AHC: U.S. moves leftward in the 1970s, but evangelicals don't feel under siege.

In 1980, I supported a much bigger commando raid against Iran, and perhaps more. Well, I was wrong, and President Carter was right.

You didn't even need that.

Frankly the Ayatollah was not suicidal, he was a religious asshole, but those who thought he was suicidal a la in modern terms Zarqawi or Bin Laden completely misread him.

Carter announcing release the hostages or in 48 hours we start bombing one of your oil fields after another and the hostages all would be released unharmed before the second hour was up.

A Commando Raid even if partially successful would get hostages killed the other way would not. The Ayatollahs really are very smart at gauging the line of US leaders and they did figure Reagan as a man who would bomb them and pegged Carter correctly as a man who wouldn't.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Get rid of the Supreme Court doing it nationally by fiat and instead have it continue to be done throughout the 70s and 80s by state houses and the reaction against it would have been totally different.

Slowly winning the battle on abortion was better for the left politically then instant winning it.

Something that gives both parties, but especially democrats more spine on foreign policy would help as well. Americans hated that their politicians were frozen and let the likes of Ayatollah and Brezhnev punk them in a way that wouldn't have happened in the 50s or 60s.
foreign policy was never really an evangelical issue
 
but the perception of weakness was.

I agree with jmc247 on this point, although I think we very much disagree on some of the specifics.
 
Carter announcing release the hostages or in 48 hours we start bombing one of your oil fields after another and the hostages all would be released unharmed before the second hour was up.
To me, public threats are for domestic consumption. Reduce chances of workable deal, and even if it "works," likely to end up with sworn enemy who does everything they can sub rosa.
 

RousseauX

Donor
but the perception of weakness was.

For Americans in general maybe but I don't think it was specifically a Christian issue unless evangelicals really saw detente or Iran as a religious issue which I sorta doubt

To put it another way, I don't think there is any popular constituency for foreign policy hawks anymore even though evangelicals are strong as ever. The war on Christmas and school prayers were issues independent of US foreign policy.
 
To me, public threats are for domestic consumption. Reduce chances of workable deal, and even if it "works," likely to end up with sworn enemy who does everything they can sub rosa.

You don't negotiate with that Ayatollah with only carrots, with no sticks or fear of sticks you get nowhere as Carter found out.

What caused that Ayatollah to back down in the Iran/Iraq War? Only when he realized Iraq would start overrunning them again did he make peace.

And, yes I was talking about Americans in general not Evengelicals in this area as it hurt liberalism that it took the kind of Carter track on foreign policy that was unable to get things done on the world stage and the public ended up watching Americans abused on a daily basis on their TV screens.
 
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Im not too familiar about other Christian sects but I know for a fact the Catholic Church forbids all forms of birth control.

Yes. They, and other conservatives, should be flexible and give up on that position if they want abortion to remain illegal.
 
Then you fundamentally don't understand what the abortion debate is about, your compromise is basically ~90% win for the conservatives

As opposed to a 100% win for the liberals OTL? How do you figure the 90% number?

I perfectly understand the abortion issue. Do you? One side says that a woman's body belongs exclusively to the woman and only she should have a say while the other side says that human life is sacred whether inside a woman's body or not.

No?
 

RousseauX

Donor
As opposed to a 100% win for the liberals OTL?
I perfectly understand the abortion issue. Do you? One side says that a woman's body belongs exclusively to the woman and only she should have a say while the other side says that human life is sacred whether inside a woman's body or not.

No?

The other side thinks life begins at conception which is a religious precept hence why evangelicals sign up to it

but given this you should understand why your compromise isn't actually a compromise and in fact there isn't really a way to compromise on the issue in a meaningful way

How do you figure the 90% number?
because abortion is illegal in exchange for dropping abstinence sex ed that's why
 
You don't negotiate with that Ayatollah with only carrots, with no sticks or fear of sticks you get nowhere as Carter found out.
When Iran's revolutionary government released the hostages after 444 days, Reagan's saber-rattling, and/or primarily to embarrass Carter?
 
And somehow the ACLU is really unpopular among conservatives, even though they believe in civil liberties, too.

I know there's now a legal foundation which goes after things from the conservative perspective.

PODs might be, if from all the activism of the '60s, one or several groups sprang up in the '70s, to give the ACLU a run for their money. And these other groups are also from the left-liberal perspective. Maybe more bread-and-butter pro bono legal work, and not necessarily always looking for the highest profile cases to change public policy (this may be an unfair characterization of the ACLU).
 
Im not too familiar about other Christian sects but I know for a fact the Catholic Church forbids all forms of birth control.

The Catholic vs. Protestant angle is largely forgotten here, and in the realm of opposition to abortion and birth control it is highly relevant.

Even though Catholicism forbids birth control, many Catholics ignore that rule, and even most of those who follow it have no objection to it being legal under the political law, though they object to Church-related employers paying for it via health insurance.

The Protestants mostly consider birth control your private business if you're married; the Fundamentalist sects of Protestantism think sex without marriage is a sin but wouldn't necessarily try to use the political law to restrict birth control access, seeing it as a lesser evil than abortion or giving birth out of wedlock.

On the abortion issue, for Catholics it really is about "life". Most Catholics think rape and incest, while tragic, don't justify the taking of fetal life. Most Protestants who oppose abortion think of pregnancy as a "penalty" for "playing around" and are more open to exceptions to abortion prohibitions in situations which aren't the woman's "fault", namely rape and incest. (Apparently these people think consensual incest doesn't happen, LOL!)
 
I have never understood why abortion was so divisive. It is so easy to find a compromise that could satisfy both liberals and conservatives; require couples that don't want kids to take birth control pills. Just pop a pill. It's that's easy and abortion can be avoided. Liberals would have to agree that abortion should be a no-no and conservatives would have to agree that birth control measures are ok and that sexual abstinence should not be held up as a virtue. A perfectly good compromise.

That's why I think it is more than abortion. It seems that liberals and conservatives hate each other and don't want to give each other an inch. That's the problem, not abortion.

The irony with abortion and sexuality in the US is that "conservative values" are a large part of why there are so many abortions in the US compared to Western Europe.

Even among people who don't believe sexual abstinence is a virtue, that meme is so prevalent in America that IMHO it affects people's (especially women's) decisions subliminally.

I need to digress for a moment. Until a non-barrier male birth control method is invented, men will (on statistical average, not every individual) try to push responsibility for birth control onto women. This is because a condom necessarily reduces the pleasure of sex. Since I don't know how graphic I can get without getting in trouble, I'll just say "responsiveness" isn't the only issue, contrary to what manufacturers say.

On the other hand, American women often feel the nagging pull of the meme that they are "bad" if they like sex "too much". Of course, planning ahead by using birth control is an indication thereof. So they play this mental game of not planning to have sex but instead getting drunk and/or "swept up in the moment", with disastrous results.

End the meme that sex is "bad" and America's abortion rates will plummet.
 
Maybe if mainstream Protestant churches tried to provide more realistic sex ed.

And maybe if the public discussion on date rape and other abusive shit, instead of the mid 80s, happened a decade earlier in the mid 70s. Sone guys are genuinely stumped and confused and don't seem to understand that a young woman enthusiastically participating in a make-out session is not necessarily consenting to more. Other guys use gray area as a weapon and an excuse for asshole-ish behavior. I have long thought that if athletes and other guys with undeniable macho credentials call out this abusive behavior, it will make a positive difference.

And if mainstream churches are doing their best on this and other issues, it will make a bridge of sorts and evangelicals won't be so alone.
 

jahenders

Banned
The irony with abortion and sexuality in the US is that "conservative values" are a large part of why there are so many abortions in the US compared to Western Europe.

Even among people who don't believe sexual abstinence is a virtue, that meme is so prevalent in America that IMHO it affects people's (especially women's) decisions subliminally.

I need to digress for a moment. Until a non-barrier male birth control method is invented, men will (on statistical average, not every individual) try to push responsibility for birth control onto women. This is because a condom necessarily reduces the pleasure of sex. Since I don't know how graphic I can get without getting in trouble, I'll just say "responsiveness" isn't the only issue, contrary to what manufacturers say.

On the other hand, American women often feel the nagging pull of the meme that they are "bad" if they like sex "too much". Of course, planning ahead by using birth control is an indication thereof. So they play this mental game of not planning to have sex but instead getting drunk and/or "swept up in the moment", with disastrous results.

End the meme that sex is "bad" and America's abortion rates will plummet.

I don't think it's reasonable to assume they'll "plummet."

So, your theory is essentially that if sex isn't viewed as "bad", then women will consciously plan to have sex and consistently apply birth control measures in that planning? That sounds highly dubious. First, women have to accept that they're planning to have sex in high numbers. Second, those women have to acquire and utilize birth control at a near-100% rate. If 100% of women could safely/comfortably use birth control pills (or injections), that might work. However, a certain percentage of women either have serious medicinal side effects and another percentage wouldn't want to use it because they might soon decide to try to get pregnant. So, in those cases, those women would have to use some other highly reliable birth control at a near-100% rate.

Finally, this assumes that the (presumably) higher overall rate of intercourse outside of committed relationships, multiplied by the failure to plan rate AND the birth control failure rate doesn't offset any reductions in unplanned pregnancies from your "sex is ok" meme. I don't think it's reasonable to take that as a given.

So, the rate of unplanned pregnancies might decrease somewhat if all women buy into that and plan accordingly, but plummeting isn't likely.
 
I don't think it's reasonable to assume they'll "plummet."

So, your theory is essentially that if sex isn't viewed as "bad", then women will consciously plan to have sex and consistently apply birth control measures in that planning? That sounds highly dubious. First, women have to accept that they're planning to have sex in high numbers. Second, those women have to acquire and utilize birth control at a near-100% rate. If 100% of women could safely/comfortably use birth control pills (or injections), that might work. However, a certain percentage of women either have serious medicinal side effects and another percentage wouldn't want to use it because they might soon decide to try to get pregnant. So, in those cases, those women would have to use some other highly reliable birth control at a near-100% rate.

Finally, this assumes that the (presumably) higher overall rate of intercourse outside of committed relationships, multiplied by the failure to plan rate AND the birth control failure rate doesn't offset any reductions in unplanned pregnancies from your "sex is ok" meme. I don't think it's reasonable to take that as a given.

So, the rate of unplanned pregnancies might decrease somewhat if all women buy into that and plan accordingly, but plummeting isn't likely.

I don't necessarily think sex outside of committed relationships will increase without the meme against it. That meme is largely ignored on the conscious level already. It's the subconscious level I'm talking about.

However, I'll admit I could be wrong about that and any effect on the rate of unwanted pregnancies could be offset (or more) by a change in absolute numbers as you said.
 
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