With the Party of Dobson
By Max Blumenthal
Created Oct 1 2006 - 9:59am
- from The Nation (posted here with permission) [1]
The day before Rosh Hashanah, Senator George Allen of Virginia addressed the
"Value Voters Summit 2006 [2]," a gathering of 1,700 Christian-right
devotees of Dr. James Dobson designed to rally the Republican base ahead of
November's midterm Congressional elections and preview potential Republican
presidential candidates for 2008. Earlier in the week, Allen had said
reports of his Jewish lineage [3] were "aspersions" before acknowledging
they were true. Immediately after his speech, as he stomped down a hallway
of Washington's Omni Shoreham hotel, I approached Allen and asked him how he
was planning to celebrate the upcoming Jewish holiday. Allen scowled, his
face turning beet red. Pausing for a moment to regain his composure, he
blurted, "I'll be with my family!" He rushed away at a quickened pace.
Further down the hallway, Allen was surrounded by a media gaggle and
bombarded with further questions about his Jewish lineage. He responded by
mentioning an award he once received from the Greater Washington Jewish
Council and said, "As far as the Jewish faith, I suspect I have a lot to
learn." Finally, Allen was plucked out of harm's way and escorted into a
waiting car by his self-described "A-Team" of grim thirtysomething aides.
(This "A-Team" did not appear to be wearing the distinctive "lighting-bolt
lapel pins" the Washington Post reports its members wore when Allen was
governor, displaying a universal symbol of white supremacy [4] inspired by
the insignia of the Nazi SS.)
Battling for his political life against his Democratic challenger, former
Reagan-era Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb, Allen did his best to endear
himself to the "value voters" crowd, entertaining them with the football
metaphors that have become staples of his stump speeches. (Allen's father,
George Allen Sr., was the coach of the Washington Redskins.) "Count on me to
be an ally, a teammate," Allen pledged. Then he praised Focus on the Family
founder James Dobson, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins,
Americans United to Preserve Marriage president Gary Bauer and the American
Family Association's Don Wildmon, as "The Four Horsemen," a reference to
Notre Dame's legendary 1924 backfield--or perhaps the original quartet [5]
from the Book of Revelations.
But as Allen sought to dampen the public controversy over his mishandling of
his Jewish heritage, his association with these "Four Horsemen" simply
called attention to Dobson's and Perkins's problematic utterances. Dobson's
Focus on the Family, for example, published an article [6] in its Citizen
magazine last February attacking the parents of federal judge Stephen
Reinhardt (whose step-grandfather was a Holocaust survivor) for telling
their son "tales of horrific violence" about the Holocaust "that lacked the
redemptive power of Christ's atonement." The Anti-Defamation League has
repeatedly condemned Wildmon for his conspiratorial diatribes [7] against
"secular Jews." And Perkins, for his part, paid [8] $82,500 to former Ku
Klux Klan leader David Duke for his phone-bank list and then spoke [9] at a
2001 fundraiser for the Council of Conservative Citizens [10], America's
largest white supremacist organization. (When I asked Perkins about his
links to Duke and the CCC, he replied tersely, "There are no links.")
After his speech, Allen huddled in a corner with Perkins and one of the
summit's few African-American participants, right-wing pastor and former NFL
linebacker Ken "Hutch" Hutcherson. Without prompting, Hutcherson offered
Allen a briefing on abortion, race and civil rights. "Too many black babies
in the last few years have been aborted," Hutcherson told Allen. "So you
wonder why we have a slow population growth."
"So what you're saying is it's [the black abortion rate] twice as high as
other races?" Allen asked with a look of astonishment.
Hutcherson nodded, then went on: "Jesse Jackson and others were against
these things early on, but because of where they get their money from,
they're for it now." Allen, who would later be confronted with a story [11]
by Salon's Michael Scherer citing Allen's former high school football
teammates who claim he used to use the word "*****," politely smiled.
Another speaker at Dobson's convention, William Bennett, has been equally
outspoken on abortion and race, declaring [12] last year on his radio show
that "you could abort every black baby in America, and your crime rate will
go down." But Bennett stuck to the script at the summit, casting aside
eugenics in favor of the more politically salient shock-and-awe themes of
"national security" and "terrorism." Discussing the gruesome murder of
American private mercenaries in Fallujah in 2004, Bennett stated
matter-of-factly, "When four Americans are hanged...you take out Fallujah.
You flatten the city! You have to teach them that American life is not
cheap."
Allen was only one of many Republican presidential hopefuls to present
himself as a kulturkampf warrior before the "values voters" summit. Others
included Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Arkansas Governor Mike
Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and Kansas
Senator Sam Brownback. (Arizona Senator John McCain, despised despite his
recent prostration before Jerry Falwell, and Rudy Giuliani, the
pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, cross - dressing [13] former mayor of New York
City, were pointedly uninvited.) Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher, was
alone in challenging the audience's backlash sensibility, calling for "an
evangelical version of shock and awe that will show Americans that we are
not just angry people." His call for moderation drew no response.
The speakers vied with one another to throw red meat to the crowd. Brownback
hailed Dobson as "a gift to this country." Romney delivered a speech
peppered with derisive references to his home state of Massachusetts, as a
predicate for his announcement of the "number-one threat facing America":
gay marriage. Romney's warning of the pink menace within was also echoed by
a close Dobson ally, the Bishop Wellington Boone, [14] who exclaimed to
hosannas from the assembled, "Back in the days when I was a kid, and we see
guys that don't stand strong on principle, we call them "faggots." A punk
is--and our people, I'm from the ghetto, so sometimes it does come out a
little bit."
The spectacle of the Republican presidential prospects competing for
Dobson's affection underscored the surprising remarks that the former
Republican House Majority Leader ***** /> Armey made to journalist Ryan Sager
a year ago in the wake of the /> Terri Schiavo affair. Asked for his
assessment of the 109th Republican Congress, Armey singled out the special
bill legislators had introduced to preserve the brain-dead Schiavo. "That
was pure, blatant pandering to James Dobson," Armey said. "Nobody serious
about the Constitution would do that. But the question was, Will this
energize our Christian conservative base for the next election?" Armey
added, "Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies."
Now Dobson was perched on the Washington stage, Republican hopefuls parading
before him, and his political prot&ecaute;g&ecaute;, Tony Perkins, the
former Baton Rouge policeman suspended from service [15] for joining a
violent abortion protest while on duty, sitting at his right hand. Dobson
recounted before his rapt audience a canned hunt in which he and his son
Ryan [16], a "youth speaker" and author of a book entitled Be Intolerant:
Because Some Things Are Just Stupid [17], recently participated, during
which Dobson killed a herded bear at close range. "It was a liberal bear,"
Perkins interjected. "It's a dead one now," said Dobson. The crowd hooted
with approval.
Dobson's tone shifted swiftly from self-satisfaction to agitation when he
mentioned that his self-declared nemesis, the Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans
United for the Separation of Church and State, was in attendance. He spent
the last ten minutes of his speech blasting Lynn for his plan to send more
than 100,000 letters to pastors warning that using church resources for
electioneering is illegal.
I encountered Lynn in the hallway outside the ballroom where Dobson spoke.
He was somewhat astonished at the amount of free promotion Dobson had
afforded him. "Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed used to have a rule never to
mention me," he told me. "I can't believe Dobson would say my name so many
times.... This conference has all the feel of a Republican convention," he
continued. "It's so bewildering to hear someone say, 'I'm nonpartisan, but
if the GOP doesn't hold the House or Senate, there will be a disaster.'"
A day before appearing at the summit in Washington, Dobson held a
stadium-sized get-out-the-vote jamboree in Pittsburgh, disguised as a
supposedly nonpartisan "Stand for the Family" rally, on behalf of one of his
staunchest backers, Senator Rick Santorum, who trails his Democratic
opponent, State Treasurer Bob Casey Jr. There, Dobson took to the podium to
warn [18] wavering "value voters": "Whether or not the Republicans deserve
the power they were given, the alternatives are downright frightening."
Without any immediately scheduled Congressional debates on social-issue
legislation to energize its base, the Christian right has adopted President
Bush's messianic "struggle for civilization" as a central feature of its
culture war rhetoric going into the midterm elections. Perkins framed the
issue by linking liberal evildoers with Islamic extremists, warning that "we
are facing threats from within and from without." Bauer described how the
passengers of United Flight 93 heroically ran toward the cockpit on 9/11,
reminding the audience, "All you have to do is run to the voting booth."
Having been instructed on their motivation, summit attendees headed to a
series of breakout sessions for their marching orders. At one session,
"Getting Church Voters to the Polls," veteran Christian-right operative
Connie Marshner distributed an eighteen-page pamphlet to participants she
said was originally prepared for Santorum's 2000 senatorial campaign. The
pamphlet advises church members to use their church directory to organize
calls to fellow parishioners from a phony company called "ABC Polls" in
order to create a data bank of "pro-family" voters. Only those voters should
be reminded to vote on election day, Marshner said. She added, "Even if you
have a pastor like that who doesn't want to do politics, you can use this
plan."
Marshner's plan is an essential element of the Republican ground game for
November. It might be deceptive, sleazy and possibly illegal. But that
doesn't matter to the "value voters." As White House Press Secretary Tony
Snow, who officially blessed the gathering, said in his speech, "What
matters most are the victories we forge together."
--
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
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