Monday, May 12, 2008
With its allies now controlling Congress and the White House, the religious right launches a crusade to cleanse America of sin. The first battlefield: Women's bodies.
Jan 3, 2003 | An ice and snow storm forced Jerry Falwell's school, Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., to shut down for a day in early December, but even that act of God didn't keep him from his life's missions. While most employees, teachers and students at the fundamentalist Christian school stayed home and didn't venture out on the roads, Falwell slid behind the wheel of his Chevy Suburban to pick up his wife at the hairdresser's. One can't blame him for feeling invincible these days. Religious conservatives fasted and prayed that antiabortion candidates would win in November; Falwell believes their prayers were answered when the Republicans won control of the 108th Congress.
Christian conservatives believe they tipped the close Senate elections to the GOP in Georgia, Minnesota and Missouri (though they lost a heated run-off in Louisiana). And Falwell gives much of the credit to fierce campaigning by President Bush, himself a born-again Christian, in the final days before the election. "His work brought out the religious conservative vote, which elected the people we want to have in office," Falwell says. "No one in the world would deny that the religious conservatives certainly played a major role in regaining Republican control of the Senate. It's encouraging to think that if we get people out, we can make a difference every time, just like in the election of Ronald Reagan."
Former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats may blame voters' preoccupation with terrorism and the impending war with Iraq for their party's midterm loss, but the Christian fundamentalists weren't distracted. With messianic zeal, they focused on a plan to control the nation's political agenda by securing the Senate. Many give credit to political strategist Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition who is now chairman of the Georgia Republican Party. Now, as the 108th Congress readies to begin its work, it's clear that the religious right will press the most conservative agenda in recent American history -- and it's clear, too, that Falwell and other conservatives have faith they will achieve their goals.
The agenda is so controversial that it has created deep divisions even in Bush's White House. Though such internal dissent is usually hidden, it flared into the open late last year when John DiIulio, a top policy adviser who departed in frustration, ripped the influence of the religious right on Bush. Thus far, however, the president has done little to discourage the troops of the religious right from their radical mission to make the government and judiciary agents for the moral cleansing of America. In their vision, churches would be given government funds to carry out social services. Prayer would be allowed -- and encouraged -- in public schools. Israel would be backed virtually without question in its conflict with the Palestinians because that would fulfill a prophecy portending the second coming of Christ. Foreign countries would have to pass a moral litmus test to receive U.S. aid.
Clearly, though, the principal aim of hard-line religious conservatives is a tighter control on reproductive options and the enshrinement of the heterosexual nuclear family as the paragon of public virtue. Making abortion illegal is central to that goal.
Their strategy stops short of a direct, immediate assault on the Supreme Court's historic 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade that legalized abortion. The Christian right abandoned the idea of an antiabortion constitutional amendment two decades ago, concluding that obtaining approval from a majority of the state legislatures would be too difficult. As of January 2002, a Mellman Group poll found that 62 percent of Americans believe the Supreme Court should continue to rule that abortion is legal everywhere in the United States, rather than let each state have that power.
Instead, the first item on the religious right's agenda is a ban on late-term abortion; the House of Representatives approved the ban in July. Christian conservatives are counting on the GOP's slim 51-48 majority in the Senate to pass the ban as well as a number of other measures that, taken together, will impose a more conservative Christian view of morality on the entire nation. Protestant fundamentalists and traditional Catholics want the government to limit sex education, promote abstinence until marriage, downplay the use of condoms to protect against diseases, and curtail the use of birth control pills, which they consider "abortifacients." (While birth control pills are designed to prevent ovulation, it is believed that sometimes they don't and that the egg is fertilized but not implanted in the womb.) And social conservatives want to limit U.S. aid for programs in foreign countries that don't adhere to these standards. Some recent nominees to influential committees and panels even regard sex between a husband and wife with misgiving.
At the same time, the religious right will continue to press for approval of dozens of conservative judicial nominees, whose confirmations were stalled as long as Democrats controlled the Senate. But with the Republican takeover, Democrats effectively conceded that they couldn't block the nominations anymore when they confirmed Michael McConnell, an abortion critic, to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee, says he will move quickly to confirm the administration's choices. And if, as expected, Bush has the chance to name one or two justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, the religious right will then set it sights directly on Roe vs. Wade. "That's a biggie," Falwell says. "It won't be easy, but that's our goal and we won't stop until it's done."
It's an old agenda. What's new is the likelihood that it can be achieved. Not only do Republicans now control the Senate, but Bill Frist, the new majority leader from Tennessee, is also seen as a staunch ally by many conservative Christians. But the issues are enormously volatile, and some analysts warn that the right could precipitate a backlash not just from the American left but from moderates at the center, too. "In some ways, it's a fiercer debate than we've ever had before," says John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio, who studies the religious right. "We're getting down to the fundamental choice between individual rights and social order."
Pro-choice advocates fear religious right-wingers will exploit their new political leverage to redefine women's reproductive rights so that they conform to core religious beliefs: No sex is allowed before marriage, human life begins at conception, and no one can destroy that life.
"We really have to face up to the fact that one of the key things that these folks want to do is void women's right to choose, send women back in time, and establish the family that they believe the Bible mandates, which is a male-headed family," says Marjorie Signer, spokeswoman for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice in Washington, representing 18 denominations of Christian, Jewish and other religious groups. "We're not fully engaging the beast and fully and completely understanding what is motivating the religious right. In our analysis, they want to establish a theocracy, a Christian ethos as a political philosophy."
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