On Sunday, August 15, 1993, the Rev. Bob Meneilly mounted his pulpit at the Village Presbyterian Church in the Republican stronghold of suburban Johnson County, Kansas, and proceeded to pour fire and brimstone on an enemy at work in metropolitan Kansas City.
The target of Meneilly's fulminations was not the new gambling boats steaming up the Missouri, or the record murders in KC, or the area's porn shops, strip clubs, abortion mills, broken homes, and chaotic schools, or even the informal apartheid reflected in the lives of his affluent flock. Small potatoes all.
No, Meneilly warned, this threat was dire -- "far greater than the old threat of communism" had ever been. Yea, verily, this was a plague of biblical proportions, a dreadful pestilence "known as the Religious Right."
The good minister "trembled for our nation" at the thought of these "zealous religionists." They were "anti-pornography." They were trying to "discredit our public school system." They were "conniving in every political way" to bring back school prayer. They opposed, he noted primly, a woman's "having a say about what goes on in her own body." And worse, they deliberately concealed their views in order "to hook those who might not hear them otherwise." Woe betide us, bellowed Meneilly: "The Republican party in Johnson County has been captured by the New Right and stealth candidates."
The sermon was more than a hit, it was a sensation -- reprinted in full in the Johnson County Sun and excerpted on the op-ed page of the New York Times. The Kansas City Star lauded the honorable minister as a "drum major for justice." Just about every local dogood organization with an award to give bestowed it on Meneilly, culminating with the prestigious Harry S. Truman Good Neighbor award (which this year went to Tom Clancy). With his new clout, Meneilly helped found a local group called the Mainstream Coalition whose purpose was to further "expose the agenda of the radical religious Right."
At the time, though living in the area, I paid no attention. A New Jersey native and a born-once-only Roman Catholic, I drank, gambled, danced (badly), and had learned most of the Bible verses I knew watching Pulp Fiction. Though a rank-and-file conservative Republican, I hadn't come across a single one of the scary radicals who so alarmed the good preacher, and another whole year would pass before I did.
I remember the occasion well. It was the victory party for Ron Freeman, the sharp young black conservative who had just won the Republican nomination for Congress in Missouri's 5th District. I was talking with another Freeman supporter, the Jewish and emphatically moderate former mayor of Kansas City Dick Berkley, when Freeman's Democratic opponent, Karen McCarthy, appeared on TV. She was trembling -- trembling, I soon realized, with rage. And the reason for her rage she soon made plain. "We can expect a negative, nasty campaign," she warned, "from the forces of the radical religious Right."
I had finally met Meneilly's Christian extremists. And they was us.
They is still us. After six years of effort, the Democratic National Committee and its fellow travelers have succeeded in convincing the uninvolved masses of the American electorate that the "ayatollahs" Robertson and Falwell are yanking the chain of every serious Republican candidate in America. More disturbing, too many Republicans have responded just the way the DNC has hoped. Like the self-described Republican Meneilly, they have joined in the attack -- or, at the very least, distanced themselves from its victims. Both strategies are utterly self-defeating.
Alfonse D'Amato found this out the hard way, and Rudolph Giuliani is learning it now. A Hillary Clinton adviser recently suggested on a talking-heads show that Giuliani would end up, as D'Amato supposedly had, "more like a senator from North Carolina than New York." New Yorkers, of course, know how self-righteous and "intolerant" a senator from North Carolina can be: They know it because New York Republicans -- D'Amato and Giuliani among them -- have spread the word. What these "moderate" Republicans have been slow to understand is that they themselves will ultimately fall victim to the anti-Right hysteria they have helped inflame.
Here's a current illustration of how the process works. An AP reporter recycles from Jerry Falwell's obscure National Liberty Journal a small item on Teletubbies, alerting parents that Tinky Winky, one of the characters on this new TV show for toddlers, is gay. The AP releases the item three days before the final vote in President Clinton's impeachment trial. Democratic pundits from Washington to Walla Walla pick it up immediately -- neglecting, however, to note that gay magazines and the Washington Post had long ago outed Tinky Winky or that Falwell personally had neither written the article in question nor ever even seen Teletubbies. By the time of the Sunday morning talk shows, Republican strategist Mary Matalin is doing the Democrats' dirty work for them: denouncing Falwell for "gay-bashing."
The circle will be complete when Democrats accuse the next Republican candidate Matalin supports of representing the party of gay-bashers. And when they do, how can Matalin possibly object?
In their work of demonizing the religious Right, the Democrats count on Republican moderates' silence. Just a month before the 1998 congressional elections, in a stunningly well-coordinated burst of demagoguery, Democrats and their allies blamed the death of a gay man in Wyoming not on the soulless, parentless, rap-happy high school drop-outs who murdered him but on the Christian Right. Given the instinctive tendency of many in the media to bolster the Democrats in the run-up to a worrisome election, this story dominated the news for a week or more. No notable conservative spoke out to object, so an out-pouring of shrill anti-Right rhetoric went unanswered, costing Republicans of all stripes countless votes.
In Kansas, in the Rev. Bob Meneilly's congressional district, just such anti-Christian demagoguery paved the way for Democrat Dennis Moore's upset victory over the conservative Republican incumbent, Vince Snowbarger. Meneilly's Mainstream Coalition led the way, sowing fear of "Christian extremist theocrats," especially among the Jewish population.
Already in 1996, when Snowbarger had first run for Congress, Republican moderates had fanned the flames. In the GOP primary, friends of the moderate candidate had targeted Jews with a letter implying that the inoffensive Snowbarger was an anti-Semite and denouncing his "extreme views." Although Snowbarger had managed to win the primary, then the general election, he had been damaged. In 1998, the fear mongering continued, and only near the end of the campaign did popular Republican governor Bill Graves make a lame defense of Snowbarger -- too little, too late. Hundreds of Graves's moderate Republican supporters had already defected to the Democrat and staked "Dennis Moore" signs in their yards. Soon after the election, an apolitical Gen-X friend told me Snowbarger never had a chance. When I asked him why, my friend answered gravely, "He's so extreme."
The only Republicans who can effectively defend the social conservatives are those who enjoy relative immunity from liberal attack -- namely, moderates like Bill Graves. Had the governor come to Snowbarger's defense two years ago, it is unlikely Snowbarger would have faced a Democratic challenger in 1998 -- or, for that matter, Graves himself a conservative challenger in the Republican primary.
Indeed, it is the moderates who have the most to gain from a consistent, unembarrassed, strategic defense of the Right. Only such a defense will begin to erase the widespread caricature of Republicans in the media. But that will take time. Of more immediate benefit -- especially to presidential candidates like George W. Bush, Elizabeth Dole, and John McCain -- is the easing of intra-party friction that will result as moderates earn the gratitude of conservatives. Had Colin Powell followed this tack in 1996, treating the right wing with consideration instead of nervous mistrust, he would be president today.
If moderates need a framework for an unapologetic defense of the Right, perhaps they can find it in federalism. The social conservatives in Kansas refrain from telling the libertarians of New Jersey how to live their lives, and the New Jerseyans return the favor. Utah and Nevada, both with overwhelmingly Republican delegations in Washington, live side by side in relative harmony, despite the obvious disparity between the Mormon-influenced culture of the one and the vice-and-gambling economy of the other.
On the abortion issue, too, moderates and conservatives can find common ground in constitutionalism. Whether pro-choice or pro-life, all Republicans should agree that Roe v. Wade violates the letter and spirit of the Tenth Amendment.
At the very least, moderates should be willing to insist to the media that the conservatives in the party are not interested in "forcing their agenda" on America. Indeed, most social conservatives would be content to have a say before their local school board. This is what makes them Republicans: They want power returned to them and their communities, power that all Americans have lost through capricious court judgments and administrative sleight of hand over the last thirty or forty years.
Social conservatives may never support the Republican middle with enthusiasm. Why should they? But if the moderate middle refrains from heaping scorn on conservatives -- or, better, actually comes to conservatives' defense as decent individuals and legitimate political players -- they will at least accord it respect. And respect, understandably, is something conservatives don't feel now for the fellow Republicans who so casually betray them.
Jack Cashill is an independent writer and film producer in Fairway, Kansas.