Weyrich privately judged Reagan’s Dallas speech insufficient on core social issues
Evidence
Publicly, Paul Weyrich was ecstatic. “We gave him a ten-minute standing ovation,” he recalled later. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole movement was snowballing by then.” Privately, however, Weyrich, who had worked so assiduously to change the topic from a defense of racial segregation, confided to conservative allies that he was not pleased with Reagan’s remarks. He noted that the candidate nearly canceled his appearance because, Weyrich said, “aides feared a backlash if Reagan were too closely identified with the so-called Christian Right.” Writing three days after the event, Weyrich complained: “Reagan aides constructed a speech for the candidate which had just enough emotional appeal for the audience, but which carefully avoided the issues of abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, Gay Rights and Prayer in the Schools, each of which is a bottom line issue with the Evangelical/Fundamentalist community represented at the gathering.” — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 137
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Weyrich himself asserted abortion was irrelevant to the Religious Right’s rise — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 22
Related
- Weyrich himself asserted abortion was irrelevant to the Religious Right’s rise (similarity 0.84)
- The Religious Right needed a rallying issue besides racial segregation (similarity 0.80)
- Politics, abortion, and school prayer failed for two decades to rouse evangelicals (similarity 0.80)
Broader Connections
- Weyrich himself asserted abortion was irrelevant to the Religious Right’s rise
#complicates(0.80) — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 22