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George W. Bush may have been elected President of the United States, but news reports clearly show that he was really chosen to be president of the Christians. In his administration, people of other faiths — Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus, and yes atheists — are irrelevant.
WASHINGTON — Christian evangelicals provided much of the passion and manpower for President Bush's reelection. But even as they celebrate his victory, many of the movement's leaders are experiencing post-election anxiety, worried that their strong support for the president might not translate into the instant influence they expected.
They are flexing their muscles to block Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), an abortion rights supporter, from a Senate leadership post overseeing judicial nomination debates — but Specter appears likely to get the job. They want a clear-cut ban on same-sex marriage, but Bush's newly stated support for civil unions makes them wonder how strongly the president will back their efforts.
And as much as they turned out in force for Bush on election day, many are worried that their power could be short-lived, given that a number of prominent Republicans who support abortion rights and gay rights are positioning themselves to succeed Bush in 2008. In recent days, some evangelical leaders have warned in interviews that the Republican Party would pay a price in future elections if its leaders did not take up the issues that brought evangelicals to the polls.
"Business as usual isn't going to cut it, where the GOP rides to victory by espousing traditional family values and then turns around and rewards the liberals in its ranks," said Robert Knight, who heads an affiliate of Concerned Women for America, a Christian conservative advocacy group. "If the GOP wants to expand and govern effectively, it can't play both sides of the fence anymore. It needs a coherent message, which came through loud and clear in the election."
Matthew Staver, who heads the conservative, Florida-based legal group Liberty Counsel, said political parties tended to "take for granted those people who put them into office, especially religious or moral conservatives. We want to make sure that doesn't happen this time."
The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, said that if Republican leaders in Congress allowed Specter to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, their political futures could be at risk. He said a Specter chairmanship could be an "albatross" for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, a potential presidential contender.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, one of the nation's most prominent evangelists, is so concerned about harnessing the movement's power within the GOP and national politics that this week he formed the Faith and Values Coalition, which, as he put it, aimed to be a "21st century version of the Moral Majority." The group will seek to register millions of additional evangelical voters, starting in January, to ensure that supporters of abortion rights, such as former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, or backers of gay rights, such as Arizona Sen. John McCain, don't win the GOP presidential nomination and that Republicans retain the White House in 2008. "If the Republican Party were to nominate a pro-choice head of the ticket, the energy level in the evangelical camp would be greatly diminished," Falwell said. "And, very frankly, I think the Republicans would lose."
The nervousness stands in contrast to the rejoicing that took place after Bush won by a wider margin than many expected. He benefited from a heavy turnout among conservative Catholics and Protestant evangelicals.
Evangelicals generally see the Bible as the authoritative word of God, emphasize "born again" religious conversion and are committed to spreading their faith and values. Those voters may have been drawn to the polls by the national debate over moral issues, such as same-sex marriage. Polls show that as many as 22% of voters ranked "values" as the most important motivator in casting their vote, and about 80% of those voters supported Bush, who spoke frequently of his Christian faith. Ballot questions barring same-sex marriage in 11 states may have brought new voters — and Bush supporters — to the polls.
Despite these voters' support for Bush, the White House seems to be treading carefully in its relationship with evangelicals. On the issue of same-sex marriage, the Bush administration has been sending what some evangelicals say are mixed signals.
Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, told reporters this week that he believed evangelicals deserved much of the credit for Bush's reelection, and that future candidates should heed the lessons of the 2004 election when it came to voters' opposition to same-sex marriage. "This is an issue about which there is a broad general consensus," Rove said. "People would be well-advised to pay attention to what the American people are saying." At the same time, Bush and his aides have focused most of their comments on other issues in the days following the election, such as revamping the tax system and reworking Social Security.
Moreover, Bush's most recent remarks on same-sex marriage infuriated some Christian conservative leaders. "I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do," Bush said on ABC in an interview that aired a week before the election. His statement put him at odds not only with some social conservatives but with the Republican Party platform.
"The president has to stop endorsing homosexuality indirectly by supporting civil unions," said Knight of Concerned Women for America.
Some evangelicals are calling on the White House to use its muscle to block Specter from becoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a post he would win through the chamber's rules on seniority. Aides to Bush have so far kept an arm's length from the controversy, calling it an internal matter for the Senate. Control of the Senate Judiciary Committee is important to conservatives because of the panel's central role in approving nominations to the Supreme Court and other federal courts and in shaping such legislation as the proposed constitutional amendment barring gay marriage. Specter appears poised to take the chairmanship despite thousands of phone calls and e-mails that have been swarming senators since the Pennsylvania moderate warned last week that judicial nominees who opposed abortion rights might be rejected by the Senate. Some interpreted his remarks to mean that Specter would oppose anti-abortion jurists, though Specter said that was not the case.
Knight called the Specter issue "a very big test" to see if the GOP leadership understood "the depth of what occurred on Nov. 2. If they decide to elevate Specter anyway, they will alienate millions of people who counted on them to begin pushing back liberalism instead of aiding and abetting it."
Adding wrinkles to their relationship with the White House, some evangelical leaders worry that Bush's circle of advisors includes aides who are insufficiently committed to conservative social values. Some see Andrew H. Card Jr., the president's chief of staff and a former Massachusetts state legislator, as too moderate. They note that Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a lesbian daughter, has said that the issue of same-sex marriage should be left to the states, in contrast to evangelicals' call for a constitutional ban.
Bob Jones III, president of the Christian conservative Bob Jones University in South Carolina, recently urged Bush to purge moderates from the White House. "If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them," Jones said in a letter to Bush after the election. "Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ."
Complicating relations between Republican leaders and evangelicals is that the movement is divided on how to wield whatever influence it has, and on which issues are most important. One broad coalition of conservative Christian leaders met two days after the election to discuss the movement's role. A memo drafted after the meeting mapped out a strategy to "welcome the Republican, Democrat and the independent" by acknowledging issues such as poverty and the environment, as well as abortion and same-sex marriage.
But as evangelicals strive to find their role in a public square that feels increasingly inviting to their cause, some leaders say they must be patient. Even if Specter becomes chairman of the Judiciary Committee, it is not necessarily a defeat, they said. Falwell said he had spoken to Rove three times since the election, and that Specter called him this week to offer assurances that he would not block Bush's court nominees.
Grover Norquist, a prominent anti-tax activist and Rove confidant who convenes weekly meetings of religious conservative leaders, said anyone who was complaining about conservatives' progress held "unreasonable expectations." "How are conservatives feeling? Ecstatic," he said. "If they are not happy because they don't have two cars, then the answer is go out and work hard and get a second car."
Source: © Los Angeles Times
12 November 2004
As the presidential race was heating up in June and July, a pair of leaked documents showed that the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign was urging Christian supporters to turn over their church directories and was seeking to identify "friendly congregations" in battleground states. Those revelations produced a flurry of accusations that the Bush campaign was leading churches to violate laws against partisan activities by tax-exempt organizations, and even some of the White House's closest religious allies said the campaign had gone too far.
But the untold story of the 2004 election, according to national religious leaders and grass-roots activists, is that evangelical Christian groups were often more aggressive and sometimes better organized on the ground than the Bush campaign. The White House struggled to stay abreast of the Christian right and consulted with the movement's leaders in weekly conference calls. But in many respects, Christian activists led the charge that GOP operatives followed and capitalized upon.
This was particularly true of the same-sex marriage issue. One of the most successful tactics of social conservatives — the ballot referendums against same-sex marriage in 13 states — bubbled up from below and initially met resistance from White House aides, Christian leaders said.
In dozens of interviews since the election, grass-roots activists in Ohio, Michigan and Florida credited President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, with setting a clear goal that became a mantra among conservatives: To win, Bush had to draw 4 million more evangelicals to the polls than he did in 2000. But they also described a mobilization of evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics that took off under its own power. In battlegrounds such as Ohio, scores of clergy members attended legal sessions explaining how they could talk about the election from the pulpit. Hundreds of churches launched registration drives, thousands of churchgoers registered to vote, and millions of voter guides were distributed by Christian and antiabortion groups.
The rallying cry for many social conservatives was opposition to same-sex marriage. But concern about the Supreme Court, abortion, school prayer and pornography also motivated these "values voters." Same-sex marriage, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, was "the hood ornament on the family values wagon that carried the president to a second term."
Whether evangelical turnout rose nationally this year, and by how much, is unclear. Without question, however, Bush's conservative Christian base was essential to his victory. According to surveys of voters leaving the polls, Bush won 79 percent of the 26.5 million evangelical votes and 52 percent of the 31 million Catholic votes. Turnout soared in conservative areas such as Ohio's Warren County, where Bush picked up 18,000 more votes than in 2000, and local activists said churches were the reason.
Over the summer, the Rev. Bruce Moore, pastor of Warren County's Clearcreek Christian Assembly, gave two sermons explaining a Christian's responsibility to vote. Then he passed out voter registration cards. His 400 congregants circulated them among like-minded friends, registering hundreds more voters. "On this election, because of the issues before the state of Ohio and the nation, they were passionate," Moore said. "It was all hands on deck. I have never seen a rush for voter registration cards in my life as a minister."
Nationally, the backdrop for the mobilization of social conservatives fell into place when Massachusetts's highest court sanctioned same-sex marriage in November. Some Christian leaders perceived not only a threat to biblical morality, but also a winning political issue. Same-sex marriage "is different from abortion," said the Rev. Ronnie Floyd, pastor of First Baptist Church of Springdale, Ark. "It touches every segment of society, schools, the media, television, government, churches. No one is left out."
Yet Bush was slow to endorse a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman. In a January conference call, Rove promised impatient Christian leaders that an endorsement would be forthcoming, and it finally came Feb. 24, nearly two weeks after same-sex couples began lining up for nuptials in San Francisco. "A few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization," Bush said. "Their actions have created confusion on an issue that requires clarity."
For several months after the Massachusetts court decision, evangelical leaders lamented the lack of a popular outcry. That changed July 14, when the Senate rejected the federal marriage amendment. Media reports described the vote as "a big election-year defeat" for the White House. It was, in fact, an election-year bonanza. Backers of the amendment clogged the Senate switchboard with calls. Perhaps most important, social conservatives shifted their focus to amending state constitutions. They launched petition drives to put amendments banning same-sex marriage to a popular vote, and those drives resulted in grass-roots organizations and voter lists that later fed the Bush campaign.
Ultimately, 13 states approved marriage amendments this year, including 11 on Nov. 2. Some Democrats suspected that the ballot initiatives were engineered by Rove and the GOP, but religious activists say otherwise. In Michigan, state Sen. Alan Cropsey (R) introduced a bill to ban same-sex marriage in October 2003 and assumed it would have the support of his party. Instead, the Roman Catholic Church in Michigan became the amendment's main booster, spending nearly $1 million to secure its passage. "I couldn't say anything publicly, because I would have been blasted for it, but the Republican Party was not helpful at all," Cropsey said. "It's not like they were the instigators. They were the Johnny-come-latelies, if anything."
Michael Howden, executive director of Stronger Families for Oregon, said it was a similar situation in his state. "There's been no contact whatsoever, no coordinating, no pushing" by anyone at the White House or in the Bush campaign, he said.
Charles W. Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, recalled a meeting early this year when Christian leaders warned White House aides that the marriage issue was likely to appear on state ballots and be a factor in the presidential election. "The White House guys were kind of resisting it on the grounds that 'We haven't decided what position we want to take on that,' " he said.
According to religious leaders, the conference calls with White House officials started early in the Bush administration and became a weekly ritual as the campaign heated up. Usually, the participants were Rove or Tim Goeglein, head of the White House Office of Public Liaison. Later, Bush campaign chairman Ken Mehlman and Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition and the campaign's southeast regional coordinator, were often on the line.
The religious leaders varied, but frequent participants included the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, psychologist James C. Dobson or others from the Colorado-based Focus on the Family, and Colson. "They did an extremely discreet job," Colson said. "It wasn't like: 'Do this. Contact these voters.' It was: 'Here's what's going on in the campaign.' It was just keeping people informed, and that's all they had to do. It was respectful of the fact that you're talking to religious leaders who are individuals, who should not be in the hip pocket of any political party."
The Bush campaign enlisted thousands of religious "team leaders" in its canvassing efforts. According to activists in battleground states, however, Christian groups were often out ahead of the campaign. Gary Cass was in charge of registration and get-out-the-vote efforts in three Florida counties for Coral Ridge Ministries, the Fort Lauderdale-based broadcasting empire of the Rev. D. James Kennedy. On nights and weekends, he also volunteered for the Bush-Cheney campaign — and found it far less organized than Coral Ridge's effort. "I couldn't get answers. I had trouble getting a sign for my yard," he said. "It was a good thing we weren't coordinating with the Republican Party, because there wasn't anybody to cooperate with."
In Ohio, Lori Viars held a party for Moms and Kids for Bush at a local McDonald's. As co-chair of her county's GOP committee, she also spearheaded a registration drive at churches that began July 4. "By the time the Bush campaign said, 'You should do voter registration through churches,' we were already doing that," Viars said.
National religious leaders, and their lawyers, also made a concerted effort to persuade pastors to disregard the warnings of secular groups about what churches can and cannot legally do in the political arena. Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, advised in mailings to 45,000 churches that their clergy should avoid endorsing a candidate by name from the pulpit. Other than that, "we told them they were absolutely free and should encourage their people to vote their convictions," he said.
Such entreaties appear to have worked. Sekulow said he believes that thousands of clergy members gave sermons about the election, and that many went further than they ever had before. The Rev. Rick Warren, author of the best-selling "The Purpose Driven Life" and one of the most influential ministers in the country, sent a letter to 136,000 fellow pastors urging them to compare the candidates' positions on five "non-negotiable" issues: abortion, stem cell research, same-sex marriage, human cloning and euthanasia.
Dobson, a powerful figure among evangelicals, endorsed Bush — though he said he was doing so as an individual, not as chairman of Focus on the Family, whose programs are heard on 7,000 radio stations worldwide. "This year the issues were so profound that I felt I simply could not sit it out," Dobson said last week. Far from sitting it out, Dobson created a separate nonprofit, Focus on the Family Action, which organized six stadium-size rallies to urge Christians in battleground states to "vote their values." A values voter, Dobson said, is someone with "a Christian worldview who begins with the assumption that God is — that he not only exists, but he is the definer of right and wrong, and there are some things that are moral and some things that are immoral, some things that are evil and some things that are good." Although liberals may mock Bush for his good-vs.-evil approach to the world, it "is seen by many of us not as a negative but as a positive," Dobson said. "Here is a man who is simply committed to a system of beliefs."
Source: © Washington Post
8 November 2004
Christian conservative leaders say their top priority in President Bush's second term is the appointment of conservative judges to the Supreme Court and throughout the judicial system. "We have high hopes of changing the judiciary. Every judicial appointment that President Bush makes will make the courts less radical and more in tune with the voters who turned out in Tuesday's election," said Gary Bauer, a prominent Christian conservative leader and president of American Values, a conservative pressure group. Unprecedented turnout by evangelical Christians was a key factor in ensuring Bush's narrow victory over Democrat John Kerry in the election. Many were motivated by their opposition to same sex marriage and abortion.
Bush may soon have an opportunity to make his first Supreme Court appointment. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 80, is undergoing treatment and chemotherapy for thyroid cancer and may have to step down. Analysts have speculated Bush could have the opportunity to appoint as many as three or four new justices since all but one of the nine justices are over 65 and several have had health problems. Even if he does not reshape the Supreme Court, Bush will certainly make hundreds of lifetime appointments to the federal trial and appellate courts in the next four years. "Front and center on the agenda is the Supreme Court. We hope and pray for Rehnquist's recovery but if a vacancy arises we are looking to the president to follow the pattern he has already applied to appeals court nominations," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice which specializes in constructional law from a conservative Christian perspective.
…
Many Christians see passage of a constitutional amendment outlawing same sex marriage, which Bush has endorsed, as an important priority. "Getting the amendment enacted within the next four years has become a realistic goal," said Charles Colson, a radio host and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries which seeks to rehabilitate prisoners by converting them to evangelical Christianity. Influential radio evangelist James Dobson and other conservative Christian organizations lost no time after the election in calling for a renewed push for the constitutional amendment, which failed in both houses of Congress this year.
On abortion, few Christian leaders believe that reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in the United States was realistic in the short term. But they expected progress in their drive to erode abortion rights and make abortions more difficult to obtain. "There can be a significant paring back of the reach of Roe v. Wade, by insisting that minors seeking abortions get parental consent and getting rid of partial birth abortions. In pragmatic terms, you want more parental responsibility, more education for pregnant girls and more abstinence teaching," said Colson. "In the longer term, the whole life issue will turn more on judges than anything else," he said.
Source: Yahoo/Reuters
5 November 2004
I feel my freedom of religion is at risk. I fear President Bush will now lead an effort to enact religious dogma into law, dogma not even shared by all Christian denominations let alone shared with my own Judaism. After all, those who pushed hardest to re-elect Bush now demand nothing less.
