Who is more narrow-minded -- the Christian Coalition, or journalists who make no attempt to understand them?
By DAN KENNEDY
Illustration by Katherine StreeterSAN DIEGO --
I t's nearly three hours into the Christian Coalition's Faith & Freedom Celebration, and the 2,000-plus folks who've turned out at Balboa Park are starting to wilt under the late-morning heat.
But they come alive when the speaker of the moment, Newt Gingrich, trains his fire on an enemy they universally loathe: the media. "I want to say something to the press," Gingrich says, "because I don't think they get this sometimes." The cheers and applause waft from one end of the Organ Pavilion to the other. Newt's punchline -- that religious conservatives are part of a tradition going back to the Declaration of Independence -- is a mere afterthought. It's the defiant tone, not the content, that's cathartic for the faithful.
As the Gingrich-led call-and-response suggests, cultural anthropologists attending this week's Republican National Convention can observe a rare encounter between two widely differing species.
In one corner is the Christian Coalition, 1.7 million people who oppose abortion rights, anti-discrimination protection for lesbians and gay men, indecency on the Internet and anything else they consider an affront to family values.
In the other corner are the media, not nearly as left-wing in their economic and political biases as they're often presumed to be, but thoroughly liberal and secular on the social issues that the Christian Coalition holds dear.
The Coalition distrusts the media for a very good reason: Most mainstream journalists hold the organization and its leaders -- founder Pat Robertson and executive director Ralph Reed -- in contempt. They see the Coalition and its allies as hate-mongering extremists, as speaking-in-tongues, snake-handling wackos who ought to crawl back under the rocks from whence they came.
This characterization is unfair, of course. Although it might be obvious to us secular liberals that women should have a right to choose abortion and that homosexuality is an orientation, not an affront to morality, it should be equally obvious that the vast majority of religious conservatives are ordinary people whose views are simply very different from ours.
Reed himself, the boyish political veteran who is the Coalition's master strategist, has engaged in a balancing act with the media this week, magnanimously hailing the "pro-life, pro-family" Dole-Kemp ticket and downplaying his role in ramming through a right-wing platform over Dole's objections, while at the same time making it perfectly clear that he may well head the most potent organization at the convention.
Indeed, Reed estimates that 1,100 of the 1,990 delegates here are strongly anti-choice, and that 500 to 600 are members of the Coalition and other religious-conservative groups. And he's tracking their every move via a "war room" -- an elaborate communications system including floor representatives armed with personal digital assistants to keep supporters supplied with up-to-the-minute information. In fact, critics such as People for the American Way, a liberal free-speech group, charge that the Coalition is nothing more than a partisan arm of the Republican Party. And the Federal Election Commission has filed a lawsuit that could result in the organization's losing its tax exemption.
With his smooth, reasonable demeanor, Reed strives mightily to downplay his organization's extremist reputation. Ironically, though, his best chance for appearing more moderate may lie in the hands of enemies who are even farther to the right than he is.
Outside the Faith & Freedom Celebration, demonstrators from Operation Rescue are marching, carrying giant posters with grotesque color photographs of aborted fetuses. Lest anyone mistake the message, they hand out pamphlets denouncing the Christian Coalition for "apologizing for the cowardice and foolish statements made by Mr. Dole concerning preborn children." Jerry Crawford, a 49-year-old Operation Rescue protester from Rochester, New York, says the Coalition is simply too willing to compromise its principles. "They've done a lot of good work, and we're very grateful to them. We just wish they'd take that extra step," says Crawford, who is wearing a T-shirt that reads, "Intolerance Is a Beautiful Thing."
Alongside the Operation Rescue activists is a group of gay and lesbian pro-choice protesters, one of whom is carrying a pink, swastika-festooned sign that says, "Ralph Reed, America's Finest Hitler."
The simultaneous demonstrations serve to cast the Christian Coalition right where Reed wants it: in the moderate middle, sober and responsible, deserving of a place at the table.
Yet there's material for conspiracy theorists, too. When I ask Christian Coalition volunteer Sylvia Sullivan, a fortysomething from La Mesa, California, what she thinks of Operation Rescue, she replies without hesitation that she belongs to both organizations. "There's a lot of overlap," she says. "It's the old good cop, bad cop."
The bottom line is that the religious right is a lot more complicated, and a lot less easy to categorize, than mainstream journalists think. Rather than dismiss these people as nutcases, the media should take a closer look at who they are: young parents frightened by the increasing coarseness of the culture, elderly churchgoers, working class families from Middle America and yes, dangerous extremists, too.
For the media, the worst part of Newt Gingrich's insult wasn't its condescending tone; it was its accuracy. We really don't get it, and it's time that we started trying.
Dan Kennedy is the media reporter for the Boston Phoenix.