The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal

[JHB]

27. it is also interesting to corelate the GOP-conservative wooing of fundies with this timeline...

That was when conservatives were looking for issues to split labor away from the Democratic Party, and abortion made a nice issue with which to do that along womens- and sex-issues while putting a compassionate face on it (just think of those poor innocent babies) rather than as simply moral scolds. All they had to do was sell the fundamentalists on a "catholic" issue.

The Moral Majority was formally initiated as a result of a struggle for control of an American conservative Christian advocacy group known as Christian Voice during 1978. Robert Grant, Christian Voice's founder, stated in a news conference that the Religious Right was a "sham... controlled by three Catholics and a Jew." Paul Weyrich, Terry Dolan, Richard Viguerie (the Catholics) and Howard Phillips (the Jew) left Christian Voice. During a 1979 meeting, they urged televangelist Jerry Falwell to found Moral Majority (a phrase coined by Weyrich). This was also the beginning of the New Christian Right.

Establishment and organizational activity
Falwell and Weyrich founded the Moral Majority in June 1979. The Moral Majority was a southern-oriented organization of the Christian Right, although the Moral Majority’s state chapters and political activity extended beyond the South. After the Moral Majority’s establishment, the state chapters grew quickly, with organizations in eighteen states by 1980. The variety of resources available to the Moral Majority at its founding facilitated this rapid expansion, which included Falwell’s “Old Time Gospel Hour” mailing list. In addition, the Moral Majority took control of the “Old Time Gospel Hour’s” publication, Journal Champion, which had been distributed to the show’s donors. Falwell was the organization's best known spokesperson throughout the 1980s. By 1982, Moral Majority surpassed Christian Voice in size and influence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority