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All elections are crucial, some are pivotal but only a rare few are truly fateful. Any victory by right or left changes the direction of the country until the next election, but sometimes the decision is irreversible. In most elections, voters come to a fork in the road, from which two paths diverge in different directions but, ostensibly, toward the same general destination. Some, like Mondays ballot in Israel, are like a T-junction from which one can only set out in opposing directions, toward completely contrary worlds.

The current, year-long election campaign began as a personal referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu. It evolved, at his initiative and under his direction, into a decision on the future of the State of Israel itself. Netanyahus desperate efforts to escape criminal prosecution led him to declare total war on democracy, the rule of law and the civic values on which they are based. Rather than facing his accusers in a court of law like a mere mortal, Netanyahu has turned his personal plight into an all-out culture war.

Bibi went gunning for his only real rivalHaaretz Weekly Ep. 66

The term culture war has been diluted over the years to include any ideological conflict over moral and social values. The term was coined, however, to depict the existential do-or-die war of the worlds that plagued Prussia and Germany in the 19th Century, in the days of Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. It pitted a conservative-Catholic-nationalistic-aristocratic coalition that resisted the waves of liberalism and democratization then sweeping Europe in an attempt to preserve their own, near-absolute, power against liberals, democrats, humanists and moderate centrists who demanded rule of law, civil rights and separation of church and state. It is a clash from which only one side emerges unscathed, while the other is left beaten and demoralized.

Culture wars are a godsend for leaders like Netanyahu and his U.S. ally Donald Trump. Both fuse all of their critics and rivals into one big and menacing blob leftist, subversive and heretical which seeks to seize power, impose its values, ride roughshod over their constituencies and annul all the glorious achievements bestowed on them by their cherished leader.

When the house is burning and liberal barbarians are at the gates, one cannot afford to indulge trifles such as checks and balances, honesty in government, the independence of the law or even simple human decency. Alls fair, you remember, in love and war, especially total war.

We didnt really need the recently revealed secret recordings by Netanyahus personal Rasputin, Natan Eshel, to know that the key to success in any self-made culture war is incitement to suspicion, resentment and hate. This has been Netanyahus weapon of choice ever since he was overheard 20 years ago, during his first tenure, whispering into the ear of a venerated rabbi: Leftists have forgotten what it means to be Jews. Nonetheless, it will be more than poetic justice if the Nathan Eshel tapes, in which the former chief of the premier's staff can be heard denigrating Likuds non-Ashkenazi voters and depicting them as suckers for manufactured hostility and animosity, will ultimately prove to be the turning point that led to Netanyahus downfall.

The eternal source for Netanyahus perpetually poisonous incitement, naturally, are Arabson either side of Israels borders. From them, all else flows. They are the beginning and the end of the all-inclusive equation by which Arabs = anti-Semites = self-hating Jews = leftists = Ashkenazim = elitists = academics = attorneys = journalists = all former Israeli security chiefs and anyone else who dares criticize Netanyahu, doubt his integrity or question his policies.

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The more ensnared Netanyahu became in his legal woes, the more his culture war strategy consumed him entirely. Netanyahus propaganda, once a ploy, became a true reflection of his soul. The big lie is the reality in which he lives while libel, defamation and gutter-politics have become his lingua franca.

This is why an election campaign, depicted as a dull reprise of the previous two campaigns held this year, nonetheless broke all known records for slime, filth and bile. On Monday night well find out if this crime pays as well.

A clear-cut Netanyahu victory means that his putsch succeeded: The only democracy in the Middle Ease will begin a steady slide to an autocratic regime no different than others. In the eyes of many of his opponents, a vote for Netanyahu is tantamount to a stab in Israels back.

A decisive victory by Benny Gantz wont bring any quick fix to Israels struggles and might actually spark greater tensions in the short term. Ultimately, however, a Gantz victory ensures the return of a semblance of sanity and moderation and, in the longer term, much to the dismay of Gantzs leftist supporters, an alliance between Kahol Lavan and a post-Netanyahu Likud. The common basis for mutual coexistence between left and right will be restored.

A third straight stalemate may be seen as the lesser evil for preventing Netanyahu from implementing his despotic designs but it nonetheless inflicts its own severe damage. The prospect of four straight elections will prolong current government paralysis, sow frustration and despondency and further erode public confidence in politics and democracy.

With Israel facing such a critical crossroads, there is no forgiveness and no absolution for those who persuade themselves that they have no one to vote for, politicians are all corrupt and nothing will change anyway. They couldnt be more wrong: Not everyones the same, not all politicians are bent and everything, but everything, could change, and for the worse. Not voting means abandoning oneself, ones family, friends, acquaintances and the public as a whole to Netanyahus toxic and hate-filled visions, toward which Israeli voters have hitherto marched en masse.

Continue reading here:
Israel election: D-Day for democracy in the all-out culture war launched by Netanyahu - Haaretz

By Dr. Jeff Mirus (bio - articles - email) | Feb 28, 2020

You may find a bit of black humor in one of our editorial notes on the news, which explains that: (a) Pope Francis had to cancel a Lenten meeting with priests because he was not feeling well; but (b) He was able to resume his rounds later the same day to meet with the Global Catholic Climate Movement (see Popes slight indisposition). But what is not funny at all is that the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has manufactured two new rights, not only the right to end your life at any time but the right to have help doing it.

The vagaries of paganism are strange and horrifying. Once we forget that we do not belong to ourselves, it becomes all too easy to protect legally every form of self-determination, including self-un-determination. Still, it is a strange exaltation of the individual human will that coerces the rest of us to play along. Clearly, the deeper purpose here is to destroy the rights of those who believe there is an objective difference between good and evil, and that nobody may be legally forced to cooperate in evil.

As we should have learned by now, evil is the ultimate source of all totalitarianisms. If we are committed to something that is wrong, we can brook no reasoned opposition. And if we are determined to press an evil course on society, we must make it illegal to refuse to cooperate in that evil. Our Lord captured this spirit precisely when He observed:

You may ask how this applies. I answer that no one can remain comfortably in darkness unless he outlaws both the light and all who call attention to it. The modern enterprise, as we know it in the West today, is primarily concerned with eliminating the light and forcing those who bear witness to it to stop.

Denial of reality even in the Church

Serious Christians spend the bulk of their lives working at avoiding this contemporary tendency. It is the saga of personal Christian progress to uncover each habit, idea, judgment and aspiration which remains hidden within our own darkness because we have either forgotten or refused to subject it to the light of Christ. No wonder, then, that modern secular courts are ever inventing more reasons to restrict the speech and behavior of Christians, lest light be shed on the pagan darkness which offers cover to those who hate the light.

And what is darkness, after all, but an absence? In exactly the same way that evil is the absence of good, darkness is definitively the absence of light. To put the matter another way, darkness is blindness to realityan inability, whether deliberate or not, to apprehend what is.

For this reason, one of the great tragedies of our era is that there is no consistent voice in favor of the light. A very few thinkers may arrive at a rational moral understanding, for by the spiritual nature of the intellect, each person has some capacity to participate in the light. But where we would hope to find a system which draws us toward the lightand by this system, I mean Christianitywhat we find instead is a welter of denominations which embrace one form of darkness or another rather than examine their worldly assumptions; and even within our own Church, a welter of groups and persons, including far too many bishops and priestsin charge of parishes or even dioceseswho do exactly the same thing, in thrall to the approbation of a fallen world. Whenever we look around on any certain issue, clarity tends to flee.

While there is far more to Catholic renewal than ecclesiastical governance, it must clearly be the principal administrative work of Church renewal to insist on standards of understanding and behavior, drawn authoritatively from God through Divine Revelation, in order to purify Catholics at every level from the polluting dross of the dominant worldly culture. But precisely because these nominal Catholics, again at every level, hide from the light in order to indulge this or that temptationeven defending and insisting upon falsehood through the basest patterns of prevarication and obfuscationwe are left in many places with no large-scale and consistent witness to the light at all.

Try an experiment: Publicly insist on some point of Catholic teaching that is rejected in the larger society, and see how many priests, religious, bishops, and Catholic university professors come forward to insist that (a) you are wrong; or (b) you are insufficiently nuanced in the expression of your convictions; or (c) you are doing more harm than good by calling attention to the matter under current circumstances.

Now sometimes one of these objections may be true. I freely admit that I still occasionally insist on a point only to learn I am incorrect; or I offer advice only to learn I had presumed too much on my own limited understanding or experience. But when our betters would have us believe this is the case on every single question on which the clear and constant teaching of the Church appears to stand in opposition to the popular ideas of our own timewhen, I say, such criticisms are all but perpetualthen we are generally under the assault, not of our own fallibility, but of darkness itself.

Insight?

The great theologian Henri de Lubac, SJ (1896-1991) offered an important perspective on this problem. As an introduction to de Lubac, let me mention that he refused the offer of the Red Hat by Pope St. Paul VI because it would have required him to become a bishop, which de Lubac said would be an abuse of an apostolic office. But he was finally made a cardinal a year before his death by Pope St. John Paul II, who dispensed him from the episcopal requirement. Such was his character. Now, back in 1943, de Lubac wrote an article about the spiritual warfare that is (supposed to be) an integral aspect of Jesuit spirituality. He considered the problem in relationship to the defining crisis of modern Western civilization (which was not, for de Lubac, the military struggle in which the nations were then engaged).

De Lubac wrote that, in previous periods of her history, the Church had weathered a variety of partial assaults: For example, assaults against the historical basis for Christianity, against the possibility or knowability of transcendent reality, and against ecclesiastical influence in human affairs. But now, he said:

De Lubac later interpreted spiritual warfare in a more primary sense, in terms of the interior struggle within each human person for or against God. But for the modern cultural dimensions of this warfare, he described exactly the problem with which we struggle even more strenuously todaya fundamental and holistic spiritual problem which, again in its cultural dimensions, plagues the Church in her personnel, and therefore in her effectiveness.

Try as we might, authentic renewal within the Church right now is hampered at every turn by this broader cultural crisis, in which even the human grasp of the very nature of things is a casualty. More often than not, we cannot successfully address the pervasive problem of ecclesiastical ministers, professed religious, and academic theologians who oppose the Churchs teaching, who jockey for positions of influence in the larger culture, or who at least decline to preach and teach forthrightly whenever that means taking a counter-cultural position. Nor have we found a way to counter the public perception of Catholicism created by huge numbers of nominal Catholics who continually abuse the name, including answering every question wrong on every public poll.

We can trace similar problems through most of Church history but, in our time especially, there appears to be little relief from the incessant, debilitating scandal.

Keeping at it

Nonetheless, while we continue to beat our heads against that wall, we can still effect personal change, in ourselves and in others. I am currently reading John Gerard SJs Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, from the era of Elizabethan England. When Gerard was passing through Basle, Switzerland on the way back to England after being ordained (November 1588), his party was courteously shown around the city by a Lutheran who hailed originally from Lorraine. Surprised at the courtesy, Gerard asked him why he had left his old country and his old faith. The man answered that he could not live under Catholic rule.

Gerard continues:

Fortunately, we will not be judged by how effective the Church as a whole proved to be in the period in which we lived. The question of effectiveness is in any case hidden in Divine Providence. But we will be judged by what we do with the gifts God has given us through His Church, especially during those seasons when He seems to be away on other business. About darkness and light, then, it is just as St. Paul said:

And why must we do this? That you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life (Phil 2:15-16). More challenging still, Paul says that to be such lights, we must do all things without grumbling or complaining (v. 14).

Ah, Christian happiness! As Mark Christopher Brandt said in a recent Catholic Culture Podcast3, this will cause many to regard us as silly and shallow people who have never suffered. But while many will derisively cover their eyes, some will be drawn to the light. They, in their turn, will become light to others. This is simply because the light really does shine in the darknessand the darkness really cannot put it out (Jn 1:5).

1 In the essay Spiritual Warfare as quoted by Joseph S. Flipper in Reading the Mystery of God: The Ignatian Roots of Henri de Lubacs Understanding of Scripture, Nicholas Healy & Matthew Levering, eds., Ressourcement after Vatican II: Essays in Honor of Joseph Fessio, SJ, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2019, p. 210.2 The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2012, pp. 9-10.3 Thomas V. Mirus, The Catholic Culture Podcast: Episode 68What I learned from Making Music with Mark Christopher Brandt.

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.

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Against Reality: Why our culture wars against the light, and why it will never win - Catholic Culture

There appear to be two ways to interpret the surge of Christian nationalism around Trump. One way is to see this primarily as an extension of the Religious Rights culture war. Another way is to understand the stated culture war, and its hot-button issues like abortion, as merely one piece within a larger and perhaps more sinister project. In The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism , Katherine Stewart argues for the latter, marshalling a synthesis of history and reporting to make her case.

Stewart has been following the Christian nationalist movement for over a decade as an investigative reporter and journalist. Her latest book highlights the way in which this movement is decentralized, consisting of a dense ecosystem of organizations, operatives, and Christian billionaire clans. Instead of collapsing Christian nationalists to single issues like abortion or gay marriage, she claims that it is an anti-democratic political movement with deep roots in a Christian opposition to civil rights, the New Deal, and abolition.

I recently spoke to Stewart about her book. The conversation that follows has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Camacho, Sojourners: You claim that America's Christian nationalist movement has been misunderstood and underestimated. How so?

Katherine Stewart: When we think of the Religious Right, we usually imagine it is just one special interest group in the noisy forum of modern American democracy. We might agree or disagree with its positions. We often see it preoccupied with cultural issues such as abortion or same-sex marriage, but we often just see it as competing within the existing system for votes while looking for a seat at the table. But Christian nationalism does not believe in modern, pluralistic democracy. Its aim is to create a new type of order, one in which Christian nationalist leaders, along with members of certain approved religions and their political allies will enjoy positions of exceptional privilege in politics, law, and society. So, this is a political movement and its goal is ultimately power. It doesn't seek to add another voice to America's pluralistic democracy, but rather to place our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded in a particular version of religion, and what some adherents call a biblical world view.

I do think it's helpful in looking at the movement to distinguish between the leaders and the followers. The foot soldiers might believe that they're fighting for those cultural issues, like a ban on abortion or a defense of what they call traditional marriage. But over time, the movement's leaders and strategists have consciously reframed these culture war issues to capture and control the votes of a large subsection of the American public. They understand that if people can be persuaded to vote on a single issue, or two or three, you can essentially control their vote by concentrating your messages in this way. They use these issues to solidify and maintain political power for themselves and their allies to increase the flow of public and private money in their direction, and also to enact economic policies that are favorable to some of their most well-resourced funders.

If you look at leaders like Putin in Russia or Orbn in Hungary or Erdoan in Turkey, when they bind themselves closely to religious conservatives in their countries in order to consolidate authoritarian form of power, we rightly identify this as a kind of religious nationalism. That's what we're seeing today with Trump's alliances with hyper-conservative religious leaders in America.

Camacho: You noticed that Christian nationalist leaders are making inroads with non-white Christians, specifically Latino pastors in places like Ohio and California. How does this fit into their overall strategy?

Stewart: The Christian nationalist movement is often characterized as a white movement. I think for some of the people in the rank and file who are white, it is an implicitly white movement because for them it involves recovering a nation that was once supposedly both Christian and white. Leaders of the movement tend to paper over the ways in which white evangelicalism and racism often reinforce one another. Of course, Trump appeals to the racism of many of his followers. But leaders of the movement can see the demographic future as clearly as you or I can. They understand that the electoral future of the movement is not ethnically homogenous. In recent years, they've made a significant outreach to Latino and black pastors. There's an irony that they're being enlisted to fight culture wars that drive support for a political party that has turned voter suppression, race-based gerrymandering, the cruel and inhumane treatment of migrants and separation of families, into a strategic imperative.

I want to give you an idea of what this looks like on the ground. In one chapter, I focused on an organization called Church United, which is a pastoral network operating in California. The founder of the group, Jim Domen, acts on racial inclusiveness in a really systematic way. Many of the fastest growing religious movements in America are in the charismatic and Pentecostal vein. These are often explicitly multiracial movements. Racial unity in Christ is one of the core themes of Church United. They organize gatherings in which the organization is introduced to pastors across the state. The aim is to get them to persuade their congregations to vote for so-called biblical values, which are typically all about the culture war issues like abortion and LGBTQ equality. A substantial number of Church United gatherings are conducted in the Spanish language.

An organization has spun off, one affiliate called Alianza de Pastores Unidos de San Diego. The members minister largely to Spanish-speaking congregations. I went to one of their events. Jim Domen was generous enough to invite me knowing that I was an opposition journalist. One of the speakers who was at this event said to the pastors, I'm going to paraphrase: When you talk to your fellowship about abortion and these issues, what's more important, talking about the minimum wage or about life? The message is very clear: Life is more important. So, these are the issues that you need to be emphasizing with your congregation.

They make it easy for pastors to communicate these issues to their congregants. The movement leaders understand that pastors drive votes and that's why they've made an enormous effort to create these vast pastoral networks that gets pastors on the same page. They give them sophisticated messaging and media tools to turn out the vote.

Camacho: In your book, you make connections between the current Christian nationalist movement and the Christian opposition to civil rights and the New Deal and Christian debates over the Civil War and abolition before that. Some might consider that to be a stretch and they might cite figures like William Wilberforce. So, I'm in interested in why you decided to make this broad historical link.

Stewart: I do discuss the contributions of maybe a dozen abolitionist theologians in my book, including Wilberforce. It is important to note, however, that at the time of the Civil War, most of the powerful denominations in the South had either promoted slavery or had at least made their peace with it. Pro-slavery theologians consciously refrained from making any judgment to upset the established order or they supported it outright. For instance, the Georgia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church said that slavery as it exists in the United States was not a moral evil. Episcopalians of South Carolina found slavery to be "marked by every evidence of divine approval." The Charleston Union Presbytery resolved that the holding of slaves, so far from being a sin in the sight of God, is nowhere condemned in his holy word. I think a lot of people don't realize that many representatives of the churches of the North were in agreement.

Yes, folks like Wilberforce and Charles Denison argued for abolitionism, and they did so in the name of religion. But Frederick Douglass observed at the time that these religious abolitionists tended to be a distinctly disempowered minority in their own denominations.

James Henley Thornwell of South Carolina, a pro-slavery theologian, described the conflict this way: The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholdersthey are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. He's identifying order and regulated freedom with pro-slavery theology.

Camacho: As you know, Betsy DeVos is the secretary of education. The argument from her camp would be that Christians are trying to combat a bias in public education that is stacked against Christians. Why do you think public education is such an important battleground?

Stewart: There's so much to unpack here. Let's just start with the hostility to government schools. The hostility goes back in time to some of those pro-slavery theologians. After Emancipation, they argued against taxing white people to educate black children. These kinds of arguments persisted to the middle of the 20th century when folks like Bob Jones objected to integration. He actually published a radio address called "Is Segregation Scriptural?" and called segregation "God's established order." We see this hostility to public education even in the 1980s and 1990s. Jerry Falwell Sr. said, around 1980, that he hoped to see the day when there are no more public schools, churches will have taken them over, and Christians will be running them.

For many members of the movement that have expressed hostility to public education and what they call government schools, it reflects a concern that children attending public schools, their children in particular, will learn tools like critical thinking or will become tolerant of religious pluralism and leave the flock. I think they've developed a persecution narrative around public education that anything failing to affirm their religion is somehow hostile to it. They reject the values of pluralism and diversity that our democratic system is meant to support. Public schools, because of their pluralism and diversity, are nonsectarian. They are meant to neither affirm nor deny any particular religious viewpoint.

The movement has, over the years, engaged in a two-pronged strategy. Number one, they start to force their program and their agenda into the public schools through things like Good News Clubs, or promoting a partisan view of American history, attacking things like the teaching of evolution. Two, they promise to deflate the schools and weaken them as Jerry Falwell Sr. hoped to see. In particular, they deflate public schools by reducing the amount of money that goes toward public schools and poor families, diverting money over to private religious schools, which, as we know, are allowed to discriminate against students that don't participate in their religion, against LGBTQ Americans and so many others.

Camacho: Reading your book really provides perspective on how much money, organization, and long-term vision the Christian nationalist movement has. And honestly, it can also be slightly depressing. What gives you hope?

Stewart: I'm seeing a lot more activism today than I saw, say, five or six years ago. We can't begin to meet the challenges that we face until we recognize what they are. And I think there's a growing awareness that we're not just dealing with a culture war. We're actually dealing with a political movement. I think that makes it incredibly helpful. While it's true that a sector of the media has basically been enlisted in a propaganda campaign, working with far-right platforms, being mouthpieces for disinformation and hate, there's so many others that are working to bring the truth to light.

Christian nationalism in some ways is the fruit of a society that has not lived up to the promise of the American idea. There is a lot of work to be done. But for now, we're free to do it. We've met these challenges in the past well enough that we made it to the present moment. Religious nationalists are using the tools of democratic political culture to end democracy. I continue to believe those same resources can be used to restore it.

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The Long-Term Vision of the Christian Nationalist Movement - Sojourners

Two cultures clash as a wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric spreads over a country in Teboho Edkins profound documentary Days of Cannibalism, which focalizes the China-Africa relationship in rural Lesotho, an enclaved country surrounded by South Africa. Utilizing an observational vrit approach, Days might be light on context, but even within these self-imposed limitations, the film reveals both the universality of cultural conflict and the highly specific economy of the Basotho people.

Framed around the changing socio-economics of the region, Edkins film moves from subject to subject as the increase in the Chinese immigrant workforce has threatened to recontextualize the traditionally trade-based economy. The system is moving from bartering to monetary exchange as a direct result of a Chinese influx. In changing this system, the Basotho have launched a socio-political protest in an attempt to denigrate the Chinese.

At the height of this conflict is the ideological differences between uses of livestock, specifically cows. Treated as a type of currency within Basotho culture, cows are viewed as a symbol of community wealth with religious significance. The Basotho can freely buy cows outside of their ethnic group, but they cannot sell them within. As such, cows became a method of storing or accumulating wealth as the community takes care of these animals and are free to use them for their labor. Individualistic ideologies of wealth and capital, associated with free-market capitalism, are the new beliefs that the Chinese are bringing into Lesotho.

This highly specific hybrid of economy and religion is pitted against Chinese notions of exchange, treating cows and livestock as goods to be bought and sold. That these two opposing ideologies are rife with conflict is, perhaps, unsurprising, but manifests itself in interesting ways. In one of the longer scenes within this relatively short documentary, two Basotho farmers are put on trial for stealing and selling cows to Chinese businessmen. The Chinese have killed the cows, violating the religious and legal precedents in Basotho culture. These two farmers were desperate for money, but have still broken the cultural laws of their group, and despite their pleas for mercy are sentenced to a staggering 10 years.

Edkins film is neutral within this conflict, showing both sides as they struggle to bridge their cultural divide, creating ethnic pockets of communities within the larger country. These smaller communities are created along racial and religious dividing lines, as the Chinese are just looking for work but are constantly rebuffed and disparaged by the Basotho. A throughline tracks a Basotho radio DJ as he spins Americanized records and comments on the Chinese workforce with increasing hostility.

Culminating in a robbery of a local Chinese-owned store, in which Edkins becomes the subject of his own documentary, Days of Cannibalism is content to observe the ethnic fracturing and increasing global influence that descends on a small country, never spending too long on a single subject and refusing to take sides in the culture wars that are seemingly on the verge of erupting in Lesotho.

In avoiding a worldview-like ideology, and refusing to recontextualize these socio-economic clashes to fit a westernized approach (though the parallels may be obvious), Days of Cannibalism may be too highly specific to reach a general audience, but the film nonetheless is a harrowing look into a seemingly forgotten corner of the world; one that, despite their long history, is still susceptible to increased fracturing that accompanies globalization.

Days of Cannibalism premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Continued here:
Berlin Review: Days of Cannibalism is a Harrowing, Profound Look at the Culture Wars in Lesotho - The Film Stage

The debate on abortion continues to divide us here in Utah and across the country, exactly as intended.

After the 1973 landmark 7-2 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which said unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional, there was relatively little political debate on womens reproductive rights, let alone a movement.

Today, of course, there is a decades-long campaign to end abortion, but it takes place in a historic vacuum, ignoring the long struggle for the most basic elements of family planning.

Times have changed. In 1969, President Richard Nixon told Congress, No American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition. The following year, he signed into law Title X the Family Planning Program.

But in 1979, Republican operatives and strategists huddled to conceive wedge issues that would favor the GOP and splinter the Democratic Party.

Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich recruited televangelist Jerry Falwell into a coalition designed to bring together economic and social conservatives around a pro-family agenda, according to historian Jill Lapore.

It would target abortion, gay rights, the E.R.A. and sex education, sowing the seeds of mass agitation and the Culture Wars.

On the abortion front, it led to picketing with protestors decrying baby killers at clinics and even the homes of providers. It also resulted in hundreds of burglaries at clinics and more than a dozen murders of clinicians and their clients.

But in the halls of Congress or the sidewalks of Salt Lake City, discussions, debates and sermons lack historical perspective on contraception, infant mortality, maternal child-bearing deaths and 100 years of developments that eventually led to reproductive freedom for women.

In 1915, maternal mortality in the United States was 607.9 deaths per 100,000 live births. By 2007, it had declined to 12.7. It climbed to 17.4 by 2018.

It wasnt until 1916 that Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic for poor women, contending that women have a right to have sex without fear of death in childbirth. She was arrested and jailed for three months.

On appeal, the court ruled that it could be permissible for a doctor to talk to a patient about contraception. But until 1936, it was illegal to disseminate information on birth control. All the while, women were getting pregnant every year and dying from back-alley abortions.

Sangers clinics eventually became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In 2019, the non-profit health centers served 2.5 million people, but only 3 percent pursued abortions, according to the organization. Most clients sought birth control or STD tests.

In their zeal to stop abortion, conservative activists are waging war against Planned Parenthood. Since 2011, some 300 state laws have been passed to restrict access to abortions. One result is the closing of Planned Parenthood clinics: 32 in 2017; 40 in 2018; and 36 in 2019. Some 400 Planned Parenthood clinics remain open nationwide.

Not coincidentally, STDs are on the rise.

Last week, Republican lawmakers in Utah moved to ban most abortions on the condition that Roe v. Wade were to be set aside. The proposal would make performing an abortion a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

When vocal proponents of banning abortion, such as Utah state Sen. Dan McCay and his wife, Riverton Councilwoman Tawnee McCay, publicly cry out to stop killing babies, they ignore women, present and past, who were denied reproductive health care and died as a result.

Even Catholic-dominated Ireland has legalized abortion.

Beyond that, pro-lifers seem unaware of their role in the systematic agitation that brought the GOP to power in order to achieve another agenda, which has led to income inequality next only to the 1890s.

These folks believe life begins at conception and in a free society that ought not be a problem. But whats troubling is that those people, who are oblivious to the long struggle for womens reproductive rights, would force their beliefs on all women, denying them agency over their own bodies.

Christopher Smart is a freelance journalist who lives in Salt Lake City.

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Christopher Smart: The intended outcome of the abortion fight - Salt Lake Tribune