Axis of Family Jihadis
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006Sometimes, you find a piece that really expresses exactly what you are
thinking, and there’s no way to improve upon it. So, here’s a rare
cut/paste job from the NYT.
The New York Times:
COLUMN: Mary Cheney’s Bundle of Joy
By Frank
Rich
Columnist Frank Rich calls Focus on the Family, Family Research
Council
and American Family Association the "axis of family jihadis" and
says
anti-gay politics is losing its ability to woo voters.
Sunday
12.17.06
IT’S not the least of John McCain’s political talents that
he
comes across as a paragon of straight talk even when he isn’t
talking
straight. So it was a surprise to see him reduced to
near-stammering on ABC’s
`’This Week” two Sundays after
the election. The subject that brought him
low was the elephant in the
elephants’ room, or perhaps we should say in
their closet:
homosexuality.
Senator McCain is no bigot, and his only
goal was to change the subject
as quickly as possible. He kept repeating two
safe talking points for
dear life: he opposes same-sex marriage (as does
every major
presidential aspirant in both parties) and he is opposed
to
discrimination. But because he had endorsed a broadly written
Arizona
ballot initiative that could have been used to discriminate
against
unmarried domestic partners, George Stephanopoulos wouldn’t let
him
off the hook.
`’Are you against civil unions for gay couples?” he
asked the
senator, who replied, `’No, I’m not.” When Mr.
Stephanopoulos
reiterated the question seconds later—`’So
you’re for civil unions?”—Mr.
McCain answered,
`’No.” In other words, he was not against civil unions
before
he was against them. His gaffe was reminiscent of a similar
appearance
on Mr. Stephanopoulos’
a
Harvard-trained doctor who refused to criticize a federal
abstinence
program that catered to the religious right by spreading the
canard that
sweat and tears could transmit AIDS.
Senator Frist is now
a lame duck, and his brand of pandering, typified
by his errant upbeat
diagnosis of the brain-dead Terri Schiavo’s
condition, is following him to
political Valhalla. The 2006 midterms
left Karl Rove’s supposedly foolproof
playbook in tatters. It was
hard for the Republicans to deal the gay card one
more time after the
Mark Foley and Ted Haggard scandals revealed that
today’s
conservative hierarchy is much like Roy Cohn’s milieu in
`’Angels
in America,” minus the wit and pathos.
This time around, ballot
initiatives banning same-sex marriage drew
markedly less support than in
2004; the draconian one endorsed by Mr.
McCain in Arizona was voted down
altogether. Two national politicians
who had kowtowed egregiously to their
party’s fringe, Rick Santorum
and George Allen, were defeated, joining their
ideological fellow
travelers Tom DeLay and Ralph Reed in the political
junkyard. To further
confirm the inexorable march of social history, the only
Christmas
season miracle to lift the beleaguered Bush administration this
year has
been the announcement that Mary Cheney, the vice president’s
gay
daughter, is pregnant. Her growing family is the living rejoinder
to
those in her father’s party who would relegate gay American couples
and
their children to second-class legal or human status.
Yet not even these
political realities have entirely broken the
knee-jerk habit of some 2008
Republican presidential hopefuls to woo
homophobes. Mitt Romney, the
Republican Massachusetts governor, was
caught in yet another embarrassing
example of his party’s hypocrisy
last week. In a newly unearthed letter
courting the gay Log Cabin
Republicans during his unsuccessful 1994 Senate
race, he promised to
`’do better” than even Ted Kennedy in making
`’equality
for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern.” Given that Mr.
Romney
has been making opposition to same-sex marriage his political
calling
card this year, his ideological bisexuality looks as foolish in
its
G-rated way as that of Mr. Haggard, the evangelical leader who
was
caught keeping time with a male prostitute.
There’s no evidence
that Mr. Romney’s rightward move on gay
civil rights and abortion (about
which he acknowledges his flip-flop)
has helped him politically. Or that Mr.
McCain has benefited from a
similar sea change that has taken him from
accurately labeling Jerry
Falwell and Pat Robertson `’agents of
intolerance” in 2000 to
appearing at Mr. Falwell’s Liberty University
this year. A
Washington Post-ABC News poll last week found that among
Republican
voters, Rudy Giuliani, an unabashed liberal on gay civil rights
and
abortion, leads Mr. McCain 34 percent to 26 percent. Mr. Romney
brought
up the rear, at 5 percent. That does, however, put him nominally
ahead
of another presidential wannabe, the religious-right favorite
Sam
Brownback, who has held up a federal judicial nomination in the
Senate
because the nominee had attended a lesbian neighbor’s
commitment
ceremony.
For those who are cheered by seeing the Rovian
politics of wedge issues
start to fade, the good news does not end with the
growing evidence that
gay-baiting may do candidates who traffic in it more
harm than good.
It’s not only centrist American voters of both parties who
reject
divisive demagoguery but also conservative evangelicals themselves.
Some
of them are at last standing up to the extremists in their own
camp.
No one more dramatically so, perhaps, than Rick Warren, the
Orange
County, Calif., megachurch leader and best-selling author of
`’The
Purpose Driven Life.” He has adopted AIDS in Africa as a
signature
crusade, and invited Barack Obama to join the usual suspects,
including
Senator Brownback, to address his World AIDS Day conference on
the
issue. This prompted predictable outrage from the right because of
Mr.
Obama’s liberal politics, especially on abortion. One radio
host,
Kevin McCullough, demonized the Democrat for pursuing
`’inhumane,
sick and sinister evil” as a legislator. An open letter
sponsored
by 18 `’pro-life” groups protested the invitation, also
citing
Mr. Obama’s `’evil.” But Mr. Warren didn’t
blink.
Among those
defending the invitation was David Kuo, the former deputy
director of the
Bush White House’s Office of Faith-Based and
Community Initiatives. In a
book, `’Tempting Faith,” as well
as in interviews and on his blog, the
heretical Mr. Kuo has become a
tough conservative critic of the corruption of
religion by politicians
and religious-right leaders who are guilty of
`’taking Jesus and
reducing him to some precinct captain, to some
get-out-the-vote
guy.” Of those `’family” groups who criticized
Mr.
Obama’s appearance at the AIDS conference, Mr. Kuo wrote, `’Are
they
so blind and possessed with such a narrow definition of life that
they can
think of life only in utero?” The answer, of course, is
yes. The Christian
Coalition parted ways with its new president-elect, a
Florida megachurch
pastor, Joel Hunter, after he announced that he would
take on bigger issues
like poverty and global warming.
But it is leaders like Mr. Hunter and
Mr. Warren who are in ascendance.
Even the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president
for governmental affairs at
Mr. Haggard’s former perch, the National
Association of
Evangelicals, has joined a number of his peers in taking up
the cause of
the environment, putting him at odds with the Bush
administration. Such
religious leaders may not have given up their opposition
to abortion or
gay marriage, but they have more pressing priorities. They
seem to have
figured out, as Mr. Kuo has said, that `’politicians use
Christian
voters for their money and for their votes” and give them
little
in return except a reputation for bigotry and heartless opposition
to
the lifesaving potential of stem-cell research.
The axis of family
jihadis—Focus on the Family, the Family Research
Council, the American Family
Association—is feeling the heat; its
positions get more extreme by the day. A
Concerned Women for America
mouthpiece called Mary Cheney’s
pregnancy
`’unconscionable,” condemning her for having `’injured
her
child” and `’acted in a way that denies everything that
the Bush
administration has worked for.” (That last statement,
thankfully, is true.)
This overkill reeks of desperation. So does these
zealots’ recent assault on
the supposedly feminizing
`’medical” properties of soy baby formula (which
deserves the
`’blame for today’s rise in homosexuality,” according
to
the chairman of Megashift Ministries), and penguins.
Yes, penguins.
These fine birds have now joined the Teletubbies and
SpongeBob SquarePants in
the pantheon of cuddly secret agents for
`’the gay agenda.” Schools are
being forced to defend
`’And Tango Makes Three,” an acclaimed children’s
picture
book based on the true story of two Central Park Zoo male penguins
who
adopted a chick from a fertilized egg. The hit penguin movie
`’Happy
Feet” has been outed for an `’anti-religious
bias” and its `’endorsement of
gay identity” by Michael
Medved, the commentator who sets the tone for the
religious right’s
strictly enforced code of cultural political
correctness.
Such censoriousness is increasingly the stuff of comedy. So
are
politicians of all stripes who advertise their faith. A liberal
like
Howard Dean is no more credible talking about the Bible (during the
2004
campaign he said his favorite book in the New Testament was Job)
than
twice-married candidates like Mr. McCain are persuasive at
pledging
allegiance to `’the sanctity of marriage.”
For all the
skeptical theories about the Obama boomlet—or real boom,
we don’t know yet—no
one doubts that his language about faith is
his own, not a crib sheet
provided by a conservative evangelical
preacher or a liberal political
consultant on `’values.”
That’s why a Democrat from Chicago whose voting
record is to the
left of Hillary Clinton’s received the same standing ovation
from
the thousands at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church that he did from
his
own party’s throngs in New Hampshire. After a quarter-century of
watching
politicians from both parties exploit religion for partisan and
often
mean-spirited political gain, voters on all sides of this
country’s culture
wars are finally in the market for something new.
