Ali Velshi explained last night how abortion was only a Trojan horse to put the religious right in power.
The religious right became frustrated by the loss of segregation as an acceptable issue to mobilize their constituency and shifted instead to prioritizing abortion as a means of consolidating religious voters into a more powerful voting bloc.
It worked.
Until that time, abortion was accepted by mainstream religious denominations. The so-called Moral Majority changed all that, Velshi said.
What the anti-abortion true believers never understood is, they were only the targets of a relentless and sophisticated high-pressure marketing campaign by the right wing. While they acted on this moral fervor, Republican politicians continued to get abortions for their girlfriends, and pretended to be religious because that was the new normal.
As Velshi said, it was only a way to take that anger over segregation and use it for their ends.
"Another conservative activist predicted that opposition to abortion would, quote, 'pull together many of our fringe Christian friends,' end quote. That was the plan to bottle up all of that ire that evangelicals felt about segregation, and concentrate on abortion, making sweeping moral arguments against health care that they claim was founded in religion," he said.
"That was the plan to build political power, and Republican politicians campaigned accordingly. And in 1980, Republican candidate for president Ronald Reagan campaigned on a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion."
His courting of the anti-abortion movement won him the presidency. (Okay, that, and his illegal deal with Iran over the hostages.)
And Donald Trump successfully followed the same game plan.
