But for all his concern with anti-Catholicism, Donohue had no qualms about sharing the stage with Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Dr. Albert Mohler. “As an evangelical, I believe that the Roman Catholic Church is a false church,” Mohler declared during a 2000 TV interview. “It teaches a false gospel. And the Pope himself holds a false and unbiblical office.” Donohue, who had raised feverish cries of protest against Democrats who made no such comments about Catholics, was silent about Mohler. In fact, the site of Justice Sunday, Highview Baptist Church, was Mohler’s home church.
“We’re fed up and we’re on the same side,” Donohue explained. “And if the secular left is worried, they should be worried.”
The evening culminated with Frist’s appearance on a giant screen hovering above the audience. Introduced as a “friend of The Family” by Perkins, Frist boldly endorsed the nuclear option. “I don’t think it’s radical to ask senators to vote,” Frist opined. “Only in the United States Senate could it be considered a devastating option to allow a vote.” His face then disappeared as Perkins rushed onstage to urge viewers to call their senators.
While Frist and the Republican leadership fell in line behind the Christian right, a coalition of moderate Republicans and centrist Democrats converged almost spontaneously against the nuclear option. Led by Republican John McCain and Democrat Joe Lieberman, who has since abandoned his party over its opposition to the war on Iraq, the so-called “Gang of 14” brokered a compromise that allowed Rogers-Brown, Pryor, and another of Bush’s filibustered nominees, Priscilla Owen, to go to the floor for a vote. Two other nominees, William Owen and Henry Saad, were withdrawn. The deal represented a tactical victory for conservatives, allowing three of the most extreme judges ever nominated to the federal bench—those supposedly victimized most by liberal bigotry—to be confirmed. But when Dobson awoke from his dream of a euphoric total victory, he grew despondent.
“This one hit me personally harder than anything has coming out of Washington,” he moaned during a May 2005 broadcast in the wake of the deal. “I literally went home and hugged Shirley [his wife] and pulled over the covers and went to bed.”
Perkins, who joined Dobson by phone, chimed in with his own plaintive confession. “I’ll tell you what—I wanted to cry,” he admitted.
Then Dobson’s expressions of sorrow gave way to his outsized persecution complex, as he claimed suddenly and without evidence that a liberal radio network wanted him assassinated. “Air America said they wish I would die and my son—and that they’re praying I would die,” he stammered. “And I would appreciate the prayers of God’s people out there because I’m not Superman.” Finally, the wounded Dobson summoned his army for one last charge into the teeth of the secular artillery. “The culture war’s been going on for 25 years and this is the climax,” he said. “This is the decisive battle. That’s why we’re all being hit.”
The Gang of 14’s compromise was followed by the confirmation as chief justice of the Supreme Court of John Roberts, a former Reagan functionary with a thin but doctrinaire conservative record—a stealth nominee—aided by a second, slightly less passionate Justice Sunday rally. Then Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suddenly resigned. With the court’s moderate Republican swing vote gone and Bush poised to nominate a radical, Dobson thrust himself into what he believed was the “decisive battle” for civilization.
In October 2005, the White House gathered together Dobson and fifteen other members of the Arlington Group, an informal Christian-right outfit operating under the umbrella of the Council for National Policy, in a conference call about Bush’s next nominee to the Supreme Court: Harriet Miers, Bush’s White House counsel. Bush nominated Miers for two reasons: first, because Bush was urged to nominate a woman to replace O’Connor, just as his father was urged to replace Thurgood Marshall with a black man; and second, because Miers was an integral part of his personal Texas machine that followed him to Washington, a crony who flattered the president by publicly proclaiming him “the most brilliant man” she had ever met.
But in the eyes of the Christian right, all that mattered was the nominee’s culture war credentials. And Miers did not have any. Tony Perkins, one of the activists who took part in the Arlington Group conference call, avoided openly condemning Miers. However, he pointedly refused to hold a Justice Sunday III on her behalf. “To support Roberts was a step of faith,” Perkins said at the time. “Miers is more a leap of faith.”
Bush and his inner circle were convinced they could sway Dobson. They knew he had sympathized with serial killers such as Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz simply because they were born-again Christians. And they recognized that his steadfast support for the embattled House Majority Leader Tom DeLay stemmed from his faith-based affinity for the fellow evangelical. To win Dobson to Miers’s side, Bush’s political handlers believed they simply had to paint her as a true-blooded Christian conservative—“a friend of The Family.”
And so the White House dispatched former Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht, a fifty-five-year-old bachelor and Miers’s erstwhile cocktail party date, to make the case to Dobson. Hecht assured Dobson that Miers had undergone a born-again experience that dramatically changed her worldview and that she would undoubtedly vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Bush consigliere Karl Rove reportedly uttered the same magic words to Dobson in a follow-up call. The strategy worked like a charm.
Two days after Miers’s nomination, Dobson hyped her to his radio audience as a “deeply committed Christian.” Then he claimed to hold secret information about her background that he could not reveal but that justified his total confidence. “When you know some of the things I know,” he assured his followers, “that I probably shouldn’t know, that take me in this direction, you’ll know why I’ve said with fear and trepidation I believe Harriet Miers will be a good justice . . . You will have to trust me on this one.”
As other Christian-right leaders joined secular conservatives in fervent opposition to Miers, and late-night talk show hosts made light of the sixty-year-old nominee’s lifelong unmarried status, entertaining lurid rumors circulating on blogs that she was a lesbian, Miers withdrew her nomination. Then the previously steadfast Dobson underwent another magical conversion, suggesting that he had in fact endorsed Miers through gritted teeth. “In recent days I have grown increasingly concerned about her conservative credentials,” he claimed to his listening audience on the day of the nominee’s withdrawal. “Based on what we now know about Miss Miers, it appears that we would not have been able to support her candidacy.”
Despite his efforts at damage control, Dobson’s inexplicable shilling for the White House threatened to undermine the dominant position he occupied within the Christian right. He had always stressed independence as the most vital asset of his leadership, and on repeated occasions he insisted to his radio audience that “Focus on the Family is not a political organization”—an incredible assertion but one Dobson’s flock accepted nonetheless. Now, some of his allies questioned his fitness to lead. “Dobson didn’t call here asking for any advice,” one Family Research Council staffer told journalist Dan Gilgoff. “He just relied on the word of Karl Rove. The only comment I have is complete puzzlement.”
With the movement at odds with the White House and Dobson on the defensive, Bush nominated Samuel Alito as Miers’s replacement. Like John Roberts, Alito was a little-known and minor former Reagan staffer and an undistinguished federal judge—another stealth nominee—who seemed to hold conservative positions on the social issues that mattered to the Christian right. He had made a few anti-abortion statements throughout his career, but nothing inflammatory enough to excite the passions of the conservative base. Yet when an element of racial animus surfaced from far back in Alito’s past, prompting Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to question his integrity, the conservative movement—including every faction under the umbrella of the Council for National Policy—immediately reunited after the Miers debacle.
When Alito’s alma mater, Princeton University, lifted its quota on black students in the late 1960s and then began admitting women in 1969, a group of disgruntled right-wing graduates formed the Concerned Alumni of Princeton to fight back. In 1983, the Concerned Alumni, which organized on campus as a whites-only “eating society,” published in its journal, Prospect, an essay that exemplified the bigotry at the group’s core. Titled “In Defense of Elitism,” the essay fumed, “People nowadays just don’t seem to know their place. Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics [sic] are demanding jobs simply because they’re black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children.”
Alito, who graduated from Princeton in 1972, was a member of the Concerned Alumni, and he cited that fact on a 1985 job application to burnish his credentials. When his membership was revealed during the opening days of his confirmation hearing, Senator Edward M. Kennedy immediately demanded a subpoena for Concerned Alumni’s records. Washington, DC, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, then denounced the nominee as “a special danger to people of color and women.” With race thrust to the forefront of the debate, the right reverted again to its Clarence Thomas strategy, deploying a phalanx of African American conservatives to protect Alito behind the shield of blackness.
Project 21, a conservative front group that calls itself “a leading voice in the black community,” spearheaded the counterattack. Although Project 21’s black spokespeople lip-synched the right’s talking points for cable news audiences, the group was masterminded by a white Republican operative named David Almasi from the office of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a think-tank that Jack Abramoff had used to illegally launder $1 million in Indian casino lobbying fees and bankroll a golfing trip for Tom DeLay. Almasi blew his cover in July 2004 when he decided to fill in for a Project 21 member who got a flat tire on his way to an appearance on C-SPAN. While introducing Almasi, the show’s bemused host turned to him and stuttered, “Um . . . Project 21 . . . a program for conservative African Americans . . . you’re not African American.”
One month before Alito’s confirmation hearing commenced, Project 21 sprung into action, issuing a press release announcing that the Congressional Black Caucus had “clearly aligned itself with the extreme liberals who share their contempt for those who would uphold the Constitution as it was envisioned by our Founding Fathers.” Project 21 dispatched one of its members, Peter Kirsanow, a union-busting lawyer who also served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, to testify in Alito’s confirmation hearing to the judge’s racial sensitivity. According to Kirsanow, in a column for the National Review published just before his testimony, there was “no factual or logical bases” for the Democrats’ criticisms of Alito’s record on civil rights.
But Kirsanow’s defense of Alito conflicted with the negative view of Constitutional protections for minorities that he himself had displayed in the past. In the wake of 9/11, for instance, Kirsanow had shocked an audience of Arab Americans by warning them that if there is another terrorist attack in America “and they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights.”
Charles Colson joined the chorus of Alito defenders with an unusual revision of civil rights history. Colson, who once burned a cross on the lawn of a black law partner in what he later described as a “prank,” and who exploited resentment of forced school desegregation to win ethnic white votes for Richard Nixon, declared in a January 2006 radio commentary that Martin Luther King was “a great conservative. Were he alive today, I believe he would be in the vanguard of the pro-life movement and would be supporting Judge Alito.” Colson’s logic, remarkable as it was, was actually part of a premeditated Christian-right effort to link Alito to the legacy of King. This campaign culminated when Tony Perkins convened Justice Sunday III at a black church in inner-city Philadelphia.
The event featured a strange cast, beginning with Bishop Wellington Boone, an African American church leader and spokesman for the evangelical men’s group known as the Promise Keepers. Perkins had recruited Boone to lend his rally a bold splash of color; however, the bishop had lost any credibility he might have enjoyed in the black community years before when he wrote, in his book Breaking Through, “We need to boldly affirm Uncle Tom. The black community needs to stop criticizing Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom is a role model.” In the same tract, Boone declared, “I believe that slavery, and the understanding of it when you see it God’s way, was redemptive.”
Herb Lusk, another conservative black clergyman close to Perkins, joined Boone on stage to shout down the liberal hosts of darkness who opposed Alito. “Don’t fool with the church because the church has buried many critics,” Lusk thundered from his podium. “All the critics we have not buried, we’re making funeral arrangements for!” Lusk, whose Greater Exodus Baptist Church played host to Justice Sunday III, was a former NFL tailback and lifelong Democrat who suddenly shifted his party allegiance to the GOP in 2002 when Republican Senator Rick Santorum guaranteed him $900,000 in faith-based federal grants.
Neither Boone nor Lusk expressed any qualms about appearing alongside Perkins, an associate of Bayou country white supremacists, or Jerry Falwell, the former segregationist who had once branded Martin Luther King Jr. as a Communist puppet. Although the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down public school segregation prompted Falwell to join the conservative campaign to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, he now claimed that the Roe v. Wade decision sparked his activism—yet another historical revisionist.
“We were able to hold off Michael Moore, most of Hollywood, most of the national media, George Soros, and the Kennedys and other crowds who fought so fiercely against the reelection of George Bush,” Falwell boomed before Justice Sunday III’s mostly black audience. “And now, now we’re looking at what we really started on 30 years ago—a reconstruction of a court system gone awry.”
Behind Falwell, in a throne-like chair, sat Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King. Her appearance at Justice Sunday III represented a major publicity coup for Perkins and his allies, providing them the royal link they so desperately sought. Perkins played up King’s participation for maximum dramatic effect, identifying her in a Family Research Council press release as “the daughter of slain civil rights leader A. D. King.” As compelling as this biographical detail was, it was false: A. D. King drowned in a swimming pool.
Although Alveda King admired her father’s fight for racial justice, her own crusade, kindled by the traumatic personal crises she endured, represented a rupture in her family’s tradition of social justice. A self-described “post-abortive mother,” King claimed to have undergone an “involuntary abortion” in the immediate wake of the Roe v. Wade decision, and then another one prompted by violent threats from the baby’s father. Afterward, she became consumed by night-mares, eating disorders, and sexual dysfunctions. “I felt angry about both abortions, and very guilty about the abortion I chose to have,” King recounted. “The guilt made me very ill.”
King assuaged her searing sense of regret by embracing evangelical Christianity and its anti-abortion politics. Her ability to weave her father and uncle’s lilting rhetoric into the Christian right’s reactionary narrative earned her the recognition of movement leaders. “Oh, God, what would Martin Luther King Jr., who dreamed of having his children judged by the content of their characters [sic], do if he’d lived to see the contents of thousands of children’s skulls emptied into the bottomless caverns of the abortionists pits?” King pleaded in a speech. By 1992, King had earned a sinecure at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, a right-wing think-tank funded by business interests and the tobacco industry, and was being ferried around the country as a paid speaker at Christian-right confabs. Like so many others belonging to the conservative culture of pers
onal crisis, King traded in the moral glamour of her family’s reputation for the lucre and emotional euphoria of culture war activism, medicating her anxiety along the way.
King’s sermon at Justice Sunday III provided an emotional crescendo to the evening, which concluded with a heartfelt rendition of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” When the crowd rose from the pews to sing along with King, Falwell haltingly lifted himself from his chair and began to mouth the words. A look of discomfort washed across his face. Dobson and Perkins, who sat beside him throughout the rally, joined in with a similar lack of enthusiasm, as though they were reading a kidnapper’s ransom letter against their will.
One of the reporters in attendance, Michelle Goldberg, reflected afterward, “The entire evening had a surreal, upside-down quality, as if history had been caught in a whirlpool and come back all jumbled.” But by conferring the moral authority of the black church on a reactionary judicial nominee, while conveying the optical illusion of a link between the civil rights movement and the Christian right, Justice Sunday III fulfilled its aim.
The Senate confirmed Alito on January 31, 2006, on a narrow party-line vote. A month later, Alito personally thanked Dobson for mobilizing Focus on the Family’s shock troops on his behalf. “My entire family and I hope that you and the Focus on the Family staff know how much we appreciate all that you have done,” Alito wrote to Dobson. Dobson immediately took to the airwaves with news of Alito’s gratitude, reading the letter aloud to his supporters as evidence of his own influence and the new justice’s loyalty to the Christian right. In concluding his broadcast, Dobson asked his listeners to “please be in prayer that by the time that prohibition on abortion reaches the Supreme Court, there will be one more conservative justice sitting there.”
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