proach, religious positions were hard to avoid. In
fact, among the organizations championing the le-
galization of abortion was the Religious Coalition
for Abortion Rights, which in 1993 became the Reli-
gious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. On the
other side, the National Right to Life Committee,
while nonsectarian, reflected conservative Catholic
ideas on what its members considered the moral
significance of an unborn child.
Similarly, religion influenced disagreements
about human sexuality, with liberals arguing against
most restrictions on sexual activity involving con-
senting adults, and conservatives at least disapprov-
ing of sexual intercourse outside marriage, which
they considered to be exclusively between just one
woman and just one man. Thus, on one side of this
cultural war, liberals usually avoided explicit dis-
approval of premarital heterosexual intercourse
among adults and of adult homosexual activity,
while conservatives, even if not advocating legisla-
tion against such practices, were often outspoken
in their disapproval. This disagreement spread to
sex education, with conservatives condemning pro-
grams that failed to stress chastity.
Religion was also involved in other school con-
flicts, including the place of prayer in public schools
and at school-sponsored events, like football games.
Additionally significant was the way in which a reli-
gion, especially Christianity, could be talked about
directly or indirectly in tax-supported schools, with
even the term “Christmas vacation” being replaced
in some schools because of the fear that it showed in-
sensitivity to non-Christians.
Race In the sense that race involves ethnicity, not
merely skin color, the topic was also a major area
from which conflict arose in the culture wars. Al-
though ideas of inferiority based on pigmentation
lingered, most Americans, when called upon pub-
licly, objected to them. The question of preferential
treatment, as through affirmative action, proved
more vexing, with liberals in the culture wars tend-
ing to advocate it as a just measure to correct histori-
cal injustice, and conservatives arguing that it
worked unjustly against innocent individuals and for
the unqualified.
Immigration to the United States also provoked
controversy, especially when the immigrants had il-
legally crossed the border with Mexico. In general,
the liberals in the culture wars sympathized with the
immigrants, who supposedly took low-paying jobs re-
fused by natives of the United States and who, ac-
cording to their sympathizers, lived as law-abiding
persons who would have had to surmount high bar-
riers to enter legally. Seeing, however, a threat to the
nation, many conservatives contended that entering
the United States illegally was itself a crime and that,
unlike immigrants in the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, those coming from Latin America in
huge numbers in the 1990’s were entering a nation
in which governmentally funded welfare payments
were high and the pressure to assimilate or merely to
learn English was low.Impact Providing subjects for commentators and
reporters throughout the 1990’s, the various battles
in the culture wars pointed to bitter differences be-
tween some Americans and occasionally captured
the attention of almost every adult, as in the diver-
gent reactions to Robert Mapplethorpe’s most con-
troversial photographs, to the verdict of not guilty in
the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, and to President
Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica
Lewinsky. Sometimes actual violence moved the
phrase “culture wars” from metaphor toward reality,
as when rioting broke out in Los Angeles in 1992 af-
ter the acquittal of four police officers charged with
beating Rodney King and when a bomb exploded in
Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics. Usually,
however, the culture wars were only a figuratively vio-
lent, though angry, struggle for a nation.Further Reading
Adams, Maurianne, et al., eds.Readings for Diversity
and Social Justice. New York: Routledge, 2000.
This textbook campaigns against what its editors
consider injustice based on race, Jewishness,
sex, sexual orientation, physical or mental dis-
ability, and socioeconomic status.
Bork, Robert H.Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern
Liberalism and American Decline. New York: Re-
ganBooks, 1996. A jurist traces American social
decay to excesses in egalitarianism and individ-
ualism.
Buchanan, Patrick J.State of Emergency: The Third
World Invasion and Conquest of America. New York:
Thomas Dunne Books, 2006. A former presiden-
tial candidate argues that massive immigration,
mostly illegal, threatens the United States with
residents who choose not to assimilate.236 Culture wars The Nineties in America