Feminist-era legislation was read by evangelicals as a coordinated assault on gender order

Evidence

In 1971, Congress passed the bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Bill with the purpose of establishing a national day-care system to help working parents. It was only thanks to Pat Buchanan, a conservative Catholic White House aide who denounced the plan as one that would bring about “the Sovietization of American children,” that Nixon vetoed the bill. Conservatives saw the legislation both as a socialist scheme to replace parents with the federal government and as an attack on American motherhood. In 1972, the same year Congress overwhelmingly approved the ERA, they also passed Title IX as part of the Education Amendments Act, prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded schools. In 1973, the Supreme Court established women’s constitutional right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade. Together with the growing power of the feminist movement, this series of events appeared to evangelicals to be a coordinated assault on traditional, God-ordained gender roles. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 191

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader work on moral panics — legislation perceived as coordinated assaults on traditional order fits the moral-panic framework from past reading.
• QUESTION: Worth verifying the claim that Nixon’s veto pivoted solely on Buchanan’s framing — how much of this is retrospective conservative narration versus documented history?