I could swear that, when running for president, Goldwater advocated an amendment to let prayer back into public schools. I remember seeing a Goldwater pamphlet that quoted the Bible, "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord."
'Ashrei ha`am 'asher bachar-bam; 'ashrei ha`am sheHaShem 'Eloqayv!
A re-writing of history has been going on concerning Barry Goldwater. The idea is that America was a socially liberal, "tolerant" place until the Religious Right arose back around 1980 or so. Up until that time, even conservatives were "tolerant" of homosexuality, abortion, pornography, secularism, etc.
In fact, Goldwater did not adopt the pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, anti-religious right agenda until the last few years of his life. In his old age, he married a leftist woman who was a Planned Parenthood activist. Until then, he had a 100% pro-life voting record, never once mentioned supporting gay "rights" or anything of that kind, voted for school prayer (and, yes, he did support an amendment to the Constitution), and never had a bad thing to say about conservative Christians.
Psychologically, I can't explain Goldwater's change of heart. Maybe he was growing senile. Maybe he liked the attention of a younger woman and changed his outlook to please her. Who knows? But once he changed, the media, which had hated him his entire career, began lauding him as the voice of "true conservatism", by which they meant social liberalism. Since that time, efforts have been made to apply Goldwater's late-in-life conversion retroactively. It's being implied that Goldwater was a Christian-bashing supporter of abortion and gay "rights" from the beginning of his career, and that "true conservatism" embraces those things. Why, up until the rise of the Religious Right circa 1980, everyone universally accepted the idea that Christians should sit down and shut up, that abortion should be available on demand, that gays should have special laws protecting them and should be allowed to "marry", that prayers at graduations are unthinkable, and so on. Of course, such assertions are nonsense.
Goldwater may indeed have procured an illegal abortion for a family member in the 1950s. It's not something to be proud of, for sure. But it didn't affect his later politics. He appears to have regarded the incident as a tragic mistake, because he certainly didn't vote pro-abortion until the late 1980s. Nor did he ever say anything positive about legal abortion. In his 1980 re-election campaign for the Senate, he used his pro-life stance successfully against a well-financed Democrat opponent. Was he being hypocritical? Perhaps. We can never really know. But the so-called "Goldwater conservatism" trumpeted by the liberal media (and often here at FR by libertarians) didn't exist until very late in Goldwater's life. Nothing in his voting, speech, or campaign record until then would have been any different from what Jerry Falwell would have delivered.