In a story I wrote a few days ago about the extremist New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement, I included a photo of one of the church members shooting a male goat because he had seen it humping another male goat. He uploaded the photo to his social media with the caption, "No fags in heaven."

My dad was friends with Jerry Falwell, and I met the family several times. I never heard him say he'd shoot a dog for being gay, but I heard other people say that. Baptist churches in the south at the time were absolutely places you could say something like that and not have anybody take offense.

Weyrich and Falwell certainly knew that. They didn't hesitate to take political advantage of extreme animus toward LGBTQ people, which I'm certain they shared. Well, at least I'm certain Falwell shared the animus. I never met Weyrich.

They manufactured outrage toward abortion, but they harnessed existing outrage toward lesbians and gay men. (Trans people were less an issue, because trans people barely impinged public consciousness at the time.)

What's crazy to me is that they're manufacturing worked with abortion. Evangelical Christians have become intensely opposed to abortion when they never used to be. And they believe they (institutionally and religiously) were always intensely opposed to abortion, even though that's plainly not true.

To some extent, they're losing the cultural war on LGBTQ issues, not in hardcore Baptist pews but across society even among many Christians, who just can't get very worked up over same-sex marriage and similar issues.

But abortion? That really caught fire! It's crazy, in a way, that a quest for religious political power led to so much societal upheaval and suffering.