Lost the game
Banned
Just what it says on the tin. How might we avoid the rise of the Christian Right, eg no Moral Majority, no Jerry Falwell, no Pat Robertson, etc?
Have Row vs Wade outlaw all abortions.
Have Row vs Wade outlaw all abortions.
Agreed. 100%.
Abortion is the ultimate underlying issue for Christians in the field of politics.
This.Personally, I think you guys are all looking at things the wrong way. Then again, it depends on how one interprets the "Christian Right" if one interprets the Christian Right to mean strictly "the moral majority, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Falwell etc." then this is doable. However if one takes a more broader interpretation, namely all Christians, it becomes harder.
If we take the first interpretation, the easiest way to eliminate the rise of the Christian "Right" is to keep the "New Democrats" from taking control of the Democratic party. As a whole this will mean that America's political spectrum will be further right than OTL, but the "Christian Right" will be far less dominant as the Christian vote will be split more evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
Yeah, from my understanding Roe v. Wade was what led to the whole thing. As the decision was decided 7-2, your best bet is to just butterfly the case away.
However...you may very well have abortion reach the Supreme Court later on. But by butterflying away Roe v. Wade you can definitely give America a couple decades to become a bit more comfortable with the idea of abortion being legal. So by the time Woe v. Rade is decided on in the '90s or whenever, there isn't as much of a fit.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5502785
While abortion no doubt had SOME part in causing the formation of the Christian right, the big issue that caused uproar was the federal government threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and numerous other Christian private schools which at the time were no better than white's only segregation academies. The federal government involving themselves in these schools pissed off a lot of Southern conservatives. The issue of abortion was used by the leaders of the Christian right to galvanize a coalition between white southern evangelicals and Catholics.
You need to prevent the things that cause reaction- i.e. the excesses of the cultural Left. A surviving MLK and black assimilationism, a lack of abortion politics and the elimination of the excesses by the cultural Left that led to Christian reaction. Keep prayer in schools, and have a distinct lack of government involvement in faith through judicial activism, and the Christians have much less to go on crusade about.
And in this scenario, you don't need to have a complete rightward shift of the whole spectrum.
YOu could still have a healthy very near OTL left.
Sounds good.