Edited by Laura I. Rendon and Richard O. Hope, Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, San Francisco, CA 1996. 490 pp. $34.95
Supreme Court Justice Antonio Scalia described the debate on the Colorado gay rights case as part of a “kulturkampf,” a German word meaning culture war. The term dates to the 1870s when Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck used the concept to eradicate Catholic influence in German society, using “government to enforce ideas of a German identity; a German way of thinking, a German culture, a more German Germany.”
Less than a century later, Adolf Hitler embraced the concept and identified a new target, German Jews. In 1992 the concept was given broad exposure in America in a speech by Pat Buchanan at the Republican National Convention. Buchanan issued a clarion call to the soldiers of the religious and far right to engage in a cultural war … to take back our cities, to take back our culture, to take back our country.
