314 a short history of the united states
society engaged in more frequent sexual activities. These encounters
became so prevalent that they produced a large number of teenage
pregnancies and many one-parent families. Among homosexuals a
dreadful epidemic broke out in the 1980 s, when a virus known as ac-
quired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, caused the deaths of
countless individuals, many of whom contracted the infection by in-
jecting themselves with illegal drugs.
In 1979 the Reverend Jerry Falwell, pastor of a Baptist church in Vir-
ginia, had founded an organization he called the Moral Majority, a
conservative religious group that became politically active. Among other
things, it lobbied Congress and party leaders to enact legislation that
would halt the “immoral behavior” which was “corrupting the nation”
and would restore “traditional family values” and the “free enterprise
system” which had been the bedrock of American life for the past 200
years. This extreme right-wing movement proved to have enormous po-
litical power in local and national elections and increasingly edged the
Republican party toward a greater commitment to religious values.
Other important changes to American society included the fact that
men and women lived longer than previous generations, thanks in
large part to the advances in medical science, such as the discovery of
drugs to cure or prevent numerous diseases. In the last half of the
twentieth century the number of Americans who lived to retirement
age doubled. Many lived into their seventies and eighties, and by the
twenty-fi rst century it was not uncommon for men and women to live
to be 100. This caused a surprising turnaround in the early twenty-fi rst
century. More people left the South than arrived in the Sun Belt. Cen-
sus reports showed that from 2000 to 2005 , approximately 120 , 000
people left and only 87 , 000 arrived in the South. A de cade earlier,
something like 57 , 000 had left and 92 , 000 had arrived. Evidently men
and women who reached their seventies or eighties, especially if their
spouses had died, moved back north to be with their children and
grandchildren. Still, of the ten cities in the country with the highest
number of residents by the middle of 2007 , four of them were located in
the south: Houston with 2,144,491, Phoenix with 1,512,986, San Anto-
nio with 1,296,682, and Dallas with 1,232,940. Only New York, Los
Angeles, and Chicago had higher numbers of populations.
The decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade allowed women