Republican Gomorrah Read online

  Terri Schiavo’s parents, the Schindlers, opposed their daughter’s euthanasia and launched a public crusade. They first hired militant anti-abortion activist Randall Terry as their spokesman. Terry, a self-proclaimed Christian Reconstructionist and acolyte of Dominionist godfather Francis Schaeffer, helped marshal Christian militants to join the struggle to prolong Schiavo’s life. This spokesman was soon joined by an order of maroon-robed Franciscan monks who kept a constant vigil outside Schiavo’s hospice. “We pray that this modern-day crucifixion will not happen,” one of the monks declared during a press conference.

  When Judge Greer denied a final petition from the Schindlers in March 2005, DeLay thrust himself into the conflict. His speech at an emergency meeting of the Family Research Council, Dobson’s lobbying arm, revealed his motives. “It is more than just Terri Schiavo,” DeLay told his rapt audience. “I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo to elevate the visibility of what’s going on in America.”

  DeLay then linked his struggle to save his own political life with the crusade to preserve the life of Schiavo. “This is exactly the kind of issue that’s going on in America, that attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others.” Attacking liberal financier George Soros and the “do-gooder organizations” he has funded, DeLay proclaimed, “That whole syndicate that they have going on right now is for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to destroy the conservative movement. It is to destroy conservative leaders . . . ”

  In DeLay’s version of the Schiavo passion play, the Republican Judge Greer and the liberal George Soros doubled as Pontius Pilate. DeLay, in the ultimate martyr’s pose, cast himself as Christ-like: the real victim of a “modern-day crucifixion.” Terri Schiavo’s inert body became a political stage prop.

  When DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) summoned Congress back from its spring recess to vote on a special bill to save Schiavo’s life, a revealing memo by an aide to Florida Republican Senator Mel Martinez who used to work for a DeLay-linked lobbying firm—a “graduate of the DeLay school”—was circulated among Republican senators. It read, “This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate will be debating this important issue.”

  On March 21, 2005, more than two-thirds of the House voted for a special bill that would take the case out of the Florida court and transfer it to a U.S. district court. The Senate overwhelmingly approved in a voice vote. President Bush rushed back from his Craw-ford, Texas, ranch to the White House in order to sign it. “I tell you I won’t feel good until that tube is put back in,” said DeLay. But the special bill, unconstitutional as it was, was nullified by Judge Greer’s final ruling.

  DeLay’s handling of end-of-life issues in his own family contrasted starkly with his obsession with preserving Schiavo’s life. In 1988, DeLay’s 65-year-old father, Charlie Ray, was left brain-dead by a tram accident in his backyard. DeLay and his mother promptly ordered doctors to remove Charlie Ray from the respirator that was keeping him alive. The chart by his hospital bed read, “Do not resuscitate.” “Tom knew, we all knew, his father wouldn’t have wanted to live that way,” DeLay’s mother told the Los Angeles Times.

  DeLay, who had spent much of his tenure in Congress railing against trial lawyers who slap big business with “frivolous, parasitic lawsuits,” joined his family in filing a wrongful-death suit against the distributor and maker of a part they blamed for the accident that killed Charlie Ray. The DeLays were eventually awarded $250,000 in an out-of-court settlement. Once the incident was over, DeLay withdrew himself from his family. According to Perl, he had not spoken to his mother or brothers since his father’s death. A flack from DeLay’s Capitol Hill office, Dan Allen, rejected accusations of his boss’s contradictory behavior. “The situation faced by the congressman’s family was entirely different than Terri Schiavo’s,” Allen said. “The only thing keeping her alive is the food and water we all need to survive. His father was on a ventilator and other machines to sustain him.”

  DeLay’s Christian-right enablers also rushed to his defense, echoing the official line almost word-for-word. “Two different situations,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins insisted about DeLay’s conflicted position on euthanasia. “With Terri Schiavo, there was no plug pulled, there was no respirator taken away from her.”

  Schiavo was removed from her feeding tube on March 15, 2005. When she died two weeks later, CT scans taken of her brain during an autopsy confirmed that she was totally brain-dead. The public, meanwhile, recoiled at the spectacle of the Republican Party’s exploitation of Schiavo’s pathetic predicament for dramatic effect. They increasingly saw the Republican Party and the Christian right as a single, merged entity.

  Congress’s public approval rating sank to 34 percent, lower than at any time since shortly after Republicans impeached President Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, 66 percent of respondents to a March 23 CBS News poll approved the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube. Only months after massive GOP victories in the 2004 elections, which Jerry Falwell had cheered as “a slam dunk,” the right had set itself on an irreversible downward trajectory.

  Fearing their marginalization by the Christian conservatives who increasingly dominated the GOP, libertarian conservatives such as Dick Armey voiced revulsion at the Schiavo spectacle. “Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from? There’s not a conservative, Constitution loving, separation-of-powers guy alive in the world that could have wanted that bill on the floor. That was pure, blatant pandering to James Dobson,” Armey told reporter Ryan Sager.

  He continued, “Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies. I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid.”

  DeLay and his Christian-right allies, however, appeared oblivious to the consequences of their exploitation of Terri Schiavo’s death. They reasoned away the public’s rejection of their crusade as further evidence of liberal media bias, the hidden hand of Soros, and the supposed hostility to Christianity in “the culture.” The notion that the majority of good-hearted Middle Americans were not united with the far right in an ironclad bond would have complicated the pseudo-populist tone of the retaliatory campaign it planned against the federal judiciary. The persecution drama instantly morphed into an ugly plot for blood revenge.

  In the immediate wake of Schiavo’s death, Republican senators Sam Brownback and Richard Shelby introduced a bill called the Constitution Restoration Act. A version was promptly brought to the House floor by one of DeLay’s closest allies, Representative James Sensenbrenner. One of the most radical pieces of legislation ever offered in modern times, it authorized Congress to impeach judges who failed to abide by “the standard of good behavior” supposedly required by the Constitution. Refusal to acknowledge “God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government,” or reliance in any way on international law in their rulings, would also trigger impeachment. In effect, the bill would have turned judges’ gavels into mere instruments of “The Hammer” and his Christian-right cadres.

  “The judges need to be intimidated,” DeLay declared.

  The Constitution Restoration Act championed by the Republican leadership was authored during a 2004 gathering of leading theocrats. Its principal author, former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was ousted for refusing a court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from courthouse grounds, had been a star speaker at Christian Reconstructionist rallies. Coauthor Herb Titus, the founding dean of Pat Robertson’s Regent University Law School, was fired when he refused to stop teaching R. J. Rushdoony alongside constitutional law. (Robertson correctly saw Titus as the key obstacle to Regent’s American Bar Association accreditation). And Howard Phillips, who added his rhetorical flourishes to the bill, was an avowed acolyte of Rushdoony and a Dobson ally.

  All three men appeared at the “Judicial War on Faith” conference, an April 2005 gathering in Wa
shington where the Christian right and its Republican surrogates rallied support for the Constitution Restoration Act. Organized by Pastor Rick Scarborough, author of a book titled In Defense of Mixing Church and State, the conference brought to Washington the sort of ornery theocrats the Republican Party normally tried to keep in the closet. Congressional surrogates of the Christian right such as Senator Brownback politely—and perhaps wisely—refused invitations to speak. DeLay was only one of two sitting members of Congress to show his face at the conference, although he did so by satellite link-up from the Vatican, where he had junketed to attend the Pope’s funeral.

  With the movement’s righteous rage at a fever pitch, the conference quickly degenerated into an orgy of violence-laden rhetoric. The 2004 presidential candidate of the Constitution Party (a theocratic offshoot of the U.S. Taxpayers Party), Michael Peroutka, called removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube “an act of terror in broad daylight aided and abetted by the police under the authority of the governor.” Red-faced and sweating profusely, Peroutka shouted, “This was the very definition of state-sponsored terror!”

  Edwin Vieira, a lawyer and author of How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary, went a step further, suggesting during a panel discussion that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin offered the best method for reining in the Supreme Court. “He had a slogan,” Vieira said, “and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘No man, no problem.’” The complete Stalin quote is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.”

  I attended this conference as a journalist. After listening to hours of jeremiads against “judicial activism,” I stepped outside the downtown hotel, where I encountered a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit whom I recognized as Michael Schwartz. Schwartz, a founder of the Washington, DC chapter of Operation Rescue, had become the chief of staff to Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn, a longtime anti-condom activist elected to the Senate in 2004, despite (or perhaps because of) his stated belief that abortion doctors should be executed.

  Before I could introduce myself as a reporter, Schwartz turned to me and another observer and announced with a crooked smile, “I’m a radical! I’m a real extremist. I don’t want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!”

  David Gibbs, a soft-spoken, pudgy-faced evangelical lawyer who had filed appeal after appeal to keep the brain-dead Schiavo alive, headlined a dinner banquet capping the conference’s last day. With the Washington press corps apparently gone for the day, conference goers exuded a sense of liberation. Now they really let loose. As they ate dinner, many festooned themselves with “Hooray for DeLay” stickers on their lapels and listened to Gibbs’s lurid suggestion that Schiavo fell into a persistent vegetative state as the result of “some form of strangulation or abuse at the hands of her husband, possibly.”

  As the audience let out a collective gasp, Gibbs proceeded to paint a fantastic portrait of Schiavo in her hospital bed. “Terri Schiavo was as alive as anyone you see sitting here,” he said. “She liked my voice. It was loud and deep and she would roll over and try to talk back.” But after Judge Greer “literally ordered her barbaric death,” everything changed.

  Gibbs described his visit to Schiavo’s hospital room after her feeding tube had been removed. Schiavo lay in bed “with her eyes sunken deep in her head . . . she was skeletal,” Gibbs recounted. “Then she turned to her mother suddenly, like she wanted to speak, and she just started sobbing.” By now, members of the audience were weeping.

  With their passionate interest in Schiavo, Gibbs and his allies recalled Benino, the socially timid, emotionally stunted character from Pedro Almodóvar’s Oscar-winning 2002 film Talk to Her. A nurse at a hospital for the comatose, Benino became transfixed by Alicia, a beautiful young woman mentally incapacitated by a terrible accident. At home, Benino tended continuously to his sick mother and her constant demands, forfeiting any opportunity for social contact with the opposite sex. While alone with Alicia at the hospital, cooing words into her ear or bathing her naked, still body with a sponge, Benino experienced his first sense of intimacy with a woman. Of course, it was a fraudulent sensation—Alicia could not talk back to Benino or respond to his touch—but Benino convinced himself he was in love. Overwhelmed with passion, he penetrated the comatose woman and impregnated her, an act that resulted in his imprisonment. When Benino was released from prison, he learned that Alicia had emerged from her coma. Stalking her from a distance as she went through her daily routine, Benino was seized with fear of the living, breathing woman. From his terror grew an intense, all-consuming sense of loathing.

  Like Alicia, Terri Schiavo was useful to the movement only as an inanimate prop. Only in her devivified state could they exploit her to embody their perceived persecution at the hands of secular-humanist tyrants. Although she could not respond to their greetings or receive their bedside prayers, Gibbs and his allies discussed Schiavo as they would have a sister, mother, or wife, referring to her simply as “Terri.” As their grim passion play approached its conclusion, they seemed to believe their own fantasy: “Terri” was alive, but only they could hear her desperate pleas. Meanwhile, the movement heaped jealousy-tinged scorn on the only man who had shared real intimacy with her—her ex-husband, Michael, accusing him without evidence of beating her into a coma. In its exploitive, one-sided love affair with Schiavo, the movement displayed all the traits of what Erich Fromm called the “necrophilious character.”

  In his 1973 book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm analyzed the phenomenon of necrophilia, concluding that it extended beyond the traditional concept of erotic attraction to rotting flesh and also manifested itself in “malignant aggression . . . unalloyed from sex, in acts of the pure passion to destroy.” The necrophilious character, Fromm wrote, is passionately attracted “to all that is dead, decayed, putrid sickly . . . It is the passion to tear apart living structures.”

  Together with his research partner, Michael Maccoby, Fromm surveyed a diverse group of research subjects for necrophilious, “anti-life” tendencies. Across the board, Fromm detected a profound link between necrophilious character traits and right-wing ideology. “The study asked the respondents a number of questions that permitted correlating their political opinions to their character . . . ” Fromm wrote. “In all of the samples, we found that anti-life tendencies were significantly correlated to political positions that supported increased military power and favored repression against dissenters.”

  Fromm identified necrophilious characters as among the most dangerous members of any society. “They are the haters, the racists, those in favor of war, bloodshed and destruction,” he wrote. “They are dangerous not only if they are political leaders, but also as the potential cohorts for a dictatorial leader. They become the executioners, terrorists, torturers; without them no terror system could be set up. But the less intense necrophiles are also politically important; while they may not be among its first adherents, they are necessary for the existence of a terror regime because they form a solid basis, although not necessarily a majority, for it to gain power.”

  The link that Fromm detected between necrophilious destructiveness and radical right-wing ideology was particularly pronounced at the conclusion of the “Judicial War on Faith” conference, when participants launched spontaneously into imprecatory prayer, a disturbing ritual in which worshippers call upon God to murder the satanic enemy. Replacing Gibbs at the podium, a pastor asked all the men in the room to get down on the floor and pray. With no other choice, I moved my plastic upholstered chair aside, took to my hands and knees, and listened as plaintive voices rose all around me with vengeful maledictions against judicial evildoers.

  One preacher piped up: “Father, we echo the words of the apostle Paul, because we know Judge Greer claims to be a Christian. So as the apostle Paul said in First Corinthians 5, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that
his spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus.”

  While the supine dinner guests prayed, a saccharine version of Pachelbel’s “Canon” emanating from the player piano in the hotel lobby seeped through the banquet hall’s open doors, suffusing the ceremony with a weird, dream-like atmosphere. When I finally dared to look up from the ground, I realized that my head was only inches from the posterior of William Dannemeyer, the former congressman who once issued a letter to his colleagues listing twenty-four people with some tangential connection to Bill Clinton who supposedly died “under other than natural circumstances.”

  As the conference attendees filed out of the banquet hall and into the humid, rain-flecked night, mostly silent except for the few who were still sobbing, they seemed prepared to do anything—absolutely anything—against judges. “I want to impale them!” as Michael Schwartz told me.

  For weeks afterward, Judge Greer lived under police protection until the climate of violence cultivated by DeLay and the radical right dissipated. “This isn’t Colombia. This isn’t drug lords terrorizing the judiciary,” Greer remarked with befuddlement. “It’s America.”

  While Schiavo was interred, DeLay still hung on for his political life. In May 2005, with the Schiavo affair not even a distant memory, the American Conservative Union, the Family Research Council, and other conservative groups organized a massive “salute” to DeLay. A Houston Chronicle poll had just shown that the voters in DeLay’s Sugar Land, Texas, congressional district had turned against their congressman. The majority leader’s declining fortunes suggested that this “salute” was, in fact, a farewell party.

  Nine hundred right-wingers appeared for the gala on May 12 at the Capitol Hilton, including most Republican members of Congress. Missing the event would have earned them the still-potent wrath of the “The Hammer” and his henchmen. At the event, DeLay was visibly moved by the show of support. As the ceremony got under way, he wiped a single tear from his eye. Then Brent Bozell, a bearded old conservative warhorse who, as president of the Media Research Council, lived off the notion of “liberal media bias,” brought the crowd to its feet by pledging to defend DeLay from “this whole sorry inquisition.”