Christian Right Does Direct Democracy

Did you know that abortion is the biggest item in “protest” activity? Yep. Wins by a mile.

In a review of a book on the Christian Right The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right by Jon Wright, Richard John Neuhaus notes how it is the Christian Right that has taken up the challenge for direct democracy that the SDS made in their Port Huron Statement in the Sixties.

“[S]ome 45 percent of respondents in the Citizens Participation Survey who reported participating in a national protest did so because of abortion. What is more, nearly three quarters of all abortion-issue protesters are pro-life, an unsurprising fact given that the pro-life movement is challenging rather than defending the current policy regime. Meanwhile, all other social issues, including pornography, gay rights, school prayer, and sex education, account for only 3 percent of all national protest activity.”

And you thought that the hottest issue right now was gay marriage.

Want to have some other media stereotypes challenged? It turns out that the pro-life movement is not really a movement of stay-at-home mothers against professional women.

[A] striking percentage of pro-life women are university educated, and many have given up professional careers to do pro-life work full-time.... “The pro-life movement,” he writes, “is actually quite diverse, and abortion politics more generally does not [as some claim] pit working-class Catholic housewives against professional, career-oriented women.”

In my view the rise of pro-life activism parallels the rise of environmentalism. Two hundred years ago, most people were fighting to make a bare existence on the land and to get a couple of children out of the nest. They didn’t have time for exquisite ideas about the sanctity of life and saving the planet.

But as soon as people moved to the city they started to have romantic ideas about Nature and the countryside. And as soon as women got free of the danger of childbirth and the heartbreak of infant deaths they started to develop romantic ideas about the delights of motherhood.

So it looks like we will have a sensible balance in the future. Liberals will champion the romantic view of Nature and conservatives will champion the romantic view of childbearing.