Unfriendly Fire

by Dr. Nathaniel Frank

  No one is exempt from uncomfortable feelings, and most of us at one time or another deal with that discomfort by pushing its source out of our minds: don’t confront, don’t consider, don’t discuss. But in 1992, as Bill Clinton began his momentous, if troubled, presidency, it became far more difficult to avoid the discussion of gays in the military. And though gay advocacy groups helped to push the issue onto the table, it was the organizational skills, and ferocity, of the religious right that turned an issue that most Americans hadn’t thought all that much about into one that—according to many—heralded the demise of America itself. What made homosexuality in the military a unique battleground in the 1990s was the looming train wreck of vocal gay rights advocates facing off against an even more vocal, and stunningly effective, coalition of religious conservatives convinced that their world—and the next one—hung in the balance.

  AS TALK OF lifting the military’s gay ban picked up in the early 1990s, the religious right emerged as a potent force in the dialogue. Sometimes called the New Christian Right, this vast missionary empire was built up in the 1970s by evangelical Christian leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson who had ties to segregationist, anti-Semitic, and anti-feminist crusades from earlier in the century. Encompassing a range of socially conservative religious groups, from traditional Catholics to fundamentalist Protestants, in the 1980s the religious right turned its attention to politics, with a particular focus on blocking abortion rights. Amassing huge fortunes from believers, books, church dues, and television shows, these groups shared mailing lists, held political strategy sessions, referred to one another in their broadcasts and mailings, and ultimately spread their message of God, family, and country to tens of millions of American homes.

  Their focus on a strong military was a natural fit. The religious right and the military establishment both shared a commitment to conservative values like a strong, hierarchical social order and traditional notions of virtue and honor. They also believed in the nation’s destiny as a godly mission to spread freedom to the world. As a result, the military drew legions of religious conservatives to its ranks, thus positioning them to play an influential role in the debate over gay military service. Often the religious right and the military establishment were one and the same.

  It was the powerful leaders of the New Christian Right who had the greatest hand in mobilizing their flocks to oppose Clinton’s effort to lift the gay ban. First, there was Jerry Falwell. In 1979, the Baptist televangelist with a megachurch in Virginia and his own Christian university founded the Moral Majority, designed largely to mobilize Christian voters to support conservative political candidates. Falwell’s radio and television broadcast, Old-Time Gospel Hour, grew into a formidable force by the end of the 1970s, reaching millions of listeners and raising tens of millions of dollars. When Ronald Reagan assured the National Association of Religious Broadcasters that he opposed the separation of church and state, he won millions of evangelical hearts and enough votes to take the White House, a feat that was credited in part to Falwell’s efforts.8 Falwell would later blame the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on feminists, abortionists, and homosexuals. His operation was just one part of an empire of conservative Christian venues for the preaching of anti-gay sentiment that rallied together in 1993.

  There was also Pat Robertson, host of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s 700 Club, the powerhouse fundraising broadcast in which Robertson linked natural disasters to homosexuals and Jewish bankers to government subversion plots. When Robertson entered politics directly, running against George Bush for the 1988 Republican nomination, he announced that his campaign would focus on battling abortion and homosexuality. That a religious leader fond of speaking in tongues could beat Bush, the future president, in the Iowa caucus spoke volumes about the influence of evangelical Christianity in American politics by that time. While Robertson’s political fortunes were limited, his material ones grew to an estimated $200 million on the success of his particular blend of fundraising and preaching about the gay-liberal-feminist menace. After his unsuccessful bid for the White House, Robertson parlayed his contacts to found the Christian Coalition, one of the most powerful grassroots political organizations in the nation, which by the early 1990s had a virtual lock on the Republican political agenda.9

  Yet even the Christian Coalition was dwarfed by the Christian powerhouse, Focus on the Family, founded by Dr. James Dobson. He became a household name in 2005 after darkly suggesting that the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants was gay and a tool of homosexual activists. A child psychologist, Dobson started his ministry in 1977, and it grew into a social and political behemoth, with millions of names on its mailing list. By some accounts, his radio broadcasts reach 220 million people every day on two thousand stations in 160 countries, and the group, with an annual budget of $150 million, fields ten thousand inquiries a day from believers seeking Dobson’s wisdom. (Focus on the Family gets so much mail that it has its own zip code.) Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, every Republican presidential candidate who wanted a chance at winning had to visit with James Dobson.10

  In 1979, recognizing his burgeoning power, Dobson finagled an invitation to the White House by asking his radio listeners to recommend him for a presidential conference on the family. Eighty thousand calls later, he was on the list and on his way to starting the political arm of his ministry, the Family Research Council (FRC). In 1988, Dobson tapped Gary Bauer, a Reagan policy adviser and sometime “family values” presidential candidate, to head FRC. The current president of FRC, Tony Perkins, is a graduate of Falwell’s Liberty University. In 1996, he was tied to the Ku Klux Klan after he managed a Senate campaign that struck a deal to share the mailing list of the Klan’s former grand wizard, David Duke. Although Perkins denied any wrongdoing, the campaign was fined by the Federal Election Commission for trying to conceal the paper trail.11

  Clinton’s election to the White House in November 1992, alongside the bubbling gay troops issue, proved an inspiring combination for social conservatives. Exactly one week after Clinton’s victory at the polls, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the navy to reinstate Keith Meinhold after a homosexual discharge under the existing ban on gays in the military. The next day, November 11, 1992—Veterans Day—reporters asked Clinton to react to the decision, and he said he agreed with it. He reiterated his commitment to ending the ban and said he planned to “consult with military leaders about it.”

  His announcement made for a powerful rallying and fundraising tool for social and religious conservatives who felt their way of life was under siege by a liberal, secular worldview that, with Clinton’s election, seemed to be gaining sinister momentum. The religious right viewed Clinton as a threat to everything they held dear: a strong military, a government sympathetic to religion in public life, the rights of the unborn, and traditional values that placed the heterosexual male at the top of the social hierarchy. And they regarded ending the ban as akin to official approval of homosexuality in the eyes of the state, a potentially irreversible move on America’s path toward becoming a godless nation.12

  But as much as evangelicals felt the need to oppose the growing acceptance of homosexuality in American culture, they were also aware of an upside to the trend: Christ’s reign on Earth would be precipitated, they believed, by a calamitous period of tribulation, when the faithful would be severely tested by the evils around them. According to their interpretation of the Bible, the precipitating events would include death, suffering, and destruction, perhaps through war. But in the absence of a true war, a culture war might do the trick. Thus, fundamentalists had an incentive to exaggerate—and even create—the harms that homosexuality could birth. While the situation was dire, it was also welcomed as an opportunity by leaders of the right to consolidate their own resources and power, and to gain national attention, political strength, and money.

  Christian conservatives grasped these opportunities at once. “Clinton has done us a great favor,” said R
andall Terry, founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, in January 1993, just weeks after the new president had taken office. “This is going to help us mobilize people to take action for the next four years.” Terry, who called his opposition work “the resistance,” said his group was “avalanching Congress with phone calls and letters” in a “rebellion against President Clinton because sodomy is against God’s law, just like baby-killing is against God’s law.” In fact, the matter of homosexuality “galvanizes our public more than right-to-life,” said the Reverend Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, because the injunction against homosexuality was even more clear-cut in the Bible than that against abortion.13

  The campaign orchestrated by the religious right to mobilize social conservatives against gay service was extraordinary, and is widely credited with helping turn public and political opinion against Clinton’s proposal to lift the ban. It helped take a public that was divided and somewhat apathetic about the issue and rally among ordinary people a hefty opposition to ending the longstanding ban on gay service. Within weeks of Clinton’s election, church leaders began to deploy their full arsenal: They approached millions of foot soldiers with open wallets, reaching into communities from the southern village chapel to the midwestern megachurch, and using their massive communications network spanning television, radio, and eventually the Internet. By the 1990s, the religious right was one of the most powerful political interest groups in the nation, and part of the reason was the proven ability of its leaders to mobilize tens of thousands of people to action literally within moments of airing a plea on television. Even before Clinton’s inauguration in January 1993, Falwell began a “dial-a-lobby” operation, using his Old-Time Gospel Hour program to generate 24,000 signatures on a petition against gay service in a matter of hours. As a result, the week after the inauguration, Congress was besieged with 434,000 phone calls in a single day, overwhelmingly against letting gays serve. The number of calls was more than five times the daily average of 80,000.14

  Unlike previous culture war battles that had generated large but spontaneous public involvement, the gay ban precipitated the most deftly organized, effective mobilization of religious conservatives. Groups like the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, the Christian Coalition, and the Traditional Values Coalition urged their constituents to jam phone lines at the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon. Their radio programs spent hours whipping up anger and resistance among their millions of daily listeners. Reverend Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, which had twenty-five thousand member churches, crowed, “We’re the ones that shut down the phone lines at the Capitol.” His phone drive was so effective that when Sheldon called, he couldn’t get through, and had to trudge to Congress in person to lobby his friends in government. These friends were considerable. He was able to assemble a press conference on Capitol Hill with a string of lawmakers and retired military officers, which he then used in his “action alert” asking church members to keep calling, keep lobbying, and keep giving money to the sacred cause of banning gays from the military. Indeed, the issue of gay service soon overtook abortion as a fundraising tool for the religious right. Oliver North, who was indicted on sixteen felony counts for his role in the Iran-contra weapon and drug smuggling scandal (his three convictions were overturned on appeal), made a direct-mail plea to hundreds of thousands of social conservatives for “a special contribution of $15 or $22 right away” to support his Freedom Alliance lobbying campaign against gay service. James Kennedy’s Florida-based Christian ministry sent appeals to his substantial following with an urgent message: “Dear Friend in Christ: July 15, 1993,” said the letter, referring to the deadline Clinton eventually set to lift the ban, “may well be a day of moral infamy in the United States—unless you and I and other caring Christians across this country do something to stop it.” Kennedy exhorted his clan to send “the most generous gift you can” to help fund the battle against Clinton’s godless ambitions. By the end of 1993, the Christian Coalition had raised its budget and membership by 20 percent.15

  The issue of gay service was the perfect battle for the Christian right, not only because social conservatives and military officers shared ideological beliefs, but because they shared members. Indeed, this was a war that, in many ways, was taking place in the conservatives’ own backyard. The influence of the religious right on many aspects of American culture was vast and growing in the 1980s and 1990s. But perhaps nowhere was it as strong as in the armed forces. Since early in the cold war, evangelicals had made systematic inroads into military culture, organizing methodically to increase their numbers and sway in the armed forces. In the 1960s, their efforts began to yield fruit, as military leaders, many of whom were themselves conservative Christians, liaised with evangelical groups to increase the number of chaplains representing evangelical denominations. By the beginning of the Reagan era, the New Christian Right was firmly entrenched in the halls of political power, as the president consulted with their leaders to help sell the country on his nuclear buildup. Evangelicals like Falwell and Robertson hoped that Reagan’s vision of the “evil empire” could revive the moral and military strength of the nation. They became willing warriors in an effort to shape a foreign policy that would save the United States through the twin pillars of military might and cultural superiority.16

  Christian conservatives viewed their opposition to homosexuality in the armed forces as part of a larger effort to preserve and expand the Christian character of the military and the nation. While the coordination of opposition to gay service among military officials and Christian conservatives began modestly, it would grow into a marvelously choreographed and stunningly successful affair. Yet sometimes, little coordination was needed: Many of the most vocal and influential military leaders were evangelicals themselves, who came to the services with an unyielding belief in the sinful nature of homosexuality and who violently opposed its acceptance on religious grounds. The existence of such connectors meant that outfits like FRC were not just preaching to the choir. The venomous misinformation they printed found its way into the center of the debate, as senior military officials took up their call to action, secured slots to testify before Congress, and entered their publications into the Congressional Record.

  Under Gary Bauer, the Family Research Council played a lead role in the battle against gay service. Beginning in 1992, it fixated on the issue and disseminated position papers that cast gay rights as a threat to the family. The idea was to mobilize their constituency to fight reform while simultaneously convincing the rest of the country that, whatever they believed about God and morality, gays had no place in the nation’s armed forces. This plan involved rallying around the argument that straights had the right not to associate with known gays, that forcing the acceptance of gays in the military meant victimizing the nation’s upright and moral sons and daughters, and that the military would be dangerously weakened by lifting the ban. In “How Lifting the Military Homosexual Ban May Affect Families,” Robert Knight, director of “cultural studies” at FRC, argued that condoning “open homosexuality” would threaten “a particularly vulnerable group within the military: military families.” Convinced that the fight for access to military service was nothing more than a tool of homosexual extremists bent on foisting their sinful ways on an innocent society of families and churchgoers, Knight painted a picture of a military—and a society—brought to its knees by militant homosexuals. Gays were sure to further press for equal access to base housing “without regard for the impact that their open embrace of homosexuality might have on children,” and so families, Knight warned, had cause for concern. Military bases already had waiting lists for family housing, “so mothers and fathers with children now face additional competition from homosexual couples.” In short, lifting the ban “would create a less wholesome environment for military families.”17

  Knight listed a host of other perilous consequences to gay military servic
e, including the possibility that military base magazine suppliers would be pressured to carry homosexual pornography. Gay nudie magazines would then be placed on shelves beside Penthouse and Hustler, staples of military reading since they first burst onto the American cultural scene. He likened gay people who “indulge in homosexual behavior” to alcoholics, saying neither should be placed in a “specially protected category of civil rights.” The analogy fanned his indignation at comparisons between race and sexual orientation, since it was impossible to “change your skin color, but you can choose to act or not on your inclinations. Ask any recovered alcoholic—or former homosexual.” Indeed Knight, and much of the Christian conservative empire, held the belief that there was actually no such thing as a homosexual; instead, we were all heterosexuals, and unfortunately some of us had to battle against evil impulses, ranging from alcoholism to theft to adultery to sodomy. “Sexual orientation can be changed,” he concluded. How could society, and the military in particular, give its endorsement or protection to people who proudly advertised their habitual choice to commit sin?18