A quiet surprise of the 86th Legislature was the failure of many of the Christian right’s priorities. While lawmakers closely aligned with religious conservatism proposed several measures to enable religion-based discrimination, further blur the line between church and state and attack abortion rights, few of those bills made it to the governor’s desk. And the ones that did were weak or symbolic.
Disgruntled Christian right activists are now accusing GOP lawmakers of ditching the conservative agenda. But it’s also possible that religious conservatives ran up against the limits of their power, which appears to be ebbing in post-2018 Texas.
Christian conservatives have enjoyed plenty of legislative success under a Republican-controlled Legislature. Since 1995, the Legislature has mandated that public school health education stress sexual abstinence and prohibits teachers from distributing condoms. A decade ago, it began allowing public high schools to offer an elective course on the Bible. The religious right helped push through one of the toughest abortion laws in the country in 2013. And while last session’s bathroom bill didn’t pass, religious conservatives still scored substantial wins in 2017: another omnibus anti-abortion law and one that allows child placement organizations to refuse on religious grounds to place children with certain parents, such as LGBTQ and non-Christian couples.
