The Christian Right Didn't Mobilize Against Abortion. They First Mobilized Against School Desegregation.

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

53% : Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right's real motive: protecting segregated schools.
48% : In other words, in North Carolina, charter schools are the new seg academies; in some cases, they are old seg academies that have been repurposed to be charter schools.
47% : Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States.
46% : As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school "alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference" in the affairs of evangelical institutions.
45% : We accepted as, well, gospel that the Christian Right had organized itself and rose to power in opposition to the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, which established a woman's right to end a pregnancy without government interference.
45% : Although Bob Jones Jr., the school's founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation.
42% : For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes)
38% : Abortion only came to the forefront because Weyrich et al. found it harder to muster a mass political movement around racial discrimination than it used to be.
37% : In fact, it wasn't until 1979 -- a full six years after Roe -- that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term.
25% : 42 charter schools received a piece of that grant.

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