Secular Sabotage
Page 15
Arthur C. Brooks, former professor at Syracuse University, looked at the data from the same source and found that “liberals in 2002 were less sympathetic than conservatives to Catholics, the Catholic Church, Protestants, and, especially, fundamentalist Protestants.” 4 Thus, the culture war is reflected in the political war, with religious conservatives and secularists going at it in a way never before seen in American history. Brooks, who is now president of the American Enterprise Institute, notes how quickly this occurred. “The transformation of the Democratic Party into the party of secularism came about in a relatively short time,” he writes. 5 He is referring to the Democratic Party of JFK in the early 1960s and its radically altered status only a decade later. No one doubts the change was for real.
“The cultural liberalism of George McGovern and the secularism of his Democratic supporters in 1972 seems to have appealed to secular voters to a much greater extent than any other religious group,” writes Layman. 6 Indeed, as Jeane Kirkpatrick first pointed out, 21 percent of all delegates and 24 percent of first-time delegates to the 1972 Democratic National Convention were secularists. 7 “Secularists first appeared as a political force within a major party at the 1972 Democratic National Convention,” note Bolce and De Maio. “Prior to then,” they say, “neither party contained many secularists nor showed many signs of moral or cultural progressivism.” 8 The secularists may have found a home in 1972, but they also got clobbered: McGovern was so radical that he carried only one state, Massachusetts, and was even rejected by the voters in his home state, South Dakota.
McGovern lost in 1972, but McGovernism—the secularization of the Democratic Party—won. It won because the McGovern Commission (formerly called the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection) was established during the 1968 presidential campaign to effectively alter the way presidential candidates were chosen. Mark Stricherz correctly notes that the New Deal coalition that included “white Southerners, Catholics, union members, blacks, and intellectuals” gave way to a party run by “secular liberals.” 9 One of the reasons this happened, Stricherz says, was what happened to Catholics: “Catholics had made up about one in four Humphrey votes in 1968, yet they received only one in fourteen slots on the commission in 1969.” 10 Four decades later Michael Gerson observed that not only do secular Americans prefer the Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 3 to 1, they harbor a strong animus against religious conservatives as well. 11
Driving the secularists have been cultural issues, foremost among them being matters of sexuality and lifestyle choices. Though the 1972 Democratic Party platform did not mention abortion, women’s issues, or homosexuality by name, they were implied in the adopted language. Terms like “The Right to Be Different,” “Rights of Women,” and “Family Planning” are codes for gay rights and abortion, and everyone knew it. 12 These were not issues attractive to rank-and-file Catholic voters, and they certainly had no appeal to blue-collar workers, the mainstay of the Democratic Party. Coupled with the libertine lifestyle of acid-head hippies and their notoriously antipatriotic stand, the flower children of the late ’60s and early ’70s were alienating religious conservatives from coast to coast. And to the extent these young nihilists were identified with the Democratic Party, it only served to push Catholics to reconsider their political allegiance.
Catholic author David Carlin understands what was happening. There had long been “FDR liberals” in the Democratic Party, men and women who identified with the interests of labor unions and the working class in general. “Civil rights liberals” were another important strand, activists and their supporters who stood for racial equality. As Carlin sees it, the years between 1968 and 1972 witnessed the arrival of a third group, the “moral/cultural liberals.” They pushed the boundaries of sexual freedom to an extent no one ever dreamed of, exercising a radical individualism that touched everything from abortion to homosexuality. Unlike the other segments of the party, the sexual free-spirits alienated many veteran members of the Democratic Party. Count Carlin among them. 13
In other words, the cultural nihilists who make up the third prong of the Democratic Party today have little in common with the “FDR liberals” and the “civil rights liberals.” The key to Democratic victory rests, in part, in keeping this destructive segment in its place. And the key to Democratic governance rests heavily in not acceding to their agenda.
As Layman points out, the proportion of secularists among Democratic delegates “increased noticeably between 1980 and 1984.” The issues that were central to this secular shift were women’s rights, abortion, homosexual rights, and church and state issues. 14 It was clear that both parties were moving in opposite directions, the net losers being the Democrats.
It is now generally assumed that regular churchgoers are much more likely to vote Republican. By contrast, those who rarely, or never, attend church services are much more likely to vote for Democrats. But as William Galston has shown, this was not always the case. Indeed, he found that in every presidential election between 1952 and 1988, whether one regularly attended church services was not particularly helpful in predicting how one voted. “But starting in 1992,” he says, “you have an unbroken string of double-digit differences.” Indeed, he offers, “Something very dramatic happened starting in 1992.” So much so that he now declares that “If you look at the relationship between church attendance—frequency of church attendance, and not party identification but ideological identification—you will see an unbroken linear relationship.” Churchgoers are more likely to be conservatives and liberals are more likely to be secularists. 15
Noting what happened in 1992, Layman observes that “The Democratic Party now appears to be a party whose core of support comes from secularists, Jews, and the less committed members of the major religious traditions.” 16 According to Bolce and De Maio, “60 percent of first-time white delegates at the [1992] Democratic convention in New York City either claimed no attachment to religion or displayed the minimal attachment by attending worship services ‘a few times a year’ or less.” Moreover, “About 5 percent of first-time delegates at the Republican convention in Houston that year identified themselves as secularists.” 17 What is particularly significant about this split is the extent to which it has disfigured the Democratic Party.
Why is the voice of secularists drowning out the voice of the faithful in the Democratic Party? Mike McCurry, former press secretary to Bill Clinton, explained it this way: “Because we want to be politically correct, in particular being sensitive to Jews, that’s taken the party to a direction where faith language is soft and opaque.” 18 It was not as though some Democrats working for John Kerry hadn’t tried to give religious issues more attention. “Every time something with religious language got sent up a flagpole, it got sent back down, stripped of religious language,” said one Democratic operative. 19 Kenneth Wald, a political scientist and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida, was just as blunt as McCurry: “There is a very strong tendency within the Jewish community to be worried about the people who are supporting Bush and Bush’s tendency to promote Christian values from the bully pulpit.” 20
It is also true that money talks. As one Democratic operative told Zev Chafets, “You can replace Jewish votes, which might be four percent nationally, but you can’t replace Jewish money. Big-donor lists begin at twenty-five thousand dollars, and at that level of national politics, forty to fifty percent are Jews. The higher the bracket, the higher the percentage.” 21 Thus, any movement on the part of Democrats to reach out to churchgoers is likely to be met with some resistance on the part of wealthy Jewish contributors.
Marc Stern of the American Jewish Congress is surely correct to say that “Most Jews are much more liberal than the rest of the population. On abortion, on homosexual marriage, on premarital sex, Jews are fundamentally different than everyone else except the most secular.” He is also right to say that “There’s nothing the Democrats can do to appeal to people who ar
e religious without alienating that part of their base.” 22 What’s stoking the problem is understood by the Jewish Forward: “Most Jews continue to view Christian majoritarianism as a threat to their interests. The calculus hasn’t changed much since Jefferson’s day.” 23 But it is also true, as Nathan Diament points out, that “religious American Christians and Jews may share many faith-informed views on specific public policy issues.” He cites gay marriage, school vouchers, and a “disgust [with] the popular culture” as examples. 24
Perhaps as important as anything, a Pew survey in August 2006 showed that only 26 percent of the public thought the Democrats were “friendly to religion” (the figure for Republicans was 47 percent). As Bolce and De Maio observed, the numbers for the Democrats were “down significantly from just three years earlier. They also found that more than four in ten respondents said that “non-religious liberals have too much control over the Democratic party.” 25
When astute political scientists like Bolce and De Maio can declare, after looking at the data, that 53 percent of secularists have a negative attitude toward the Catholic Church, and that the same percentage identifies themselves as liberals, something profound has happened. 26 In many cases, this shift has had a deep personal effect on long-time Democrats. David Carlin is typical. For him (and for many others), being a Democrat was as natural as being an Irish Catholic—they were one and the same. And his love for both was eternal. Until he felt betrayed, that is. Carlin now refers to the Democrats as the “Anti-Christian Party.” 27
Carlin’s observation may seem unduly harsh to some, but to religious conservatives who have tracked the affinity of left-wing activist groups and their role in the Democratic Party, it rings true. Consider what happened in 1988 when Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis boasted of his ACLU membership. This certainly did more to unite Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish conservatives than any other issue.
To religious conservatives, the ACLU embodied the worst of what American culture had become. At the time, I was a Bradley fellow at the Heritage Foundation, writing a book on contemporary social problems. What attracted Heritage to me was the publication of my 1985 book on the ACLU. It was not surprising, then, that when Dukakis made an issue of his ACLU status, the Bush presidential campaign would turn to me for advice and evidence of the ACLU’s positions. I gladly did what I could to help them. Garry Wills, no friend of conservatives, wasn’t happy. Referring to fights over the meaning of the First Amendment, Wills wrote that “The Bush campaign was able to exacerbate this struggle, calling on the advice of William A. Donohue, the sociologist who wrote the right wing’s favorite book on the subject, The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union. Donohue, for instance, gave the campaign the useful political charge that the ACLU would keep ‘kiddie porn’ legal.” 28
The left went after Bush with a vengeance for calling Dukakis “a card-carrying member of the ACLU.” I. F. Stone, no stranger to communist circles, said Bush “injected into the campaign a pale whiff of the witch-hunting McCarthyite 50’s.” Similarly, the New York Times editorialized that Bush was guilty of a McCarthyite “smear” by mentioning Dukakis’s “card-carrying” membership in the ACLU. Samuel Walker, ACLU official and house author, also said that Bush “introduced the ACLU into the 1988 presidential campaign.” 29 As I demonstrated in my second book on the ACLU, all of them were wrong. It was Dukakis, not Bush, who initially sought to make the ACLU a campaign issue. In May 1987 in Los Angeles, and again in August 1987 in Spencer, Iowa, Dukakis explicitly boasted, “I’m a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union.” 30 That those words came back to haunt him is hardly Bush’s fault.
“It sometimes seems as though the election is more about the ACLU than anything else,” said Tom Brokaw of NBC News. It sure seemed that way. Peter Jennings at ABC was on the same page with Brokaw on this issue. Indeed, he asked Bush during the first debate why he continued to bring up the Dukakis-ACLU affiliation. Bush replied that he didn’t like most of the positions of the ACLU and offered four examples: opposition to the voluntary movie ratings system; a legal challenge to the tax-exempt status of the Catholic Church; a defense of child pornography; and a desire to gut “In God We Trust” from our coins. Though the ACLU and the New York Times protested that Bush had misrepresented the Union’s positions, they were wrong: I supplied the Bush campaign with all of these positions, and they were taken right out of the ACLU’s Policy Guide. 31
If churchgoers were soured after the 1988 presidential campaign, they were infuriated after the next one. Layman found that the Democratic Party’s platform of 1992 was “the most polarized” ever on cultural and moral issues. In addition to its unyielding support for abortion rights, “The 1992 platform was the first in which the Democrats specifically mentioned gays and lesbians.” 32 So radical had the Democratic Party become that it even sought to punish one of their own because of his pro-life views. In 1992, Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey, a strong pro-life Catholic Democrat, was blocked from speaking at the party’s national convention. Some of the Catholic-hating delegates even wore buttons denouncing Casey as a papist.
The Clinton Years
Clinton’s appointment of Dr. Joycelyn Elders as Surgeon General was one of the president’s early blunders with the faithful. Even before she drew the ire of the Catholic League, she made headlines. A longtime advocate of condom distribution in the schools, Elders saw teenage pregnancy rates increase during her tenure as director of the Arkansas Health Department; rates had actually decreased in the period prior to her appointment. However, it was her cavalier attitude toward condoms that was most interesting. “I tell every girl that when she goes out on a date—put a condom in her purse,” she said. Known for keeping a “condom plant” on her desk, Elders also offered these words of wisdom: “We have had driver’s ed for kids. We’ve taught them what to do in the front seat of the car, but not what to do in the back seat of the car.” 33 It was the job of the government, she reasoned, to do just that.
It was on the subject of abortion that Dr. Elders got into big trouble. She was on record saying that those who oppose abortion were “non-Christians with slave-master mentalities.” Besides speaking derisively, she got downright insulting when she said that those who were pro-life “love little babies so long as they are in someone else’s uterus.” In fact, she even went so far as to say that pro-lifers should get over their “love affair with the fetus.” 34 Bad as these remarks were, they were no match for what she had to say about Catholics.
Elders was a secular saboteur par excellence. On January 18, 1992, she gave an address to the Arkansas Coalition for Choice wherein she accused the Catholic Church of being “silent” and doing “nothing” about such issues as slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, the Holocaust, and the disenfranchisement of women. Moreover, at a 1992 pro-abortion rally, she said, “Look at who’s fighting the pro-choice movement—a celibate, male-dominated church.” 35 The Catholic League quickly charged that what Elders said “smacked of ignorance or malice,” a conclusion that was supported by the Washington Post; it ran an editorial saying, “The League was right.” 36 Elders proved to be a liability to the administration and was eventually fired, but not because she offended Catholics or had loopy ideas about sex. She was simply deemed incompetent.
The United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo made relations between the Clinton administration and Catholics even worse. It was expected that the issue of abortion would separate the Holy See and the Clinton administration, but what made matters ugly was the prevalence of anti-Catholicism at both the Cairo conference and the preparatory session that preceded it at the U.N.
Since nearly all of the Catholic bashing came from the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and since the Clinton administration worked closely with the offending NGOs, it was clear that at least some of the Clintonites were involved. From the hoots and howls that greeted representatives of the Holy See to the anti-Catholic buttons and
literature that were distributed at the conferences, it was obvious that Catholics were not welcome. Indeed, the anti-Catholic group, Catholics for a Free Choice, was accorded more respect than delegates from the Vatican.
It was left to State Department spokeswoman Faith Mitchell to deliver the most telling low blow. She charged that the Vatican’s disagreement over the Cairo conference “has more to do with the fact that the conference is really calling for a new role for women, calling for girls’ education and improving the status of women.” 37 The statement so outraged Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon that she wrote an open letter to the president registering her concerns; it was signed by the leaders of organizations representing hundreds of thousands of Catholic women and was published in the New York Times under the sponsorship of the Catholic League. 38
About a month after the Cairo conference ended, I received a phone call from Jim Castelli of the Office of Public Liaison in the White House. He was disturbed to see that the Catholic League monthly journal, Catalyst, featured a story titled “League Assails Clinton Administration for Bigotry.” This, coming on the heels of the New York Times open letter, was found to be troubling. Castelli began by stating that he could cite “chapter and verse” why the Clinton administration was not anti-Catholic. I accepted the challenge and began citing chapter and verse why it was. Castelli, who had previously written patently unfair columns about Cardinal O’Connor and who had contributed to the National Catholic Reporter, identified himself as a “fellow traveler in Catholic circles.” That was the most revealing comment he made. It also sheds light on why Castelli’s office was the venue for a host of dissident Catholic organizations in July 1993. 39
If there was one Catholic official in the administration who was not a phony, it was former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn. In his July 6, 1994, letter to the president, Flynn, the Ambassador to the Vatican, blasted the Clinton administration for being anti-Catholic. He said he was “embarrassed” about the “ugly anti-Catholic bias that is shown by prominent members of Congress and the administration.” 40