If you missed it, the Washington Post ran an excellent item over the weekend on a religious-right player a lot of Americans have probably never heard of, but who’s influence is definitely on the rise.
In his home town of Pearland, Tex., Baptist minister Rick Scarborough was tireless in promoting his conservative Christian way of thinking.
He attacked high school sex education courses, experimental medical treatments and transsexuals trying to change their gender identification. He recruited like-minded candidates to run for the local school board and city council. He crisscrossed the country to protest the ousting of Roy S. Moore, former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, for installing a Ten Commandments tablet at his courthouse. And Scarborough created a network of “Patriot Pastors” to lead evangelicals to the polls in 2004.
Now he has set his sights on bigger stakes: pushing Senate Republicans to change the rules so that Democrats cannot block President Bush’s judicial nominees. The fight over the judgeships was once a largely academic argument over the constitutionality of the filibuster. But now it provides a fiery new front in the culture war. And Scarborough is emblematic of the Christian right leaders who have been drawn to the fray.
Scarborough and other grass-roots conservative religious leaders believe the federal courts are trouncing Christian values on marriage, abortion and other right-to-life issues raised in the Terri Schiavo case. While he lacks the name recognition of more prominent religious activists, such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and evangelist Pat Robertson, Scarborough is a potent force with close ties to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and influential Senate conservatives.
Scarborough is an interesting right-wing character whose rise to notoriety has taken an unusual, and rather circuitous, route. Unlike Robertson, Falwell, et al, Scarborough started his drive to merge religion and government with a local initiative to create a little mini-theocracy in Pearland. Despite the success he’s having now, Scarborough’s effort to create a pseudo-Taliban in his small Texas town was not exactly a triumph.
Scarborough used his church to find like-minded candidates for local office. In the mid-90s, “his” people held a number of key government posts, including the city manager and police chief, as well as members of the city council and school board.
It didn’t last. Shortly after taking over Pearland, Scarborough-backed politicians started getting rejected by voters. His city manager was fired under a cloud of scandal. By 2002, Scarborough had no cronies left in local government. Even like-minded Texans grew tired of his schtick: when Scarborough tried to win control of the Texas Baptist General Convention to “take the state for Jesus,” he lost to a moderate candidate by a 2-to-1 margin.
Scarborough created an advocacy group called Vision America to mobilize his fellow fundamentalists — joining an already-crowded landscape of a dozen other groups with the exact same raison d’etre — which proceeded to have almost zero impact on American politics.
So why should any of us care about him now? Because, all of a sudden, Scarborough is a major player.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay started calling Scarborough “one of my closest friends.” Jerry Falwell labeled Scarborough one of the of the religious right movement’s top new leaders for the future. As the Republican Party started relying more and more on fundamentalist Christians to provide the party with a base of support and activists, leaders like DeLay and Bill Frist started turning to Scarborough to provide the troops for their crusade.
This is not only interesting in the immediate sense — Scarborough is helping push more and more churches into the nuclear option fight — it’s also important in the coming years as the right looks for new culture warriors to replace the old ones. Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson aren’t getting any younger, and each has had health issues in recent years. Rick Scarborough is a fringe, extremist figure now, but as his list grows and his connections to GOP leaders solidify, his influence will grow considerably.
In other words, keep Scarborough’s name in mind.