Election 2004: Short Takes

Max Blumenthal:

As I write this, Karl Rove is somewhere declaring victory. Though the results of the election are still up in the air, Rove has good reason to celebrate. He devised a strategy to capitalize on the mood of evangelicals who believe they're in a crush between marriage-hungry homosexuals from below and liberal "activist judges" from above – and it carried Bush to inches from the finish line, if not to victory.

The notion that the institution of marriage is somehow under attack by a gay menace has been cultivated behind the walls of evangelical Southern Baptist and pentecostal charismatic churches for decades. Rove merely adapted it into Bush's campaign platform and watched as anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives followed in nearly a dozen states. Ohio's anti-gay marriage initiative is so extreme, its Republican governor, Bob Taft, cautiously opposes it, fearing an exodus of white-collar workers to gay-friendly states. But there and elsewhere, gay marriage brought evangelicals out in record numbers and nullified the human wave Democrats counted on to retake the Senate and White House.

In many ways, the evangelical crusade against gay marriage is the latest outgrowth of the ideas of evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer is the intellectual godfather of the evangelical movement; in the 1970's Schaeffer penned "A Christian Manifesto" and "How Should We Then Live," bestsellers still unknown outside of Christian circles which articulated the evils of relativistic secular humanism through the lens of cultural and intellectual history. Secular humanism had resulted in a daily genocide of unborn babies in America's hospitals, Schaeffer argued, and evangelicals should vent their outrage by making politics their focus. His analysis resonated with a new, highly educated evangelical class which had rejected the premillenialist doomsday theology of preachers like Oral Roberts in favor of an aescetic lifestyle and a hyper-politicized agenda which stressed putting the country under the control of biblical law.

By the early 1990's, Schaeffer's teachings had spawned the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and provided an ideological structure for influential evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and Rev. Rob Schenck, who is John Ashcroft's former pastor. Today, with Operation Rescue and Moral Majority leaders in congressional offices and the White House, gay marriage has replaced abortion as the issue propelling the next wave of the evangelical grassroots.

This wave rolls from places like Colorado Springs, a wealthy town populated by countless California exiles living in McMansions in gated communities who sway to gospel music in 5,000-plus member mega-churches. And with aggressive proselytizing, the wave crashes upon Latino barrios, rural black towns in Dixie and even maximum security prisons. If Democrats are wondering what happened to their landslide or why the massive turnout they generated has nevertheless wound the country up in another grinding, protracted election, perhaps they should take a look at the grassroots right-wing evangelical movement.

John Stauber:

Only one U.S. Senator had the courage and the commitment to civil liberties to vote against the Patriot Act in the weeks after the terror attacks of 9/11. Pop quiz, quick, name that Senator! If you said the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, you'd be wrong. Even the feisty progressive from Minnesota failed to oppose John Ashcroft's attack on civil liberties sold as essential to fight Bush's war on terror.

The lone opponent of the Patriot Act was Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Wellstone's colleague across the Mississippi River.

Fast forward to the fall of 2002 and the run-up to Bush's war on Iraq. Democratic senators, including Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, John Edwards and John Kerry all voted to give President Bush the authority to attack Saddam Hussein. Russ Feingold voted against the war. I spoke at the time with a Feingold staff member who worried that these two votes would doom Feingold in his 2004 race for re-election. "We'll be bashed viciously as weak on terror and anti-war, they'll trash us mercilessly and it will cost Russ his race."