The Bush administration, sex and the moral agenda

By Edward Ashbee

The Bush Administration, sex and the moral agenda considers White House policy towards issues such as abortion, sex education, obscenity and same-sex marriage. The book suggests that although accounts have often emphasised the ties between George W. Bush and the Christian right, the administration's strategy was, at least until early 2005, also directed towards the courting of middle ground opinion.

This study offers a detailed and comprehensive survey of policy-making; assesses the political significance of moral concerns; evaluates the role of the Christian right, and throws new light on George W. Bush's years in office and the character of his thinking. The book will prove invaluable for those taking social science courses as well as as well as anyone with a general interest in the Bush presidency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847796424

Edward Ashbee

Edward Ashbee is Head of Social Studies at Denstone College, Staffordshire

Book preview

1

The rise of the moral agenda and American public opinion

Moral and cultural concerns became frontline political issues from the late 1960s onwards.¹ In the years that followed President Richard Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969, tensions around questions such as abortion, single parenthood, the role of women and the legitimacy of same-sex relations played an increasingly important and visible role in debates about public policy, the shaping of party loyalties, the appointment of judges and the electoral process.

The roots of this lay in the ‘sexual revolution’ and the loosening of established moral codes, particularly among the ‘Woodstock generation’ that came of age at the end of the 1960s. The discarding of the conventions associated with romance and courtship has been well charted in both music and words. As Richard Neville, the transnational editor of countercultural magazines such as Oz and Ink recorded:

Underground sexual morality is, in its own way, as direct as the Old Testament. If a couple like each other, they make love. Table for two, boxes of chocolates, saying it with flowers, cementing it with diamonds … seem as dated as Terry Thomas in a smoking jacket. The ancient rituals do not apply.²

The impact of the ‘sexual revolution’ was not just limited to those who had chosen to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’. The expressive individualism that underpinned the changes in attitudes and behaviour laid the basis for new social movements. The feminist movement put forward calls for access to contraception and abortion and, at the same time, offered a redefinition of womanhood and a critique of the family. The National Organization for Women (NOW), which became the ‘peak’ organisation within the American women’s movement, was formed in 1966 while more radical women’s liberation groups, such as those that organised the protests against the Miss America contest, began to emerge a year later.³ At the end of the decade, the gay liberation movement was established following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village bar. Although it initially campaigned against discrimination, sections of the movement shifted, during the years that followed, from the calls for rights that had defined its early days towards ‘queer politics’. Talk of equality was displaced by an increasingly vigorous critique of heterosexist structures and institutions.

Others also felt the cultural shockwaves. The suburbs, which had been mocked by Mike Nichols in his 1967 film, The Graduate, as the epicentre of surface conformity, neuroses and hidden desire, became associated in newspaper and magazine reports with ‘open marriages’ and ‘swinging’, a phenomenon captured just two years later in the film, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. Despite the disquiet and hostility of many in the women’s movement as well as the anger of cultural conservatives, pornography became more widely available and took an increasingly explicit form. A count in the spring of 1970 revealed that there were 830 adults-only bookshops, 1,424 bookshops with adults-only sections, and 200 cinemas showing hard-core films.⁴ In 1970, the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography which had been established by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 concluded that it could find no evidence of a link between pornography and harmful behaviour. While it backed laws prohibiting the sale of pornography to children, it called for an end to legal restrictions on the acquisition and use of sexually explicit materials by adults.

‘Sexual revolution’

Of course, some accounts of the ‘sexual revolution’ need to be qualified. The most popular representations of the era are shrouded in myth. Ira Reiss’s 1967 study of young people suggested that although more premarital sexual activity was taking place than there had been a generation earlier, it was largely limited to steady, monogamous and long-term relationships.⁵ Similarly, Tom Smith concludes that the metaphor of a sexual ‘revolution’ is a poor description and an exaggeration if applied to popular attitudes. Although there were significantly higher levels of approval for premarital sex as the 1960s and 1970s progressed, allowing unmarried couples who slept together to do it in a more open and less furtive way, attitudes towards homosexuality and, for that matter, extra-marital sexual relationships, remained firmly traditionalist.⁶ Once the marriage vows had been taken, an overwhelming majority felt that they should be respected. There were also important attitudinal differences between the cultural character of the metropolitan regions on the east and west coasts and the more rural American ‘heartland’.

Nonetheless, despite these caveats, the ‘sexual revolution’ had a reality insofar as it ushered in, or at the least accelerated, long-term shifts in the character of ‘leading cultural indicators’, as William Bennett, President George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Education and ‘drugs tsar’, was later to dub them. Illegitimacy rates rose. In 1970, 26.4 per cent of births were to unmarried mothers but twenty years later, in 1990, it was 43.8 per cent.⁷ During the same period, the proportion of single-parent families, as a percentage of all families, more than doubled, reaching 28.1 per cent in 1990.⁸ The divorce rate increased by over a third and the number of cohabiting households increased rose sixfold.⁹

The cultural changes of the period set the stage for a shift by the courts. The US Supreme Court, which seemed to have been captured by the liberal zeitgeist of the age, based many of its most far-reaching judgements upon a loose constructionist understanding of the Constitution. The Justices emphasised implied rights alongside those that were formally assured. They cited the spirit of the Constitution rather than the literal text. The Court was also increasingly drawn towards judicial activism. From the perspective of its more conservative and traditionalist critics, the Court was no longer showing due deference to the elected branches of government but was instead going beyond its constitutional bounds.

The Court’s 1965 ruling, Griswold v. Connecticut, had particular significance. It drew on notions of substantive due process and an implied ‘right to privacy’ in ways that would be built upon in later years.¹⁰ Griswold struck down laws preventing the sale of contraceptives to married couples. Seven years later, in a 1972 ruling, Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Court extended the right to privacy to unmarried couples by striking down a Massachusetts law that restricted the distribution of contraceptives to those who were married. As Justice William J. Brennan asserted in the majority opinion:

If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.¹¹

There were nonetheless limits to the privacy rights established by Griswold and the Eisenstadt rulings. As late as 2004, twenty-four states still had laws prohibiting adultery and ten had anti-fornication statutes.¹² However, in the wake of Eisenstadt, prosecutions became exceptionally rare and their constitutionality was open to question. A course had been set.

A year after Eisenstadt, in a momentous ruling that restructured judicial politics over the decades that followed, Roe v. Wade (1973) extended the right to privacy still further by declaring that, within at least the early stages of a pregnancy, there was an untrammelled right to an abortion and at later stages, provision was liberalised. Restrictive laws were struck down.

From 1973 onwards, the number of abortions performed annually spiraled reaching 1,608,600 in 1990.¹³ While the Court acknowledged the constitutionality of further constraints by, for example, upholding the 1977 Hyde Amendment which prohibited the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortion, the basic principle underpinning Roe remained intact (see pages 204–5). Indeed, there were suggestions that because of the judicial tradition that courts should defer to precedent, the ruling became more firmly established with each month that passed.

The rise of the Christian right

The changes in values wrought by the ‘sexual revolution’ are however only a part of the picture. Just a few years after the crowds had gathered at Yasgur’s farm for the Woodstock festival in August 1969, the Christian right had established itself as an important constituency that could exert significant political leverage. It was a classic ‘counter-movement’ that set its face against the moral and cultural shifts of the preceding years.

There can be little doubt about the extent and scale of the political consequences of these developments. Interest group activity took a more factional and intense form. Leading figures within the Christian right began to play a role in Republican Party politics. The process of nomination and confirmation to the federal courts began to be structured around particular moral and cultural concerns. Issues that had been in the background moved to the foreground. The centre of ideological gravity within the American right shifted towards social conservatism. New ‘wedge’ issues emerged that divided long-established political blocs. The discourse of campaigning and policy-making increasingly incorporated notions associated with morality, sex, sexuality, gender roles and the politics of identity.

Interest group and electoral politics

The most visible expression of the reaction against the sexual revolution was the formation of the Moral Majority in 1979. Led by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, it often seemed to speak in terms that stressed the principle of retribution. As Falwell asserted, ‘AIDS is God’s judgment of a society that does not live by His rules’.¹⁴ However, the Moral Majority had lost much of its initial élan by the mid-1980s and was formally wound up at the end of the decade.

Its place was taken by the Christian Coalition which was established in October 1989. The Coalition built upon the networks formed during the Reverend Pat Robertson’s campaign to win the 1988 Republican presidential nomination and against a background of growing discontent with the seemingly elitist, ‘insider’ character of Washington ‘Beltway politics’ as well as increasing disenchantment with George H. W. Bush’s administration. Whereas Reagan had been regarded as steadfast, Bush appeared to have a much more pragmatic and less resolute character. Relatively few evangelicals had secured administration posts and despite the President’s periodic gestures towards evangelicals, the cultural gulf with his mainline Protestantism seemed to be growing. While the White House placed Clarence Thomas, a strict constructionist who became one of its most resolutely conservative members, on the Supreme Court bench, his appointment was overshadowed by the nomination of Judge David Souter who generally sided with the Court’s more liberal members. Hopes of rolling back earlier Supreme Court rulings, most notably Roe, remained unfulfilled.

Although Pat Robertson was the Coalition’s founder and served as president, the organisation also reflected the personality and character of the executive director, Ralph Reed. Reed, who had led the College Republicans was, despite his relative youth, an experienced operative. He quickly established himself as a leading lobbyist and one of the most influential figures within Republican circles. In a cover story, Time magazine dubbed him the ‘right hand of God’. Under Reed’s direction, the Coalition moved away from the uncompromising and sometimes vituperative declarations that had characterised the Moral Majority’s campaigning, although there were suggestions that the shift was more a matter of style than policy substance.

The November 1994 Congressional elections provided testimony to the Coalition’s growing role within the Republican Party and its electoral muscle. Forty-four of the 73 Republican House freshmen and 8 of the 11 newly elected Republican Senate freshmen were, according to the Coalition, ‘prolife, profamily’ candidates.¹⁵ They had concentrated their resources on the 45 most closely fought contests. In these, the candidate that they backed won in 30 races. This was, as John C. Green has noted, more than twice the size of the Republicans’ margin of victory in the House of Representatives. He suggests that the movement probably had a broadly similar impact in 20 Senate races and 15 gubernatorial campaigns. Furthermore, the Coalition probably had even greater influence in elections to state legislatures and local government positions and school boards. As Green notes:

School boards became a special target of movement pragmatists, since these positions offer influence over education and also develop a cadre of potential candidates for higher office in the future. One study found that 14 per cent of school board candidates nationwide were associated with the Christian right, and many more may have been supported by the movement. One of the best known successes was in Kansas, where Christian conservatives gained control of the state board of education and removed evolution from standardised tests.¹⁶

Nor was the Christian Coalition alone. Other Christian right organisations also grew, although for the most part they had more of an ‘outsider’ status than the Coalition.¹⁷ Indeed, in some states, the Family Research Council was more active than the Coalition although instead of building grassroots chapters it often sought instead to create ties with established organisations.¹⁸ Concerned Women for America, which recruited many of its members from among Roman Catholics, was built through local Bible and prayer groups. The Traditional Values Coalition emphasised opposition to homosexuality and offered backing to those ministries that sought to persuade gays to abandon their sexual orientation. There were also state-based campaigns. In Colorado, following the passage of ordinances in Aspen, Boulder and Denver that prohibited discrimination against homosexuals in the provision of housing and jobs, campaigners sought to pass a constitutional amendment that would deny such ‘special rights’. Companies, they asserted, would be compelled to employ gays and lesbians while landlords would be forced, whatever their religious convictions, to rent accommodation to gay and lesbian couples.

Alongside these organisations, there were also spiritual campaigns that had a latent political character. Groupings such as True Love Waits and The Silver Ring Thing encouraged and promoted sexual abstinence before marriage. Promise Keepers brought evangelical men together so as to renew their commitment to Christ and their families. At its peak in 1997, a Washington DC rally attracted between 700,000 and a million people. However, Promise Keepers’ emphasis on notions of male leadership and the ways in which men had abandoned their duties by being ‘feminised’ provoked some controversy. The organization also faced serious financial difficulties and, in 1998, adopted a volunteer structure.

Patrick J. Buchanan’s bids to secure the Republican presidential nomination also brought cultural concerns to the fore. While his insurgent or ‘pitchfork’ style led to tensions with the Republican establishment, and the Christian Coalition distanced itself from his efforts, he gained 36.5 per cent of the vote in the 1992 New Hampshire primary contest, thereby denting the electoral credibility of President George H. W. Bush and contributing to his loss of the White House later in the year. In 1996, Buchanan won New Hampshire, slowing the momentum of Senator Bob Dole’s campaign. Buchanan spoke in similar terms to the Christian right although his campaigns were also structured around a critique of globalisation and immigration. He attacked abortion, condemned the ‘raw sewage of pornography’, and made a plea for moral traditionalism. He drew on memories of his childhood in the neighbourhoods of Washington DC, the teachings of Roman Catholicism, and ‘paleoconservative’ notions of American nationhood. His 1992 national convention address, which some assert led to the alienation of moderate voters from the Republican ticket, was structured around a commitment to ‘the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which this nation was built’.¹⁹ Using military metaphors and drawing parallels with the retaking of the Los Angeles neighbourhoods by the National Guard following the urban riots of April and May 1992, he spoke of a religious war for the soul of the nation. Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton were in the enemy trenches:

The agenda Clinton and Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.²⁰

A quarter of a century after its emergence in the 1970s, the Christian right had established itself as an influential political constituency. It was embedded within Republican ranks. While the movement faced significant organisational difficulties at the end of the 1990s and during the Bush years, a survey conducted in 2000 by Campaigns and Elections based upon estimates by the movement’s supporters and opponents, suggested that Christian conservatives were regarded as being in a strong position in 18 state Republican parties. In 26 states, Christian conservatives were said to have moderate influence. This was twice the 1994 number. In 7 state Republican parties, Christian conservatives only had a weak presence, a decline from 20, 6 years earlier. And the weak category declined to seven cases, down from 20, 6 years prior.²¹

Judicial politics

The long-term significance of the 1973 Roe ruling by the US Supreme Court cannot be overstated. Although other countries liberalised their abortion laws, this was generally the prerogative of the legislature rather than the courts. In the US, in the wake of Roe, the locus of the abortion debate shifted to the judicial arena. Lobbying activity changed in character. Alongside leaflets and protests, campaigning groups began to submit amicus curiae briefs to the courts on a routine basis.

The nominations process became overtly politicised and the Senate, the chamber responsible for the confirmation of presidential nominees to the federal courts, acquired an increasingly partisan character. Confirmation hearings became highly charged as pro-life and pro-choice activists sought to discredit nominees who might not have sided with them. David Brooks has described the process. Through the Roe ruling, he has argued, the Supreme Court:

set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since … Each nomination battle is more vicious than the last as the methodologies of personal destruction are perfected.²²

During the 1980s, cultural conservatives hoped that President Reagan’s judicial appointments would usher in a counter-revolution that would lead to a rolling back of Roe and other ‘loose constructionist’ rulings. Despite assurances from the White House, there had been little enthusiasm for Sandra Day O’Connor, his first nominee to the Supreme Court. In September 1986, Antonin Scalia joined the bench and William Rehnquist, who had served as an Associate Justice since 1972, became Chief Justice. Then, in 1987, he nominated Robert Bork. Amid fears that Bork, a formidable thinker and jurist, would add an unyielding conservative voice to the bench and perhaps win over others, there was determined opposition to his nomination from advocacy groups and within the Senate. Bork’s role as Solicitor-General during Richard Nixon’s final months in the White House was resurrected. Although he appeared to have modified many of his earlier views when questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Bork was accused of seeking the reversal of pivotal Court rulings including Brown v. Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas) which led to the desegregation of the schools and Roe v. Wade. Bork’s nomination was defeated by 58 to 42.

President George H. W. Bush’s 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas, a black conservative who became one of the most resolute of the ‘strict constructionists’ on the Court, also met bitter opposition. Political considerations meshed together with personal issues after testimony was given to the Senate Judiciary Committee by Anita Hill, who had worked with Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She alleged sexual harassment. Despite a sustained campaign by liberal organisations, Thomas eventually won nomination but only by 52 votes to 48. While President Clinton’s two Supreme Court nominees emerged unscathed from the confirmation hearings, his nominations to the lower courts faced difficulty. Between 1996 and 2000, twenty nominees to the circuit courts of appeal were denied hearings, or a vote, or consideration on the Senate floor.²³

Issue evolution, partisanship and polarisation

The increasing visibility of cultural issues, the embedding of the Christian right within the Republican Party, and the growing fractiousness of the judicial confirmation process, went together with changes in the character of partisanship.

The US parties were traditionally broad and loose coalitions. Party beliefs and traditions were structured around social welfare provision and management of the economy. In the wake of the New Deal, the Democrats were associated with a degree of regulation and interventionism as well as provision for some of those in need. Although radical conservatives such as Phyllis Schlafly asserted that the party echoed the politics of the Democrats rather than offering a choice, the Republicans were more closely tied to laissez-faire, the free market and individual self-reliance. Insofar as sexual morality had a place in the political process, it was not a Republican prerogative. Indeed, even in the mid-1980s, the Democrats still had a lead when respondents were asked about ‘traditional family values’.²⁴ Seemingly, the bolstering of the family was associated more with the expansion of government provision than radical tax-cutting policies.

Although other issues, most notably national security, are important, today’s partisans are rather more clearly defined on the basis of moral values and faith. The development of partisan identities structured, at least in part, around moral concerns and the relocation of ‘morality’ so that it is the property of conservatism has gone hand-in-hand with growing partisanship and an increased sense of rancour and bitterness between the parties.

During the 1970s, the Democrats embraced many of the ideas and principles that were rooted in cultural liberalism. In the decades that followed, and in the wake of election defeats, the party shifted rightwards and in the 1990s tolerated Bill Clinton’s emphasis on small government, welfare reform and law and order. Nonetheless, Democratic thinking continued to draw upon identity politics and stress the rights of traditionally disadvantaged groupings. In particular, the party was tied despite small numbers of ‘pro-life’ Democrats, to abortion rights and the representation of sexual behaviour in terms of private and morally relativistic choices.

For its part, Republicanism became increasingly tied to cultural conservatism. During the 1970s, the party had included cultural liberals as well as conservatives in its ranks. Indeed, in 1972, a higher proportion of Republicans than Democrats believed that abortion should be ‘always permitted’.²⁵ For the remainder of the decade, more Democrats than Republicans told pollsters that abortion should be ‘never permitted’.²⁶

The ‘takeover’ of the GOP by cultural conservatives can be largely attributed to newcomers within the Republican bloc. White southerners defected from the Democrats in the wake of civil rights reforms. Figures such as Strom Thurmond who had represented the ‘Dixiecrat’ faction within the Democratic Party became loyal Republicans. There was also a shift among traditionalist blue-collar ‘white ethnics’ (such as Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans and Polish-Americans) in cities such as Chicago who felt much more of an affinity with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan than with those in the Democrats’ ranks who talked of minority rights and appeared to make common cause with America’s enemies. At the end of the 1970s, evangelicals joined the Republican bloc and by 1986, 69 per cent of white ‘born-again’ Christians who cast a vote, backed the Republicans.²⁷ By the end of the 1980s, other churchgoers, particularly those who belonged to ‘mainline’ Protestant denominations such as Episcopalianism, had also began to shift towards the Republicans, although their loyalty was less pronounced than that of evangelicals and was, in part, a function of the frequency with which they attended church services. Moral concerns may have played an important part in this. Although there was, as Ted Jelen suggests, an initial reluctance, among the mainline Protestant churchgoers to join together with evangelicals, President George H. W. Bush’s formal embrace of conservative social attitudes (by, for example, backing ‘pro-life’ policies) may have made the politics of cultural traditionalism more acceptable to many of them.²⁸ At the same time, Roman Catholics were also moving towards Republicanism although this was not, Jelen argues, correlated with moral traditionalism or the specific issues associated with it but instead seemed to be tied to growing prosperity and upward socioeconomic