For the last several months, the leaders of approximately two dozen right-wing religious groups have met regularly in and around Washington to discuss their plans for the gay marriage fight. They call themselves the Arlington group, named for the D.C. suburb where the group first met. Members of the group initially sought a constitutional amendment that would ban not just gay marriages but civil unions as well.

Many in the group have now fallen in line behind the Federal Marriage Amendment introduced by Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R.-Colo., a measure that bans gay marriage but seems to leave room for state legislatures -- but not courts -- to institute civil unions. Bush's press secretary said Tuesday that the Musgrave amendment meets Bush's "principles."

However, some members of the Arlington group, like the conservative Concerned Women for America, are still pushing for a stiffer measure, one that would unequivocally ban any legal recognition of gay relationships whatsoever. "It should be an inalienable right, guaranteed by our Constitution, to live in a marriage-based society," said Robert Knight, director of the Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute. "When you create counterfeit marriages and put them into the law, you're undermining society's most important safeguard against tyranny."

The disagreement has created a rift on the right. The Christian Coalition, led by the politically pragmatic Roberta Combs, kept its distance from the Arlington group initially because Combs thought its all-or-nothing approach was unrealistic. Members of the religious right have "got to learn to give a little to get a little," Combs told Salon in the early days of the Arlington group's work. "We've got to learn to look at the big picture. The saying goes that Rome wasn't built overnight. Things don't happen overnight. It's baby steps. You've got to work toward the big goal, like every other liberal group has done, like every other conservative group has done."

By last week, Combs' frustration with the Arlington group had reached the breaking point. She sent a letter to members of the group in which she schooled them in the political realities of the situation. Said one source: "She gave them a little lesson on politics and how things work." The hard-line members of the Arlington group didn't take kindly to the condescension. "Let's just say that Roberta is entitled to her opinion, and leave it at that," Knight said curtly.

Knight rejected the idea that pragmatism should control the marriage debate. There is virtually no chance that an anti-gay-marriage amendment will win the required two-thirds support in the Senate -- a point that Knight and many other Republicans have acknowledged. So if Bush's endorsement of an amendment is largely a symbolic -- some would say cynical -- move, Knight said the president may as well "swing for the fences" by pushing an amendment that bans gay marriage, civil unions and any other kind of domestic-partner recognition for same-sex couples. As for the Musgrave measure, Knight said: "What this amendment does is split the president's base while uniting his opponents."

Although the leaders of the religious right are divided on the specific language of a constitutional amendment, they are united in their desire to make marriage a front-burner issue between now and November.

The ultra-right Family Research Council has distributed a marriage protection pledge to every elected state and federal official in the country, says FRC spokesman Bill Murray. Politicians who sign the pledge commit themselves to protecting "the inviolable definition of marriage" as the "legal union between one man and one woman." Between now and November, Murray says, the FRC will make sure that voters in every corner of the country know who signed the pledge -- and who didn't.

Focus on the Family is working hard in Massachusetts, urging its members to push for an amendment to the state's Constitution that would overturn the Supreme Judicial Court's decision. In January, Focus on the Family leader James Dobson sent direct mail to 2.5 million people throughout the country, "educating" them on the marriage issue and encouraging them to push for anti-gay-marriage legislation in their own jurisdictions.

Another Arlington group member, the Southern Baptist Convention, is also working to keep its membership informed about the gay marriage issue -- and who stands where on it. "What we'll be doing between now and November is doing our very best to make sure that every Southern Baptist who is eligible to vote is registered to vote and to make sure that every Southern Baptist who is registered to vote is aware of where the candidates stand on the issues they care about," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptists' Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Land said gay marriage will be "preeminent" among those issues. "I think this will be an issue in state legislative races, I think it will be an issue in governors races, I think it will be an issue in congressional races, I think it will be an issue in Senate races, and I think it will be an issue in the presidential race," he said.

The Christian Coalition distributed 70 million voter guides in 2000 and says it will do much the same this year -- and that gay marriage will be part of the package. A Christian Coalition staffer based in Washington said the group is in contact with its members virtually every day now, spreading the word about gay marriage. The group is pushing hard for a vote in Congress on the constitutional amendment sometime this summer -- just in time to force Democrats' hands before the November elections.

Gay marriage is "going to be an issue in the election," vows Combs, the Christian Coalition's leader. "I think it's going to be an issue that probably some people will judge candidates on. Our job through our voter guide is that we educate people about where candidates stand on the issues, and I think that's how a lot of people make their decisions about the candidates they vote for."

Although these groups must maintain at least some semblance of partisan neutrality to keep their nonprofit status, it's clear that their opposition to gay marriage -- and their support for a constitutional amendment banning it -- will help build political support for Bush as November nears. The groups generally can't tell their members how to vote, but they can tell them which candidate defends the "sanctity of marriage" and which one is in bed with the "radical" homosexual lobby.

"These conservative groups have amazing grass-roots ability," said Christine Matthews, the president of a Republican consulting and polling firm based in Alexandria, Va. "They have a whole network of supporters who are with them on these socially conservative issues. So while President Bush and his spokespeople maintain very moderate language, the far-right base has their whole list of folks who they can target in a more retail sense, through direct-mail pieces and phone calls, and through the churches. They'll use language that's not the kind you hear on broadcast TV or in presidential speeches. They don't have to risk alienating moderate voters because they won't be speaking to those people."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

In his State of the Union address in January, George W. Bush said the debate over gay marriage must be waged with respect because the same "moral tradition" that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman "also teaches that each individual has dignity and value in God's sight." He returned to the theme Tuesday, saying that the marriage debate must be conducted "without bitterness or anger," and that "strong convictions" should be matched with "kindness and good will and decency."

It's classic Bush-Rove: Position the president as a moderate, a good guy, a God-loving family man, then look the other way as his allies and underlings slide into the gutter. Just before his surrogates began bloodying up John McCain in South Carolina, Bush went on "Meet the Press" and proclaimed himself a "uniter not a divider." According to exit polls, South Carolina voters actually believed that McCain -- not Bush -- had run the nastier campaign.

Many political observers expect Bush will take a similarly hands-off approach to the gay marriage issue -- while his surrogates fight dirty where it counts. "You're not going to have Bush talking about it and arguing about it during the campaign," says Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "But direct mail, telephoning, literature drops and speeches in evangelical churches -- all of these things will be part of the tapestry."

And expect marriage to play a role in key congressional contests around the country, not just the presidential race. Former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk was on the receiving end of the Republicans' anti-gay dirty tricks when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2002. On the day before the election, someone placed waves of anonymous prerecorded phone calls in which a man with an effeminate voice praised Kirk, an African-American and a Democrat, for all that he had done for the gay community. It's hard to know whether the calls had an effect, but Kirk lost the race. The winner: Republican John Cornyn, a former client of Karl Rove's who is now pushing the anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment as a U.S. senator.

A former Kirk staffer says the election-eve auto-calls were aimed at "predictably white areas, to Republican and swing-vote areas." Democrats and gay rights activists predict any anti-gay Republican attacks this year will be targeted with similar precision. The attacks will be used as "stealth approaches to communicate with particular constituencies" in places "where you would expect it to resonate," says Seth Kilbourn, national field director for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay-rights group.

Chief among those places: the South and rural parts of swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. The Republicans will "use gay marriage in those places to avoid talking about the economy and the war," said a campaign strategist currently working for a Southern Democratic Senate candidate. The strategist spoke on the condition that she not be identified; homosexuality is such a hot-button issue, she said, that she couldn't take the risk that a Google search on her name would turn up a story on gay marriage.

The strategist said that Republicans have made it a practice to "out-gun, out-gay and out-pray" Democrats whenever they want to avoid talking about issues where they don't have the upper hand. Typically, that approach has worked well with blue-collar whites -- as Howard Dean put it, the "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks" -- but it may work even better with African-American voters this year.

While African-American voters are usually reliably liberal on economic issues, they tend to be more conservative on issues like pornography, abortion and homosexuality. They may be the perfect target for a Republican "wedge" on gay marriage. If Republican operatives can wrap a Democrat in the gay-rights banner, some wager, turned-off African-American voters might stay home from the polls. The Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston threw its weight behind efforts to pass a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in Massachusetts, though some local African-American leaders opposed the group's move.

Even in the more conservative South, the gay marriage issue may not matter much to black voters, says the Rev. Joseph Darby. Darby, who leads Morris Brown AME Church in Charleston, S.C., is one of the most influential black ministers in the South. While he agrees that his flock is likely to oppose gay marriage, he says that African-American voters have other issues on their minds. "What's more morally reprehensible?" Darby asks. "To embrace the idea of same-sex unions or to have young men and women dying in the name of some invisible weapons of mass destruction?"

That's a sentiment Democrats hope to hear a lot between now and November. Many are also counting on the leaders of the Christian right to overreach and either go too far in their anti-gay-marriage crusade, alienating swing voters, or push too hard for vocal support from the administration, destroying the facade of Bush's moderation.

That may already be happening. After the Arlington group met earlier this month inside the Family Research Council's offices in Washington, some members couldn't help bragging a little about the backing they got from the administration for a constitutional amendment. While some members of the group were initially cagey about who gave them assurances, Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention, couldn't resist telling the New York Times that it was Karl Rove himself. In a follow-up interview with Salon and Rolling Stone, Land said that Rove had assured the Arlington group that Bush would come out soon in favor of a constitutional amendment and would push for a vote on it in Congress "sooner rather than later."

The Christian Coalition got similar assurances the same day from Rove. "We were laughing about how the Arlington group had to call Rove and then wait around for him to call them back," said Christian Coalition spokeswoman Michelle Ammons. "Rove called Roberta the same day without her even asking." Ammons said that Combs has "the ear of the White House more than" any of the other groups on the religious right. "They call us all the time," she said. "They know we mobilize people."

Combs herself is a little more circumspect about her relations with the White House. In an interview with Salon and Rolling Stone near her South Carolina home in December, Combs talked about how close she is to Bush and Rove and about how much she likes them both. But when asked whether she had discussed gay marriage with either of them, Combs clammed up. "I think the White House knows where the Christian Coalition stands on the issue of gay marriage," she said. How does the White House know? With something between a smile and a smirk, Combs said: "They just know. Periodically, we meet with the White House on issues. That's basically all I'm going to say."

As Combs seems to understand, the White House may be happy to court the religious right in private but wary about pledging its allegiance in public. Open cooperation between Bush, Rove and the militant, anti-gay-marriage movement could hurt the president come November. "One of the problems the Republican Party has with swing voters is that Republicans are seen as divisive and intolerant," says a prominent Democratic strategist who asked not to be identified. "That's one of the reasons that people who make $100,000 a year and live in the suburbs and whose interests are otherwise aligned with Republicans find themselves voting with the Democrats -- they find the Republicans too intolerant. So the last thing they want to do is run a campaign on intolerance."

Maybe that's why almost a month passed between the day that Rove told members of the Arlington group that Bush would support a constitutional amendment and the day that Bush actually did so. The delay certainly had some on the right worried. Bay Buchanan, who heads The American Cause, the conservative think tank founded by her brother, culture warrior Pat Buchanan, told the Washington Times last week that Bush's "hesitancy makes the true believers be concerned that he's not with us."

That doubt may be hard for anyone outside the religious right to understand; on issue after issue after issue -- including the recess appointment last week of rabid anti-abortionist William Pryor to the U.S. Court of Appeals -- Bush has cast his lot with the born-again crowd. The only real question, it would seem, is how forcefully he'll do so when it comes to gay marriage. Bush can appease the religious right -- yet again -- by making gay marriage a public centerpiece of his campaign. Or after a quiet endorsement, he can stay above the fray, as he did in Texas and South Carolina, while his allies do the dirty work for him.

Larry Sabato says the gay marriage issue is "tailor-made" for such an under-the-radar campaign. Sabato expects to see anonymous fliers distributed outside churches, fliers showing "men kissing men and women kissing women, unattractive men and women in chains and leather," accompanied by text suggesting that the Democratic candidate supports gay marriage. He expects there to be telephone push-polls, campaign calls masquerading as legitimate polls in which conservative or moderate voters are asked whether they'd still support John Kerry if they knew he believed in gay marriage and thought it should be the law of the land.

That's not what Kerry thinks, of course, but nobody ever really thought John McCain was gay, either.

Recent Stories