These States' Leaders Claim to Be 'Pro-Life.' So Why Are So Many of Their Citizens Dying of COVID-19
As the coronavirus surges across the U.S., states across the South and West have reported sharp increases in their daily number of new cases. While the initial outbreaks in New York and Seattle reflected where community spread of the disease began in the U.S., these more recent surges in Florida, Texas, Arizona and some two dozen other states reveal more about our capacity to respond. Many Asian and European countries that experienced their first cases and initial outbreaks at the same time we did have successfully suppressed the virus and returned to semi-normal life. Meanwhile, COVID spreads across the U.S. like contrast dye on an MRI, highlighting a malignancy in our body politic.
When we look closely at the data, the regions where the coronavirus is currently surging are precisely the places where white people have been manipulated by a distorted moral narrative for decades. Ironically, the governors who are most willing to watch their citizens die are the ones who have used “pro-life” rhetoric to compel people of faith to support the narrow interests of corporate greed and white political power. COVID has revealed how the “pro-life” movement is killing us.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Republican politicians who wanted to unite a white electorate in the South, the suburbs and across the Sunbelt knew they could no longer directly appeal to white cultural values in the wake of the civil rights movement. So they began using the language of traditional values and religious liberty to persuade white voters that the real problem in America is moral decline and cultural corruption. By framing women’s rights as an assault on traditional values, this movement mobilized white people who felt threatened by civil rights, women’s rights and the anti-war movement of the 1960s and ‘70s to assert their values as “pro-life.” They opposed abortion while promoting a narrative that blamed poor people for their problems and glorified the “opportunities” corporate profits afford to the industrious.
For the past 40 years, this narrative has been reinforced through a coordinated network of independent media, private school curricula, pulpits and political operatives. As investigative journalist Anne Nelson describes in her book Shadow Network, conservative Christians have increasingly come to live in a self-reinforcing wraparound culture of propaganda. When that network of information demonized efforts to address the current pandemic by staying at home, even from church, they resisted public health advice in the name of religious liberty.
https://time.com/5866928/coronavirus-pro-life/?amp=true&__twitter_impression=true
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