That Pro-Life Kid in 1984

The middle of the beginning

Jan 22, 2024

Last week, I talked about an event that introduced me to the reality of politics in my home state of Arizona. But the reality is that I had been primed for that reality for years before that introduction.

As a 12-year-old kid in 1984, I was obsessed by two major passions: Indiana Jones, and Ronald Reagan. Since we didn’t have the option of re-watching movies back then, most of my time was spent re-living the thrills through my collection of action figures. And since my mom was careful about limiting my TV time, I often listened to the radio while I played - and my radio was always tuned to KFLR, the local Christian “Family Life Radio” station.

Dr. James Dobson was a big influence on my thinking in those years - and I had a lot of time for thinking. At the time, he was known for his work as a child psychologist, mainly famous for publishing books that defended the practice of spanking and maintaining discipline. Like my family, Dr. Dobson was an evangelical Christian, so much of what he said sounded like what I heard in my church and at family gatherings.

If your path crossed mine in 1984, you would very likely find yourself a captive audience to a long and rambling reenactment of The Temple of Doom or a restatement of whatever I had learned listening to then-recent broadcasts of Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio program. We know a lot more about the autism spectrum these days, and when I recall those years of my childhood, I see that I exhibited behaviors that suggest that I was on that spectrum. I displayed an obsession with specific topics, an inability to read social cues, and a tendency to expound on my obsessions in inappropriate ways at inappropriate times - combined with less visible behaviors, like “stimming,” repetitive play, and intense attachment to objects.

But at the time, in 1984, I certainly had no framework for understanding what was going on in my head. I only knew what I was told - and what I processed through repetition and play during the long hours of Arizona summer vacation. Most of what I was told came from people who presented themselves to me as “non-political” and who didn’t claim to have any special knowledge about the world except for what God revealed to them. (Think about THAT claim for half a second.) We were people who assumed our moral authority came directly from God, and we tried our best to relate to the rest of the world using “common sense” - a term that comes up a lot when people don’t want you to question their basic assumptions.

That combination of moral certainty and common sense was how I was taught to approach the world. But everyone, including Dr. Dobson, went out of their way to distance themselves from politics. How a person voted was strictly between them and their convictions. Of course, by the time a person went to the polls, their family and their church community and their kindly but firm radio mentors would have made it clear that your convictions could only really support one person or party - and in my family, church community, and radio universe, that was the party that took a “pro-life” position on the issue of abortion.

To borrow from Fred Clark (aka “The Slacktivist”) in his 2016 essay “This is what abortion politics is for”:

Back in the 1970s, white evangelicalism was mired in the disgrace of having been epically, utterly, spectacularly wrong about the Civil Rights movement. They hadn’t just picked the wrong side in a political battle. It was far worse than that. By defending injustice, they had disgraced themselves, surrendered all claims of moral competence, and become disgraced pariahs.
This was unsettling. These were people who thought of themselves as the standard-bearers of morality and rectitude. They read their Bibles and held forth on what those Bibles mean and how others should read them too. They didn’t drink or dance or cuss or go to the movies. They expected other people to honor them as the arbiters and exemplars of morality and “godly” living. But now those others were looking down on them — appalled by their utter lack of morality and decency because they had failed the biggest, clearest and most obvious moral test of their time. They had no excuse, no answer, no recourse.

That was where my church, family, and culture sat in 1984. I didn’t know anything about that at the time, having been a child in the 1970s. All I knew was that babies were being murdered - by the millions! And it was all because of the decline of moral values caused by the Sexual Revolution, and the Supreme Court “banning prayer” - which was another lie that I didn’t know was a lie until much later.

Thanks largely to Dr. Dobson’s radio program, I knew that the pro-life standard bearer was Ronald Reagan and that he was running for re-election against horrible baby-killers, Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. I knew, thanks to Dr. Dobson’s frequent guest, Phyllis Schlafly, that Ferraro embodied all of the anti-Christian evil of the Feminist movement. I didn’t understand much of this, of course. I just knew that I had heard these people on Dr. Dobson’s program and that what they said seemed to match what was preached in my church and whispered about by the men in my family when their wives weren’t around.

I am a very different person now.

That kid that I was in 1984 would be appalled by me. I am an atheist, a feminist, the father of one transgender person, and soon-to-be father-in-law to another. That kid was in the middle of what I now see as the beginning of my journey to become who I am. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the “conservative” and “radical” parts of myself, and that kid was the embodiment of that radical side.

But being that kid was unavoidable. Like everybody else, I was the product of my family and my schools, driven to make sense of the conflicting contradictions of the ideas that were held by those around me. I wrote a lot about that journey in my 2016 book, Tad’s Happy Funtime: A Collection of Misremembered Events.

Becoming who I am today required a lot of patience - both from myself and from those who had to deal with me. My opinions and my values were shaped by what I learned along the way, by asking questions that were frequently hard for anyone to answer. Now that I’m in my 50s, I feel like I’ve seen enough to draw informed conclusions about some things; others are still frustrating and elusive.

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