Republican Gomorrah Read online

  Dobson was careful not to press the Murrays further for insights into their son’s pathology. Blaming Satan was always safer than excessive reflection. “We can’t explain it, we can’t understand,” Dobson declared. “We say, ‘Lord, someday we will understand, but today we don’t.”

  There was really little else Dobson could say. Murray’s parents were not neglectful of their son, nor were they intentionally abusive. By all accounts, they raised him in faithful accordance with the teachings of the Christian right’s leading self-help gurus. In their cloistered world, where home-schooling is viewed as an ideal alternative to “government schools,” and where the rod is rarely spared, they were model parents. Murray’s killing spree thus reflected less on his parents than on the all-encompassing authoritarian culture that Dobson had helped to shape. When practiced in the real world, the movement’s “family values” sometimes produced some unusually dysfunctional families. Only by blaming Satan and his minions for Murray’s acts could the Christian right avoid acknowledging this absolutely damning indictment of its ideology.

  This sort of reasoning had been seen before, from figures ranging from Ted Bundy to Tom DeLay to Ted Haggard. When confronted with their own crimes and sins, these movement icons found that faulting the prince of darkness was far easier than accepting personal responsibility.

  By the time Colorado Springs completed its mourning period, the Republican primary had begun in earnest. The primary field was a cast of deeply flawed figures, each one less attractive to the conservative movement than the next. Almost none of them boasted culture war bonafides, yet all campaigned as though their ambitions depended on “value voters.” Ironically, the Republican politician most despised by the Christian right, Senator John McCain, a sworn enemy of conservative icons from Tom DeLay to Jerry Falwell, secured the nomination. McCain immediately lurched to the right, embarking on a doomed strategy that would ratify the self-destruction of his party.

  PART THREE

  But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

  2 TIMOTHY 3:1-5

  CHAPTER 21

  THE PARTY OF DOBSON

  The political hopefuls who entered the Republican primary contest each campaigned in the shadow of George W. Bush. Bush was, and still is, the paradigmatic president of the modern Republican Party. Yet few liberals could make sense of his appeal. He was intellectually incurious, inarticulate, and insolent to the point of self-satire. A scion of patrician wealth schooled in the Ivy Leagues, his anti-elitism seemed cynical, if not utterly insincere. Even more, the motives of Bush’s seemingly expansive base of supporters mystified the most sagacious pundits. “At one level this election was about nothing,” Thomas Friedman wrote the day after Bush’s reelection. “None of the real problems facing the nation were really discussed.”

  Thomas Frank’s postelection best-selling book What’s the Matter with Kansas? asserted that Republican politicians had cleverly exploited culture war issues such as abortion and gay marriage to con low-information middle Americans into voting against their economic interests. This strategy, according to Frank, was honed in Kansas by free-market fanatics such as Senator Sam Brownback and Representative Todd Tiahrt, and it found its apotheosis in Bush’s reelection campaign. Frank’s analysis was penetrating, refreshing, and even path-breaking, but it was incomplete. Why did evangelical voters feel such a powerful emotional affinity for Bush and his allies? Could his conservative positions on social issues fully explain their enthusiasm? The answers to these questions resided not so much in clever corporate Republican flimflam as in the appeal of Bush’s born-again experience—his escape from freedom.

  Countless biographies, documentaries, and biopics about Bush begin during his reckless youth. The colorful episodes are well known: Young Bush destroying a Christmas wreath during a drunken prank (one of three known times he was arrested), squandering lucrative business opportunities, failing miserably during a bid for Congress, and compounding a testy relationship with his imperious father. The most essential component of Bush’s personality—the character trait that would help define his presidency—developed from his mounting guilt when he submitted himself to a born-again experience.

  By embracing Christianity, the alcoholic scion of privilege not only suppressed his urge to drink liquor but also garnered instant cachet in the evangelical movement that increasingly dominated Sun Belt politics. With his willingness to trumpet the personal crises that led him to Jesus, Bush was able to connect to the new Republican base in a way few politicians before him had done. “I’ve had some personal experience with [drugs and alcohol]. As has been reported, I quit drinking. The main reason I quit was because I accepted Jesus Christ into my life in 1986,” Bush told his faith-based initiatives guru, Marvin Olasky. With the help of Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for the movement’s most famous born-again, convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson, Bush integrated pious confessions into his public addresses and even his answers to questions raised during debates.

  But like Tom DeLay, another born-again recovering alcoholic, Bush did not eliminate his addictive tendencies altogether; he simply transmuted them into authoritarian religion. He became what official Alcoholics Anonymous material describes as a “dry drunk”—someone who, by turning sober, develops exaggerated character flaws including “exaggerated self-importance” and “a rigid judgmental outlook.”

  Bush projected his attitudes into some of his most momentous decisions. “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God,’” said Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister at the time of a high-level meeting with Bush in June 2003. “God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq. . . . ’ And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.’ And by God I’m gonna do it.”

  This account, though denied by a White House spokesman, provided a perfect encapsulation of Bush’s tendencies. His God was a stern taskmaster who charged Bush with his historical mission to change the world through force of arms. “You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength,” Bush said when asked by journalist Bob Woodward whether he had asked his father for advice on Iraq. “There is a higher father that I appeal to.” Imbued with divine strength, Bush felt free to project the urges that had been present since his youth into his political behavior. Each evildoer Bush vanquished, from the Afghani taxi driver whose legs were “pulpified” during an “enhanced interrogation” session, to the Democratic senators smeared as treasonous molly-coddlers, bore the consequences of his divinely sanctioned sadism.

  None of the candidates in the 2008 Republican primary possessed the psychological traits that animated Bush’s radical presidency. Purely from the standpoint of character, the three Republican frontrunners—McCain, Romney, and Giuliani—contrasted with Bush dramatically. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a good thing. After all, by the beginning of the primary Bush was the least popular American president in recent history. However, the 25 percent of the public that still approved of Bush’s leadership by the end of his second term represented the backbone of the Republican Party. Indeed, by 2006 the Republican Party had been so thoroughly subsumed by the Christian right, and so well purged of most of its moderate elements, that the insufficiently religious primary frontrunners entered the race with severe handicaps.

  Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s campaign was dead on arrival, even though poll-obsessed Washington pundits and New York-ba
sed press wiseguys assumed otherwise. The son of a mafia-linked felon who had made his bones relentlessly prosecuting his targets, Giuliani’s own erratic behavior prompted his mayoral campaign in 1993 to commission a “vulnerability study” that highlighted his “raucous social life” and warned that “questions of a weirdness factor” could impede his ambitions. But little could deter the swaggering conquistador from his oddly self-destructive ways. After securing an annulment of his marriage to his second cousin, Giuliani married Donna Hanover, a local television anchor. While he was still with Hanover, Giuliani appeared so frequently with his press secretary, a twenty-eight-year-old woman he handpicked for the job, Vanity Fair reported that they were dating. In 1999, Giuliani wooed another mistress, Judith Nathan, by using public funds to chauffeur her to her vacation condo and ordering police detectives to walk her dog. When the scorned Hanover threw Giuliani out of Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral residence, he moved in with two openly gay friends. On at least three occasions, Giuliani appeared in drag in videotaped skits, including once with billionaire Donald Trump, who sniffed his stuffed brassiere and smooched his neck.

  In 2000, Giuliani’s personal crisis was played out before the media. Along with his health crisis—he developed prostate cancer—the embarrassing revelations caused him to drop his contest for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton. Disgraced and discredited, Giuliani nevertheless resurrected himself during the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Demonstrating calmness and compassion, he emerged as a national leader, filling the vacuum left by the strange three-day disappearance of President Bush. Rudy the hero was the portrait covering the picture of Rudy the bizarre. Still vigorous at the age of 63, Giuliani was the Republican answer to Dorian Gray.

  Among the crisis-addled Christian right, Giuliani’s greatest sin was not his “raucous” private life but, rather, his refusal to submit to a born-again process that would have laid his past indulgences to rest. Of course, the evangelical test ran against Giuliani’s grain, where piety and hypocrisy lived comfortably side-by-side. When he appeared before the Value Voters Summit in November 2007, Giuliani pleaded for empathy. “You and I know that I’m not a perfect person,” he said with a forced chuckle. “I’ve made mistakes in my life. But I’ve always done the best that I could to try to learn from them.” His confession fell on deaf ears. Outside the conference hall, a group of local movement activists grumbled to me about Giuliani’s attempts to win them over. “It’s a foundational issue,” said Doug Steiger, a Maryland-based anti-abortion organizer. “From our standpoint, three marriages is painful.

  He’s for abortion, he’s for homosexual marriage. It’s just evidence of his lack of commitment to our understanding.” Giuliani’s promise to appoint “strict constructionist” judges—a coded vow to stack the judiciary with anti-gay, anti-abortion figures determined to overturn Roe v. Wade—was insufficient as well. So long as he lived outside the rigid social doctrine of evangelical culture, he was unacceptable.

  Senator John McCain, already loathed for his defiance of conservative orthodoxy on issues from gay marriage to stem cell research, was also viewed with disdain by the movement. A mainline Episcopalian who claimed suddenly during the 2008 primary to have become a Baptist, McCain was noticeably uncomfortable with overtly religious gestures. Further, he had expressed no remorse for leaving his first wife for a younger, richer woman. McCain attempted to reconcile with his old enemy Jerry Falwell, addressing the graduating class of Liberty University in May 2006, but with negligible results. Before McCain’s campaign even began, James Dobson took to the airwaves to condemn him. “Speaking as a private individual, I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances,” Dobson announced in January 2007. Despite Dobson’s rebuke, McCain retained the quiet respect of the Republican grassroots, and he was seen by many of the party elite as the GOP’s most viable candidate.

  Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney had never drunk a drop of alcohol and had been married to the same woman for over three decades. But his personal austerity meant little to the self-proclaimed proponents of family values. They preferred someone like themselves, an evangelical who either underwent or understood the born-again process. The sinless, mannequin-like Romney did not fit the mold. His campaign was burdened by evangelical fears about his membership in the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon organization condemned as a cult by the Southern Baptist Convention and Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

  James Dobson’s wife, Shirley, had excluded Mormons from participation in her 2004 National Day of Prayer, yet Dobson and many of his peers treated Romney respectfully during the campaign. Dobson, for his part, described Romney as “presidential” during a radio broadcast. But behind the scenes at the Value Voters Summit, where Romney introduced himself to Dobson’s followers, movement activists attempted to amplify questions about Romney’s religion. “Take a look at what he really believes,” Janet Folger, an influential Florida evangelical, anti-Mormon activist and founder of a group called Faith2Action, remarked to me after Romney’s speech. “He believes that Jesus is Satan’s brother! Are you kidding me?”

  In the corridors of the summit’s exhibition hall, an evangelical film producer accosted attendees, claiming to them that Romney believed in something called the “White Horse Prophecy.” According to the producer, Church of Latter Day Saints founder Joseph Smith prophesied that the Constitution would one day “hang by a thread” because of widespread social licentiousness, but that it would be saved by a church elder who had ascended to the presidency. When another Mormon candidate for the Republican nomination, Senator Orrin Hatch, declared during a 1999 appearance on a Salt Lake City radio station, “the Constitution is literally hanging by a thread,” he drew unexpected and unwanted attention to his faith, forcing him to deny to reporters any divine motives for seeking the presidency. Romney could not afford similar scrutiny.

  Once a proud heir of the liberal Republican tradition bequeathed to him by his father, former Michigan governor George Romney, Romney tacked right. When his father had run for the Republican nomination for president in 1968, his Mormon background had never been raised as an issue. That it now put a question mark over Romney testified to the rise of the religious right.

  Romney poured vast sums of his personal fortune into cultivating movement support. In the end, he was only able to entice an avaricious, discredited figure like the Reverend Lou Sheldon into his camp. Sheldon, a fanatically anti-gay preacher dubbed “Lucky Louie” by casino lobbyist Jack Abramoff for his eagerness to line his pockets with gambling industry money, hoped his access to Romney would restore his former influence. “I sat for four hours in Mitt Romney’s family room with his wife, Ann,” Sheldon told me, “and it became very clear to me that he is clearly with us.” (Sheldon then drifted off onto his favorite topic, warning me that I could turn gay at any moment. “Remember, homosexuality could strike you,” he said, jabbing a finger in my chest. “You could go into a gender identity confusion because it is a psychological imbalance.”)

  The unexpected rise of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee mortally wounded Romney’s campaign. Huckabee brazenly channeled Janet Folger, who now supported his campaign. “Don’t Mormons believe Jesus is Satan’s brother?” Huckabee remarked to a reporter.

  Huckabee’s campaign was poorly funded, understaffed, and practically unknown by the time his bid for the Iowa caucus began. Romney, meanwhile, had pumped $17.4 million of his personal fortune into his campaign ahead of Iowa; he would spend $85,000 a day on advertising, much of which was negative. But Huckabee’s background as an ordained minister in the Southern Baptist Convention enabled him to compensate for his financial disadvantage, especially in evangelical-heavy primary states.

  A longtime confidant of James Dobson, Huckabee had maligned gays well before it was fashionable for Republicans to do so. In 1992, Huckabee called for quarantining AIDS patients to prevent the spread of HIV. To bolster his proposal, he cited the ca
se of Kimberly Bergalis, a woman who said her openly gay dentist infected her with HIV during a routine examination. Bergalis, who claimed she was a virgin, was later diagnosed with two sexually transmitted diseases—genital warts and the human papiloma virus—that she had acquired from sexual encounters prior to contracting HIV. Huckabee’s views changed little after the discrediting of Bergalis; when asked about his proposal fifteen years later on the campaign trail, he defiantly stood by it.

  Huckabee was not some cynical politician pandering to leaders of the Christian right. He was a leader of the Christian right. In ads that his campaign ran in Iowa and South Carolina, Huckabee consolidated his status, ostentatiously billing himself as a “Christian Leader.” “I am not coming to you,” he told evangelical audiences on the campaign trail, “I come from you.”

  Romney attempted to neutralize Huckabee’s gathering appeal by adopting right-wing positions on gay marriage and abortion, reversing stands he had taken as governor of Massachusetts. Still slipping in the polls with the Iowa caucus only a month away, Romney realized this was not enough. After bunkering with his staff, he resolved to deliver a major speech that would assuage concerns about his Mormon faith. Romney announced his speech to the media with great fanfare, deliberately inviting comparisons to John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 address before an assembly of Southern Methodist ministers, in which he forcefully and defiantly dispelled the notion that his Catholicism disqualified him for the presidency.