Abortion has not been a religious issue. Its central position in the heart of Evangelical Christianity is fairly new, beginning only in the late 1970s. Before that the issue was not at all centraol to the denominations flying under the name evangelical. Since Brown v Board of Education, the Christian right had been pumping for tax exempt status for religious schools which remained racially segregated.
As that stance drew fire not only from the Constitutionalists but also from the American public at larege as openly racist positions became less favored by the public at large. What has recently become known as “woke” actually began in the late 50s and the 60s when industries like the media and entertainment began hiring more and more Blacks (bear in mind that in 1970 only 7% of the population was Hispanic) and political victories for Black leaders followed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So conservative Evangelicals looked elsewhere for a cause to unite Evangelicals and, along the way, to raise funds.
Paul Weyrich and, as AI tells me, Jerry Fallwel were instrumental in making this massive shift among this large segment of the U.S. population.
Here is where it gets subtle, at least on my part. Slightly over half of Evangelicals live in the South. Tracing the influence of slavery on American culture is an interest of mine and therefore I turn to the South to find its strongest presence. And what we find is high resistance to abortion among slave owners, not so much among their own families and other White people but among slave women. The reason does not flow with the milk of human kindness but from the thirst for profit: a newly purchased slave cost a fortune but a baby, with time and growing into what slave owners called “a big strong buck” was free and a what they called a slave “gal” served several purposes: labor, sex, and baby slaves.
I leave it up to you to gain a sense of just how great an influence on attitudes toward abortion this earlier practice continues to exert on today’s population.
BTW, that use of “gal” explained for me my mother-in-law’s bridling at being called a gal; something normal in my White working-class background.
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Here is a good use of my Magnum Opus. The Magnum Opus is a very long essay I wrote and which will appear here when I’m done with my legal problems and can turn to it for finishing touches. The essay simply takes all the institutions and forces in any society and lays out how to take them all – all of them – into account when attacking an issue in society.
The use is this: apparently some schools have taken an approach to grading which arouses the ire and suspicion of a lot of people and certainly makes me wonder. The idea, of which I have only the vaguest grasp, is that students “these days” are so beset with stress that reducing the stress of grades has a useful and positive end. What is it?
To be honest, the idea is worth exploring, to my mind. But then my mind has been questioned before, even by me. Here’s my practice as a teacher: I had an opportunity to take a Latin program at a Catholic prep school and teach students not without grades but with very easily achieved bench marks and goals. The be even more honest, Latin attracted the “better” students even after they had passed a matriculation interview. However, that was balanced by students whose parents paid through the nose to get them in precisely because they had a learning disability, broadly defined. So my path was not entirely cleared for me.
My first year gave me three classes, third years (whose students were remarked on by another teacher as “the brightest kids in the school”), second years and first years. The program had been so worn down by frankly terrible teaching by a poor depressive that only eleven students graced my first year and one committed suicide during the year.
However, I had already been teaching Latin for the 20 prior years in a public high school and so was pretty ready, after years of studying and conferencing in SLART (Second Language Acquisition Research and Training) that I was prepared to launch my notion of a teaching method designed to promote actual acquisition of a foreign language, treating Latin as just another language.
Again, to be fair, I have a dynamic presence in the classroom and I immediately became very popular with both students and colleagues (with a few amusing exceptions). And, parenthetically without the actual parentheses, I will add that there were some spectacular results, including raising the enrollment of first years to 25 the following year and then to 50 after that. Those results can be found elsewhere on this blog. I was abetted by a vice-principal who gave me free rein and by the fact that as I arrived for my interview the vice-principal and principal were feverishly preparing to do their full jobs plus split those 3 Latin classes among themselves with barely remembered high school Latin. Again, to be honest, I had been teaching Latin all those years with only two years of high school Latin 52 years earlier.
Given this open market for my methodology I gave As to anyone, which was most of these students with already high GPAs, who reached the bench marks. Coming from a deep counseling background, I spotted students who were extremely grade conscious in a way that betrayed their clear joy of learning. So, seeing success with those students and many, many in my earlier teaching, I viewed the experimental deemphasis on grades as not without merit, though the effects will have to be closely watched. But, with this same full honesty found in this little essay, I will note hearing from older people my whole life their distaste for learning due to a rigid and unproductive search for high grades. As with so many things, it is a matter of balance and context, and perhaps you will read my very long piece on institutions and forces and their centrality in evaluating and planning.
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Several years ago I was recruited by a group of Progressive Democrats to campaign for the party. That propelled me to follow the urging of some of them, the main one having just contacted me to get together with one aim being to spread my reach via YouTube, to start a TikTok series on political topics. The design in my head came out of my realization that they, at 20 and 30 years old, had little idea of what the elderly voted on, i.e. their outreach had nothing about social security, Medicare, and similar issues of concern for older voters, the most reliable voters of the general public. After about 30 TikToks I discontinued my efforts until recently when a couple of acquaintences suggested and helped me with YouTube.
My concern about these young Progressives oversight has not abated. I hear and read very able activists to the left, some all the way to socialist positions, vastly misread a major chunk of their audience. Just because millions of Americans, including many who voted for Trump or at least tended Republican, are sick of the overreach of the GOP and the literal insanity of Trump, that doesn’t mean they can’t be turned off by dumb slogans like “defund the police.” Is that inexperience, tone-deafness, indifference, or just youthful enthusiasm that can be toned down in order to stop their off-putting exhuberance and be as aware of the “cultures” of the elderly as they are of the variety of Hispanic cultures or the deep background on the Black experience. Some of the Mexican-American “kids” are so worked up about unfair immigration practices horribly exacerbated by ICE that they forget a lot of Mexican-Americans are not all that excited about more people coming over the border, even with papers. Ruben Gallego said that any volunteer for his campaign that used the term Latinx would be put right back on the bus to California. Sensitivity to everyone, including Trump voters, is essential to success in pushing our country forward. As someone who reveled in the incredible changes, good and bad, of the 60s only to see the excesses of the 70s and the backlash of the 80s and 90s and then the election of Obama and the rise of the Tea Party and then MAGA….. OMG as my young colleagues exclaim, I really need to see helmsmen to steer us on to the sort of society we thought we were building back then.