an ultimate concern. Nazism however is
painfully idolatrous.
As Ruth Bader Ginsberg noted, Roe vs Wade was poorly decided and should have involved state legislatures (since Public Health is the domain of THE STATES, by the Tenth Amendment): scheerpost.com/2022/06/24/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-offers-critique-of-roe-v-wade-during-law-school-visit/
Posthumously, her wish has been granted, at least in part, and it’s up to the states to determine their rules for abortion. Kansas is a Bright Red state and overwhelmingly supported access to at least some abortions. Most people favor access to some abortions, along with Hillary’s (and Tulsi Gabbard’s) quote that “abortion should be safe, legal and RARE [Hillary’s emphasis]”.
Wealthy people have always had access to abortions, the Hyde Amendement makes no federal funds to be used for abortion. Again as Public Health, states should have the discretion of what to do with federal funds for Public Health, including abortion. There was tremendous erosion of STATES’ Rights during the Covid pandemic, contributing to the horrific failed response.
This article appears set in the 1990s. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell no longer have much influence. Israel is a theocratic state; maybe Utah is as well, but on the whole the US is secular and pragmatic (in 1963, JFK being a Catholic was a big deal; hardly any mention was made of Biden being Catholic.)
Politicians on both sides would prefer abortion remains a political issue rather than a Public Health issue. Check out starting at about 1 hr 10 minute mark the same bogus BS we have heard over and over: youtube.com/watch?v=2z613_M5gxE
Sorry, there is something very wrong here….It is neither the states NOR the Federal government’s MORAL right to decide what goes in or out of a woman’s/girl’s body….Anyway, whoever decided that politicians should interfere with such an obviously personal matter?
maxine:
Couldn’t agree more. Whether abortion is legal, anti-abortion supporters argue, shouldn’t be decided by the federal government. That’s a local decision that should be left to the states. Why not leave the decision to the pregnant woman? You can’t get more local than that.
So, it’s okay to carry a gun but it’s not okay to get an abortion – go figure…
Well, in order to fend them off carrying a gun might be the only option, so there’s that.
When has this nation not had “Christian Nationalism” in the worse possible way? Please read these books, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s ‘Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, And A History of Erasure and Exclusion’ also ‘An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States’ God dammit, when has this country NOT been as it is? NEVER! It’s in our national DNA, has always been there and unlikely will never leave.
Socialist revolution. Abolish religion and superstition.
No doubt that the abortion issue has been used by nefarious individuals and organizations for nefarious purposes going beyond the issue itself, but where in this blanket, binary analysis do you fit in the millions of liberal Catholics, for example, who believe both in robust human rights AND that abortion is at least somewhat akin to murder? I ask this question as one who personally believes that the decision to terminate a pregnancy belongs to the woman and her doctor.
Abortion should be legal and free on demand. Any religionists who believe it is murder will not be forced to have abortions. As for the rest of us, it is nobody’s business whether we choose abortion. We do not need their permission. The separation of church and state is in the Constitution for a reason.
Of course abortion should be free on demand….But I can’t see why it should be legal or illegal….It shouldn’t have anything at all to do with the legal system….Why should some dumb politician who doesn’t know me from adam decide what should remain in or be discarded from the most private parts of my body?….I seem to be the only one here who has addressed this issue.
This is the neo-fascist movement that’s been percolating for decades in the U.S. As noted, they use the abortion issue as a weapon to impose their far-right agenda. They couldn’t care less about “the babies”, at least not the leaders. It is all too sad that the common-folk supporters of these groups believe they are “pro-life”, their minds distorted by religious fanaticism and political propaganda.
Its fairly straight forward, Im surprised you have difficulty seeing it, especially as a “theologian”. Since when does ANYONE have a right to kill ANYONE, especially children ? If you are a Christian theologian, and havent figured that out, you are in the wrong business. Christ is very clear on this subject.
So you’re another in a long line of believers who think a woman’s reproductive system belongs to men?
Hear, hear.
Every time I hear the word “fascism” thrown out I mentally cringe. Mussolini is the godfather of the fascist doctrine. Those that want to throw the word around need to read his books and writings on the subject. It will quickly become cleat that we live in a fascist State(i.e. the United States)
hxxps://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/221166.Benito_Mussolini
hxxps://sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/2B-HUM/Readings/The-Doctrine-of-Fascism.pdf
hxxps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism