During the furor over Indiana’s new “religious liberty” law, the debate has been haunted by some not-too-distant memories of the last time rapid social change encountered an embattled conservative population placed on the defensive. Yes, it enrages today’s religious conservatives to hear their demands for a zone of “conscience” in which they may choose to exempt themselves from antidiscrimination laws with similar demands a half century ago. But the parallels cannot be wished away.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became an unavoidable and imminent reality, conservatives—not all of them southerners—executed a strategic retreat, accepting the demolition of de jure segregation but defending de facto segregation via private action. This required last-ditch opposition to the provisions of the law prohibiting discrimination by employers and those offering “public accommodations” such as restaurants, hotels and retail stores. Here’s how the 1964 Republican presidential nominee took his stand with Dixieland:
I wish to make myself perfectly clear. The two portions of this bill to which I have constantly and consistently voiced objections, and which are of such overriding significance that they are determinative of my vote on the entire measure, are those which would embark the Federal Government on a regulatory course of action in the area of so-called “public accommodations” and in the area of employment–to be precise, Titles II and VII of the bill. I find no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority in either of these areas; and I believe the attempted usurpation of such power to be a grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government, namely, that of a constitutional government in which 50 sovereign states have reserved to themselves and to the people those powers not specifically granted to the central or Federal Government.
Goldwater didn’t merely object to these portions of the law on “constitutional conservative” grounds, however:
[I]n addition I would like to point out to my colleagues in the Senate and to the people of America, regardless of their race, color or creed, the implications involved in the enforcement of regulatory legislation of this sort. To give genuine effect to the prohibitions of tho bill will require the creation of a Federal police force of mammoth proportions. It also bids fair to result in the development of an “informer” psychology in great areas of our national life–neighbors spying on neighbors, workers spying on workers, businessmen spying on businessmen, where those who would harass their fellow citizens for selfish and narrow purposes will have ample inducement to do so. These, the Federal police force and an “informer” psychology, are the hallmarks of the police state and landmarks in the destruction of a free society.
This prediction, of course, was thunderously wrong, but it reflected the kind of “slippery slope” arguments we are hearing today with respect to enforcement of nondiscrimination laws involving LGBT folk. Just as importantly, Goldwater and many others were engaged in an effort to depict discriminators as victims of government overreach simply wanting to live their lives according to their religiously informed consciences.
Southern white churches were not necessarily leading the fight against civil rights legislation, but they were certainly heavily present in the ranks. And their leadership position became decisive in another front of the fight to preserve a right to private racial discrimination: the white flight from integrated public schools into “segregation academies” that were more often than not organized by churches. This was not a small issue; indeed, the historian Randall Balmer makes a convincing case that the fight to maintain tax-exempt status for such schools was the original impetus for the rise of the Christian Right, well before conservative evangelicals decided to unite with conservative Catholics in the anti-abortion cause.
Conservative Christians have long been vulnerable to the charge that they offer religious cover for what may be simple resistance to social change, as reflected in the strong alliance between conservative evangelicals and a Republican Party only partially interested in the agenda of the Christian Right. It’s interesting that this alliance has recently been extended into the traditionalist hierarchy (if not so much the laity) of the Catholic Church, precisely over the campaign for “religious liberty” protections.
There are two very specific reasons for the rapid growth of this campaign into a major preoccupation for the GOP and for conservative Christians: the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, with its contraceptive coverage mandate, which tripped all sorts of conservative cultural triggers, and then the sudden, shocking success of the marriage equality movement. As Michael Linderberger pointed out at The New Republic this week, it was the latter that really lit the fuse, most particularly the 2011 breakthrough in New York:
The first to seriously sound the alarm was New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan. “We are living in New York, in the United States of America—not in China or North Korea,” Dolan said. “In those countries, government presumes daily to ‘redefine’ rights, relationships, values, and natural law. There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ means.”
That was bracing stuff, and it lit a fire among conservatives who were eager to shift the debate away from the rights of gays and lesbians and onto more favorable ground, the rights of Americans to practice their faith. That movement is only now cresting in a wave of religious freedom statutes. You could see it last year in Arizona and in last week’s victory for gay marriage opponents, Pyrrhic as it likely is, in Indiana.
Like southern “Christian” segregationists in the recent past, today’s politicized conservative Christians are executing a strategic retreat into an allegedly private sphere where they are on stronger ground in resisting anti-discrimination policies. They intensely dislike the parallels on the grounds that hostility to gay rights and/or same-sex marriage in deeply entrenched in their faith, or in the case of conservative evangelicals, in the Bible.
That is exactly what the segregationists said as well, of course. It is not hard to foresee a day when the tortured efforts of religious leaders to stitch together a few culture-bound passages into an eternal condemnation of homosexuality (or for that matter, abortion, which is virtually invisible in Scripture) will look just as absurd and embarrassing as yesterday’s thundering sermons on black people being consigned to submission by the Curse of Ham. And then maybe the strategic retreat into efforts to hang onto discrimination via protestations of “religious liberty” will look less sympathetic as well.
Ed Kilgore is the principal blogger for Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, Managing Editor of The Democratic Strategist, and a Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. Earlier he worked for three governors and a U.S. Senator. He can be followed on Twitter at @ed_kilgore.
Just a quick comment: Barry Goldwater was far from being a bigot. While he was incorrect in his interpretation of the law and although his campain was strongly supported by deep South bigots, segregationalists and maniacs, he himself was no more discriminatory than any public figure of his time. He came out strongly in favor of gay soldiers, decades before the military allowed them to serve openly. He was a complicated man, and wrong on this and other issues, but Barry Goldwater was a good man and an excellent Senator.
The Crackers in the Antebellum South used it all the time to justify slavery. “This here Bible sez it’s okay.”
You don’t say?
“On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.”
“I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in “A,” “B,” “C” and “D.” Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?”
“And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of “conservatism.”
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”
“It’s time America realized that there is no gay exemption in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence.”
“You don’t need to be straight to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.”
Yep, conservative hero and icon Barry Goldwater said all these things, which would make him a reviled pariah in today’s Republican Party.
My understanding of Goldwater is that his brand of conservatism was rooted in an old-fashioned suspicion of government and its historical inclination to abuse and usurp power, which certainly was an animating factor in the establishment of the United States, the Constitution, and Bill of Rights. This philosophy certainly led him astray on a variety of issues, but it wasn’t specifically based on what Jesus or the Bible told him. This is a fundamentally different worldview than that of the Evangelical Christianists and other extremists, who want to establish a theocracy under the guise of “conservatism.” As Goldwater’s statements about the religious right show, he correctly perceived the nature of the preachers and theocrats who’ve now grabbed philosophical and ideological control of the GOP and of the conservative movement in general.