ABSTRACT
Rosalind Pollack Petchesky (1981) claims that the New Right has gained ideological legitimacy through its focus on reproductive and sexual issues. It has thus appealed to various church groups and pro-family groups because of its self-identification as a coalition fighting to keep society ‘moral’. Seymour Lipsett and Earl Raab write that backlash movements ‘require an aggressively moralistic stance and will find it somewhere. There needs to be invoked some system of good and evil which transcends the political or social process and freezes it’ (1970, p. 117). All the groups in the New Right have a strong moral stance: they represent a set of values which are good and decent and need defence against licentious, selfish and promiscuous people. The stress on issues like sexuality reinforces this position. Alan Crawford (1980) sees the rise of the New Right as also motivated by ‘status frustration’ which takes place when people see their prestige threatened by social inferiors.
