The Religious Right Goes to Washington

Republicans are staking their hopes of holding on to power in the November elections on looking tough on terror. But at the Family Research Council's first "Values Voters Summit" in Washington last week, billed as the most important political event in the Christian Right's history, a showcase of 2008 Republican presidential hopefuls, and, tellingly, the president's own spokesman, all focused not on terrorists or war or global jihad, but on the threat posed to America by two men getting married. Under the stress of possibly losing its grip (on power), the party of the so-called "values voter" has collapsed under the weight of its own moral dishonesty.

Speakers at the conference fired up the audience, but there was virtually no mention of the occupation of Iraq, spiraling health care costs, a huge housing bubble, or the daily economic struggles many Americans face. Those things pale in comparison to the real threats: a declining culture, and the shadowy network of feminists and Hollywood executives that are responsible for its fall.

Bishop Wellington Boone, a black preacher, distributed a pamphlet entitled, "The Rape of the Civil Rights Movement: How Sodomites Are Using Civil Rights Rhetoric to Advance Their Preference for Sexual Perversion." Jenn Giroux of Cincinnati's medievalist Citizens of Community Values denounced feminism and proclaimed, to enthusiastic applause, "We want to be protected by men! That doesn't make us weak!" Don Feder, the anti-Hollywood provocateur and founder of Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation, said that George Clooney hates George W. Bush the way Hamas hates Jews. An unrepentant George Allen was canonized as the victim of "the worst gotcha journalism we've seen in recent years."

It is by now old news that the Perkins-Dobson-Wildmon-Bauer quartet is hysterical, close-minded, and out of touch with all but a vocal minority of religious fundamentalists who think that the ACLU has laid waste to America and that everything could be fixed if all gay people turned straight and Christians were just allowed to preach the Gospel in every corner of America's public squares. But while the movement lacks what many would consider virtue, its virtue to Republican bean counters is the durability of its leaders' predictability. Every two years, Republican strategists, sensing an election about to slip away, beg the Christian Right to mobilize its voters. The Christian Right complies. And about a year and a half later, like a jilted lover, the Christian Right complains loudly that the Republicans have betrayed them, have forgotten about their issues, have led the nation astray by allowing crazy judges to let two men get married. So they organize a conference. The Republicans show up. The Republicans pretend there is nothing more pressing in the world's greatest democracy than preventing certain citizens from having families. Relieved, the Christian Right (and, illegally, some of its tax-exempt pastoral foot soldiers, too) tells its followers to vote Republican. And it will go on this way until a collective wave of moral spine -- from Republicans, Democrats, and just regular, nonpartisan people who think statements like "Sex and the City" "is one of the most damaging shows of our generation" are just plain ludicrous -- stands up against the bullies at the pulpit.

The warmest reception of the day was reserved for the president's proxy, Tony Snow. If there was any doubt that he had perfected the art of turning every day into opposite day while shilling for Fox News and the Bush White House, he laid that doubt to rest with his sickening homage to the president's "humility." While some people might view Bush's hypercompetitive bike rides through the blistering Texas heat as an effort to humiliate others, Snow cited them as an example of Bush's humility as he gives "glory to a Creator." (More dictionary and less Bible might be in order.) Snow described the bike rides as an example of Bush's ability to "indulge in the glories of life and [not have to] apologize for things that give our lives shape and meaning."