Conservatives and the "F" Word: Coulter's Not the Only One

With mounting news that newspapers are dropping Ann Coulter's column over what is now known as her "macaca moment," it's time that conservatives repent not only over Coulter's use of the word "faggot" but that of other luminaries as well.

Bishop Wellington Boone, the Atlanta preacher notorious for his charged appearances at Justice Sundays and other Family Research Council and Focus on the Family events, also uses the slur "faggot." At the "Values Voter Summit" in Washington last fall, attended by many of the same GOP presidential hopefuls as last week's CPAC conference, Boone said:

Back in the days when I was a kid, and we see guys that don’t stand strong on principle, we call them “faggots.” … [People] that don’t stand up for what’s right, we say, “You’re sissified out!” “You’re a sissy!” That means you don’t stand up for principles.

To my knowledge, no one attending or affiliated with the Values Voter Summit denounced Boone's speech; in fact, the weekend was a forum for him to distribute his pamphlet, "The Rape of the Civil Rights Movement: How Sodomites Are Using Civil Rights Rhetoric to Advance Their Preference for Sexual Perversion."

But Boone is not just a flamboyant preacher with incendiary rhetoric. His most recent project, the Network of Politically Active Christians (NPAC), a Washington-based arm of his Atlanta church, is housed in the Family Research Council building. The goal of NPAC, said Dean Nelson, its executive director whom I met at an event last month, is to teach and train political activists and candidates from a "Biblical perspective." If that all sounds like familiar progeny of the Christian Coalition, remember this time that the sought-after candidates are black. Nelson told me that after campaigning with James Dobson and Tony Perkins during the 2000 election cycle -- the goal of which was to elect conservative senators who would favor a federal anti-gay marriage amendment -- "Boone felt there was a need to reignite a vision for training African Americans to be more politically involved and educated."

In 2006, NPAC ran nine candidates for office nationwide, one of whom, a black Republican state representative in Georgia, won. Most of the others ran as Republicans in predominantly Democratic districts and lost. But this is just the beginning for NPAC, which obviously isn't going to make most black American Republicans anytime soon, but is taking a page from the conservative infrastructure in order to make conservatism more black. In the works is a project called the Douglass Leadership Institute, which will be modeled on dominionist D. James Kennedy's Center for Christian Statesmanship, but with training elements drawn from Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, which has trained most of the country's most prominent conservative operatives, including Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, and Ralph Reed. The Center for Christian Statesmanship sponsors lunches and other events for Capitol Hill staffers and interns; one former staffer told me that the invitations depict the events as an opportunity to connect and network with other interns and staffers, but when he got there, he was treated to prayer and a Scripture-laden speech by House Republican Study Committee chair Mike Pence (R-IN) about how finding Jesus made him a better person.

Even if most African-Americans remain Democrats, Nelson told me, he hopes that such training will make them a conservative voice in the Democratic Party. (Whether the Democratic Party will listen is another matter; the event at which I met Nelson was sponsored by Bishop Harry Jackson, a Boone protege and leading light of a black, religiously conservative movement that's being courted by the Perkins and Dobson team. Jackson is a registered Democrat, but no influential Democrats that I know of agree with his Black Contract with America on Moral Values.)

But back to "faggot." Boone is just as guilty as Coulter, even though he's not nearly the household name that she is. But if pressure is to be put on conservatives to distance themselves from her offensive slurs, equal pressure should be put on the conservative movement, its religious tentacles, and the nascent theocratic conservative movement Boone and Jackson are trying to build in the black community to distance themselves from him and his offensive speech as well.