"Not only is it commonly assumed that Roe started the conflict over abortion but the common assumption, both outside and within the legal academy, is that Roe has driven the realignment of Republican and Democratic voters around abortion. According to Benjamin Wittes, “One effect of Roe was to mobilize a permanent constituency for criminalizing abortion—a constituency that has driven much of the southern realignment toward conservatism.” As Cass Sunstein put it, “[T]he decision may well have created the Moral Majority, helped defeat the equal rights amendment, and undermined the women’s movement by spurring opposition and demobilizing potential adherents.” Or as Sandford Levinson explains, “I have often referred to Roe as ‘the gift that keeps on giving’ inasmuch as it has served to send many, good, decent, committed largely (though certainly not exclusively) working-class voters into the arms of a party that works systematically against their material interests but is willing to pander to their serious value commitment to a ‘right to life.’” David Brooks charges yet more harshly: “Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since.” Robert P. George invokes Roe in warning the Supreme Court not to accept the constitutional claim for same-sex marriage: “By short-circuiting the democratic process, Roe inflamed the culture war that has divided our nation and polarized our politics.”"