1100 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy
politically and offended many white Americans. In 2000, Republican presiden-
tial candidate George W. Bush emphasized that his brand of conservatism was
multicultural, not exclusionary.
Cultural Conservatism
Immigration occupied only one front in what came to be called the Culture
Wars— battles over moral values that raged throughout the 1990s. The Chris-
tian Coalition, founded by evangelical minister Pat Robertson, became a major
force in Republican politics. It launched crusades against gay rights, abortion,
secularism in public schools, and government aid to the arts. Pat Buchanan’s
Republican convention speech of 1992 calling for a “religious war for the soul
of America,” mentioned earlier, alarmed many voters. But cultural conserva-
tives hailed it as their new rallying cry.
It sometimes appeared during the 1990s that the country was refighting
old battles between traditional religion and modern secular culture. In an echo of
the 1920s, a number of localities required the teaching of creationism, a religious
alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution. The battles of the 1960s seemed to be
forever unresolved. Many conservatives railed against the erosion of the nuclear
family, the changing racial landscape produced by immigration, and what they
considered a general decline of traditional values. Cultural conservatives were
not satisfied with a few victories over what they considered immorality, such
as the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which barred gay couples from spou-
sal benefits provided by federal law. (The Supreme Court would declare the law
unconstitutional in 2013.)
Family Values in Retreat
The censuses of 2000 and 2010 showed family values increasingly in disarray.
Half of all marriages ended in divorce (70 percent on the West Coast). In 2010,
more than 40 percent of births were to unmarried women, not only sexually
active teenagers, but growing numbers of professional women in their thirties
and forties as well. For the first time, fewer than half of all households consisted
of married couples, and only one- fifth were “traditional” families— a wife, hus-
band, and their children. More than half of all adults were single or divorced.
Two- thirds of married women worked outside the home. The pay gap between
men and women, although narrowing, persisted. In 2010, the weekly earn-
ings of women with full- time jobs stood at 82 percent of those of men— up
from 63 percent in 1980. In only two occupational categories did women earn
more than men— postal service clerks and special education teachers.
Although dominated by conservatives, the Supreme Court, in Casey v.
Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania (1992), reaffirmed a woman’s right to