Clashes over “Family Values”

If the promise of a multicultural nation was one contested political issue, another was the state of American families. New Right conservatives charged that the “abrasive experiments of two liberal decades,” as a Reagan administration report put it, had eroded respect for marriage and what they had called, since the 1970s, “family values.” They pointed to the 40 percent rate of divorce among whites and the nearly 60 percent rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies among African Americans. To conservatives, there was a wide range of culprits: legislators who enacted liberal divorce laws, funded child care, and allowed welfare payments to unmarried mothers, as well as judges who condoned abortion and banished religious instruction from public schools.

Abortion Abortion was central to the battles between feminists and religious conservatives and a defining issue between Democrats and Republicans. Feminists who described themselves as prochoice viewed the issue from the perspective of the pregnant woman; they argued that the right to a legal, safe abortion was crucial to her control over her body and life. Conversely, religious conservatives, who pronounced themselves prolife, viewed abortion from the perspective of the unborn fetus and claimed that its rights trumped those of the mother. That is where the debate had stood since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.

By the 1980s, fundamentalist Protestants had assumed leadership of the antiabortion movement, which became increasingly confrontational and politically powerful. In 1987, the religious activist Randall Terry founded Operation Rescue, which mounted protests outside abortion clinics and harassed their staffs and clients. While such vocal protests took shape outside clinics, antiabortion activists also won state laws that limited public funding for abortions, required parental notification before minors could obtain abortions, and mandated waiting periods before any woman could undergo an abortion procedure. Such laws further restricted women’s reproductive choices.

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Activists Protesting Outside the Supreme Court in 2002
In 2002 the Supreme Court considered a case in which the National Organization for Women (NOW) had challenged the legality of abortion clinic protests, such as those undertaken by Operation Rescue. The activists, and the case itself, demonstrated that the question of abortion remained far from settled, and Americans on all sides of the issue continued to hold passionate opinions. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

Gay Rights The issue of homosexuality stirred equally deep passions. As more gay men and women came out of the closet in the years after Stonewall (see “Stonewall and Gay Liberation” in Chapter 28), they demanded legal protections from discrimination in housing, education, and employment. Public opinion about these demands varied by region, but by the 1990s, many cities and states had banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Gay rights groups also sought legal rights for same-sex couples — such as the eligibility for workplace health-care coverage — that were akin to those enjoyed by married heterosexuals. Many of the most prominent national gay rights organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign, focused on full marriage equality: a legal recognition of same-sex marriage that was on par with opposite-sex marriages.

The Religious Right had long condemned homosexuality as morally wrong, and public opinion remained sharply divided. In 1992, Colorado voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that prevented local governments from enacting ordinances protecting gays and lesbians — a measure that the Supreme Court subsequently overturned as unconstitutional. That same year, however, Oregon voters defeated a more radical initiative that would have prevented the state from using any funds “to promote, encourage or facilitate” homosexuality. In 1998, Congress entered the fray by enacting the Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed states to refuse to recognize gay marriages or civil unions formed in other jurisdictions. More recently, gay marriage has been legalized in eleven states: California, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, Washington, and Rhode Island.

Culture Wars and the Supreme Court Divisive rights issues increasingly came before the U.S. Supreme Court. Abortion led the way, with abortion rights activists challenging the constitutionality of the new state laws limiting access to the procedure. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), the Supreme Court upheld the authority of state governments to limit the use of public funds and facilities for abortions. Then, in the important case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), the Court upheld a law requiring a twenty-four-hour waiting period prior to an abortion. Surveying these and other decisions, a reporter suggested that 1989 was “the year the Court turned right,” with a conservative majority ready and willing to limit or invalidate liberal legislation and legal precedents.

This observation was only partly correct. The Court was not yet firmly conservative. Although the Casey decision upheld certain restrictions on abortions, it affirmed the “essential holding” in Roe v. Wade (1973) that women had a constitutional right to control their reproduction. Justice David Souter, appointed to the Court by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, voted with Reagan appointees Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy to uphold Roe. Souter, like O’Connor, emerged as an ideologically moderate justice on a range of issues. Moreover, in a landmark decision, Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Supreme Court limited the power of states to prohibit private homosexual activity between consenting adults and, more recently, in Windsor v. United States (2013) declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. The Court had crept incrementally, rather than lurched, to the right while signaling its continued desire to remain within the broad mainstream of American public opinion.

EXPLAIN CONSEQUENCES

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