But mostly the Council has been a source of embarrassment to Republicans hoping to move their party beyond a race-baiting image. Former Reagan speechwriter and conservative pundit Peggy Noonan pithily declared that anyone involved with the CofCC “does not deserve to be in a leadership position in America.”
When I asked Perkins at the Family Research Council’s 2006 Value Voters Summit what he had said when he spoke to the CofCC, his discomfort was apparent. He cringed and quickly backpedaled until he disappeared into a mob of waiting reporters eager for his opinions on the upcoming midterm congressional elections. After I reported in 2005 on Perkins’s purchase of David Duke’s mailing list, the Family Research Council issued a statement that flatly dismissed my reporting as “false,” claiming the “connection [to Duke] was not known to Mr. Perkins until 1999. Mr. Perkins,” the statement added, “profoundly opposes the racial views of Mr. Duke and was profoundly grieved to learn that Duke was a party to the company that had done work for the 1996 campaign.” Yet Perkins remained unable to explain how his signature wound up on the check to Duke, and he refuses to acknowledge that the FEC fined his former boss for attempting to cover up the Duke connection he brokered.
Yet Perkins’s dealings with Duke became an issue when he declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in 2002. Though Perkins flatly denied that he had ever had anything to do with Duke, and denounced the ex-Klansman for good measure, his signature was on the document authorizing the purchase of Duke’s list.
Despite endorsements from James Dobson and a host of nationally known conservative leaders, most of them CNP members, Perkins did not even finish as the top Republican in his state’s Senate campaign. With his defeat among Republicans, Perkins had seemingly reached the end of his political lifeline, and under ordinary circumstances he would have faded into obscurity. But instead, his relationship with Dobson would enable him to wield even more influence over the Republican congressional leadership than he might have enjoyed had he been elected Louisiana’s junior senator.
Just as Perkins conceded the election, Gary Bauer, the Family Research Council’s longtime president, was forced out of his post. Members of the Council’s board of directors were rankled by Bauer’s hapless bid for the presidency in 2000, a crusade that he mounted against their advice, and one that was remembered better for the image of the candidate falling over backward off a stage while flipping pancakes than for any measurable benefits it brought to the Christian right. Meanwhile, rumors that Bauer engaged in an extramarital affair with his twenty-seven-year-old deputy campaign manager prompted two top staffers to quit his campaign in protest of his “inappropriate behavior.” Dobson, who (according to reporters Thomas Edsall and Hanna Rosin) had joined the Family Research Council board members in ordering Bauer to stop meeting behind closed doors with the young staffer, was livid.
At a press conference in September 2000, Bauer denied the affair as a “rumor” and insisted that despite his “pro-family” campaign theme, he should not be held to a higher standard than any other politician. “I am not a minister,” he lectured reporters. “I am not a pastor.” Soon after, Bauer withdrew from the race and inexplicably endorsed Senator John McCain, a figure loathed by the conservative movement. Dobson was so infuriated by Bauer’s move that he broke off all contact with his former friend. According to Dobson’s official biographer Dale Buss, the two did not restore their working relationship until 2004.
With Bauer momentarily cast into the political wilderness, Dobson anointed Perkins the new Family Research Council president in 2002. Perkins’s appointment to the influential role arrived at a fortuitous moment. He came to Washington in the immediate wake of 9/11, when the president enjoyed record approval ratings, when the Republicans controlled both House and Senate, and when everything seemed possible. The “war on terror” electrified the radical right’s domestic agenda, enabling movement activists such as Perkins to press for ambitious initiatives to roll back abortion and civil rights for gays and minorities.
Born-again Watergate felon Charles Colson highlighted the radical right’s attempt to intertwine the war on terror with the culture war. “Let’s acknowledge that America’s increasing decadence is giving aid and comfort to the enemy,” Colson wrote in a 2002 editorial for the evangelical magazine Christianity Today. “When we tolerate trash on television, permit pornography to invade our homes via the internet, and allow babies to be killed at the point of birth, we are inflaming radical Islam.” Colson’s suggestion, as difficult as it was to accept at face value, was crystal clear: The United States needed to bring its laws governing morality in line with those of Islamic theocracies. Bin Laden’s minions needed to be appeased.
When Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the White House deployed Colson to market the war to fellow evangelicals in the context of St. Augustine’s Just War doctrine—a dubious exercise, considering Augustine’s explicit rejection of preemptive, unilateral warfare. Meanwhile, the popular televangelist and former Southern Baptist Convention president Charles Stanley warned, in a February 2003 sermon, that those who opposed or disobeyed the U.S. government in its drive to war “will receive condemnation upon themselves” from God.
Even though the Christian right conducted its campaign to mobilize the conservative grassroots almost entirely within the insular realm of mega-churches, online journals, and radio airwaves, it affected public opinion dramatically. Evangelicals rallied to Bush’s side with unmatched fervor, supporting the invasion and its eventually discredited justifications in a greater percentage than any other demographic group. The Christian-right leaders who orchestrated this PR push waited patiently for their reward, hoping that the appointment of far-right nominees to the federal bench and Supreme Court was not far off.
In a grudging show of respect for their Republican hosts, Christian-right leaders shrank into the shadows during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Instead of culture war cant, the halls of New York City’s Madison Square Garden resounded with fervid chants of “Whatever it takes! Whatever it takes!” each time a speaker invoked the war. And that slogan could have applied equally to the parade of moderate Republicans—and the absence of conservatives—on the podium. Primetime speeches by figures such as New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senator John McCain, and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger lent the convention a relatively moderate tone, while Christian-right figures were practically quarantined by party elites afraid of alienating independent voters.
Mormon publishing executive Sheri Dew was one of the meager sops the GOP tossed the Christian right during the convention. Dew, an unmarried forty-six-year-old woman who delivered the convention’s opening invocation, had earned renown among evangelicals for her anti-gay invective, particularly her declaration that proponents of gay marriage were “lining up with Hitler.”
Meanwhile, at the Plaza Hotel across the street from the convention, the Council for National Policy quietly plotted its second-term strategy. Inside the secret meeting, the movement’s leading lights united behind a strategy to seize the reins of the judicial branch once and for all after the 2004 election. Perkins, who presided over the meeting, demonstrated his clout by arranging for the new Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, to speak.
Frist, a former brain surgeon and wealthy heir to a hospital chain fortune, emerged from the white-gloved, patrician tradition of Tennessee Republicanism, but he took a turn to the hard right in order to rise through the Republican ranks in Congress. Now, he represented the key to the radical right’s court-packing plan. At the Plaza Hotel, Perkins and his fellow Council for National Policy members presented the grateful Frist with its “Thomas Jefferson Award.” The only reporter able to gain access to the meeting, David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times, reported that Frist told his glowing hosts, “The destiny of the nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement.”
Then, in December 2004, one month after Bush won reelection, Frist donated $5,000 through his political action committee to Perki
ns’s failed Senate campaign. Considering that the donation was made two years after Perkins’s campaign had sputtered to a halt, and that Frist had endorsed Perkins’s rival in the race, thus contributing to his defeat, the donation appeared as a tribute by which the majority leader ingratiated himself with the Christian right’s point man on Capitol Hill. Perkins gladly accepted the money, recognizing that Frist would shepherd the president’s most radical judicial nominees through the Senate.
Senate Democrats had confirmed nearly two hundred of Bush’s nominees to the federal bench by the time Bush was reelected—more than in Reagan’s first term, Bush’s father’s term, or Clinton’s second term. Yet the Democrats refused a handful of especially radical nominees who reached the Senate floor for a vote. The filibuster, which requires a two-thirds majority of senators to override, enabled the Democrats to stop the confirmation of some judicial picks for years and also forced the withdrawal of other nominations.
The White House, however, devised a clever strategy to place the Democrats on the defensive: deliberately nominating a handful of black archconservatives to the federal bench. Expecting the Democrats to filibuster, the White House enlisted Perkins and a phalanx of right-wing movement surrogates to present these nominees to their followers as victims of “liberal racism.” Perkins and his allies, whose history of racial politics had been something of an embarrassment, leapt at the opportunity.
CHAPTER 15
BOLDLY AFFIRMING UNCLE TOM
When James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and their movement allies mobilized for the coming battle over court appointments, they reminisced fondly about President George H. W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas. By accusing his Democratic opponents of staging “the high tech lynching of an uppity black man,” Thomas applied an effective racial patina to the right’s persecution complex. After enduring damaging accusations of sexual harassment and pornography use, Thomas developed a vengeful anti-liberal streak that colored his draconian opinions on the Supreme Court. Having closely observed Thomas’s career and recognized his utility, the movement s legal activists urged George W. Bush to nominate more conservative minorities to the federal bench. If and when Democrats opposed the nominees’ confirmation, the movement planned to accuse them of every form of discrimination, from anti-Christian bigotry to elitism to simple racism. In doing so, they could once again obscure the Republican Party’s agenda of bigotry.
An African American sharecropper’s daughter named Janice Rogers-Brown, nominated to the 11th circuit federal court of appeals, became a spearhead of Bush’s strategy. Appointed to California’s Supreme Court by Republican governor Pete Wilson despite the state bar’s warning that her “judicial opinions were insensitive to established precedents and improperly reflected [her] philosophical and personal views,” Rogers-Brown had distinguished herself with frenzied anti-government tirades. “[W]e no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it,” she opined.
“We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate—the drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens.”
When Democrats filibustered Janice Rogers-Brown, responding to calls from the NAACP and the Black Congressional Caucus to block her confirmation, the movement spewed forth a flood of manufactured outrage. In an editorial for the San Francisco Chronicle, Deborah Saunders, a conservative columnist, attacked the Congressional Black Caucus. “Caucus members will hound any black person who escapes the liberal plantation,” she wrote. An op-ed by the Wall Street Journal editorial board accused the Democrats of filibustering Rogers-Brown for being “too qualified—and black.” And the executive director of the right-wing Committee on Justice, Sean Rushton, claimed that Democrats construed Brown as a “race-traitor, Uncle Tom sellout . . . because she is a conservative black woman.”
Rogers-Brown’s radicalism was matched, if not exceeded, by another of Bush’s African American judicial picks, Claude Allen. Raised in inner-city Washington, DC, Allen was warned by his mother that he would ruin his career by becoming a Republican. He proved her wrong when, immediately after graduating from college, he joined the staff of Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, a demagogue who had devoted his career to race-baiting, gay bashing, and various other moral crusades.
While toiling for the Helms machine as a press aide, Allen smeared his boss’s Democratic opponent in his 1984 reelection campaign, former governor Jim Hunt, as a tool of “the queers,” but he remained silent when Helms voted against making Martin Luther King Jr. Day a federal holiday. (He later claimed he had left work early in protest.) Allen befriended Clarence Thomas in 1991 and soon became the judge’s protégé. “He would always say to make sure I conducted myself appropriately,” Allen recalled. After a stint clerking for federal justice David Sentelle, another product of the Helms machine, Allen was pipelined into the administration of Virginia’s right-wing Republican governor, Jim Gilmore. There, he collaborated with Christian-right allies to undermine abortion rights and sex education.
When Bush nominated Allen in 2003 to the 4th circuit federal court of appeals, covering the southeastern states, the most conservative jurisdiction in the country and a possible springboard to the Supreme Court, Senate Republicans pressed aggressively for his confirmation. Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who helped shepherd Clarence Thomas through the confirmation process, asked Allen toward the end of his hearing what his grandfather, the first member of his family born out of slavery, would say about his nomination. Allen, stirred with emotion, sought to summon a response. Finally, he declared, “He would say, ‘Keep serving our nation and giving back to those you have received from.” Like Allen’s past patrons, Helms and Gilmore, Bush was assured of his grateful nominee’s loyalty.
Yet Senate Democrats filibustered Allen, forcing Bush to withdraw his nomination. When his second term began, Bush appointed Allen his chief domestic policy advisor, a plum post that paid as much as any other in the White House. Allen, acting in his role as government agent for the Christian right, immediately ordered the removal of information about condoms from the Centers for Disease Control’s website. He then prohibited federal grant recipients from even discussing contraceptives unless they specifically described them as “not effective.”
“I love you and appreciate you,” James Dobson told Allen, a guest on his radio show in August 2005, “and it comes directly from my heart.”
For all of Bush’s talk of “compassionate conservatism,” he nominated Charles Pickering Sr. to the federal bench. Pickering, who switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP to protest the Civil Rights Act of 1964, had collaborated during the late 1960s with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission—his home state’s anti-civil-rights secret police—in a plot against integration. (In 2002, Pickering’s son, Charles Jr., dispatched campaign staffers to plumb for votes at a Council of Conservative Citizens meeting during his successful bid for Congress.) Pickering’s history of racial animus made his nomination too contentious to pursue, and he was forced to withdraw.
To advance the right’s campaign to confirm other filibustered nominees, Tony Perkins pointed to Pickering, who happened to be an evangelical Christian, as a victim of liberal religious bigotry. “It’s almost as if there’s a radical minority in the U.S. Senate that’s saying this: ‘You have to choose between your faith and public service,’” Perkins complained to Pickering during an April 2005 broadcast of his Family Research Council radio show. “Tony, that’s exactly right,” the former nominee responded. By Perkins and Pickering’s logic, the burden of oppression had passed from racial minorities to pure-hearted evangelicals opposed to abortion and “the homosexual agenda.”
The following week, Perkins initiated a campaign to pressure Senator Frist and the Republican leadership to obliterate opposition to Bush’s judicial nominees by deploying the so-called “nuclear option,” an arcane parliamentary maneuver that would have e
liminated the two-hundred-year-old practice of the filibuster. Perkins made his case at a massive, nationally telecast rally dubbed “Justice Sunday” that he convened at a Kentucky mega-church. Besides Dobson, Colson, and the usual warriors of the Christian right, Perkins corralled Frist into appearing. A flier for Justice Sunday leveled the time-tested accusation of anti-Christian persecution against the liberal evildoers. “The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias,” the flier read, “and now it is being used against people of faith.” This theme would dominate the rally, as Bush’s blocked nominees were portrayed as helpless Christians thrown to ravenous liberal lions while a coliseum full of pointy-headed secular elites howled for their blood.
With Perkins emceeing in his typically dour style, the role of rabble-rouser fell to Dobson, who exclaimed, “The biggest Holocaust in world history came out of the Supreme Court” with the Roe v. Wade decision. Dobson seemed oblivious to the fact that he was speaking on the second night of the Jewish holiday Passover. On his radio show nearly two weeks earlier, Dobson offered a new variation on the theme of liberal anti-Christian bigotry, comparing the “black robed men” on the Supreme Court to “the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan.”
Justice Sunday also featured a token Catholic, the gruff New York warhorse William Donohue, head of the nation’s only “Catholic civil rights organization,” the Catholic League. In the battle to confirm William Pryor, a far-right nominee who happened to be Catholic, Donohue was deployed to argue that the Democratic senators who filibustered him were motivated by nothing more than base anti-Catholicism. “There isn’t de jure discrimination against Catholics in the Senate,” Donohue complained at the top of his lungs. “There is de facto discrimination. They’ve set the bar so high with the abortion issue, we can’t get any real Catholics over it.”
Republican Gomorrah Page 15