MAY 2, 1997
GAY PEOPle's ChroNICLE
11
SPEAK OUT
Reed is getting out while he can still claim victory
by Bob Roehr
Ralph Reed's decision to step down as executive director of the Christian Coalition marks the end of an era in American politics. Reed has long been the most dangerous of the theocratic political leaders, because he has been the most pragmatic. His main concern has not been the moral stance of what is right and wrong within a fundamentalist world view, but assembling a majority to win elections. Above all else he has been a political animal, not a religious one.
Several years ago he called on the religious right to begin to play down their traditional anti-abortion and anti-homosexual stances as political litmus tests. He knew from polling data that these issues resonate with only a small portion of the electorate, and even among those folks only a small portion see them as top priorities.
He tried to shift the focus of the Christian Coalition to pocketbook issues of tax cuts and job insecurity, which most Americans view as their principal concerns. He knew that was the way to build the numbers necessary to win elections. In theory, the idea made sense.
But Rich Tafel, executive director of the gay Log Cabin Republicans, didn't buy it. I vividly recall a conversation with him at the time Reed announced this shift in strategy. Tafel had absolute confidence that Reed would fail. His evangelical upbringing and training as a minister left Tafel certain that softening the message would not be sufficient to motivate the Coalition's hard core of donors and workers, and they would trickle away to inactivity or to other groups that maintained their stridency. Tafel thought the Coalition carried too much baggage to lure many from the political center into its fold.
Reed also failed because the hard core of the religious right, those public figures such as his boss and mentor Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and the key organizational muscle at the state, county and precinct level, were in the end unwilling to embrace pragmatic politics.
"The leopard can't change its spots," is the way Tafel put it. Theirs is a politics based upon true belief, some would say hate. They were not willing to, perhaps they are incapable of moving beyond the mean-spirited polarization of social issues, most notably gay bashing. The 1992 Republican National Convention will be seen as the high water mark of the religious right, that point when the infection of their bigotry flared most visibly upon the American scene. And it set in motion the immune system of the American body politic.
The genius of the American political system is often not a head-on challenge to a dissident group, but its ability to co-opt elements of that challenge and in so doing, isolate the more extreme components and
STOP
•
shut them off from the mainstream.
Bob Dole did it with a bit of pandering to the religious right while at the same time resisting the most hateful aspects of their agenda. Bill Clinton did it by becoming a de facto Republican. The entire political spectrum shifted a bit to the right, and in so doing eased the pressure from that extreme. Thus the system regained a homeostasis, or equilibrium.
Reed realizes this. He knows the rightward movement has been halted, that the religious right will not achieve governing power, that its influence has peaked and now in the national equation, it will only ebb. He is getting out while he can still claim victory.
The public voice is overwhelming. The country has long been polarized on the hotbutton issue of abortion, and those positions have only become more firmly entrenched than ever. The numbers are not going to shift dramatically.
The political battle on AIDS has largely been won. Two years ago the Human Rights Campaign's landmark polling on AIDS showed that the issue had become depoliticized among the electorate. That has largely been reflected in votes in Congress. Funding continues to increase regardless of which party controls Capitol Hill.
The struggle of gays and lesbians, despite periodic setbacks, is moving overwhelmingly in the direction of equality. In the workplace, in public forums, before the law in marriage, in the military, the movement is inexorably towards at least acceptance, if not the outright embrace of tolerance and equality.
Reed knows what his chief sponsors and allies are unwilling or unable to admit: that in the political long term these are not winning issues. They can motivate a hard core of true believers, most notably those who give money, but they are a negative among the broader electorate. Raising them often inhibits the ability to put together winning coalitions on election day.
This does not mean that the religious right is going to dry up and blow away. Desperation in losing ground and religious fervor stimulated by the approaching millennium seem likely to intensify outbursts of hurtful anti-gay rhetoric and action. That is particularly true in light of the departure of Reed's moderating presence.
Ironically, we should welcome the harshness, the increased stridency and shrillness, because it will ultimately force the largely disinterested center into making a choice. And that choice will be one of fairness and equity for all Americans, including those who happen to be gay and lesbian. The opportunities continue to unfold before us. Let us seize them and work to make them real.
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