The Reverend Patrick Mahoney, national media director of the combative anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and the Christian Defense Coalition’s executive director, spoke at the same press conference to call women’s groups “shameful” in their refusal to entertain Jones’s charges. Just as it was “a disgrace to all women” to call Hill “a pawn of the Left,” so too it was to suggest Jones was “a pawn of the Right.” Defending himself to a room of acerbic Beltway reporters, Mahoney fumed, “You know what my comment to the conservatives is? If you vilified Anita Hill, then you have no right to speak about Paula Jones—it’s that simple!… But if you supported Anita Hill, then stand for Paula Jones!” One reporter asked Mahoney about his recent comment that President Clinton’s policies were the most un-Christian of this century and possibly ever, a comment Mahoney defended and repeated (“from abortion to Haiti to Bosnia”). The righteous indignation was palpable, and Mahoney was adamant. However, reporters did not ask, nor did the speakers articulate, what was specifically Christian about Paula Jones’s legal case above any other, enough to make her the special beneficiary of a Christian legal defense fund.58 Arguably, the very framing of this group as a “Christian Defense” concern suggested that Jones might be a pawn. In other words, the Right responded to the Left’s apparent hypocrisy by creating new Christian organizations that, directly or indirectly, had the aim of attacking a liberal president.
Other Christian groups varied in their responses to sexual harassment charges against Clinton. Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network aired a television interview with Jones; the network’s news director defended this decision to a reporter who expressed surprise, noting without apology that sometimes “news is tawdry.”59 Gilbert Davis, one of two Virginia lawyers who took over Jones’s case from her first Arkansas attorney, worked with the Christian Action Network, a public advocacy and education group focused on protecting “America’s religious and moral heritage” (based on “biblical principles, values, traditions and American ideals”).60 But the Christian Coalition’s Reed claimed to take the high road and declined to get involved in the Jones case, writing, “I have always deliberately confined my criticism of Clinton to public policy issues, not his character or moral shortcomings.”61
After three years of public legal wrangling and Jones’s team upping the financial ante, in August 1997 Clinton’s lawyers offered a settlement of $700,000; Jones rejected it because it did not include an apology from Clinton, who continued to deny that the incident Jones alleged had occurred. The lawyers who had been working for Jones, disagreeing with her decision not to settle, abruptly quit her case. At that point John W. Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute (TRI), a Christian legal association, stepped into the gap and took up Jones’s suit.62 His office offered to bankroll the case, and he phoned a lawyer friend in Dallas, Donovan Campbell, a TRI board member who had previously defended Texas’s anti-sodomy law at the Supreme Court. Campbell agreed to represent Jones, and his firm hired a husband-and-wife private investigation team, Rick and Beverly Lambert, self-described “Christian conservatives” who came to see the case “not only as a job but also as a cause.”63 The cause, for all these Christian players, seemed to be that of toppling Clinton’s presidency, viewed as ungodly and rotten to the core—not eradicating sexual harassment per se. This all may have been too tasteless for some Christian conservatives: when TRI took up Jones’s case, one of the country’s largest Christian broadcasting networks, Moody Broadcasting Network, canceled a program sponsored by the institute, allegedly because of its involvement.64
Whitehead was a graduate of the University of Arkansas Law School who, as a young radical, had once published an interview in the student newspaper with a young Professor Bill Clinton, who taught law there in the mid-1970s. Whitehead had converted to a particularly politicized version of Christianity under the tutelage of antimodernist thinkers including R. J. Rushdoony (who influentially argued that biblical law should replace civil law) and Francis Schaeffer. In 1982, Whitehead founded the Rutherford Institute as a nonprofit organization primarily dedicated to taking on cases for religious freedom. Having defended the religious activities of public school students, the right of employees to wear Christian symbols, the teaching of creation science, and the rights of abortion clinic protesters, he was already well-known in the Christian legal world before taking on the Jones case against President Clinton.65 If there was a religious freedom claim to be made in this case, Whitehead would make it.
As Whitehead wrote, what Clinton allegedly did to Jones seemed “like a clear assault on Christ’s view of how men and women should relate to each other in the workplace.” He took the case on, he said, because, “I thought it would be a great opportunity for Christians to say, ‘We really do care about sexual harassment in the workplace.’ In my opinion, we were long overdue for the first foray of Christians into a significant sexual harassment case.”66 While critics accused him of being politically motivated, Whitehead responded, “The Jones case was not about politics. It was about a woman’s fundamental human and constitutional right to be free from sexual harassment in the workplace.” Lest anyone mistake the relevance of this issue to his own faith, Whitehead cited not only Jesus’s respectful treatment of women—a topic he’d examined in his earlier book, Women’s Rights and the Law—but also the fact that “all rights hang together.” That is, “if one freedom can be violated, they all can be, including religious freedom.”67
Fourteen years earlier, in fact, Whitehead had spent a semester teaching at the law school of Oral Roberts University, where he and his wife had developed a friendship with none other than Anita Hill. “We had several conversations about being a Christian in the legal profession,” he recalled later, “and I found her to be a genuinely nice person.” Hill was one of the few faculty members who engaged with his five children instead of ignoring them, and she treated them, he said, “with genuine affection.” When she testified during the Thomas confirmation hearings, wrote Whitehead, “it was difficult for me to believe that Anita made up the charges she leveled at Thomas, and I believed her testimony.” It was the more disappointing to him, then, that Hill remained publicly silent about the case of Paula Jones.68
Whitehead was lambasted from both the secular left and the Christian right for taking on Jones. Whatever his motivations for representing her, he was hardly the only conservative to take interest or to refocus attention on President Clinton’s sexual misbehavior and possible sexual harassment. The Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) spoke out frequently against what it called the “war of intimidation against Paula Jones in the courtroom of public opinion.” Citing the promise by Clinton’s attorney, Robert Bennett, to make Jones’s sexual history an issue, for instance, IWF leaders condemned these “sexist and misogynistic tactics” and denounced feminists—or “the popular new women’s sports event, the Feminist Flip-Flop”—for standing silently by their man instead of living up to their professed principles.69 Ann Coulter, the lawyer and commentator, advised Paula Jones’s first set of lawyers in their legal battle against Clinton and may have helped secure the Rutherford Institute’s involvement. She made an even bigger name for herself with her first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, which meticulously detailed the president’s sexual misconduct as well as his cover-up lies and argued for his impeachment.70 As Coulter angrily told a journalist, “We’re shrugging about this guy using this woman like a dog.… He’s behaving like some sort of sultan or tin-pot dictator.”71 The outrage expressed by conservative women and men toward Clinton could not have been stronger.
Conservative Christian fury toward Clinton’s alleged harassment included disgust toward previously disclosed affairs and other sexual misdeeds. In the midst of the Jones scandal, explosive revelations of Clinton’s affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, came to light and once more roiled the nation. Now the rage at Clinton focused not only on his exploitative behavior toward women but on the disgrace his behav
ior brought to the office of the presidency. Clinton had offended norms of public propriety with his undignified behavior—having an affair, conducting it in the White House, and lying about it as a sitting president. An Indiana-based conservative Christian talk show host and blogger named Mike Pence—a future state governor and US vice president—invoked this point in several pieces published during the Clinton years. In one, “Why Clinton Must Resign or Be Impeached,” Pence quoted Herbert Hoover on the presidency representing “more than executive responsibility” and serving as “the inspiring supreme symbol of all that is highest in our American ideals.”72 In another, he argued that Jones’s civil suit should have been deferred until he was out of the White House, which would have saved the nation from “the obscene, anti-marriage media circus” the case unleashed.73
In November 1998, Clinton and Jones reached an out-of-court agreement: Clinton would pay $850,000 but would neither apologize nor acknowledge wrongdoing. Both sides claimed victory.74 Meanwhile, a recently released report that detailed a wide-ranging investigation of Clinton by independent counsel Kenneth Starr was about to exert a blockbuster impact on the sitting president’s impeachment.
THE ACTS THAT PAULA JONES attributed to Clinton were far worse, ethically and legally, than anything Thomas allegedly said or did to Anita Hill. So if the same groups that avidly promoted Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination—and worked to demolish Hill’s standing as a means to that end—later worked as aggressively to defend Paula Jones against President Clinton, perhaps they simply saw clearer truth and greater injustice in the second case. Possibly their minds had been opened to the brutal realities often faced by working women on the job, exposed to crudeness of the most disgusting kind. Maybe they were just finally fed up with sexual harassment and the vulgar loutishness of entitled male bosses who thought they owned the world and every body in it.
Or maybe that’s just religion, sex, and politics. On December 19, 1998, the US House of Representatives voted to impeach President Clinton on two charges: perjury and obstruction of justice. The winding path that led to this historic vote was plowed by Starr and included a multitude of alleged abuses by the president—including the failed land deal known as Whitewater, the firing of travel agents in the White House, alleged misappropriation of FBI files, and, above all, the sexual harassment case of Jones, which ended one month prior to the impeachment vote. It was through Starr’s wide-ranging investigation that Lewinsky’s office affair with Clinton came to light, thanks to the phone conversations Linda Tripp taped between her and Lewinsky and submitted to Starr; and it was Clinton’s denial of that affair that paved the way to impeachment. Starr was the Texas-born son of a Church of Christ minister and, at this time, an active member of the independent evangelical McLean Bible Church. (He would go on to serve as the dean of Pepperdine University’s law school and the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Baylor University.) He oversaw the eponymous report that turned “the once clear line between public and private behavior” into “a big sloppy lipstick smear,” in one journalist’s words, by detailing the Clinton-Lewinsky affair “down to the kinkiest details.”75 The Far Right had succeeded in what had come to seem an obsession: presidential destruction and absolute humiliation.
President Bill Clinton addresses a 1998 White House prayer breakfast shortly after admitting to an “improper physical relationship” with Monica Lewinsky, in what became known as his “I Have Sinned” speech. DAVID HUME KENNERLY/GETTY IMAGES.
The report and impeachment vote were salvos in the ongoing culture war over sex, and conservatives on the Far Right reveled in it. Richard John Neuhaus, the Catholic priest and editor of the conservative journal First Things, had advocated impeachment for the purification of the nation, calling for an “enormous emetic” that “would purge us.” Robert Bork, the judge whose own nomination to the US Supreme Court had been destroyed by liberal and feminist groups, said an impeachment would be a good thing to “kill off the lax moral spirit of the sixties.” The National Review wanted Clinton’s impeachment as a cure to what editors decried as the “womanly ‘sogginess’ that pervades our culture and ‘undermines masculine intractability that serves as a bulwark for republicanism.’” And Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman from Texas, advocated impeachment to “set an example for our children and grandchildren.”76 Or, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board mused, praising Starr for his persistence in going after Clinton despite the invective thrown his way for it, “Who better to bring Bill Clinton to justice than a hymn-singing son of a fundamentalist minister?”77 In the end, Clinton survived to the end of his presidential term, as his 1999 Senate trial failed to garner the necessary two-thirds majority to convict and remove him from office. It had been a sordid spectacle, and the muted outcome stirred little emotion, mostly relief that all this was now history.
What remained of Clinton’s sex scandals was less an increased awareness of sexual harassment than increased polarization among Americans who held conflicting views of the significance of his sexual behavior, depending on their political commitments. By the end of the 1990s, Americans were well aware that they were divided by two warring understandings of sexual morality that were profoundly politicized. The nation lacked a common understanding of sexual ethics and seemingly possessed virtually no shared language for discussing values. The one side had staked its claim on public propriety and traditional virtue, wedded to a desire to oppose a president who supported abortion rights and LGBT rights, at least moderately more than his conservative counterparts. The other side, averse to moral crusading on sexual matters, valued sexual freedom and a dividing line between private consensual behavior and public concern, wedded to support for a president and his feminist spouse who favored liberal causes. These were not consistently pure philosophies—there were hypocrisies, contradictions, and blind spots on both sides—but they offered genuine differences in overall priorities and worldviews. The broader war over Clinton, including but by no means limited to sexual harassment, revealed and continued to shape that divergence of worldviews extending to a whole range of gendered issues as they impinged on the political realm.
In the end, the Christian right successfully utilized the Clinton scandals to expand and solidify its power, leading up to the 2000 presidential election of George W. Bush, the first self-described evangelical Christian elected with the full backing of a mature religious right. But the election was extremely close: Bush actually lost the popular vote by a slim margin to his Democratic rival, Al Gore, and errors and irregularities in voting procedures in the state of Florida left the results in doubt for over a month before a Supreme Court decision determined the outcome. Liberals and progressives were incensed, but the Right had won, thanks in no small part to the mobilization of Christian conservatives spurred by sex.
CHAPTER 8
SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND LGBT RIGHTS IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
THE CLINTON IMPEACHMENT LAID BARE the diverging worldviews that divided American Christians, and more generally split the nation, at the end of the twentieth century. As the post-Clinton era dawned, the two camps remained political enemies on other issues as well—inevitably feminism, and notably abortion, which seemed the perennial focus of those religious conservatives who believed that abortion was murder and that outlawing it was of critical import to the country’s moral health. A different issue fraught with its own conflict-laden history also loomed large both in the churches and in the wider culture during this period: the fight over homosexuality was reaching a crisis point and would soon crack apart still more of the adhesive feelings of trust and goodwill that had bound many together despite their differences.
Attitudes toward same-sex love and marriage underwent an interpretive sea change in the early years of the new century. Long habits of treating lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people with scorn, contempt, and pity had been melting for some years prior to that, but the pace of change picked up rapidly during the Bush presidency. Televisi
on and movie depictions of LGBT characters expanded and grew popular with wide ranges of viewers. Parents and relatives of LGBT children progressively sloughed off the old shame and silence to stand up for their loved ones with pride. Anti-discrimination laws went from unthinkable impossibilities in the outlook of most citizens to justifiable if not indispensable and fundamental rights. Eventually, marriage between two people of the same sex became officially authorized, first state by state and, in 2015, for the entire nation.1
Growing numbers of Americans, including religious liberals and progressives, rejoiced at these changes in the legal, social, and cultural status of sexual minorities and adjusted their vocabularies to use the terminology preferred by queer people themselves. Many others, if not quite rejoicing, dutifully tolerated the social, political, and legal shifts around them and gradually came around to new contemporary realities and embodied identities. But outrage and resistance remained potent in certain quarters, most notably among vocal subsets of fundamentalists and some other conservative Christians—belying yet again any hope of genuine national unity or even modest rapprochement. Nowhere were national divisions over homosexuality deeper than in the church.
Those deep religious divisions faced a number of challenges, epitomized by the events surrounding a historic milestone in the Episcopal Church. In the spring of 2003, Episcopalians in the diocese of New Hampshire were facing the election of a new bishop. Four candidates were on the ballot, two women and two men. All were worthy; all had lengthy, impressive histories of serving the Episcopal Church. But unlike most ordinary diocesan elections, this was not a discreet affair watched mostly by lay and clerical insiders. As election day grew closer, throngs of reporters from the national press flocked to Concord, where the vote was to take place at St. Paul’s Church. On June 7, the clergy and laity together speedily elected Gene Robinson, a Kentucky-born fifty-six-year-old divorced father of two grown daughters who had served thirty years as a priest. He was also the first openly gay and partnered man ever to win diocesan election to the office of bishop in the Episcopal Church.
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