> I'm familiar with Buchanan, of course, but he's always been a
> professional xenophobe. What I'd be more interested in seeing is the
> extent to which that basis for opposing abortion has actually taken
> root within the anti-abortion movement, at grassroots level and/or
> among the "leaders" of the movement.
>
I don't follow abortion politics as closely as some others on the list, but I've lived in this country all my life and this idea that the U.S. anti-abortion movement is fundamentally about race and immigration strikes me as totally wrong, almost comprehensively wrong. Anti-abortion politics is about the fetish of the nuclear family, women's sexuality, fear of secularization and individualism, etc. The leaders of the movement go out of their way to situate their politics in the discourse of the *universal* value of human life, and they really believe it (in their fashion): They fight against abortion in the third world, they adopt non-white kids from the third world, they fancy themselves the heirs to the abolitionist movement, they're true believers in this stuff. (Of course, they support capital punishment mostly, but I never said they were consistent.) As for the rank-and-file, I grew up around a lot of them, and the same goes for them. The xenophobic anti-immigrant type of conservative is mostly a different tribe and to the extent that the two strands coincide, they don't seem to make the connection between the two issues. I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong about this but I don't think so. Anyone else?
SA