1 gen 1992 anni - Culture war speech

Descrizione:

culture war: A term derived from a 1992 speech by the Republican politician Patrick Buchanan to describe a political struggle, dating to the 1920s, between religious traditionalists and secular liberals. In the 1990s, social issues such as abortion rights and the rights of lesbians and gay men divided these groups. (


Standing at the podium at the 1992 Republican National Convention, with thousands of his supporters cheering, Patrick Buchanan did not mince words. He had already ended his campaign for the presidential nomination, but the former Nixon speechwriter and Reagan aid still hoped to shape the party’s message to voters. “This election,” he told the audience — including millions watching on television — “is about what we stand for as Americans.” Citing Democratic support for abortion rights and the rights of lesbians and gay men, Buchanan invoked “a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war.” His long list of enemies included “environmental extremists who put birds and rats and insects ahead of families, workers, and jobs.”


Buchanan’s provocative address, which became known as the “ culture war” speech, hit two themes that came to define American politics in the 1990s and early 2000s: religious conflict and economic precarity. His “religious war” was another name for a long-standing political struggle, dating to the 1920s, between religious traditionalists and secular liberals (see “Culture Wars” in Chapter 21). The moral certainty of traditional religion is on your side, Buchanan assured his Republican followers, in the battle with Democrats “for the soul” of the country. But to address growing economic uncertainty, especially for blue-collar Americans, Buchanan had an economic message as well. “We need to let them know we know how bad they’re hurting,” Buchanan said of the anxious and disillusioned workers he had met on the campaign trail. Against the backdrop of globalization, American politics in the 1990s and early 2000s followed the script of Buchanan’s speech, careening back and forth between contests over divisive social issues and concern over Americans’ economic security.


Clashes over women’s rights, gay rights, and the family proved to be another cultural battleground, extending the political conflicts that had grown out of the 1960s and 1970s. New Right conservatives charged that the “abrasive experiments of two liberal decades,” as a Reagan administration report put it, had eroded respect for marriage and “family values.” They pointed to the divorce rate, which had doubled between 1960 and 1980 and continued to climb — nearing the point at which almost half of marriages ended in divorce. They also highlighted the nearly 60 percent rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies among African Americans. Cultural conservatives eyed a wide range of culprits for the decline of the family: legislators who enacted liberal divorce laws and allowed welfare payments to unmarried mothers, feminists who called for equal participation for women in jobs and education, as well as judges who condoned abortion and banished religious instruction from public schools.


Reproductive rights provided a central stage in this cultural struggle over the family, pitting feminists against religious conservatives and turning abortion access into a defining issue between Democrats and Republicans. Feminists who described themselves as prochoice viewed the issue from the perspective of the pregnant woman; they argued that the legal right to a safe abortion was crucial to her autonomy over her body and life. Conversely, religious conservatives, who pronounced themselves prolife, viewed abortion from the perspective of the unborn fetus and claimed that its rights trumped those of the mother.

In the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court had affirmed a woman’s right to choose an abortion. In the generation after Roe, evangelical Protestants took leadership of the antiabortion movement, which grew politically powerful and developed a three-part strategy: protest, pass abortion restriction laws in the states, and methodically work through the federal courts in an attempt to overturn Roe. In 1987, the religious activist Randall Terry founded Operation Rescue, which mounted protests outside abortion clinics and harassed their staffs and clients. Antiabortion activists also won a number of state laws that limited public funding for abortions, required parental notification before minors could obtain abortions, and mandated waiting periods before any woman could undergo an abortion procedure. Such laws further restricted women’s reproductive choices, while still remaining constitutional under Roe.

Activists Protesting Outside the Supreme Court in 2002

In 2002 the Supreme Court considered a case in which the National Organization for Women (NOW) had challenged the legality of abortion clinic protests, such as those undertaken by Operation Rescue. The activists, and the case itself, demonstrated that the question of abortion remained far from settled, and Americans on all sides of the issue continued to hold passionate opinions.

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