Dave Shiflett

Yet I can say with absolute certainty that I’d reject any proposal from John and Patsy Ramsey. Like many Americans, I’m under the strong impression that the Ramseys murdered their 6-year-old daughter JonBenet, just as surely as O.J. Simpson murdered his ex-wife Nicole and her visitor Ronald Goldman. That makes it strange indeed that the country’s most prestigious religious publishing house is bringing out the Ramseys’ book of recollections and recriminations. Thomas Nelson Publishers’ announcement of an April release for their book, “The Death of Innocence:
The Untold Story of JonBenet’s Murder and the Investigation That Failed Us
All,” has been met with near-universal silence in the business, yet it raises a huge question: How did Thomas Nelson establish the Ramseys’ innocence?

Before getting to Nelson’s response, it’s worth recalling that the Ramseys remain very much under suspicion, even if a Boulder, Colo., grand jury chose not to indict them for the Christmas 1996 murder of their daughter. In an extraordinary series of statements, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens (who has personally reviewed all the evidence in the case) made obvious that he thinks the Ramseys are guilty, even though the grand jury couldn’t issue an indictment in the case.

Owens began an Oct. 27, 1999, press conference by saying, “For the past 34 months, the killers of JonBenet Ramsey have escaped justice.” The plural “killers” cropped up several more times. “The killers in this case made some serious mistakes, but they are also very smart. They have stonewalled effectively and covered their tracks well.”

Owens concluded with this statement: “Finally, to the killers of JonBenet Ramsey, let me say this: You only think you have gotten away with murder. There is strong evidence to suggest who you are. I believe that the investigators are moving closer to proving their case. They will keep pursuing you. And I am confident that each day brings us closer to the day when you will reap what you have sown.”

In case the Ramseys missed this pointed message, Owens asked the Ramseys directly to “quit hiding” behind their lawyers and press agents and help him find the killers — “no matter where that trail may lead.” When the Ramseys responded that John Ramsey had hoped to speak to the governor, Owens responded with his most incriminating statement yet: “Mr. Ramsey is considered to be a prime suspect. It would be very inappropriate to meet with him.”

So the question for Thomas Nelson is, what does the publishing house know that Gov. Owens doesn’t? TN’s publisher, Rolf Zettersten, has stated publicly that he believes the Ramseys have been falsely accused. “We think this is a faith story in the sense that their faith in God has certainly sustained them through the grieving process over losing their daughter in a terrible tragedy and through the ensuing years of false accusations and misleading statements about them and who they are,” he told the Denver Rocky Mountain News.

In a press release from Thomas Nelson, the Ramseys maintained, “We have remained silent while baseless and slanderous accusations about our family were made by the frenzied media.”

Zettersten did not answer my telephone or e-mail requests for an interview with Salon. (An assistant explained that no response would be forthcoming.) That left me looking into another recent decision by the religious publisher, in my attempt to understand what Nelson’s motivations might be in the Ramsey case.

That other book is Misty Bernall’s “She Said Yes,” about the murder of her daughter Cassie Bernall in the Columbine High School tragedy last year. The early press reports of Cassie Bernall’s death — that she was asked by shooter Dylan Klebold if she believed in God, and when she said yes, he shot her through the temple — were in fact disputed by a primary witness and police investigators soon after the events occurred.

Nelson’s publicity materials for the Bernall book, however, make no mention of the controversy, and the publisher continues to sell the book capitalizing on the “she said yes” scenario. In its Internet advertising campaign for the book, the publisher quotes Newsweek (“Cassie Bernall said yes when asked if she believed in God — and instantly became an evangelical saint”), as well as an earlier Rocky Mountain News story: “Bernall entered the Columbine High School library during lunch. She left a martyr.”

Nelson’s own blurb for the book begins: “On April 20, 1999, Cassie Bernall, a 17-year-old junior at Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado, was a typical teenager having a typical day. With the single word she said on that Tuesday, the life of Cassie Bernall and her courage in the face of death gripped the heart of an entire nation.”

The Nelson division distributing the book, Word Publishing, strikes a similar note in its advertisements. “In She Said Yes, the mother of slain Littleton, Colorado student, Cassie Bernall — whose last words were an affirmation of her belief in God — shares in dramatic detail her daughter’s journey from adolescent turmoil to finding faith in an age of doubt. Drawing on her own reminiscences of her daughter, as well as those of others impacted by Cassie’s life and tragic death, Bernall has created a loving, but unflinchingly honest portrait of a young woman who paid the ultimate price for her faith.”

After reading these claims, I sent Word Publishing an interview request: “As you know, police investigators, as well as some witnesses, have asserted that the original story — that Cassie was asked if she believed in God, and was killed when she answered in the affirmative — is most likely not accurate. In your promotion material, no mention is made of these developments. Instead, the original scenario is maintained. Could this omission possibly mislead customers?”

Word Publishing responded that it would grant no interview, though the company added, “The true story of the book is Cassie’s miraculous transformation, not simply her death. However, when writing her book, Misty Bernall heard that there were differing accounts of the day’s events. She went back to all sources in her book who reported on what they saw and heard that tragic day in the library and all wished their accounts to remain unchanged: they stuck by their stories.”

As a hack writer, I fully understand that in our era, controversial figures require literary and public relations representation as much as they might need legal representation. I am fully in favor of legislation requiring such representation, to be paid from public funds if necessary. To be named a court-appointed hack would be a step up for the likes of me.

Yet as a regular churchgoer, it’s my belief that because Cassie’s story has been used as an evangelical rallying point for young people, a very high standard of accuracy should be demanded. Otherwise, a crisis of faith might well follow the discovery that the story that had brought one to belief, or inspired strong devotion, was bogus. The story of another student, Valeen Schnurr, does not appear to be in dispute and is equally heroic, though it did not end with her martyrdom. She did say yes when she had every reason to believe it would cost her her life, and she lived. I’d much rather have an evangelist tell that story to my children than one of questionable validity.

As for JonBenet, her sad story inspired an anonymous writer to paint these words on her tombstone in the St. James Episcopal Church graveyard in Marietta, Ga.: “No Justice in U.S.A.”

Now, those are not the words of a hack, but of a prophet. And, as to the religious publisher’s motives in publishing a book by JonBenet’s probable killers, I suspect there is some good old-fashioned mammon worship going on here.

The anti-gambling victories have been portrayed as the work of conservative Christians, but in fact they represent a larger political trend that cannot help but pierce the bliss of Gambling Inc. The belief that organized gambling corrupts both individuals and the political process has drawn a widening swath of voters — a broad coalition that reaches all the way from Focus on the Family chief James Dobson to Ralph Nader. As one anti-gambling advocate says, “You can fit all of America between Dobson and Nader.”

These two gambling defeats took different paths. In Alabama, where Gov. Donald Siegelman won office by promising a lottery would pump money into Alabama’s dismal public school system, 61 percent of voters still supported the lottery as of late August. But the usually reliable sales pitch — let’s support gambling for the children’s sake — was beaten back with the politically liberal argument that the lottery money would come out of the hides of Alabama’s poor. A very rare coalition of black and white churches stepped in to lead the crusade, which voters approved, 54-46 percent, despite being outspent three to one.

The political upheaval was even more dramatic in South Carolina, where the state Supreme Court ruled this month that the $2.8 billion video poker industry must cease operations at the end of June 2000. The ruling came after a poker baron filed suit to stop an upcoming referendum; while the court agreed the referendum was unconstitutional, it also ruled that without a public referendum the games could not maintain their legal status. (Even if the referendum had been allowed to proceed, observers say the industry faced certain loss at the voting booth. Polls had indicated that as many as 70 percent of likely voters — rallied by an unusually diverse coalition — wanted to pull the plug on the games. )

Anti-gambling activists milked an old moral theme: that gambling offers something for nothing, therefore diminishing the role of fair and honest labor in human affairs. But the coalition also made use of more political themes: Video gambling hurts the poor; it is an economic drain; it is bad for the state’s image.

“I’ve never seen a coalition like this one,” says Ed McMullen of the South Carolina Policy Council. “You had blacks and whites, rich and poor, Baptists and Jews, liberals, conservatives and libertarians, and people from every region of the state.” Even the trial lawyers were in on the kill: A lawsuit alleging that video gambling represented unfair trade practices and a RICO racketeering violation was victorious in district court, and a class action against operators is in the works.

“At first people on the left didn’t want to get in,” says Tom Grey, head of
the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling. “They thought the anti-gambling effort was a movement by the same people who support flying the Confederate flag over the capitol. But then we got the Methodist Church on board, and in South Carolina, the Methodist Church is 20 percent black. After
that, the bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal church joined, because they knew that African-Americans are getting hurt the worst. When the Chamber of Commerce signed on,
it was like the cavalry coming in.”

It all represented a dramatic turnaround: When Gov. David Beasley
declared in 1998 his intention to shut down video poker, Democrat Jim Hodges
rode a wave of gambling money into office. But as the referendum drew closer, the operators began suffering the effects of several years of bad local and national publicity.
For one thing, there were the news stories: A child suffocated in a car while mom gambled away her paycheck; a poker operator was jailed for bribing a sheriff; a hit man was allegedly contracted to take out a rival operator. There was also the fact that one could not enter a one-pump gas station in the most remote part of the state without bumping into two or three video machines and a handful of poker drones.

The video operators played every card in their deck. They begged the state to tax them more heavily for the sake of public education, asserted that as many
as 70,000 jobs were at stake and warned that the coalition’s next targets
would be liquor and rock music.

Gambling interests are also reportedly behind a statewide billboard campaign promising the elimination of the state’s hated car tax if gambling were approved — though an industry spokesman denied the connection.

None of the scare tactics worked, however, and the courts ruled against the video poker operators. “The big boys who run the casinos are laughing because they think this is just about a lottery and rogue video-poker operators,” says Tom Grey. “But they don’t realize how much has changed because of these victories. We were getting very close to getting driven out by money and muscle. Now, these broad coalitions show that we’re not just a bunch of religious do-gooders. People are recognizing the harm [gambling] machines do. And it doesn’t matter if the machine is in a South Carolina gas station or on a gambling barge on the Mississippi River.”

While an immediate rollback of gambling legalization is unlikely, a change in public sentiment could force presidential candidates to take
a stand on gambling. Both parties, however, are drenched in gambling money.

Common Cause reports that Democrats have received $8,526,711 in PAC and soft
money from gambling interests over the past decade, while Republicans have pulled in $8,011,333. The largest donor, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees
International Union, which represents 75,000 casino workers, gave a total
$2,120,657 in PAC and soft money since 1989, 81 percent to Democrats.

Timothy O’Brien, a New York Times reporter and author of the book “Bad Bet,” said the industry put at least $4.5 million into national campaigns between 1992 and 1996, making gambling “a political force at the federal level on a par with the National Rifle Association and the United Automobile Workers.”

Mother Jones magazine, meanwhile, found that the industry gave more than $100 million in donations and lobbying fees to state legislators between 1992 and 1996.

Politicians don’t like talking much about gambling, especially in this era of
public expressions of piety. A politician may boast of a personal relationship with the Creator, but if he’s known to be funded by Las Vegas, with its innumerable hookers, pastie-twirlers and hustlers, the effect is somewhat diminished.
(One exception to the piety promoters is Donald Trump, now considering a run for the Reform Party nomination, who owns casinos and whose gambling empire donated a total of $427,000 to both parties between 1989 and 1998.)

The flashpoint for Republicans should come during the South Carolina primary.
“When Republicans come to South Carolina, they’re going to have to say where they stand on gambling,” says Grey. “It’s all people are talking about down there. Steve Forbes” — who has the luxury of not having to depend on party money — “has spoken against video poker … Bush spoke out against casino gambling while he was governor of Texas, but when he was in South Carolina a while back, he took a pass on video gambling. He said it was a states’ rights issue. McCain has said a few things against gambling, but not much.”

McCain may be talked out for now, and for good reason. McCain has raised more money from gambling interests than all the other presidential candidates combined, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. During the first six months of 1999, McCain reportedly took in $51,663, perhaps because of his support of 1995 pro-gambling legislation and his strong backing of Indian casinos. American Gaming Association chief Frank Fahrenkopf Jr. adds that McCain “never misses a championship fight in Las Vegas.”

On the Democratic side, the issue is bubbling in New Hampshire. Democratic
Gov. Jeanne Shaheen supports a “slots for tots” initiative to put video
gambling machines at four racetracks to raise money for education. Video gambling, she says, is the “least onerous way to address that revenue shortfall.”

It happens that her husband, Bob, is Al Gore’s state campaign chairman, which
may partly explain why Bill Bradley has shown interest in the issue. “If I were governor, I wouldn’t go this route,” he said during a visit. (Bradley opposed a statewide gambling initiative in his own state, New Jersey, in 1974, though casino gambling was approved two years later). Bradley sounded a bit like an Alabama Baptist: “You walk into these places and the people who are there are people who really can’t afford to gamble.”

Which, of course, raises the question of where a prominent Tennessee Baptist stands on the issue. “It’s a perfect set-up for Bradley,” says Grey. “He can ask Gore, who is the beneficiary of gambling money, why we should work so hard to get people off welfare and back to work, only to have casinos move in and take their paychecks. It also gives him a perfect segue into campaign-finance reform, where Gore is also vulnerable.” Gore may be about to learn an often-overlooked lesson, he concludes: “Gambling will get you money, but it won’t get you votes.”

But Bush stumbled, Stone believes, when he began “answering by degrees. That raises additional questions.” What about lasting damage? “Way too early to tell,” says Stone, but the possibility definitely exists. “The danger is that he is largely an undefined commodity. People are still forming impressions. At this time a discussion of cocaine is not a positive.”

Those of us of a libertarian bent, however, delight in Bush’s squirming, and see the opportunity to ask a serious policy-related question: Does Gov. Bush, a fierce and unforgiving anti-drug warrior in his home state of Texas, believe he should have been jailed if he used cocaine 25 years ago (as his coded, time-framed non-denials seem to imply)? Unfortunately, that question will probably never be answered, but libertarians may begin to ask it, loudly.

Bush might be expected to have the most trouble with conservative women and religious activists. They have spent the last few years flogging the White House nookie monster for his evasions and lapses, and can’t help but notice that their man has a Clintonian odor about him of late. But their desire to back a winner might overcome their worries about Bush’s past.

“All politicians aspire to a noble hypocrisy,” observes Grace Paine Terzian, the flame-haired minister of propaganda and vice president at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum. “From my perspective, youthful cocaine use is not as troubling as cheating on your wife.” Grace blames the intrusive media for Bush’s problems, though she admits feeling little such sympathy for Clinton during his long, slow evisceration. “That’s my prejudice at work,” she admits, adding she will give Bush a pass for the most politically noble of reasons: “We want our guy to win.”

This line of reasoning was echoed by many. Bush would have to approach the frontiers of butt-naked barbarism to spook Terzian and her allies. But others are more concerned. Michael Jones, chief of the Voice of the Elephant Political Awareness Committee of Ft. Worth, Texas, likes Bush so far, but says his reaction to the cocaine question worried him. “His answers are pure Clintonspeak,” says Jones. “They raise the character question. If he came forward and said, ‘I was just a spoiled rich brat but I got over these problems,’ that would be one thing. But he doesn’t, so this could hurt him.”

But where are voters like Jones going to go? It could be that, as in November 1998, when Democrats unexpectedly gained seats in Congress, conservative voters won’t go to the polls. “Last time around, no candidate lit up conservatives,” Jones explains, “so we stayed home. Most of us already think Bush is too liberal. If he becomes tarnished by character questions, we’ll stay home again, or go to a third party.” The result, he says, will be to “give the Democrats the trifecta — the presidency and both houses of Congress.” Such is the price of principle among deep-woods conservatives.

No one knows how many cliff-jumpers there are in the Republican ranks. But Bush faces a problem with religious conservatives that is deeper than cocaine allegations. That problem is sincerity — or the lack thereof. The past few weeks have caused some conservatives to question Bush’s character, and they are not as forgiving of character flaws as Clinton’s Democratic friends.

“The Christian right would quickly forgive Bush for cocaine,” says Roberto Rivera, a Christian intellectual at Charles Colson’s Wilberforce Forum. “After all, many of them have had similar conversions. The problem with Bush is that there’s a growing impression that he really isn’t a changed man.” Rivera points to Bush’s Talk magazine interview with conservative journalist Tucker Carlson, in which Bush used the F-word and made light of Karla Faye Tucker, a Texas double murderer and religious convert who is much admired among evangelicals.

“That bothers the religious right much more than the cocaine story,” says Rivera, an insight seconded by Michael Cromartie, who heads the evangelical studies projects at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “If he keeps using the F-word, he’s going to have real trouble,” says Cromartie. “And he made a major mistake by making fun of Karla Faye Tucker. Evangelicals found her to be a very sympathetic person.”

If evangelicals do not believe Bush’s conversion from a hard-drinking, and perhaps hard-drug ingesting, party boy is authentic, he will experience a wasting away of support that, until very recently, seemed very much in the bag.

“All of this lends support to people like Paul Weyrich, who are seriously questioning political involvement by religious conservatives,” says Rivera. “They’ve been involved for 20 years, but all they’ve gotten is lip service from the Republicans.” They have also suffered plenty of embarrassments, most recently when supposed comrade in arms Newt Gingrich was once again exposed as a cad.

“Gingrich was invited to address the Christian Coalition even though everyone knew he was having monkey sex with one of his younger aides,” says Rivera. “The Bush situation confirms the idea that politics may not be the best place for religious conservatives to put their hopes.”

This is not a universal view, Rivera adds. Even religious conservatives who are not overly fond of Bush are defending him as the victim of Democratic leaks and a hostile media. Bill Murray, son of missing (and presumed dead) professional atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair and Chairman of the Religious Freedom Council, questions the credibility of the damaging Talk magazine interview. The publication’s “sensationalism” makes him doubt Carlson’s revelations, despite Carlson’s solid conservative credentials. Short of Bush being caught in an outright lie, Murray thinks the Republican front-runner will suffer little permanent harm.

One thing’s for sure, however: Some of the glow is off Bush’s halo.