Jonathan Dudley suggested in a recent CNN religion blog that as late as the 1960s the consensus among evangelical thinkers was that life begins not at conception but birth.
.. The author of Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics argued that televangelist Jerry Falwell spearheaded the reversal of opinion on abortion in the late 1970s in order to form a political alliance with Catholics and win voters for the Republican Party.
.. approval of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized most abortion by First Baptist of Dallas Pastor W.A. Criswell, president of the Southern Baptist Convention at the time.
“I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed,” Criswell said.
.. Wayne Dehoney, SBC president for two terms in the 1960s .. “Protestant theology generally takes Genesis 2:7 as a statement that the soul is formed at breath, not conception,” Dehoney said.
.. “I asked him about the biblical statement that God knows us even when we are in our mother’s womb,” Clinton wrote. “He replied that the verse simply refers to God being omniscient, and that it might as well have said God knew us even before we were in our mother’s womb, even before anyone in our direct line was born.”
.. The Southern Baptist Convention revisited abortion in resolutions every year from 1976 through 1980. By 1980 the exclusions had narrowed to saving the life of the mother.
.. Balmer described an “abortion myth” that the Religious Right movement began in direct response to the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. Balmer instead called it “a political movement” actually sparked when the IRS attempted to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.
Everyone agrees that evangelicals, including Southern Baptists, were late to the pro-life cause, but not everyone agrees about the reason.
Divided America Stands—Then, and Now
Historian Allen Guelzo says the nation is more bitterly split than ever—with the exception of the Civil War era.
.. it wasn’t because Taney was the most vile pro-slavery ideologue in the country,” Mr. Guelzo says. “He wasn’t—I mean, the man had actually emancipated his own slaves. And while he certainly wasn’t friendly to abolitionists, that’s not why he wrote Dred Scott the way he did. He did it because the situation in 1857 seemed to have demonstrated that neither the legislative branch nor the executive branch was capable of arriving at a solution for the slavery question. So who steps up into the batter’s box? The judiciary—we will settle this.”.. “Because these slave states were all contiguous, they could look at a map and see themselves as a political unit.” Eleven did in 1860-61... If you look at Democrats and Republicans since the middle of the 19th century,” he says, “the political culture of the parties has not changed all that much.” Their policies may be drastically different, but “that’s the tip of the iceberg. What you want to look at, as far as historical continuity, is the seven-eighths of the iceberg below the water.”.. The other components pairs do seem continuous for both parties, as Mr. Guelzo says. Morals: Democrats, “individual”; Republicans, “collective.” Economic system: Democrats, “static”; Republicans, “dynamic.” Philosophy: Democrats, “Romantic”; Republicans, “Enlightenment.”.. Democrats preferred the economic uniformity of a society of small farmers and artisans but were more tolerant of cultural and moral diversity.”.. political style, a cousin of philosophy: “Democrats love passion, Republicans love reason.”.. “Lincoln is as reasonable as a Vulcan with Asperger’s,” Mr. Guelzo says. “If you listened to him for five minutes, you weren’t impressed. If you listened to him for 25 minutes, he had you, because you couldn’t argue. He had done all the work.”.. Republicans think of themselves as Americans first, whereas today Democratic localism takes the form of subnational identity politics... decline in national solidarity, Mr. Guelzo cites Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s public assertions .. that the Iraq war was a failure... In the 1850s, “you had brawls on the floor of the House of Representatives. One of the most precious ones was when William Barksdale from Mississippi got into a flying fistfight with a Northern representative, and one of them reached out to grab him by the hair and pulled off his wig.” That was in 1858... “The people who always wanted to silence others, always wanted to have the lynchings, were the pro-slavery people,” he says. “It surprises my students, as it should, that Southern postmasters were given free rein to censor the mails coming into Southern post offices. They could take material that might be suspected of being abolitionist in nature; they were allowed to destroy it—because you didn’t want a slave who might turn out to be literate to read any of that, now did you?”.. “By getting it out of the states, it’s removed an opportunity for it to become that kind of sectional issue. I’m not saying that as a fan of Roe v. Wade, but at least we haven’t gone to war over it.
Tomi Lahren Was Made for the Trump Era
The rising TV starlet might have run afoul of social conservatives. But with her wide reach and trademark sass, her future could be positively Trumpian.
.. she’s pro-choice
.. I’m for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well.”
.. Beck, Lahren’s boss, questioned Lahren’s libertarian bona fides as a zealous Trump supporter
.. Trump is anything but libertarian.
.. high-speed rant style with “Final Thoughts .. little jalapeño poppers of bravura bile clock in at just 30 seconds, and are perfectly suited to social media
.. Lahren’s departure from TheBlaze might contain clues for the future of conservative media in the age of Trump and beyond, and even for the Republican Party.
.. most in conservative media are impotent to censure the president himself for his betrayal of signature conservative positions, they can flex some muscle by smacking down Lahren
.. a suggestion of what could happen, ideologically, if the GOP is ever emboldened .. to take Trump to task for his disregard of both civil liberties and family values.
.. on track to be the Samantha Bee of the right
.. the ironies that interest her concern “snowflakes” and “participation-trophy” types
.. she admitted that Trump’s on-tape comments about groping women didn’t “look good
.. “Don’t go around acting holier than thou about this, like you’ve never heard anyone say anything like that before.
.. “When will those in black communities take a step back and take some responsi-damn-bility for the problems of black communities? Because it seems to me blaming white people for all of your problems might make you the racist.”
.. grew up in a military family in South Dakota
.. with decades of sass ahead of her, Lahren is rumored (without clear evidence) to be in Fox’s sights
.. Mindful of her senior-citizen base, Lahren has made her home not primarily on Snapchat or even Twitter but on venerable old Facebook.
.. Facebook is a perfect place for her to perform for Tea Partyers and older conservatives, leaning on her love of guns and country to come off as the dream daughter—like Ivanka Trump, but country and not snooty.
.. tacit pact with Beck: He could give her the conservative white-old-man seal of approval and then she would be allowed to be spicy and pro-Trump, which in turn would be evidence of Blaze’s big tent.
.. Beck is a genuinely principled conservative, and his commitments to both family values and libertarianism made Trump—multiply-married, genital-grabbing, pro-choice in some interviews—insupportable, and finally appears to have made Lahren insupportable, too.
.. many uneasy bargains .. are being tested now
.. If Ryan’s tax reform, or Pence’s desired overturn of Roe v. Wade, come to nothing, how much more will they be willing to sacrifice for this rogue president?
.. there are libertarians, who have quarrels with Trump.
There are family-values types, who have quarrels with Trump.
And then there is Trump—a reality star who darkens his skin and lightens his hair and says whatever gets the biggest response
.. She’s trying to be Trump.
David Souter Killed the Filibuster
control of the Supreme Court functions as a somewhat delayed reward for winning ideological battles at the presidential level, and then as a check on the next ideological coalition as it’s taking power.
.. Thus judicial appointees of the pre-New Deal era restrained Roosevelt’s liberalism for a time, and the judicial appointees from liberalism’s New Deal-Great Society heyday continued to advance liberal causes even as the Democratic coalition fell apart.
.. it was Souter who was the real outlier, Souter who really prevented the long era of Republican appointees from putting restraints on social liberalism, Souter who made today’s judicial battles seem more existential to the right than to the left.
.. Souter was sold to George H. W. Bush by his chief of staff, John Sununu, and the moderate-to-liberal New Hampshire Republican Warren Rudman as an easy confirmation because he lacked a paper trail.
.. Souter spent a brief time voting with the conservatives, then cast one of the crucial votes to uphold Roe, then swiftly evolved into as reliable a liberal as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama could have ever hoped to appoint … and then, as the by-then-inevitable coup de grâce, retired under Obama, allowing Sonia Sotomayor to take his place.
.. Had Souter simply voted like a typical Republican appointee — not in lock step with Antonin Scalia, but as an institutionalist, incrementalist conservative, in line with the current chief justice, John Roberts — then it’s likely that Roe v. Wade would have been mostly overturned in the 1990s, returning much of abortion law to the states, and that the gay rights movement would have subsequently advanced through referendums and legislation rather than a sweeping constitutionalization of cultural debate.
.. This, in turn, would have dramatically lowered the stakes of judicial politics for many Republican voters