EXCERPTS: from CHAPTER 6

Dobson’s D-Day

“It’s the hardest thing in the world to do. It would be easier to elect a president than to amend the Constitution.”

The Terri Schiavo affair was a new high-water mark for the Christian Right. Never had the White House and Congress moved so quickly and transparently to satisfy the movement, and on an issue as unpopular with a broad majority of the American people.

Less than two years earlier, though, some of the Christian Right’s leading lights feared that the air had gone out of their movement again.

It was summer 2003, a full twenty-five years after Paul Weyrich’s earliest success in enlisting evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in a political crusade. On the surface, everything seemed fine. Evangelicals and fundamentalists were actually meeting with considerable success in Washington, particularly on antiabortion rights legislation. Having the Values Action Teams in Congress, the House and Senate in Republican hands, and the most openly evangelical president in memory in the White House were developments the movement had fought for, and they were savoring the benefits, even as activists griped that progress was still too slow. The problem was that such success had a downside: with Bill Clinton’s polices and sexual indiscretions no longer providing fodder for fund-raising letters and with the GOP in control of Washington, in-the-pews religious conservatives had grown complacent. Evangelical advocacy groups saw their revenue and membership lists flatline. For the first time in its twenty-six-year history, Focus on the Family announced cutbacks, laying off thirty-six employees, mothballing an additional sixty unfilled positions, and trimming twelve and a half million dollars from its budget.

The malaise helped provoke American Family Association founder Don Wildmon, best known for spearheading boycotts against companies supportive of gay rights, to convene a June 2003 meeting of about a dozen high-profile Christian conservatives in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington. The group met in an apartment complex that was home to Sandy Rios, president of the evangelical group Concerned Women for America.

As chance would have it, James Dobson had stepped down from the presidency of Focus on the Family, a perch he’d occupied since launching the ministry in 1977, just a few weeks earlier. After a few false starts in the preceding years, Dobson had finally jumped ship in May 2003, partly with an eye to stepping up his political activism. For the first time in Focus’s history, he was unencumbered by the demands of managing the sprawling organization’s day-to-day operations. He could also worry a bit less about running afoul of IRS restrictions on political advocacy by nonprofit groups, even as he retained the title of Focus chairman and continued hosting its daily flagship radio program, Focus on the Family. For Don Wildmon, meanwhile, having Dobson attend his June summit in Arlington gave it instant gravitas, ensuring that the Christian Right’s most prominent leaders would show up. Actually, Wildmon would have preferred that Dobson host it. “Nobody knows Don Wildmon,” Wildmon said in an interview. “Everybody knows Jim.”

“To be honest with you,” another of the summit’s attendees said, “I think people came because Dobson was there.”

The first topic to surface among the Christian Right leaders in Arlington was what to do about the proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would ban same-sex marriage. At that point, the existence of such an amendment had received little national attention. Most Americans had never heard of it. But a small band of conservative scholars had been asserting for years that U.S. courts were quietly but inextricably moving toward the legalization of gay unions. Wildmon’s summit attendees viewed the prospect of gay marriage not only as a genuine threat, but also as a likely catalyst for rousing the evangelical grassroots from their slumber. Besides viewing homosexual activity as sinful, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians believe the marriage of one man and one woman is an institution ordained by God in the Book of Genesis. The expectation that gay marriage would be legalized by judges rather than by elected lawmakers could be counted on to stoke the antipathy many evangelicals and fundamentalists had long felt toward the judiciary, over rulings that legalized abortion and outlawed school prayer. In the process, the activists in Arlington knew, their own ailing organizations stood to be revived. By the end of the meeting, the group resolved to focus exclusively on the question of how to stop gay marriage before it began.

But if the attempt to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage held the promise of reinvigorating the Christian Right, much as the successful effort to kill the Equal Rights Amendment had in the late seventies and early eighties, it also threatened to drive a huge wedge through the movement. A good number of Christian Right activists opposed the amendment strategy because of the huge outlays of time and resources such a campaign would require. Many suspected that such a project would ultimately fail, as had the long crusade for a Right to Life Amendment. Instead, they backed more practical strategies to stop gay marriage, like prodding Congress to strip courts of jurisdiction in gay marriage cases and redoubling efforts to get the most conservative judges appointed to the judiciary. Conservative Catholic activists, meanwhile, worried that an amendment push would distract from the fight to limit abortion rights, an issue much closer to their hearts than stopping gay marriage.

A conservative family feud over a constitutional amendment was brewing, and it would divide even the sprawling organizational empire that Dobson had spent decades constructing. The Family Research Council, Focus on the Family’s Washington proxy, would zealously oppose the amendment at first, even though the chief architect of the campaign to pass it was an alumnus of Focus’s Family Policy Council network. Such early fissures suggested that the amendment threatened to totally splinter the Christian Right at a moment when it had already fallen on hard times. On the other hand, a unified campaign to pursue a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage could not only revive the Christian Right, but also unite its key advocacy groups as never before. A political cause of such magnitude, and the sides it would require parties and politicians to take, held the potential to influence future elections, including presidential contests. Whether it would bring ruin or rebirth, the movement had a choice to make: to amend or not to amend. And no one would have more influence in shaping the decision than James Dobson.