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| Pamphlets handed out in churches during the early sixties. |
Every once in awhile I like to remind people that the Religious Right that helped to get Ronald Reagan elected to the presidency in 1980, did not get its start as a political movement that embraced conservationism, pro-life, and an anti-homosexual agenda.
No there was a time when none of those issues even registered with the Fundamentalists.
As Frank Schaeffer
likes to remind people, it was he and his father who helped shape the Evangelical pro-life movement, and it was they, working under the banner of the "Moral Majority," who made it the main issue that Republicans ran on in the 1980's.
But before that what united that group of folks was not "killing" unborn babies. No it is the possibility that there might be some babies born with "mixed blood."
And the father of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, was one of
the worst agitators:
Like many Southern White ministers, Falwell didn’t sit on the sidelines at the outset of the modern civil rights movement, he joined the opposition.
“Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right 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,” Max Blumenthal writes in an insightful article in The Nation magazine. “This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naively unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. 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.”
Four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregated public schools, Falwell gave a speech titled, “Segregation or Integration.”
His message was unmistakably clear: “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. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn the line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”
This was the issue that originally united the Southern white Evangelicals together, and it continues to permeate the conservative party to this day.
So is it really any wonder that Fox News clearly shows a racial bias in their coverage?
Of course not. Because their main demographic is older conservative white folks who were raised in churches where those pamphlets were common place, and the pastor's sermons were peppered, not with warnings about premarital sex or the homosexual agenda, but instead with the need to keep the races from mingling at to keep God's people pure.
