Document 27.7 Paul Weyrich, Building the Moral Majority, 1979

Document 27.7

Paul Weyrich | Building the Moral Majority, 1979

Paul Weyrich, a conservative Republican from Wisconsin and founder of the Heritage Foundation think tank, orchestrated the formation of the Moral Majority. A devout Catholic, he sought to unite Christians in a crusade against abortion and other liberal causes, as the following excerpt shows.

Because of the strong political reaction against abortion, the necrophiliac agenda for euthanasia, limiting the number of children a family may have (population control) and other overt antifamily schemes has been slowed down considerably. . . .

What the right-to-life movement has managed to put together on the abortion issue is only a sample of what is to come when the full range of family and educational issues becomes the focus of debate in the 1980s.

The homosexual rights advocates, genetic engineers and militant secular humanists who insist on their religion in the schools had better understand what is happening.

The threat to the family has caused leaders of various denominations to put aside their sectarian differences and, for the first time in decades, agree on basic principles worth fighting for. . . . [T]he pro-family movement is a recognition that the moral majority must be put together as a coalition—because our very right to worship as we choose, to bring up our families in some kind of moral order, to educate our children free from the interference of the state, to follow the commands of Holy Scripture and the Church are at stake.

Source: Paul Weyrich, “Building the Moral Majority,” Conservative Digest, August 1979, 18–19.