For a movement that claimed to be on top of the political world after the elections in November, the religious right hasn’t had a great winter.
Despite the religious right’s demands, Arlen Specter was confirmed as the Judiciary Committee chairman with unanimous GOP support. Despite the movement’s principles, the new co-chair of the Republican National Committee supports some abortion rights. And despite the president’s earlier promises, Bush announced in a recent interview that he would not lobby the Senate to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage.
The rumbling among the party’s base has been increasingly intense in response, but what will come of it? The religious right, the theory goes, is stuck — it’s not as if they’re suddenly going to start forging ties with the Dems. It’s a dynamic that prompted Ed Kilgore, Matt Yglesias, and Marshall Whitmann to call the movement a group of “suckers.”
The GOP big wigs pay obeisance to the religious right because they provide the foot soldiers for their campaigns. The Republican establishment cynically manipulates the cultural issues because they recognize that a party that is dedicated to redistributing wealth upward has little chance of majority status. Once elected, Republicans reward the religious right with some crumbs while the real goodies are handed out to their wealthy donors and their corporate cronies.
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Perhaps some day it will dawn on the rank and file of social conservatives that they are being manipulated to serve another agenda by the hierarchy of the Republican Party. Until then…the GOP will take them for suckers.
I agree that the party may continue to take the religious right’s support for granted, but I can’t help but wonder whether the movement’s patience may soon wear thin. Indeed, as far as I’m concerned, it’s only a matter of time.
Bush’s gay marriage comments, for example, have the GOP “foot soldiers” pretty worked up.
President Bush came under fire from some social conservatives yesterday for saying he will not aggressively lobby the Senate to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage during his second term.
Prominent leaders such as Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, and many rank-and-file Bush supporters inundated the White House with phone calls to protest Bush’s comments in an interview published Sunday in The Washington Post. “Clearly there is concern” among conservatives, Perkins said. “I believe there is no more important issue for the president’s second term than the preservation of marriage.”
Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family said, “I am sure [White House] phone lines are lighting up all over.”
In the Post interview, Bush, for the first time, said senators have made it clear to him the amendment has no chance of passing unless courts strike down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which protects states from recognizing same-sex marriages conducted elsewhere. Challenges to the act are pending in state courts from California to Florida.
“It was not articulated that way in the campaign,” Perkins complained.
Well, of course not. If Bush had told evangelicals that an amendment banning gay marriage wouldn’t pass and would be a waste of time, he couldn’t have manipulated millions of evangelicals with appeals to their worst instincts. Get with the program, Perkins.
I know what you’re thinking. Both sides of this intra-party divide realize their co-dependency — the religious right may be frustrated by the speed of progress, but they need the Republican Party to remain strong or their priorities will go no where, while the GOP may care more about tax cuts for millionaires than a culture-war agenda, but they need the religious right to win elections. It’s a match made in … well, somewhere unpleasant.
But the assumption that the religious right would stick with their GOP cohorts no matter what is a mistake. Some of the movement’s high-profile personalities (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell) are party hacks who care more about their fundraising than their agenda, but the religious right has at least one powerful leader who would be willing to sacrifice to make a point. It’s James Dobson — and he almost bolted from the party in 1998.
On March 18, in the basement of the Capitol, 25 House Republicans met with psychologist James Dobson for some emotional venting. But this was not personal therapy; it concerned the fate of their party. Dobson, long on loyal radio listeners and short on patience, was threatening, in effect, to bring down the GOP unless it made conservative social issues, including abortion, a higher legislative priority. “If I go,” he has said, “I will do everything I can to take as many people with me as possible.”
[…F]or over two hours, until nearly midnight, House conservatives confronted Dobson about his indiscriminate attacks on the Republican Party, asking credit for achievements he had ignored. At one point the wife of a congressman, in tears, explained how Dobson’s broadside had hurt their family, inviting harsh questions from friends. An emotional Dobson, according to one witness, responded, “I’m so sorry I hurt you.”
Sobered, Dobson canceled planned meetings with the New York Times and the Washington Post, where he would have laid out his threat to leave. But in the next two weeks, he sent lengthy, public letters renewing the threat, which hangs in the air like distant thunder at the Republican picnic.
Dobson meant it then, and if he’s unsatisfied with Republican progress in the coming year, no one should be surprised if makes equally sincere threats again.