Several decades ago, I was trying to convince a young man in Murray to vote for Democrats in an upcoming national election. He replied that he couldn’t vote for Democrats because they “kill babies.” Taking life needlessly is an unapproved form of murder, different from approved murders by soldiers in our many wars, in self-defense known as justifiable homicide, and in prisons executions we call kjhklhbhj capital punishment.
We see unapproved killing as immoral and link morality with religion, even though one can be moral or ethical without being religious. Morals are simply telling the difference between right and wrong.
Even in the 1970s, before the Moral Majority movement of Jerry Falwell in the 1980s, Republicans had begun working to convince Americans that they were the only party that supported morality. They convinced many evangelical Christians, especially in the South, that truly moral people must vote Republican because Democrats favor women’s rights to their own bodies and immigration to the United States by non-Christians.
Republicans also sneered that many Democrats didn’t go to church, and those that did attended “off-brand” churches like those of Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Unitarian Universalists.
What can we make of all of this?
Democrats are no more and no less moral than Republicans. We are all, to use the familiar Christian term, sinners. So how have some Christians on the political right been able to convince their brothers and sisters in Christ that only Democrats are immoral sinners?
The answer is found, like many interesting things, in our history.
Before 1980, many religious people were careful not to publicly favor any one political party. Catholics, Protestant, and Jews all claimed to be good, patriotic Americans.
When I began Catholic grade school in 1949, at the intersection of 4th and Main in downtown Davenport, Iowa, all eight grades of us stood before school on a large patio, in full view of downtown city traffic, raised the flag, and recited the pledge of allegiance—and that was five years before President Eisenhower put the words “under God” in the pledge 1954, to assure everyone that Americans were not godless communists. We even had an American flag in our church in those days.
That changed in the 1980s when President Reagan and Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” captured the flag of Evangelical Christianity and planted it firmly on the Right side of the American political spectrum. Even in the 1970s, many Republicans did not see abortion as an example of murder, but they all came to do so once they saw it as a way to win evangelical Christian votes. They began by using their gift for inflammatory language to call abortion “infanticide.”
Alas, the Democratic Party didn’t hire the right public relations firms soon enough and, in any case, were divided among themselves on abortion. They were able to win back some votes by defending a woman’s right to choose, a slogan making them even more “immoral” in evangelical Christian eyes.
This was a brilliant and successful political tactic by Republicans, which may have accomplished its goal after 50 years, judging from the national attention given recently to the leaked draft of a decision by the Supreme Court to ban abortions, reversing the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which made abortion a constitutional right.
Well, now that this issue may finally be settled, perhaps my young friend who couldn’t vote for baby-killers several decades ago will consider voting for Democrats, with whom he might agree on other issues.
Like other ethical voters, my friend probably saw abortion procedures as far more serious than the other moral evils in American politics, such as lying, cheating, and stealing. Admittedly, those more acceptable sins do not have the emotional pull babies and children have upon us, something our Republican friends understood when choosing abortion as their major campaign issue.
However, now that victory over abortion seems to be at hand, at least in red states, moral Republicans can look to some of the other immoral behaviors of their political leaders. They can condemn politicians who tell Big Lies about election results, for example.
Who knows where this might lead? Why, perhaps you can be moral and a Democrat, after all!