Far right not thrilled about being left out
By Frank Cerabino
Palm Beach Post Columnist
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
NEW YORK — The "people of faith" are here, although you might not know by watching the convention coverage on television.
The Republicans have wisely decided to keep their sanctimonious base mostly under wraps this week so as not to scare off moderate voters.
"The Republican National Committee has failed to put a prime-time face on the majority of the party, and that's troubling," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council.
But Christian conservatives will be making an unprecedented push this fall to reelect George W. Bush, blanketing churches with their political messages while enlisting spies to "rat out a church" where "same-sex marriage or some other liberal legislative agenda" is endorsed from the pulpit.
<b.There's even an evangelical alternative to Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. It's called George W. Bush: Faith in the White House, a straight-to-DVD million-copy release scheduled to coincide with the Oct. 5 launch of Moore's movie in stores.
The counter-documentary adoringly paints Bush as a man who is guided by his deep religious faith. Even into Iraq.
"He prayed with a lot of people and brought a cache of Christian pastors in to see what they believed," filmmaker David Balsiger said outside the screening of his movie. "You don't hear that about the man."
Certainly not this week.
Before watching the movie, I went to see Perkins, who was part of a Coalition of the Shunned that gathered Monday in a small, under-air-conditioned room at a Howard Johnson's hotel across the street from Madison Square Garden.
It's a far cry from 1992, when evangelical Christians let it all hang out at a raucous "God and Country" rally to kick off that convention — a showpiece event starring Pat Robertson, Pat Boone and then-Vice President Dan Quayle.
On Monday, Perkins was in the shabby hotel, handing out fortune cookies to reporters, hoping to dramatize that that the fortune of the party was tied to its abortion-banning, gay-shunning, stem-cell loathing, if-only-we-could-force-everybody-to-pray-in-schools conservatives.
The messages in the cookies: "Real Men Marry Women," "Save the Constitution! Impeach an Activist Judge" and "#1 Reason to Ban Human Cloning: Hillary Clinton."
The Eagle Forum's executive director, Lori Waters, was there to complain about those pesky activist judges who have upheld a separation between government and religion.
She suggested impeachment. Or worse.
"Congress has the ability to limit the jurisdiction of the courts," she said. "They could eliminate the courts if they wanted to."
As I said, the Republicans were smart to sideline this bunch for this week while pretending to pitch their big tent, and remaining largely silent about Vice President Dick Cheney's public pronouncements that he doesn't support the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage — one of the cornerstone issues of the so-called pro-family agenda.
(Just a nitpick here: But aren't gays part of families? And if "protecting marriage" is so important, why don't these watchdogs of morality try to demonize the real culprit: heterosexual divorce?)
Religious conservatives also are unhappy about some of the platform language, which doesn't go far enough on stem-cell research for them, and doesn't stress abstinence as an alternative to teen family planning, a line that had been in the 2000 platform.
"If the party moves to the left significantly, by not talking about pro-life issues, and pro-family issues, that's a very big mistake," Waters said.
I don't think so. A good dose of this crew is enough to send those less zealous running for cover.
The screening of the new Bush documentary was held in another hotel ballroom Monday, which was decorated with a banner that said "Government is not God."
The documentary views Bush's presidency as one guided from above, portraying him as a man who has apparently been divinely inspired to lead his nation.
"Will the faith of George Bush be sufficient to keep us in God's hands? Perhaps, if we join our faith to his," says documentary narrator Janet Parshall, a board member of the National Religious Broadcasters and author of the book The Light in the City: Why Christians Must Advance and Not Retreat.
The Bush documentary will first be distributed in 5,000 Christian bookstores before it goes to Wal-Mart, Kmart and other mass-market retailers. It's being marketed by Oregon-based Grizzly Adams Productions along with another one of its titles, The Evidence for Heaven.
"See evidence that Heaven is more real than Earth!" the advertisement for that movie says on the same page as the Bush movie, which proclaims: "This powerful program offers a never-before-seen insider's look at how one man's dedication to prayer and the daily application of God's Word has transformed his life."
And the world.
As the movie concludes, it summarizes how Bush's divine guidance has led to great things in Iraq.
"Things are changing in the Middle East and changing for the better," the narrator says. "For the next 100 years, in the Islamic world, he'll be remembered as a great liberator."
They don't call themselves faith-based for nothing.
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