Dems, If You Don’t Care About the Supreme Court, You May Not Deserve to Win

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on May 4, 2022

Contrary to the widespread belief that America’s “Religious Right” was born out of righteous fury against the 1973 Roe decision, writes Dartmouth University history professor Randall Balmer, “What prompted evangelical interest in politics, in fact, was a defense of racial segregation.”

In his 2021 book “Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right,” Balmer recounts how two years before Roe, the lesser known 1971 Green v. Connally decision threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions. The suspect institutions included Bob Jones University, which had its tax-exempt status revoked in a 1976 dispute.

Citing Paul Weyrich, Grover Norquist and other leading conservatives of that period, Balmer describes how the moral crusade against abortion replaced school desegregation as the movement’s central issue later, “when a more palatable issue was needed to cover for what was becoming an increasingly unpopular position following the civil rights era.”

Ironically, American evangelicalism was known as a progressive force opposed to slavery earlier in its history. With the anti-abortion issue, its adherents became powerful enough on the right to help fuel President Ronald Reagan’s rise, the Grand Old Party’s right wing and deliver 81% of white evangelicals to support Donald Trump’s presidency.

But I have been dismayed to see new generations of pro-abortion rights liberals increasingly take that right too much for granted.

While Democrats were focusing on Washington, Republicans were turning to the grassroots politics of Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition leader, who said in 1996, “I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members.”

As Barack Obama can tell you, grassroots organizing pays off. Organizing from the bottom up has led, as of April, to Republicans holding held a majority in 62 state chambers, according to Ballotpedia, and Democrats held the majority in 36 chambers.

Factor in the Electoral College and you can see how a dedicated minority can take power over a passive majority. All of which helps to explain why the Supreme Court has become overwhelmingly conservative and the outlook for Democrats in the midterms looks gloomy.

Democrats, like other voters, haven’t been nearly as excited about midterm elections as they have been about those in presidential years. But if you can’t get excited about something as monumental as the fate of Roe v. Wade, maybe you don’t deserve to win.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)