How Protestant Evangelicals shifted their abortion stance | GOPLifer

Chris Ladd is a blunt critic of the Republican Party but he is no RINO.  He really is a conservative - believing in things like small government, Edmund Burke, etc.  But he is not a racist and he opposes obscurantism.  This puts him in opposition to the GOP's most fervent base which formed as the result of a marriage between racist northern whites and racist southern whites.  They united around opposition to welfare, and integration.  But their shameless racism became unacceptable in polite society so they developed a code language, and added anti-abortion and an anti-tax sentiment that concurred with their opposition to spending for "them" but tolerated exceptions for the "deserving" like Medicare, Social Security, and veterans benefits. - gwc

How Protestant Evangelicals shifted their abortion stance | GOPLifer:

Abortion politics, like positions on school prayer, porn, divorce law, and other religious issues followed in the wake of segregation, not the other way around. The Southern Baptists declined to take an unequivocal stand against abortion rights for almost a decade after Roe v. Wade. The culture war got its impetus from desegregation, not from abortion.

By the late ’70′s, overt race-baiting was no longer tolerated on the public stage. The forces threatened by the Carter Administration’s decision were in no position to campaign openly in favor of segregation. They needed a proxy. In time, abortion and school prayer became convenient, race-neutral rhetorical banners beneath which Southern Protestant Evangelicals and Northern Catholics could march together, however uneasily. The tensions that once divided them have not faded away entirely, but have come to matter less and less as the “culture” issues they share in common take center stage.

That awkward marriage has in time produced a unique offspring, best symbolized by Sen. Rand Paul. The modern Neo-Confederate movement has now managed to synthesize an alliance between the conservative Northern Catholics who once supported George Wallace and Southern Dixiecrats on the basis of a shared interest in religious fundamentalism and a resentment of government efforts to strip religious groups of their policy influence.

Bouie is right to point out that evangelical abortion politics has changed dramatically over a single generation, but it was school segregation, not Roe, that provided the catalyst.

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