Seated beside archconservatives Thomas, Scalia, and new Chief Justice John Roberts—the so-called Roberts Court—Alito formed the anchor of a radical judicial bloc that quickly and dramatically reversed decades of civil rights legislation. The court, in a 5-4 decision in June 2007, ruled that public schools could no longer integrate on the basis of race, essentially eviscerating the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Clarence Thomas remarked bluntly in his majority opinion, “It is unclear whether increased interracial contact improves racial attitudes and relations.”
Writing on behalf of the court’s four dissenting members, Justice Stephen Breyer lashed out for seventy-seven pages at what he called a “radical” decision “that the court and the nation will come to regret.” In a voice trembling with emotion, the normally dispassionate Breyer held forth for twenty minutes before a packed courtroom. “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,” he said.
By the middle of Bush’s second term, the president and the Republican Congress had managed to seat one of the most radical Supreme Courts in history and to confirm scores of right-wing ideologues to lifetime positions on the federal bench. This accomplishment will probably be the most enduring legacy of the Republican majority that dominated government between 2002 and 2006. However, as the Republican Congress sank deeper into bizarre personal scandals, the euphoric mood that sprang from Alito’s confirmation rapidly degenerated into bitter acrimony and outright embarrassment.
The saga of strange scandals that engulfed the Republican Party in Bush’s second term began to grow stranger in January 2006 when Claude Allen informed Miers, who was back in her old post as White House legal counsel, that he had been charged with a misdemeanor in a credit card misunderstanding. The White House took him at his word and even rewarded him with a seat next to First Lady Laura Bush for Bush’s State of the Union address. The following month, however, Allen suddenly resigned, claiming he needed to spend time with his family—a canned explanation that few believed. Finally, in March, when Allen appeared in court, the reason why he had resigned was revealed.
After a grinding day of anti-condom activities, Allen liked to go shopping. Typically, he would visit a department store such as Target and purchase hundreds of dollars worth of electronic goods. After loading those goods into his car, he would return to the store with his receipts, fill a shopping cart with the same exact items he had just purchased, and return them, getting the refunded money back on his credit card. Allen had repeated this scheme at least twenty-five times, according to the police who arrested him after he was detained by store security guards. Facing eighteen months in prison, Allen pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years’ criminal probation, forty hours of community service, and a $1,350 fine.
With tears streaming down his face, Allen claimed to his sentencing judge that his kleptomania was sparked by the stress of the “tumultuous time” after Hurricane Katrina. During the hurricane, as impoverished, black residents of New Orleans died by the hundreds, drowning and starving while the Bush administration stood by impotently, the White House delegated Allen to speak to the president’s sensitive side. “Just the mere fact you have pictures of the president on TV embracing grieving mothers, embracing pastors of churches that have been destroyed,” Allen said on the tenth anniversary of the Million Man March, “that speaks about the personal character of our president, who is truly concerned about healing our nation.” Now, as he groped for excuses for his stealing spree, the disgraced aide presented himself as a victim of the tragedy that engulfed New Orleans.
“Something did go very wrong,” Allen wept to the judge. “I failed to restrain myself.”
Presumably, most people who make $161,000 a year, as Allen did, do not battle the urge to steal items they could easily afford. But Allen was, by his own admission, afflicted by inner demons that he had tried to “restrain” for perhaps his entire adult life. During moments of stress, the temptation to sin gathered inside him until it finally exploded in ways he may have been unable to control. Only through the strict dictates of evangelical religion and the rigid control of his conservative overseers could Allen contain his urges. The masochistic tendency demonstrated by Allen suggested that more complex psychological factors than blind ambition fueled his attraction to right-wing moral crusades.
But like so many other social conservatives who turned to masochism as a form of self-medication, Allen discovered that he had merely transmuted his problems, not solved them. As Fromm wrote in Escape from Freedom, “The masochistic ‘solution’ is no more of a solution than neurotic manifestations ever are: the individual succeeds in eliminating the conspicuous suffering but not in removing the underlying conflict and the silent unhappiness . . . It springs from an unbearable situation, tends to overcome it, and leaves the individual caught in a new suffering.”
Just as black movement figures such as Allen advanced their ambitions by endearing themselves to race-baiting white politicians, conservative women secured a special status within the movement by inveighing against the feminist legacy that made their careers possible. Seemingly unaware of the irony of their cause, they blamed the smashing of traditional gender roles for inflicting the sexual traumas that led them to seek out the fatherly protection of Jesus. Through Bush and the Republican Congress, the personal became political as the women of the movement designed federally funded abstinence education programs for a new generation of vulnerable young women.
CHAPTER 16
FEEDING BABY MONSTERS
For two days in October 2007, the entire field of Republican primary candidates paraded on stage before James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and thousands of their followers at the Family Research Council’s annual Value Voters Summit. Mitt Romney, a one-time liberal Republican governor of Massachusetts, hailed the good works of Dobson on behalf of “The Family”; former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee declared America has to import so many workers because “for the last 35 years we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce”; and Senator John McCain, still reviled by the movement, touted his crusading to help persecuted Christians around the globe.
Even John Cox, an unknown California businessman running for the GOP nomination, parachuted into the conference to flash his culture war credentials. Cox made certain to recount to every “value voter” he met that his father had conceived him by raping his mother. “She had no choice [but] to have me,” he told me, “and so I am pro-life to the core of my being.” By channeling the culture of personal crisis undergirding the Christian right, the long-shot Cox desperately hoped to somehow distinguish himself from his better-funded, well-established rivals.
On the summit’s final evening, silver-haired couples clad in tuxedoes and sequined evening dresses shuffled into a hotel ballroom for “A Night to Honor James Dobson.” In spite of the fact that the Dobson tribute was an annual affair, speakers behaved as though they were sending their Dear Leader off into the sweet hereafter, bestowing on him gushing tributes that sounded like eulogies. Dobson reveled in their panegyrics, smiling wistfully and guffawing at every corny anecdote, while the crowd cheered his beneficent acts, reflecting their sense of privilege at being present at a gathering of America’s most pro-family Family.
The tribute was made to seem like an intimate affair, as though the entire audience had been invited to Christmas Eve at the Dobsons’ house. Dobson’s wife, Shirley (or “Shirl-sey,” as he affectionately called her), boasted that she had married the “biggest catch” in her high school, then exuberantly gushed before hundreds of strangers, “I love you, James Dobson!” Dobson’s son, self-styled evangelical “youth speaker” Ryan, revealed through a prepared video address that even though he once spurned his father’s pro-corporal-punishment childrearing manuals, they now guide him as he raises his own strong-willed infant son.
Next, one of Dobson’s closest friends, Elsa Prince-Broekhuisen, the septuagenarian mother of Blackwater Worldwide founder Erik Prince,
and wife of the late Focus on the Family financial angel Edgar Prince, recounted in painstaking detail a trip to France she took with the Dobsons—not the stuff of National Lampoon vacations. Finally, Dobson strode triumphantly to the stage to accept a “lifetime achievement award” from his own Washington lobbyist, a man he hired and whose salary he oversees: Tony Perkins. The crowd rose from their seats with a roaring ovation for Dobson’s manufactured milestone.
Only one speaker captured my waning attention. She was Danae Dobson, the perky, blonde, thirty-something daughter of James Dobson. Danae began working for Focus on the Family in high school. “I was in the correspondence department, and I would read the letters that came in about, for instance, women whose husbands were hooked on pornography,” she told her father’s official biographer, Dale Buss. “My eyes were kind of opened at a tender age to all of the things that could go wrong in a marriage.”
When she ascended into her father’s media empire, Danae cultivated an eager audience of teenage girls. Focus on the Family has published over a dozen of Danae’s books, including her 2003 opus Let’s Talk! Good Stuff for Girlfriends About God, Guys, and Growing Up. Danae’s advice columns are featured regularly in her father’s magazine for adolescent girls, Brio!, where she has informed aspiring evangelical hipsterettes that “God is cool! In fact, he’s so cool there are no words to describe him!” (“I use the word cool to describe everything from cars to movies,” Danae explained. “It’s a reliable way to reveal how much we like something.”) But God is not only cool; he’s creative. “Snow is created by God, too,” Danae wrote. “Who else could have thought of something you can ski on one day and drink the next?”
In 2004, Mel Gibson selected Danae Dobson to help him quell the controversy surrounding his film The Passion of the Christ. After a private screening with Gibson, Danae composed a letter extolling his film as “a realistic depiction of what Christ did.” Her widely distributed missive caused damaging blowback, however, when conservative commentator Cal Thomas, an erstwhile friend of James Dobson, revealed that her letter was plagiarized almost word-for-word from one of his columns. (The rest of it appeared to have been lifted from The Passion’s promotional material.)
Despite her prominent role in her father’s “pro-family” empire, Danae remains unmarried. According to Dobson’s official biographer, Dale Buss, “Danae has been involved in a number of serious relationships. But she acknowledges the difficulty of any potential husband measuring up to the standards she sees in her father—or passing his muster.” Then again, Danae might have better things to do than tend to children and perform the wifely duties that her father mandates for his female followers. As Danae’s mother, Shirley, told Buss, although Danae would “love to be married and have a family, she wants to go on with her life.” And so she does, publishing books, touring the country on speaking junkets, living the life of a modern, independent woman while attacking the feminist ideals that have made it possible for her to do so.
In choosing work over family, Danae joined a long tradition of women activists who propel the conservative movement’s anti-feminist agenda. As the sociologists Margaret Power and Paolo Baccheta noted in their book Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists, the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted of conservative women around the world, “One striking feature of a great many right-wing women leaders and full-time activists is their system of double standards. There is a huge gap between how right-wing women . . . live out their lives as individuals on the one hand, and the subjectivities they propose for other women on the other.”
Danae Dobson may dally around with boyfriends in her private time, but she is required to play daddy’s little girl when speaking before Christian-right audiences. At the Value Voters Summit, Danae offered tender childhood memories of “cuddling up in front of the TV watching movies” with her father; of making sand castles, going out for ice cream cones, and doing the things that daddies and daughters do. But then Danae’s tribute took a strange and sudden detour when she invoked the scandal of Pastor Ted Haggard, a former friend and political ally of her father who had been defrocked for having sex with a male escort and abusing methamphetamines:
Last year there was a prominent Christian leader who was involved in a very unthinkable scandal and he was asked to step down from his role as pastor which the board decided to do because it was the right thing to do. And I just was so deeply saddened by that, and I saw a photo of this gentleman’s wife and she had such an expression of sadness on her face. And I heard from someone who knew his children that his children were traumatized. . . . It caused me to really step back and consider my dad and what a prominent leader he was in the Christian world. And I was just overwhelmed with a sense of peace because I knew that I was never gonna have to go through and suffer that type of pain. I knew that my dad would never cause me to endure and go through what this man’s family is going through. And on Father’s Day this year I wrote on my dad’s card these words: ‘Thank you for never causing me to have to lie in bed wondering what you were up to and how it was going to affect us and how it was going to affect our ministry. Thank you for being a man of character and integrity. A man who I can trust.’
Many women have spent anxious nights wondering where their wayward husbands were and what they were doing, but few women of Danae’s age suffer similar anxieties about their fathers. In the subculture of the Christian right, however, Danae’s expression of total dependence on her dad is idealized as “agape love,” a self-destroying, masochistic love that women are supposed to harbor for authoritarian male archetypes. By dissolving themselves into the movement’s authoritarian structure, women like Danae gain the protection and encouragement of omnipotent father figures, extra-magic helpers who release them from the terror of going it alone in an exploitive society.
Focus on the Family has cultivated this masochistic sensibility by sponsoring “purity balls” across the country. At these mock cotillions, evangelical fathers dance and dine with their adolescent daughters as though they are their husbands. When the gala reaches full swing, the fathers rise and read a pledge “to cover my daughter as her protection and authority in the area of purity.” Then, the daughters stand and drop white roses at the foot of a cross, symbols of the chastity they will attempt to maintain until marriage.
But more often than not, girls who drop flowers at purity balls are deflowered soon after. Over half of them wind up having sex before marriage, and with a man other than their future husband, according to sociologists Peter Bearman and Hannah Bruckner. Bearman and Bruckner also note that communities with the highest populations of purity ball attendees also have some of the country’s highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). In Lubbock, Texas, where abstinence-only education has been mandated since 1995, the rate of gonorrhea has risen to double the national rate, while teen pregnancy has spiked to the highest level in the state. A congressionally funded study of adolescent behavior, Add Health—the most comprehensive of its kind in history—revealed another dirty secret of the Christian right: White evangelical women lose their virginity on average at age sixteen, younger than any group besides black Protestants.
These statistics should have discredited the movement’s morality machine once and for all. Instead, the exploding rate of sexually related disasters in evangelical communities has sustained the Christian right, enabling its activists to exploit personal crises for fundraising and recruitment drives. For every crisis pregnancy there is a crisis pregnancy center where anti-abortion activists propagandize vulnerable teenage girls. Because many of these centers are funded by Focus on the Family, the teens passing through their sterile back rooms may be presented with a copy of Brio! or given the popular tract by former Focus on the Family counselor Steve Arterburn, Every Young Woman’s Battle, a book that posits masturbation as a dangerous gateway drug, while unintentionally revealing its appeal. “Once you begin feeding baby monsters,” Arteburn warned, “their appetites grow bigger and they want MORE
! It’s better not to feed such a monster in the first place.”
The women who oversee the Christian right’s personal crisis industry are very often products of the same trauma-wracked culture that they mine for recruits. When they advocate for abstinence-only education or against abortion, they stir their audiences with lurid confessions about their own horrific experiences in secular society—their demeaning sexual encounters, their abortions, their shame. Redemption from a life of sexual sin is the right-wing woman’s business card; it is all the expertise she needs. “I’ve been that woman,” said Leslee Unruh, a leading female culture warrior who boasts of her “common sense background” in the field of sexual health. “There is no freedom after an abortion. You carry an empty crib in your heart forever. There is no freedom.”
Unruh had an abortion when she was in her early twenties. It was her fourth pregnancy with her first husband, whom she divorced soon thereafter. Unruh converted into a hardcore Dominionist after meeting her second husband, Allen Unruh, a chiropractor and anti-abortion activist. In 1984, Leslee Unruh founded her own “Christian counseling” business, The Alpha Center, in her hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. There she hosted purity balls and evangelized young pregnant women against abortion, even, on a number of occasions, offering them illegal bribes to carry their babies to term and then give them up for adoption. In 2006, Unruh pleaded guilty to several misdemeanor charges of adopting babies without their mothers’ permission. In exchange, the state dropped four felony charges it had planned to bring against her.
Republican Gomorrah Page 17
