Uploaded by Ben Morehead, Associate Publisher of Policy Review magazine 
and authorized agent for the copyright owner(s).

CASTING A WIDER NET
Religious Conservatives Move Beyond Abortion and Homosexuality
by Ralph Reed Jr.
From the Summer 1993 issue of Policy Review
To subscribe to Policy Review, call (800) 544-4843

     During Adlai Stevenson's second losing campaign for the
presidency in 1956, Harry Truman met with the embattled candidate
to offer him some advice. Mr. Stevenson, then badly trailing
Dwight Eisenhower, asked the former president what he was doing
wrong. Mr. Truman led him to the window, pointed to a man walking
down the street below, and said, "What you've got to do is figure
out how to reach that man."
     This same dilemma now faces the pro-family movement. Though
blessed with talented leadership, strong grassroots support, and
enormous financial resources, it has not yet completely connected
its agenda with average voters. The pro-family movement still has
limited appeal even among the 40 million voters who attend church
frequently, identify themselves as evangelicals or orthodox Roman
Catholics, and consider themselves traditionalists on cultural
issues.

Developing a Broad Agenda

     There are many explanations for this political disconnect.
One is a basic breakdown in communication. In his incisive
critique of the "family values" theme of the 1992 campaign,
pollster Richard Wirthlin points out that political communication
proceeds on three levels: policy, personal benefit, and values.
The pro-family movement's political rhetoric has often been
policy-thin and value-laden, leaving many voters tuned out.
     Values are important to voters, but values alone are not
enough. The successful candidate or movement must promote
policies that personally benefit voters -- such as tax cuts,
education vouchers, higher wages, or retirement benefits. Without
specific policies designed to benefit families and children,
appeals to family values or America's Judeo-Christian heritage
will fall on deaf ears.
     A related shortcoming is that pro-family activists have
built their movement around personalities rather than policies.
Visible religious figures play a vital role in building
grassroots membership and generating financial support. But their
personal charisma, while an important asset, is no substitute for
good policy.
     Prominent personalities are always critical in building
social movements. Labor unions were dominated in the 1940s and
1960s by controversial figures like John L. Lewis of the United
Mine Workers or Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters. Today, however,
labor organizers are more likely to be lower-profile political
professionals. The same can be said of the civil-rights movement,
which no longer has one dominant figure such as Martin Luther
King. A similar transition will probably occur in the pro-family
movement during the coming decade.
     The pro-family movement in recent years has put too much
emphasis on political solutions to America's social problems.
Political involvement alone will not bring about cultural
renewal: it is also important for the faith community to feed the
hungry, teach the illiterate, provide loving care for unwed
mothers, bring together families, and reawaken the spiritual life
of criminals. These require cultural institutions more than
election-day mobilization.
     The most urgent challenge for pro-family conservatives is to
develop a broader issues agenda. The pro-family movement has
limited its effectiveness by concentrating disproportionately on
issues such as abortion and homosexuality. These are vital moral
issues, and must remain an important part of the message. To win
at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion, however,
the pro-family movement must speak to the concerns of average
voters in the areas of taxes, crime, government waste, health
care, and financial security.

Attracting a Majority of Voters

     The issues of abortion and gay rights have been important in
attracting activists and building coalitions. When tactics become
ends in themselves, however, social movements falter.
Abolitionists spent decades in the early 19th century petitioning
Congress in vain for anti-slavery laws before expanding their
focus to the free soil movement. Cesar Chavez built the United
Farmworkers union in the 1960s with hunger strikes and boycotts.
But as he continued the same organizational tactics, membership
in his union plummeted, falling to under 20,000 by the time of
his death earlier this year.
     If the pro-family movement is not to suffer the same fate,
the cluster of pro-family issues must now be expanded to attract
a majority of voters. Network exit polls conducted in 1992 are
instructive. Only 12 percent of voters indicated that abortion
was a key issue in their voting decision. Even more startling,
only 22 percent of self-identified, born-again evangelicals --
about 24 percent of the total electorate -- listed abortion as an
important voting issue. And only 16 percent of all voters listed
family values as one of the most important issues in their voting
behavior.
     There is growing evidence that suggests that evangelicals
and their Roman Catholic allies are concerned about the same
issues as the broader electorate, but with a pro-family twist.
Their primary interest is not to legislate against the sins of
others, but to protect the health, welfare, and financial
security of their own families.
     In this sense, the pro-family movement and its natural
constituency have passed like two ships in the night. A recent
survey by the Marketing Research Institute found that, aside from
the economy, the chief concern of voters who attend church four
times a month was not abortion, pornography, or prayer in school,
but cutting waste in government and reducing the deficit. A poll
of GOP voters by Fabrizio, McLaughlin and Associates in January,
1993, also found that the issue that most united evangelicals and
fiscal conservatives was the deficit.
     The reason is simple. Taxes fall heaviest on middle-class
families with children, who must tighten their belts and balance
their checkbooks. They wonder why government cannot do the same.
The furor over federal funding of the arts in 1990 and 1991 was
not about censorship, but about eliminating government waste and
abuse.
     According to exit polls, 17 percent of self-identified
evangelicals in 1992 cast their ballots for Ross Perot, only two
percent less than the total electorate. Perot downplayed or
avoided stating his support for taxpayer funding of abortion. The
centerpiece of his campaign was deficit reduction, an issue that
resonates among middle-class families.

Famine in Family Time

     Family tax relief is another important issue to churchgoing
voters. Members of both political parties are beginning to
understand the importance of reducing the tax penalties on
savings, capital formation, and jobs creation. The family, too,
exemplifies Justice John Marshall's admonition that "the power to
tax is the power to destroy."
     In 1950 only 2 percent of the income of the average family
of four in America went to pay federal income taxes. Today that
figure is 24 percent. When state, local, and property taxes are
included, the typical family of four spends a whopping 37 percent
of its income to pay its tax bill.
     Higher taxes have torn at the fabric of the American family.
In many families, both parents must work just to make ends meet.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the second income generates
an average of only 27 percent of total household income. Because
of confiscatory tax rates, therefore, mothers and fathers often
work for the sole purpose of paying for taxes, meals, wardrobe
expenses, and day care.
     Children are the main victims of this financial strain. As
employers and the government encroach on the time and attention
of parents, children are left to pick up the crumbs from the
table. The result is a famine in family time. In 1965 parents
spent 30 hours each week in direct, intimate interaction with
their children. By 1985 that figure had fallen to only 17 hours
per week, and today shows no signs of increasing.
     An essential principle that should guide tax policy is that
income dedicated to the care and nurturing of children is
sacrosanct and should be exempt from taxation. The standard
deduction for dependents today is only $2,300. However, if the
standard deduction had kept pace with inflation since World War
II, its value today would be approximately $8,000. No family of
four in America with an income of $32,000 or less would pay
federal income tax. One promising step is a bill offered by
Representatives Rod Grams and Tim Hutchinson that would provide a
$500 tax credit for each child and pay for it with a cap on
discretionary domestic spending.
     In the late 1970s, the U.S. economy labored under the twin
burdens of inflation and sluggish growth. The challenge of fiscal
policy at that time was to lower marginal tax rates to generate
economic growth and create jobs without inflation. In the 1990s
the primary objective of fiscal policy should be to make the tax
code more family friendly, allowing parents to keep more income.
     Health care is another issue that directly affects the
family's pocketbook. It is inextricably linked to the moral
health of society. Good health reflects good living; poor health
in many cases betrays poor living. Yet this simple fact is almost
entirely missing from the current policy debate over health care
on Capitol Hill.
     The United States spends $800 billion a year on health care,
roughly 14 percent of its entire gross domestic product. As Dr.
Leroy Schwartz of Health Policy International has documented,
many of the most expensive items in the health care budget are
directly attributable to behavioral problems. Crack babies, with
intensive care costs of $63,000 per infant, cost $25 billion.
Drug abuse and its associated violence cost the nation additional
tens of billions of dollars.
     Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United
States. Lung cancer claimed 146,000 lives last year; 90 percent
of these victims were cigarette smokers. Recent figures indicate
that the direct cost of lung cancer on the economy may be as high
as $5 billion, with an additional $10.1 billion of indirect costs
such as lost wages. America's 18 million alcoholics suffer from
cirrhosis of the liver and a host of other costly ailments.
     Hospital emergency rooms overflow with the victims of gang
wars, drive-by shootings, and domestic quarrels. Murder, assault,
and unintentional injuries run up a bill of $100 billion a year.
Sexual promiscuity imposes its own terrible costs, including
hepatitis, AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases.
     Unless these widespread social pathologies are ameliorated,
there can be no genuine solution to the health care cost crisis.
Poor physiological health is often a reflection of psychological
disorders such as stress, loneliness, marital discord,
alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, lack of exercise, or poor eating
habits. The healthiest environment for persons suffering from
these disorders is not a hospital, but a loving home.

Protecting the Children

     The key to understanding evangelical and Roman Catholic
voters is appreciating their devotion to their children. Voting
behavior was once determined by geography or income. Today, the
two most predictive demographic characteristics of conservative
voting behavior are church attendance and having children present
in the home. Survey data reveals that 47 percent of the
electorate attends church twice or more a month. Seventy-six
percent of churchgoing voters are married, and 66 percent have
children.
     Crime is a major issue to churchgoing voters because they
worry about protecting their children. Parents no longer feel
that their children can safely venture more than two blocks from
their homes, and no wonder. While U.S. population has increased
only 41 percent since 1960, violent crime has increased 560
percent. The number of crimes has increased from 4.7 million in
1965 to 14.8 million in 1990. The U.S. violent crime rate is five
times that of Europe, and our incarceration rate is the highest
of any major industrialized nation in the world.
     The crime problem in America is largely a problem of single
men raised in absentee-father households. A child growing up in a
home without the father present is three times as likely to abuse
alcohol or drugs, twice as likely to drop out of high school, and
three times as likely to commit murder or rape. As George Gilder
has pointed out in Men and Marriage, while single men comprise
only 13 percent of the total population, they account for 40
percent of all criminal offenders and commit 90 percent of all
violent crimes.
     Many of their victims are children. In Washington state last
year, prison officials executed convicted murderer Wesley Alan
Dodd as death penalty opponents burned candles at a silent vigil
outside the penitentiary. No one bothered to light a candle for
the murder victim, four-year-old Lee Iseli. Mr. Dodd was on
parole after serving just four months of a 10-year sentence for
child molestation when he abducted Lee Iseli from a playground
just a few blocks from his home. He took the boy to his
apartment, strapped him to a bed, and spent all night repeatedly
suffocating him, reviving him, and brutally molesting him. As the
sun rose over this horrible scene, Wesley Dodd choked the child
to death, hung his body in a closet, and went to work at his job
as a shipping clerk.
     Such violence will prevail as long as the two-parent family
continues its decline as the primary socializing institution in
society. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued in 1965, "from the
Irish slums of the 19th century eastern seaboard to the riot-torn
suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in
American history: [When] a community that allows a large number
of young men to grow up in broken families ... that community
asks for and gets chaos." Moynihan added that in such a society,
"crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out at the whole
social structure -- these are not only to be expected, they are
very nearly inevitable."
     Today one in five white children is born to an unmarried
woman; two out of every three African-American children are born
out of wedlock. This social calamity has produced gang violence,
juvenile crime, and pathology among our youth that has no
parallel in history. Our inner cities have become war zones. An
African-American male between the ages of 18 and 35 in the
District of Columbia has a greater chance of being killed than an
American soldier did in Vietnam.
     Liberal solutions to crime, such as rehabilitation and early
release programs have failed utterly. Nor are traditional
conservative policies -- building more prisons, for example -- an
adequate answer. Since 1975 the United States has quadrupled its
rate of incarceration and the prison population has soared from
250,000 to 1.3 million. Yet our streets are less safe and our
neighborhoods more terrorized than ever.
     The only true solution to crime is to restore the family.
Young males raised in homes with male authority will emulate
their fathers in marriage and procreation. Through their
families, they will have a personal stake in creating a moral
climate for their own children. Moreover, the penal system needs
reform to allow for redemptive sentencing for non-violent
criminals that allows them to work, pay back their victims, and
make restitution to society.

Make Schools Safe

     Education is another issue that churchgoing voters view
primarily through the eyes of their children. Many observers
mistakenly believe that the abortion issue gave rise to the
Religious Right. In fact, the spark that ignited the modern
pro-family movement was the fear of increased government
regulation of church schools. When the government begins to
threaten their children, evangelicals will pour into the civic
arena like a flood, albeit reluctantly. The first goal of
education policy should be to make schools safe. Increasing
numbers of American children bring weapons to school every day.
Stuffed in book bags or hidden in lockers, these weapons are
turning schools into combat zones. Violence against teachers is
commonplace. In Lorraine, Ohio, a female student attempted to
stab her teacher to death after a dare from classmates, who
promised her their lunch money if she committed the murder. The
knife-wielding student was 15 years old.
     In part because of the breakdown in discipline in public
schools, churchgoing voters strongly support choice in education.
A growing parental rights movement is gaining momentum at the
grassroots level. In Chicago a group of parents recently filed
suit against the city for failing to provide their children with
an adequate education. In Wisconsin earlier this year, Linda
Cross, a parent and schoolteacher, narrowly lost her campaign for
state superintendent of schools after being outspent 10-to-1 by a
union-backed candidate who opposed school choice. Although
powerful teachers unions oppose the parental rights movement,
citizen groups are pressing for reform. In San Antonio, Texas,
the Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation, a nonprofit
corporation, provides school vouchers to 934 inner city students
for half their tuition. The Golden Rule Insurance Company began a
similar program in 1991 in Indianapolis, Indiana. These citizen
efforts will soon test their strength at the ballot box. A choice
initiative will be on the ballot in California in November, and
both sides have pledged to spend a total of $15 million in the
campaign. School choice initiatives will also appear on other
state ballots in 1994. As with the tax limitation movement and
the success of proposition 13, a victory in California could
spawn ballot-measure victories throughout the nation.

Coalition for Common Sense

     The parental rights movement found its most dramatic
expression recently in New York City. School board elections in
New York have historically been sedate affairs. But the 1993
campaign read like a subplot from Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the
Vanities, complete with the histrionics, bombast, and
larger-than-life politics unique to the Big Apple.
     The controversy began with the Rainbow Curriculum, a
multicultural curriculum that included instruction about the gay
lifestyle to first graders. Mary Cummins, a feisty Irish
grandmother and school board member in Queens, successfully
resisted the imposition of this curriculum in her community
district. She and other Queens school board members were then
summarily fired by school Chancellor Joseph Fernandez, who later
lost his own job as a result of his role in the growing
controversy.
     The battle spilled over into the campaign for school board
seats in the city's five boroughs and 32 school districts.
Parents groups and pro-family organizations distributed 500,000
nonpartisan voter guides informing voters where 540 candidates
stood on a broad range of issues, including school choice and
more parental involvement in curriculum decisions. The ACLU
hysterically called the involvement of people of faith "the
greatest civil liberties crisis" in the history of New York City.
The Reverend Al Sharpton denounced the parents' efforts as
"racist." This campaign of fear and intolerance failed. Over half
of the 130 pro-family candidates won, and several school boards
in Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island are controlled by parental
rights advocates.
     The New York City experience is important for two reasons.
First, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, if you can make it there, you
can make it anywhere. Family-friendly education is as popular in
the Big Apple as it is in the Bible belt. Second, it united a
multi-racial, multi-ethnic, ecumenical coalition for common
sense. Cardinal John O'Connor and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese
cooperated with Protestant groups in the distribution of
nonpartisan voter guides; civil rights leader Roy Innis joined
with white and Hispanic parents in turning out the vote; and
Orthodox Rabbi Shea Hecht of the National Committee for the
Furtherance of Jewish Education endorsed the campaign of his
Christian brethren. The pro-family movement's inroads into the
African-American, Hispanic, Catholic, and Jewish communities may
be the most significant development since its emergence in the
late 1970s.
     Reforming welfare to make it more conducive to family
formation is an important element in a broad-based pro-family
agenda. Just as the tax code penalizes marriage and children, so
does the welfare system subsidize family breakup. Welfare reform
has been put on the back burner by the Clinton Administration,
but it is a top priority for many churchgoing voters.
     The number of families on welfare has risen from 1.9 million
in 1970 to 4.7 million today. Of all the children born in 1980,
22.2 percent of white children and 83 percent of black children
will be dependent on welfare before they reach the age of 18.
Because women on welfare lose their benefits if they take a job
or get married, they face a strong disincentive to work, save,
and form a stable marriage. Welfare dependency is stark evidence
of the economic inviability of single motherhood. Because
children learn what they live, intergenerational poverty is
common. This should come as no surprise. The habits that welfare
subsidizes and fosters are the same habits that, when inculcated
in children, make it difficult to break loose from dependency.
     There is a way to break the cycle: subsidize marriage and
work while lowering incentives for family breakup. There are many
proposals for reform: requiring welfare recipients to find a job
within two years; reducing rather than eliminating benefits when
a male enters the home; requiring job training or education as a
condition of benefits. Probably the best immediate policy goal is
to grant waivers and additional funding to states willing to
experiment with welfare reform. As with the progressive reformers
of the early 20th-century, pro-family activists should use the
states as laboratories, and legislate at the federal level only
the reforms that work.

All Things to All People

     The pro-family movement will realize many of its objectives
if it can begin to speak to the issues that concern the voters.
The Bible admonishes to "divide your portion to seven, or even to
eight, for you do not know what misfortune may occur on the
earth." Diversifying one's investments applies to political
capital as well as financial capital. Building a political agenda
around a single issue is a risky proposition, because when
progress lags on that issue, as it inevitably will, the viability
of the entire movement is threatened.
     The key to success for the pro-family movement is to discuss
a broader issues agenda in the language of the target audience --
churchgoers and families with children. In doing so, a social
movement until now composed largely of white evangelicals can win
natural allies among Catholics and racial minorities. The Apostle
Paul said that he had become "all things to all people that I may
by all means win some." His methodology made Christianity the
dominant faith in the Western world within three centuries. The
same technique can make the pro-family movement the most
effective grassroots voice in America if properly followed.

RALPH REED JR. is the executive director of the Christian
Coalition.

To reprint more than short quotations, please write or FAX Ben
Morehead, Associate Publisher, Policy Review, 214 Massachusetts
Avenue, NE, Washington, DC 20002, FAX (202) 675-1778.
