Evangelical Obsession With Roe v. Wade and LGBTQ+ Rights | Excerpt from “Moon in Full” by Marpheen Chann
The following is an excerpt from Moon in Full: A Modern Coming-of-Age Story by Marpheen Chann, who was adopted and came out as gay to his evangelical conservative family in rural Maine.
We were in the throes of a culture war that wanted nothing less than to keep LGBTQ+ people out of the mainstream, out of the public eye, and, thus, silent and invisible. As a nation, we had just emerged from the 1980s and the Reagan administration, which tried to ignore the AIDS crisis, and even referred to it as the “gay plague.” But just before Reagan’s election, another, more sinister phenomenon was quickly growing into a movement that has shaped American politics: the evangelical movement. The election of Ronald Reagan was the first in which evangelicals entered the political fray. Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell laid the foundations of this voting bloc with an organization called the Moral Majority, which caricatured abortion rights and homosexuality to grow a movement that wields tremendous power over the Republican Party today.
From the get-go, despite a fundamentalist moral message, the evangelical movement was already showing signs of an ends-justify-the-means strategy. Reagan, a twice-married man who rarely attended church, was elected with two-thirds of the evangelical vote. Fast- forward to when Donald Trump won 80 percent of the evangelical vote despite multiple marriages, numerous sexual scandals, and being a prolific liar. But few evangelical leaders seem to care—which is interesting, given that President Barack Obama, a self-avowed Christian and whose presidency was free of sexual or morally repugnant scandals, was considered anathema by the evangelical right.
It really boils down to two issues, which helped to bolster and grow Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the evangelical movement: LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive rights. President Obama, amid all the conspiracies regarding his faith and his citizenship, supported women’s and LGBTQ+ rights and, eventually, came out in full-throttled support of same-sex marriage. President Trump’s moral turpitude was overlooked because he was surrounded by evangelical and faith leaders who were advising his administration and driving policy that strips away hard-won rights for LGBTQ+ people and women, from the Department of Education’s policies on whether transgender students can use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity, to pushing through, with the help of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, three conservative Supreme Court nominations to lay the groundwork for state challenges that chip away at Roe v. Wade.
