Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (32 page)

Laborers Union $2,255,900

Machinists/Aerospace Workers Union $2,188,138

United Auto Workers $2,155,050

American Medical Association $2,028,354

Service Employees International Union $1,871,774

National Beer Wholesalers Association $1,871,500

Carpenters & Joiners Union $1,869,920

National Association of Home Builders $1,824,599

United Parcel Service $1,755,065

United Food & Commercial Workers Union $1,743,652

National Education Association $1,717,125

Verizon Communications $1,677,617

American Bankers Association $1,657,615

American Federation of Teachers $1,599,555

A search of “Christian Coalition” turns up $250,000 donated by Pat Robertson in the 1997-1998 election cycle. In the “Ideological/Single-Issue PAC” category, “Abortion Policy/Pro-Life” groups gave $482,789 to federal candidates in 1999-2000—compared with $1,159,966 from Pro-Choice PACs.

The total for all “Republican/Conservative” PACs combined was $2,599,663. That’s less than the contributions from a single trial lawyers’ PAC. It is comparable to the individual donations to the Democrats from about a half dozen individual union PACs.

From January 1, 1999, through June 30, 2000, three unions made soft money donations of approximately $2 to $3 million apiece to the Democrats. (Service Employees International Union, $2,853,250; American Federation of State County & Municipal Employees, $2,568,600; Communications Workers of America, $1,995,000).
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In the same time period, the entire category of “Ideology/Single-Issue givers” from Christians to Sierra Club members contributed just over $1 million to Bush and Gore combined.
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But the slush fund champion of the 2000 campaign was a group that is arguably even more annoying than Christian conservatives—lawyers.
²⁰
According to the director of the Center for Responsive Politics, lawyers were the biggest political contributors in the 2000 election cycle “no matter how you look at it.”
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By September 2000, trial lawyers alone contributed more than $7 million to the Democrats and $13,500 to the Republicans.
²²

Yet, the “substantial financial resources” and “bullying influence” of the Legal Left was never alluded to, much less decried, in the
New York Times.

So how did the editors of the
Times
settle on “substantial financial resources” as the source of the religious right’s inordinate influence on national politics? Are there any facts supporting the
Times’s
thesis? Did it occur to anyone at the
Times
to check? No. As usual, the editors were speculating wildly and irrationally on the basis of their own freakishly narrow, insulated lives. No one at the
New York Times
knows anyone who could possibly be described as either “religious” or “right.” Thus, the frequent popularity of traditional values at the voting booth in national elections—and the unaccountable devaluation of the interests of Manhattan heroin addicts and transvestites—is a total mystery, suggestive of a sinister plot. It must be money!

But for pure detachment, nothing beats the
Times’s
accusation that the religious right engages in “bloc voting.”
²³
Unless you are a Manhattan liberal, the suggestion that Christian conservatives bloc vote more than other groups—say, blacks, Jews, Hispanics, women, or editors of the
New York Times
—will instantly strike you as highly suspect. To begin with, whatever else “religious right” means, the absolute bare minimum requirements are: (1) religious and (2) right. Having defined “religious right” as people who are right-wing, the
Times
then denounces them for being right-wing. The “Scientologist right” probably leans toward Republicans, too. Only in an environment of ideological fanaticism can a tautology be passed off as analysis.

Still and all, voters who identified themselves as “white religious right” (14 percent) were less predictable voters than people who identified themselves as either “conservative” or “liberal” without qualification (totaling 29 percent and 20 percent of the population, respectively). In the 2000 election, the “white religious right” chose Bush over Gore 80 percent to 18 percent. Self-identified conservatives voted for Bush 81 percent to 17 percent and self-identified liberals voted 80 percent to 13 percent for Gore.
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Apart from the promising development of 14 percent of the population cheerfully identifying themselves as a liberal cuss word, it isn’t particularly startling that 80 percent of people who call themselves politically “right” tend to vote Republican.

Eliminating the tautological aspect of the “religious right,” and getting straight to the heart of the matter—Christians “bloc vote” less than almost any other imaginable cohort. Quite a bit less, actually. In order of magnitude and based on the 2000 presidential election, the biggest “bloc voters” were blacks (Gore, 90 percent; Bush, 8 percent); Jews (Gore, 79 percent; Bush, 19 percent); Hispanics (Gore, 67 percent; Bush, 31 percent); and unmarried women (Gore, 63 percent to 32 percent). Non-Cuban Hispanics voted for Gore by 75 percent, contravening Milton Himmelfarb’s famous quip that Jews live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.

By contrast, Christians are the least predictable voters of almost any demographic group. Protestant voters went for Bush 55 percent, compared with 43 percent for Gore. This was almost identical to the breakdown among white people (54 percent to 42 percent) and men (54 percent to 43 percent). Catholics were the most evenly balanced, voting for Gore over Bush by a razor-thin 49 percent to 47 percent. According to a poll cited in the
Dallas Morning News,
even among Evangelicals, only 41 percent are registered Republicans, with about 30 percent apiece registered Democrats or Independents.
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If you wanted to know who someone voted for in the 2000 election, any one of these demographic factors would give you more information than knowing the person is a white Protestant:

Black Gore, 90 percent to 8 percent

Jewish Gore, 79 percent to 19 percent

Hispanic Gore, 67 percent to 31 percent

Unmarried women Gore, 63 percent to 32 percent

Compare that to white Protestants, who voted for Bush by 62 percent to 32 percent.
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Even people who self-identify as “white religious right”—a narrow category of aggressive conservatives who enjoy annoying Northeastern liberals—bloc vote less than blacks, and bloc vote about the same as Jews, But you never read about blacks or Jews being “easily led” or exercising undue influence by their infernal “bloc voting.” To the contrary, when blacks bloc vote 90 percent for the Democrats, it’s the Republicans’ fault for somehow not “reaching out” to minorities. But when white Protestants show a slight preference for Republicans, it’s supposed to demonstrate something nefarious about the Protestants.

Meanwhile, the media continue to issue hysterical Klan-watch updates about the “religious right,” as if these phrases conveyed information of taxonomic precision. Thus, a few months after the presidential election in which 90 percent of blacks and 79 percent of Jews bloc voted for Al Gore, an op-ed in the
New York Times
purported to sketch the views and feelings of “Christian conservatives.” Steven Waldman, editor of an Internet site about religion, prattled on about “Christian conservatives” as if it were a small, closely held corporation. According to Waldman, Christian conservatives are intolerant, threatening to George Bush, and suspicious of “pluralism.”
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How about an op-ed piece purporting to analyze what “white people” believe? What are their hopes and dreams? Is there any internal debate among white people over the Bush presidency? Do many white people accept a “limited form of pluralism”?

Beyond the basic building blocks of “religious right”—Christians who tend to vote Republican—the meaning of “religious right” remains maddeningly obscure. Considering that McCain’s message denouncing the religious right was such an important one, a message worthy of amplification on the editorial page of the
New York Times,
the message might be a little clearer. Even a witch hunt requires a working definition of the witch. Are you a member of the “religious right” if you want your taxes cut and believe in a Supreme Being? Or must one also support elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts? Is an unseemly enthusiasm for the NEA’s elimination the defining characteristic?

In fact, according to the careful analysis of the
New York Times,
the NEA is a major bete noir of the apocryphal “religious right.” The
Times
has reported on several occasions that “the agenda of the religious right” includes “elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts.”
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Is that now the definition of the “religious right”? It’s never explained.

Despite its founding expressly to “combat the political influence of the religious right,” “People for a Small Sliver of the Malibu Way” is maddeningly elusive in defining the enemy. Its website denounces every known conservative from judge Robert Bork to Rush Limbaugh. The only definition of the “religious right” that ever holds up is “Republicans Liberals Don’t Like.” In this sense, it is the molecular opposite of “moderate Republican.”

One could go mad trying to nail down even the leaders of this vast and terrifying conspiracy. Four Republicans who have been frequently identified in the media as “leaders” of the religious right are Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Buchanan, and Gary Bauer. No meaningful classification scheme would ever lump these men together. Falwell endorsed George Bush Sr. over Robertson for president. Robertson endorsed Senator Bob Dole over Pat Buchanan for president. Bauer endorsed John McCain—even as McCain viciously attacked Falwell and Robertson as “agents of intolerance” and “forces of evil.” Pat Buchanan defended Falwell—but not Robertson— against McCain’s attacks.

The point of throwing these men together as leaders of the religious right is not to explain or clarify. It is simply to say, “We don’t like them.” They are no more or less alike than any other four Republicans chosen at random— excluding those dubbed “moderate Republicans,” who are all identical. The only commonality among the four is that they are all Republicans born south of the Mason-Dixon line. These purported “leaders” of the “religious right” are talismans, meant to inspire fear even as the public is trained to laugh at them reflexively.

It’s difficult to make a case for the Reverand Jerry Falwell as a leader of the “religious right” inasmuch as his organization, the Moral Majority, disbanded in 1989.
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Two of Falwell’s assistants at the Moral Majority—erstwhile commanders of the “easily led” Evangelicals—wrote a book in 1999 arguing that religious people should get out of politics altogether.
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Pat Buchanan doesn’t rank as religious right on the definition given by CNBC’s Chris Matthews, who informed Peggy Noonan that since she was a Roman Catholic, she was not religious right.
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(This is meant as praise from liberals.) Gary Bauer’s support for campaign finance reform and John McCain led to his alienation from conservative Christians and dissociation from the Family Research Council, the organization he once led.

On close examination, the vast movement of spooky sect members infiltrating the Republican Party and threatening the nation’s stability always seems to come down to just one man: Pat Robertson. Noticeably, even those who monitor the “religious right” are hard-pressed to come up with names other than Robertson’s.
Church & State
magazine, a publication that issues hysterical updates on the religious right, speaks of “men such as Pat Robertson and his shock troops.”
³²
In National Public Radio’s expose on the religious right before the 2000 election, the Christian-watch expert referred only to Pat Robertson and “other leaders of the religious right.”
³³
When writer Andrew Sullivan wrote about the “religious right” for the
New York Times,
he described a single event: Pat Robertson’s 70th Birthday Party.

If it’s Robertson whom liberals are worried about, they scare easily.

Like Catholic schoolgirls engaging in wild promiscuity to prove they aren’t fanatics about their religion, Robertson consistently takes the most pathetically moderate, establishment positions within the Republican Party. He is, after all, a Yale Law School graduate. If Robertson were from Vermont and didn’t yap about God on TV, liberals would fondly refer to him as a “moderate Republican.”

On the eve of the South Carolina Republican primary in 1996, Robertson dramatically threw his support to establishment choice Bob Dole. Robertson’s endorsement was timed to ensure maximum damage to Dole’s surging conservative rival, Pat Buchanan, who had just won the New Hampshire primary. South Carolina went for Dole, and Buchanan was effectively knocked out of the race. Dole may well have been the inevitable nominee, but whatever ends up happening always looks inevitable in retrospect.

A month after the House of Representatives impeached Clinton, Robertson declared on his television show,
The 700 Club,
that the whole impeachment business should be dropped. The Yalie advised Republicans to “dismiss this impeachment hearing and get on with something else, because it’s over as far as I’m concerned.”
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In 1999, Robertson supported Most Favored Nation status for China. In doing so he sided with “business groups” against an “unusual alliance of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans”—as the
New York Times
described the contending sides. A year later, Robertson came out for a moratorium on the death penalty—fleetingly winning the respect of the
New York Times.
When President Bush’s “faith-based” initiatives were being roundly lambasted in the press as a sop to the “religious right,”
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Robertson publicly opposed them. A few months after that, Robertson spoke sympathetically of China’s “one child” policy, which happens to include state-ordered abortions. On CNN, Robertson noted that China has 1.2 billion people, “and they don’t know what to do.” Expressing a startlingly un-Christian sentiment, he continued, “If every family over there was allowed to have three or four children, the population would be completely unsustainable. ... I think that right now they’re doing what they have to do.”
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