1. Values Voter Summit Lowdown: Religious Right Not Dead Yet, Still Screaming and Kicking.
At this weekend's Values Voter Summit, the annual confab sponsored by Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defense Fund, and American Values, the adoration of Sarah Palin was so intense that it eclipsed her running mate. The prevailing theme of the conference was that feminism was dead because Palin proves its supposed raison-d'etre, abortion, is unnecessary for rising to the heights of power. Glass ceilings could be cracked, the participants maintained, by a woman juggling five kids and a Bible.
But drill (you know, that's their favorite thing to do) beneath the surface, and you find that the source of religious-right excitement is not necessarily a love of Palin but the fact that Palin proves the movement's continued relevance. It was because of religious-right activists that McCain decided to forego a pro-choice running mate. It was because of them that the Republican Party has the most anti-choice abortion plank in history. If McCain wins, they will claim victory and demand payback from him.
Yet the leadership is also clearly feeling the pressure from the evangelicals who are abandoning them and their culture-war obsessions. Star Parker, the venom-tongued admirer of R.J. Rushdoony, the father of Christian Reconstructionism, the authoritarian movement that advocates for the imposition of biblical law, charged that Christians are persecuted by a "salacious media that will swim the sewer to destroy our cause" and are corrupted by public schools she described as "cesspools," which "indoctrinate children with an anti-Christian worldview."
Taking direct aim at the evangelical centrists who have condemned the very malevolence that Parker embodies, she accused the "religious left" of "socialism" for working to end poverty. Declaring her property, money, and taxes "mine," Parker called wealth redistribution "a violation of scripture." Parker mocked the "new catchphrase, common ground for the common good. True common ground for the common good," she concluded, "is freedom, not statism."
2. Palin's Roots in the Anti-Abortion Movement.
To many religious-right activists, Palin was an unknown until the day McCain announced that he had tapped her to be his running mate. But news traveled fast that she was "one of us," not only an evangelical, but an anti-abortion zealot who met with the approval of some of the most extreme anti-choice groups in the country.
Daniel McConchie, vice president and executive director for Americans United for Life and a longtime Palin fan, said she had an "underground kind of reputation" among anti-abortion activists. AUL favors criminalizing abortion, banning RU-486, and requiring women to get an ultrasound if they are considering an abortion, and promotes the myth that abortions cause breast cancer.
Joy Yearout, political director at the Susan B. Anthony List, which supports anti-choice candidates at the local, state, and national level, also said her group had been long familiar with Palin. Although Yearout couldn't point to very many policy or legislative initiatives Palin advanced for her group's cause, she emphasized, as did McConchie, that anti-choice activists trust her because of her choice to continue with her fifth pregnancy despite knowing that the baby would have Down syndrome.
That decision, other activists also told me, is more than adequate proof of her anti-choice credibility.
As a result, unlike other candidates who have to prove their commitment to the cause on the campaign trail, Palin can be confident in the base's support without even having to mention abortion. In her interview with Charlie Gibson, Palin emphasized, "I know that we can all agree on the need for, and the desire for, fewer abortions in America and greater support for adoption, for other alternatives that women can and should be empowered to embrace to allow that culture of life." Although she admitted that she opposes Roe and believes abortion should be illegal except if the mother's life is in danger, Palin's stab at abortion-reduction rhetoric was a clear attempt to allay concerns of more moderate voters that she's too zealously anti-choice.
But no one should be fooled by Palin's attempt at moderation. McConchie told me that McCain's staffers were "much more accommodating than Bush's people were in 2004" in allowing conservative activists to dictate the platform language.
3. "Fresh" Ideas for Grass-roots Activists: Sex, Sex, and More Sex!
On Saturday at the summit, workshops covered the usual topics, like abortion, gay marriage, the "double threat" of illegal immigration and radical Islam, along with the terrible freedom-busting thing we call the separation of church and state. So I picked the workshop titled "Three Fresh Ideas for Grass-roots Activists."
What I didn't realize was that when the religious right says an idea is "fresh," they mean it's about sex.
Silly me -- I honestly thought there would be something new here, a peek into what religious-right advocacy groups would be doing on the ground this election cycle. Instead, I learned about how to shut down strip clubs and porn shops in my neighborhood, how to end gay-pride parades in my town, and how to introduce books on "ex-gay" reparative therapy into the local public high school library to balance out all those Christian-bashing books about how LGBTQ people are people, too, and shouldn't be condemned to hell.
For more on the Values Voter Summit, don't miss TAP contributor Adele Stan's investigation of the racist anti-Obama materials on display in the exhibit hall.
4. Meanwhile, Other Religious Leaders Condemn Torture and Promote Human Rights.
While the religious right spent the weekend wrestling with its demons, other religious leaders were convened in Atlanta for the summit "Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul." Organized by Evangelicals for Human Rights and a coalition of other secular, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim groups, the event was intended to raise awareness of "the impact torture has on our national soul," said David Gushee, the president of Evangelicals for Human Rights and a leading religious voice against torture.
In a session titled "What the Torture Debate Reveals About American Christianity," Gushee told his audience that evangelicals have tended not to be critical of the Bush administration's torture policy because of "evangelical authoritarianism, especially in our most conservative quarters, that elevates the role of the man over his family, the male pastor over his church, the president over his nation, and our nation over the rest of the world. The kinds of checks and balances provided by democratic constitutionalism, the wisdom of other nations, and international law are devalued."
5. Palin and God's Will.
Many people listening to Sarah Palin's speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God Masters Commission thought they heard her say that the Iraq War was God's will. Charlie Gibson heard that, too, and when he asked her about it last week, she claimed not to presume to know God's will. She maintained that she told her church audience to pray that God's will would be done, not that she knew that God's will was being done.
Fair enough on Palin's part -- that is what she said. But Gibson could have gone a step further and elicited more, based on that same speech, about whether there are other circumstances in which she does claim to know God's will. She might pray that other leaders will carry out God's will, but what about when she is the leader in question? Does she know she's carrying out God's will?
Palin prayed with the audience that day that Jesus "may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, and that spirit of revelation, including a spirit of prophecy, that God is going to tell you what's going on and what's going to go on." Palin tells the audience that "God has sent me from underneath the umbrella of this church throughout the state," and asks everyone to pray for the pipeline she aims to build, because "God's will has to be done."
Is the pipeline God's will? How does she know? It's a fair question, but Gibson didn't ask it.
Contact me at tapthefundamentalist@gmail.com/.
