Anti-Gay Politics and the Religious Right
A Report by
the People For the American Way Foundation
Table of
Contents
The recent highly
publicized ad campaign by a coalition of fifteen Religious Right
organizations is the latest tactical ploy in a long-term political
strategy of vilification and political marginalization of gay and
lesbian Americans. Far from the campaign of compassion that Religious
Right leaders have portrayed, the recent ads further an explicit
political agenda that seeks to criminalize gay relationships and deny
basic rights to gays and lesbians in a range of critical areas:
employment, housing, and families.
Anti-gay politics have long been at the core of Religious Right
fundraising and organizing efforts. As the Religious Right becomes an
increasingly powerful element of the GOP base, anti-gay rhetoric and
policies have become more prominent in party platforms, legislative
fights, and public policy at local, state, and national levels.
Republican Party leaders risk being caught between public support for
equal rights for gays and lesbians and the unremitting hostility toward
gay rights from Religious Right groups that form the party's core
activist base. Congressional leaders' willingness to embrace anti-gay
rhetoric and legislation may be part of a strategy to energize
Religious Right voters for the fall congressional elections, and it may
reflect the longer term impact of the Religious Right's growing
strength within the party. Nevertheless, some GOP leaders are concerned
that the party's close identification with anti-gay bigotry may cost it
support among the general public in the year 2000.
This memo briefly analyzes elements of the Religious Right's broader
anti-gay political strategy; our staff can provide in-depth information
on any of these topics. People For the American Way Foundation has
monitored the Religious Right political movement and its attacks on
gays and lesbians for nearly two decades. The Andrew Heiskell National
Resource Library, which is open to researchers and journalists, has
catalogued a wealth of original source material, including Religious
Right groups' direct mail and television and radio broadcasts. In
addition, People For the American Way Foundation publishes an annual
report called Hostile Climate, which extensively documents incidents of
institutionalized anti-gay bigotry and discrimination from around the
country.
In
early May, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay hosted a summit meeting
between GOP congressional leaders and a group of disgruntled Religious
Right leaders who demanded more congressional action on right-wing
social issues in return for encouraging religious conservatives to go
to the polls in this fall's election campaign. Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA)
was put in charge of a "Values Action Team" to make sure that Religious
Right concerns were high on the GOP agenda.
Three weeks later, President Clinton issued an executive order
protecting lesbians and gay men from employment discrimination in the
federal workforce, provoking outrage among Religious Right leaders. On
June 15th, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott compared homosexuals to
alcoholics and kleptomaniacs while appearing on the Armstrong Williams
show, a cable television talk show. His comments generated criticism
from gay organizations and from the White House, and elicited support
from Religious Right groups.
In mid-July, fifteen Religious Right organizations launched a newspaper
ad campaign that Bob Knight of the Family Research Council called "the
Normandy landing in the larger cultural wars." The same week, Rep. Joe
Hefley (R-CO) proposed an amendment to overturn the Executive Order and
Rep. Frank Riggs (R-CA) proposed an amendment to withhold federal
housing funds from San Francisco as punishment for the city's domestic
partner benefits ordinance.
In the public debate spurred by the newspaper ads, organizers of the ad
campaign claimed that the ads were not political, and that the message
was one of "hope" that gays could be "cured." The timing of the ads and
the political nature of many of the groups that signed them made it
clear that those protestations were not credible. The ad campaign was
an effort to change public debate from a discussion of discrimination
to a discussion over whether homosexuals can be "cured" and turned into
heterosexuals. For civil rights advocates, the answers to complex
nature/nurture questions are irrelevant to civil rights issues; for
anti-gay activists, a simplistic model of gays as diseased — and
"curable" — is central to their fight against equality.
Janet Folger, director of the Center for Reclaiming America, organized
the ad campaign. The Center is a creation of Coral Ridge Ministries,
the $40 million empire of Florida-based teleevangelist D. James
Kennedy, who has been hard at work to build his national profile. For
the past five years, Coral Ridge has hosted an annual "Reclaiming
America for Christ" conference that has attracted many GOP leaders; in
1995 Kennedy established a foothold in Washington, D.C. with the Center
for Christian Statesmanship.
The ad campaign followed a public furor touched
off by Sen. Lott's equating gays with alcoholics and kleptomaniacs, but
it has long been a central tenet of Religious Right groups that
homosexuals are diseased, and can be "cured" with a combination of
religious indoctrination and psychological counseling. Reparative
therapy as practiced by a variety of "ex-gay ministries" includes a
large dose of gender stereotyping: men are encouraged to play football
or learn auto mechanics, women to wear dresses and makeup.
Scientifically, the benefits of so-called "reparative therapy" are
dubious at best: the American Psychological Association has denounced
the practice as ineffective and potentially harmful, while groups
claiming to "cure" gays provide no evidence to back their claims,
carefully neglecting to conduct follow-up studies of their former
patients. John Paulk and his wife Anne are the current "poster
children" of the "ex-gay" movement, appearing on the cover of Newsweek;
in 1993 John Paulk told the Wall Street Journal that "To say that we've
arrived at this place of total heterosexuality — that we're totally
healed — is misleading."
Politically, Religious Right groups use the disease or addiction model
to assert that civil rights protections should not be afforded to gays
and lesbians. According to this "logic," public policy that treats gays
with equality and dignity actually inhibits individuals from seeking to
be "cured." In Maine earlier this year, "ex-gays" were featured in one
of the television commercials run by Religious Right groups during the
successful campaign to overturn a statewide anti-discrimination law.
The recent ads also attempt to equate homosexuality with AIDS and other
diseases; one of the recent ads was titled, "From Innocence to AIDS,"
cleverly alluding to Religious Right myths about gay recruitment of
children and promoting Religious Right efforts to portray homosexuality
as a "death-style." Typical of such rhetoric was a recent Chuck Colson
article about Billy, a doll being marketed in the gay community. Colson
suggested that all Billy dolls should come with a plastic coffin,
asserting that most gays are "men whose lives are tragically marked by
disease, addition, misery, and early death."
Dr. Robert Garofalo, a Boston pediatrician who authored a health study
of gay teens last spring, complained to the Boston Globe that the
recent ad campaign, was "a complete misrepresentation" of his research
on substance abuse and other high-risk behavior. Garofalo told the
Globe he believes the disproportionate risk of gay youth for substance
abuse and suicide are the result of alienation gay teenagers face in a
"culture that is often unaccepting." Religious Right groups attributed
the problems to homosexuality itself, which Garofalo calls "the
complete opposite conclusion of what the paper actually concluded."
Misrepresenting ideology as science is a favored tactic. Paul Cameron
is a virulently anti-gay "researcher" whose methods led to his being
ousted from the American Psychological Association. Although Cameron
has been thoroughly discredited, his "research" continues to be a
favored source of ammunition for the Religious Right. William Bennett,
Chuck Colson, and others continue to repeat Cameron's conclusion that
the life expectancy for gay men is 43 years, a statistic based on his
reading of obituaries in gay newspapers. (Cameron's statistic was
effectively demolished in online magazine Slate) Bennett's trumpeting
of this statistic last year on ABC's This Week and in the Weekly
Standard was picked up by National Review and continues to circulate as
the kind of "truth" that the Religious Right wants to tell America.
The
Evolution of Religious Right Strategy
The ad campaign was a
reflection of Religious Right organizations' increasing sophistication
on this issue, having learned that overt hostility toward gay people
does not play well among the American public. Earlier this year,
Religious Right strategist and former Christian Coalition executive
director Ralph Reed spelled out a public relations strategy for
Religious Right activists dealing with gay issues:
"You've got to make it clear that your purpose is not to hurt or punish
someone else. It's not a negative-based movement or a fear-based
movement or an anger or hate-based movement but instead the movement is
about love and honor and respect and about modeling for our children a
healthy lifestyle. That's what the issue ought to be about. I think if
we can define it in that way, we can't lose."
— Jay Sekulow Live radio
show, February 20, 1998
Reed's advice reflects the reality that most Americans take a
live-and-let-live approach to their gay and lesbian neighbors. Polls
show that strong majorities favor protections from discimination in
employment and housing. Religious Right groups seek to re-shape public
attitudes, and thus influence public policy, by denigrating gays. It's
far easier to convince voters to support discrimination if you have
previously convinced them that gays and lesbians are out to molest
their children or destroy their churches. But harsh gay-bashing
rhetoric, which motivates core supporters, has proven less successful
with the general public. So now even the most virulent anti-gay
organizations, such as Gary Bauer's Family Research Council, adopt the
language of compassion when it suits their public relations needs.
This change is purely tactical. The language of love and compassion is
an effort to soften the sounds of an agenda that remains unchanged. The
Christian Coalition's Randy Tate recently provided an excellent example
of how seamlessly Religious Right leaders move from a declaration of
compassion to support for discriminatory public policy:
"I think that
as Americans, and particularly as a person of faith, that we need to
extend Christian charity to all individuals. That doesn't mean in the
public policy realm that we need to extend special privileges to
individuals based on their private sexual behavior."
— Hardball with
Chris Matthews, August 11, 1998
The Big Lie of the campaign
against equality for gay and lesbian Americans is the assertion that
seeking protection from discrimination is somehow the equivalent of
demanding "special rights" or "special privileges" that are not
available to other citizens. The "special rights" message was the key
to passage of an anti-gay referendum in Colorado in 1992, and is now
the centerpiece of similar campaigns, including this year's referendum
in Maine, where voters overturned an anti-discrimination law. After the
Maine vote, the Christian Coalition's Randy Tate said, "The American
people rejected the notion of special rights based on sexual activity
behind closed doors."
There are several variations on this message. For
example, Pat Robertson told his TV viewers earlier this year, "I just
don't think we should craft laws that give privileges on the basis of
the way people perform sex acts." Gary Bauer took a more circuitous
path to the same destination when he said, "While I believe homosexuals
have rights, I do not think they are right. And they certainly don't
have more rights than the rest of us. They have a right to their own
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but they do not have a
right to impose their views upon our lives, liberties and happiness."
The special rights lie, asserted endlessly, is designed to overcome
Americans' overwhelming support for equal rights and replace it with
resentment and hostility against gays and lesbians; it is often
buttressed by questionable statistics about gays' allegedly high income
levels. This is especially true of the Religious Right's efforts to
recruit anti-gay allies from among African American churches. During a
Cincinnati referendum in 1993, anti-gay groups produced a videotape
targeted to African American audiences; the tape featured Trent Lott,
Ed Meese and other right-wing luminaries warning that protecting the
civil rights of lesbians and gay men would come at the expense of civil
rights gains made by the African American community.
In addition, the battle cry against "special rights" was the
centerpiece of opposition to a federal anti-discrimination bill, the
Employment Non Discrimination Act (ENDA), which was defeated by one
vote in the U.S. Senate in 1996. More recently "no special rights" was
the core message of the Religious Right's campaign to overturn
President Clinton's executive order banning discrimination against gays
in the federal workplace. Carmen Pate of Concerned Women for America
said the executive order was "not about equality under the law, but
about special privileges." In the last instance, the rhetoric was so
plainly and patently untrue that a sufficient number of Republican
members of Congress voted in favor of equality on the job and the
executive order was allowed to stand.
"Special rights" rhetoric masks the pro-discrimination policy positions
Religious Right groups are staking out. Their attacks on corporations
that offer domestic partner benefits make it clear that Religious Right
leaders' anti-gay ideology will not permit something as basic as
extending simple fairness to gay employees. Religious Right groups'
calls for a national boycott of Disney are well known. A few years ago,
American Airlines was attacked for its anti-discrimination policy in
hiring and for its support of gay community organizations.
A host of
Religious Right leaders, including D. James Kennedy, Gary Bauer, James
Dobson (Focus on the Family), Beverly LaHaye (Concerned Women for
America), Don Wildmon (American Family Association), and Richard Land
(Southern Baptists) signed an open letter, printed as a newspaper ad,
attacking American Airlines. Gary Bauer's claim that the airline's
anti-discrimination policies somehow actively promoted discrimination
against religious employees were so ridiculous that the airline's own
Christian employees' organization disavowed it. American Airlines
officials met with Religious Right leaders but rejected demands that
they discontinue marketing to the gay community.
Religious Right
leaders have responded to criticism of their anti-gay onslaught by
claiming that gay rights advocates are the aggressors, seeking to
destroy families and faith, and that conservatives would be happy for
gays to just live their lives in peace. Religious Right leaders and
their political allies try to tap American's common sense respect for
privacy by asserting that no one wants to regulate what gays do in
private; the truth is far different.
On a recent edition of ABC-TV's Nightline, the anti-gay ad campaign's
mastermind Janet Folger tried to assert a claim of reasonableness,
saying "No one wants to take away from the rights that every citizen
enjoys, the equal rights that are enjoyed even by those in the
homosexual community." Yet when she was pushed, she admitted that she
supported laws that advocate imprisonment for homosexual contact — the
kind of laws that essentially define gays as criminals. Religious Right
groups and elected officials and judges use criminal sodomy laws to
deny gay parents custody of their own children and to argue that gays
shouldn't be allowed to be teachers or hold other positions of public
trust. The Family Research Council recently defended criminal sodomy
laws as necessary to discourage homosexual behavior and thus prevent
the collapse of society. An American Family Association publication put
it very simply and clearly: "We resist the effort of the homosexual
community to establish their lifestyle as legitimate."
The most incendiary
element of Religious Right groups' anti-gay efforts is falsely equating
homosexuality with pedophilia. The Family Research Council's Bob Knight
falsely asserted that the Employment Non Discrimination Act would
extend legal protections to pedophiles. Parents are told that gays and
lesbians are out to molest their children. Gay rights groups are
falsely accused of supporting legalization of pedophilia, when in fact
every major gay organization denounces it as criminal. Just this week a
Michigan gay rights organization won a defamation case against a state
legislator who falsely accused the group of supporting sex between
adults and children. The accusation itself, of course, is emotionally
explosive and incomparably damaging, and so continues to be hurled at
gay rights advocates.
For example, a direct mail letter from Don Wildmon of the American
Family Association included this emotional appeal. "For the sake of our
children and society, we must OPPOSE the spread of homosexual activity!
Just as we must oppose murder, stealing, and adultery! Since
homosexuals cannot reproduce, the only way for them to 'breed' is to
RECRUIT! And who are their targets for recruitment? Children!"
One newsletter from D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries featured
a photograph of very young children under the headline "SEX WITH
CHILDREN? HOMOSEXUALS SAY YES!" The newsletter asserts "Adult sex with
children has been a crucial component of the homosexual movement all
along, and officially since the 1993 March on Washington when it was
included as a demand (#55) in their famous manifesto." That assertion
is a blatant misrepresentation of the platform plank Kennedy refers to;
the same newsletter reports the text of plank #55 as supporting "the
implementation of laws that recognize sexual relationships among youth,
between consenting peers." Thus a measure clearly aimed at
decriminalizing sex between consenting teens was distorted by Kennedy's
rhetoric and falsely portrayed as an effort to legalize adult sex with
young children. This is, unfortunately, an indication of how little
respect is accorded to the truth by Religious Right groups on this
issue.
Earlier this year, the Oklahoma House unanimously passed a bill that
would have banned school districts or companies that contract with them
from employing openly gay people. The consequences of fearmongering
around gays and children can be brutal. In Michigan two years ago, a
popular high school music teacher was hounded out of his job and
harassed mercilessly after his homosexuality became public after he and
his partner held a commitment ceremony. The teacher, in his 30s, died
of a heart attack shortly thereafter. A lesbian teacher in South Fork
Utah is currently being subjected to similar unrelenting harassment.
It's a favorite organizing and fundraising tactic of the Religious
Right to demonize those with whom they disagree. Religious Right
leaders portray civil rights advocates — and liberals in general — as
enemies of faith. D. James Kennedy once asserted that "the diabolical
mission" of People For the American Way was "to crush the influence of
the Christian religion in American society."
But of all the enemies the Religious Right loves to hate, they reserve
their most poisonous invective for gays and lesbians. Pat Robertson
asserted earlier this year that the city of Orlando was inviting divine
retribution in the form of meteors or hurricanes by allowing rainbow
flags to fly from city lightpoles during a gay pride celebration. Other
examples abound.
I really believe that Christian oppression is just around the corner. I
really believe that the level of anger arising out of the homosexual
community primarily, but the whole humanistic movement that's out
there... as they gain political power — and they got it now — they're
going to continue to oppress us.
James Dobson, Focus on the Family
When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here
that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved in Adolph
Hitler were Satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two things
seem to go together.
Pat Robertson, Christian Coalition, 700 Club
1/21/93
[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and
throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face
of ministers.
Pat Robertson, Christian Coalition, 700 Club, 1/18/95
Satan uses homosexuals as pawns. They're in, as you know, key positions
in the media, they're in the White House, they're in everything,
they're in Hollywood now. Then, unfortunately, after he uses them, he
infects them with AIDS and then they die.
Anthony Falzarano, PFOX,
Janet Parshall's America, 2/27/96
If the militant homosexuals succeed in their accursed agenda, God will
curse and judge our nation... The goal of the homosexual movement is to
'mainstream' unspeakable acts of evil... Their cries for tolerance are
really a demand for our surrender. They want us to surrender our
values, our love for God's law, our faith, our families, the entire
nation to their abhorrent agenda.
Randall Terry campaign literature
The
prospect of same-sex marriage being legally recognized in the state of
Hawaii has been a boon to Religious Right organizing around anti-gay
issues. Religious Right groups provided the muscle behind the federal
"Defense of Marriage Act" and similar state bills barring recognition
of same-sex marriages. In November, voters in Hawaii and Alaska will
vote on anti-gay marriage state constitutional amendments; national
Religious Right groups are funding both campaigns. Polls show that
legal recognition for gay marriage has less popular support than do
anti-discrimination ordinances. Religious Right groups are taking
advantage of that gap in public opinion to milk the gay marriage issue
for maximum political benefit.
One of the Right's tactics in opposing gay marriage is to fan the
flames of unfounded fears that gays are dangerous to children;
Religious Right groups are at the forefront of state and federal
efforts to ban gays from adopting children or serving as foster
parents. In a disturbing number of legal cases, judges have cited
homosexuality as a justification for declaring parents unfit and
denying them custody of their own children. At the core of opposition
to gay marriage is an adamant refusal to recognize that loving gay
relationships can have any worth or merit.
Religious Right groups have devoted
extraordinary amounts of time and energy to blocking Senate
confirmation of James Hormel, who has been nominated by President
Clinton to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg. Religious Right
leaders, who claim not to favor discrimination, believe that no openly
gay individual should be allowed to serve in a position of high
visibility. In order to provide cover for this overtly bigoted and
discriminatory position, Religious Right leaders have accused Hormel of
endorsing pedophilia and child pornography.
Andrea Sheldon of the
Traditional Values Coalition combed a gay archives established in
Hormel's name at the San Francisco Public Library and distributed
materials that Senators might find offensive, even though Hormel's
financial support for the archives gave him no role in the selection of
library materials. Another cover story for blocking Hormel is the
assertion that his appointment would offend mostly Catholic Luxembourg;
in reality that country's officials have made it clear that Hormel
would be welcomed as ambassador.
Hormel's nomination has caused some splits between the Religious Right
and some Republicans who are opposed to the Religious Right's flat
opposition to a gay person serving as ambassador. Senator Majority
Leader Lott has allowed a few Senators to block Hormel's nomination
from getting to the Senate floor, where it is considered likely that he
would be confirmed.
In response to a National Review editorial that being gay should not
disqualify Hormel from serving as ambassador, Religious Right patriarch
Paul Weyrich asked, "Shall we tolerate pedophile or rapist or
necrophilia ambassadors?"
Among the hardest core of the
Religious Right are those who embrace "reconstructionism," which
advocates imposing a radically fundamentalist interpretation of
"Biblical law" onto American society. On the September 4, 1998
Armstrong Williams talk show, Colorado talk-radio personality Bob
Enyard called for the death penalty for gays and adulterers. Last year,
a Christian radio talk-show host in Costa Mesa, California said,
"Lesbian love, sodomy are viewed by God as being detestable and
abominable. Civil magistrates are to put people to death who practice
these things." The announcer urged listeners to contact legislators and
ask that they enact capital punishment for homosexuality. The station
manager called the program "an honest dialogue concerning Christian
beliefs." Congressional candidate Randall Terry, former head of
Operation Rescue, extends this view of "Biblical law" to include
"Biblical slavery" and capital punishment for rebellious teenagers.
In Texas
earlier this year, after state GOP officials denied Log Cabin
Republicans, a gay Republican group, a table at the party's June
convention, party spokesman Robert Black called LCR a "deviant group"
and equated gays with child molesters and the KKK. A peaceful protest
by the gay group was met by embarrassingly venomous counter-protesters.
There is a degree of consternation among Republican party leaders about
embracing Religious Right groups and their priorities during an
election year. Certainly the parade of presidential hopefuls who will
speak from the Road to Victory podium indicate a strong desire for the
support of motivated activists who are likely to vote. In a year when
pundits are predicting record-low voter turnout, energizing the
activist base will hold the key to dozens of elections.
Yet GOP
strategists worry that too close an embrace of the Religious Right may
alienate mainstream voters who disagree with movement positions such as
the criminalization of all abortions and legalized discrimination
against gays and lesbians. Religious Right activists have made major
gains in the control of local party structures in many states, yet some
of this year's early elections indicate that visible support from
Religious Right leaders is no guarantee of electoral success, even in
Republican primaries.
Earlier this year, at a
candidate forum sponsored by the Northwest Arkansas Christian Coalition
chapter, Springdale mayoral candidate Timothy Hill elicited applause
when he declared "Homosexuals are perverts....I will do everything I
can do keep them out of Springdale." He promised to post a sign at the
city limits saying "No fags in Springdale" and another reading "Welcome
to Springdale: Home of God-fearing armed Christian citizens."
People For the American Way Foundation has extensive files on major
Religious Right groups and smaller organizations, such as Americans for
Truth About Homosexuality, which publishes the anti-gay Lambda Report.
Our Hostile Climate report and ongoing research documents the very real
dangers of the Religious Right's anti-gay campaigns, not only to
civility and civil rights, but to the very lives of gay and lesbian
Americans, who are increasingly the subject of violence and harassment.
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