💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2023 › 07 › 01 › an-origin-story.gmi captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:42:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Now seems as good a time as any to link an origin story of the religious right,
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans. The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial dating, would be expelled.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
and then somehow they flip-flopped on abortion,
In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
and the rest, as they say, is history.
(Be sure to send them some extra mettā, which is another way to say "love thy neighbor", even or especially if some purportedly Christian groups aren't exactly on the ball with the practice—they rather more worship Mammon, or swear by the invisible hand of the market…)