The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by Rick Perlstein

Author:Rick Perlstein [Perlstein, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781476782416
Amazon: 1476782415
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2014-08-05T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

* * *

New Right

FOCUSING ON THE GLITTERING PERSONALITIES, pundits little noticed the right-wing insurgency bubbling barely beneath the surface—what conservatives referred to, like civil rights activists from the 1960s, as “the movement.”

Activists in the “pro-life” cause (James Wolcott of the Village Voice helpfully explained that the unfamiliar term referred to those fighting against abortion) had been thick on the ground at CPAC. A month before that convention, what Christianity Today called “an unexpectedly large turnout” of twenty-five thousand braved the winter chill for the second annual “March for Life,” commemorating the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. The previous year’s march had drawn only what the AP had estimated as “hundreds.” The flagship evangelical magazine, tending toward sympathy with the pro-lifers, indelicately declared, “No longer can they be dismissed as a group of cold-hearted Catholics simply following orders from the Pope.” A Catholic senator, James Buckley, and an evangelical one, Mark Hatfield, introduced a resolution the week of the Roe anniversary to extend “the right of life—to all human beings including their unborn offspring.” Shortly after, Buckley was joined by the very conservative Southern Baptist, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, to propose the same language as part of a constitutional amendment banning abortion.

Another Catholic-evangelical pairing took place in Washington on March 19. Some 2,500 antibusing activists from fourteen states led by Louise Day Hicks, and a massive contingent bused from Kanawha County, West Virginia, marched from the Washington Monument to the Capitol. One of the fundamentalist preachers who’d led the West Virginia fight, Avis Hill, said, “This is the first time the two big struggles, against busing and dirty textbooks, have stood side by side. This is the beginning of a political rebellion. . . . If they can break us in our mountain home, they can break us in the farm towns of Jefferson County. If they can break us in the streets of South Boston, they can break us anywhere.” Hicks’s colleague Raymond Flynn said “the premises are the same . . . the intrusion of the federal government into what was ordinarily considered a local responsibility.” Orated Hicks, “We can never be lambs.” The previous day, representatives of both movements met with officials from the White House Domestic Council, who assured them “that President Ford recognizes their protests as an important issue.”

Then, on April 7, the bishop for the diocese of the four counties surrounding San Diego, representing some 512,000 Catholics, an activist in the city’s nonsectarian Pro-Life League, announced priests would refuse Holy Communion to any Catholic who “admits publicly” to membership in the National Organization for Women or any other group advocating abortion: “The issue at stake is not only what we do to unborn children but what we do to ourselves by permitting them to be killed.” He called abortion a “serious moral crime” that “ignores God and his love.” NOW proclaimed this year’s Mother’s Day a “Mother’s Day of Outrage”—in response, it said, to the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s “attempt to undermine the right of women to control their own bodies.

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