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The Schlocky Horror Jesus Show
 I traveled recently down to our nation’s capital to attend the Family Research Council’s Value Voters Summit. The FRC’s speakers list was a who’s who of wingnuttery, so I couldn’t resist.
The Family Research Council is run by Tony Perkins – a pink-cheeked, former Louisiana state legislator (two terms), a political campaign consultant (lost) US Senate candidate (lost again), and police officer (suspended for failure to report an illegal conspiracy involving anti-abortion activists violently attacking a police line protecting an abortion clinic). He was also a reporter for a local Baton Rouge television station called “Woody Vision,” which sounds like a gay porn channel, but was actually the ego-vehicle of Christian conservative State Rep Woody Jenkins.
In 1996, Jenkins ran against Sen Mary Landrieu (D-LA); Perkins was his campaign manager. Sorry boys, no dice. After the election, an FEC investigation, instigated by Jenkins’ re-count demand, revealed that Perkins had paid white supremacist David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. Perkins denied it at first, but his signature on the invoice forced him to fess-up. When Perkins ran for the US Senate himself in 2002, he came in fourth in the Republican primary.
In fairness, I learned a few things about the religious right over the weekend, and they weren’t all bad. For instance, many fundamentalist men do a pretty good Clinton impersonation, and like to make “hot chick” jokes in Bubba's raspy drawl. Never fails to get a yuk. They should stop attacking Clinton and thank him – he not only provides them with can't-fail material, he's also their only excuse to be naughty.
Value Voters are an economically diverse group in a limited sense. The attendees ran the full middle-class socio-economic gamut – I saw two kinds of women: corn-fed fraus in sensible shoes, and a strange breed of emaciated, leather pants and QVC jewelery wearing, over-coiffed, bird-like waifs; the men were either big bellies with short ties, or business casual charmers. And they were all so sweet they made my teeth hurt.
Blackwater Security – the same outfit that got the sweet no-bid contract in Iraq – was on the job. Blackwater is owned by Christian fundamentalist and former Navy Seal, Erik Prince. Prince is also the brother-in-law of Dick Devos, the Amway Tsar and Republican nominee for governor in Michigan this year. The mercenaries were on duty to keep an eye out for guys like the Rev. Barry Lynn, the president of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, who stopped by as a registered attendee to check things out. I know this because the Christian sitting next to me said to his wife, “That idiot Barry Lynn is here, but the Blackwater guys have him.” When we returned from lunch, there was “An Open Letter from Tony Perkins to Barry Lynn,” on our seats, thanking him for coming, and encouraging him to change his evil ways. Barry had wisely beat feet by then.
Another thing I learned about the Neddites is that they have their own Bizarro narrative about everything from Hurricane Katrina, (the President wasn’t playing golf when the levees burst, he was in the situation room with Dick Cheney deciding whether they should fly Air Force One themselves down to NOLA to rescue evacuees), to the Founding Fathers who, in their cosmology, were acting on behalf of God and not the people when they wrote the Constitution and invented liberal democracy.
The patriarch and founder of FRC, James Dobson is a psychologist, but everyone calls him “Doctor” as if he were about to grab their balls and tell them to cough. And it came close to that. Dobson told the audience, “I’m extremely disappointed in what the Republicans have done with the power that values voters gave them. They sat on their hands when it came to the values agenda.”
That agenda includes the federal marriage amendment, overturning Roe v. Wade, putting up a fence with Mexico “and securing all our borders,” the flag burning amendment, and judges. They just hate judges.
The senate judiciary committee sat on most of Clinton’s judicial nominees, so they can’t be the problem. And seven of the nine justices on the US Supreme Court were appointed by Republicans. The Neddites have the White House, and give better than half the Congress an 80% rating or better – but still, they believe they must do better. In fact, they won’t be happy until they have an unopposed majority in every branch of government, at every level, from Podunk to DC. Because, as Gary Bauer, a former FRC president and 2000 US presidential candidate put it: “We believe in ordered liberty under God.”
To enforce ordered Liberty under God, one-party rule is necessary. Just as ordered liberty under Marxism-Leninism, ordered Liberty under Nazism, ordered liberty under Puritanism, and ordered liberty under Islamic Sharia do.
After excoriating Congressional Republicans for a lackluster term, the Doctor quickly added the caveat that no matter how bad they are, they’re head and shoulders over the Democrats – so get out there and vote Republican in November! Dobson’s nothing if not clever. In the same twangy diatribe he put the Neddite sympathizers in Congress on notice while endorsing them – as only a psychologist could.
Sen George Allen (R-VA) was there looking relieved to be in a room where no one was going to ask him where his bubbie’s really from, or how to spell “Macaca.” The woman who introduced him said he was the “victim of the worse kind of gotcha journalism,” which presumably is the kind that gets someone she likes.
Allen gave the standard Neddite speech. As did Sen Sam Brownback (R-KS), Gov Mitt Romney (R-MA), Gov Mike Huckabee (R-AR), Rep Mike Pence (R-IN) – they’re all tight borders, low taxes, no gay marriage, no abortion, and much more culture. Bible-believing Christian culture, that is, which is code for making everything that isn’t prohibited mandatory.
Fourteen points down in the polls and fighting for his political life, Sen Rick Santorum (R-PA) wasn’t in the house, but delivered a dispirited address via video, looking and sounding as if he were being held hostage by secular terrorists, chained to a radiator in the basement of Independence Hall.
The Neddites don’t simply support the PATRIOT Act, no-warrant wiretaps, Gitmo, torture, and Bush – they love them. They even love the war in Iraq. You can tell because they get all misty and verklempt whenever they mention all the Americans pointlessly dying there.
When it was Bill Bennett, the Bookie of Virtues turn to speak, he pointed up into the press section and shouted, “Reporters should be prosecuted for printing leaked wartime intelligence information.” (Standing ovation, lots of huzzahs.) He was referring to the leaked April National Intelligence Estimate that said Iraq has worsened our position vis global jihadism. He also said, “Rather than talk about when we are getting out of Iraq, we should be talking about what we should be doing to expand the war to Iran and Saudi Arabia.” Then he came out in favor of water boarding and, “Whatever it takes.” (More raucous applause.)
Sean Hannity was there, fawning over Doctor Dobson, his “friend and mentor,” doing his best Clinton voice, and Ted Kennedy hiccups. A regular laugh riot.
Ann Coulter spoke, and spoke, spoke…if you think she’s hard to take in 6-minute intervals on Fox, try listening to that squawking scarecrow for an hour. (I didn’t, I left.) Her lock-jawed, self-satisfied affect, full of stale Monica and Chappaquiddick jokes and veiled threats – “There were no abortion doctors killed for the first 17 years of our battle in the courts….but when democracy lets people down, they resort to other means,” – was just too much for me. I didn’t even get my book signed. And I swear, up close, if Marilyn Manson were a blonde…
The Neddites use religion as a cover for their violent tendencies and intolerant attitudes, but don’t speak for all Christians. Far from it. The day before the Values Voters Summit began, President Bush’s own church, the United Methodists, called for a week of “protests and civil disobedience to end the war.”
I went to the values Voters Summit to determine what, if anything we have to fear from these people. FRC is a large, well-organized but de-centralized, sand-in-their-panties doomsday cult run by a racist, slick-as-shit Louisiana pol, and an angry psychologist whose most famous book “Dare to Discipline,” extols the Biblical virtues of child-beating. So in short, we have everything to fear from this crowd, and if we don’t defend our freedoms as zealously as they want to take them away, we’ll lose.
~Jack McEnany
Also see: Ann Coulter, Mitt Hypocrite, Mitt Romney
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