Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeRedskin
I was thinking about this on the way home tonight. It seems to me that, somehow, the litmus test for conservatism became abortion and opposing gay marriage. Essentially, the tail started wagging the dog. The religious right knew that the limited government conservatives could not get elected without their votes while they didn't care about being elected... they just wanted to be right. Doctrine became more important than governing.
While Reaganism gave lip service to the religious right and first courted the movement as part of Reagan's America First type program, Reagan was, philosophically (if not in practice) a small government kind of guy. Bush 1 was never a fan of the religious right nor they of him. During the Clinton years, middle and center right folks fell into his "third way". It was during this time that the religious right really started coming into its own and organizing on a grass roots level. During Bush II, the social conservatives essentially cut out the fiscal conservatives.
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No American politician has ever spoken more eloquently against abortion than Ronald Reagan. He couldn't, for instance, ban partial birth abortion because the Democrats always controlled the house. But he said things that Bush 43 would never have dreamed of. As for gay marriage, it did not emerge as an issue until the late 1990s, so it's not really valid to use it as sign of the right's increasing influence. Also, to suggest that the religious right "came into it's own" in the 1990s is a misreading of history. It came into it's own as a movement in the 1970s. People who try to seperate Reagan from the evangelicals are revisionists.