Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 23, 1993 TAG: 9305230057
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
In four months, President Clinton has challenged almost everything revered by evangelicals and other social conservatives. And now, the direct-mail appeals are flying. The airwaves are echoing. The phone lines are ringing. The videotapes are circulating.
Just this weekend senators started receiving a 17-minute tape in which Roberta Achtenberg, Clinton's nominee to be an assistant housing secretary, is seen giving her female companion - a judge - a kiss during the 1992 gay pride march in San Francisco.
"Nothing in my adult life has shaken me quite like the devastation we are seeing. Most of what we have fought for is on the line today," James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, wrote his members in March.
The basic message from dozens of groups with millions of members and sympathizers: Clinton's support for abortion rights and gay rights will subvert Christian beliefs and destroy the family.
Immediately upon taking office, Clinton inflamed social conservatives by lifting restrictions on abortions and proposing to end the ban on gays in the military. A barrage of direct mail ensued.
"The last thing I thought I'd be doing is asking you to take urgent action on the issue of homosexuals in the military," Beverly LaHaye, president of Concerned Women for America, wrote to some of her 600,000-plus members in March. "Just days ago I sought your help in stopping `The Freedom of Choice Act' - the deadliest abortion bill in U.S. history."
Last week, a House committee completed work on that abortion bill in a long emotional session, while senators across the Capitol sniped at one another and at Achtenberg in an unusually personal and acrimonious floor debate. They're scheduled to vote on her nomination Monday.
Fast approaching after that are battles over federal AIDS and abortion funding, the gay ban, controversial nominees for surgeon general and civil rights enforcer, and a bill guaranteeing access to abortion clinics.
While abortion continues to show up in fund-raising appeals, the movement now appears preoccupied with gay issues - the military ban, the Achtenberg nomination, the specter of a gay civil rights bill that evangelicals contend would permit gay marriage and require churches and schools to hire homosexuals.
"It's been quite hectic," said Marshall Wittman, chief lobbyist at the 400,000-member Christian Coalition's newly established Washington office. "Each day is often two or three issues at the same time."
Sheldon, whose group represents 25,000 churches, spent most of last week working with various senators to derail Achtenberg's nomination. Then he rushed back to San Diego to protest Clinton's nomination of Thomas Payzant, the city schools superintendent, as an assistant education secretary. Payzant's policies, he said, "are targeted to tearing down the family."
Civil liberties groups who keep track of religious right activity say the furor in the Capitol is a sideshow to the concrete gains evangelicals are making at the state and local levels. But it's Clinton who has energized and armed them, sending their membership and contributions skyward.
"Our government has become a weapon the anti-Christian forces now use against Christians and religious people," Pat Robertson, president of the Christian Coalition, said in a spring letter to potential contributors. "By standing together we can turn America back from its headlong plunge into moral chaos."
At least three groups - the Traditional Values Coalition, the Christian Action Network and Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty Alliance - sent their own camera crews to the April 25 gay rights march in Washington to produce videos damaging to the gay cause. Falwell did a whole week of radio shows on the march and the direct-mail fallout has just begun.
In a press release this weekend, Falwell also accused Achtenberg of "conducting a personal and aggressive campaign to bring about the dissolution and disbanding of the Boy Scouts of America, unless they agree to accept homosexual scoutmasters and boys who are atheists."
Falwell said he would call every senator to urge a vote against Achtenberg's nomination and pledged to publicize the names of those senators who vote for her.
Sheldon's daughter Andrea made the march the centerpiece of the values coalition's latest financial appeal.
"I felt like I had been transported to Sodom and Gomorrah. . . . You can imagine my shock when . . . hundreds of topless lesbians paraded past the White House," she wrote. "A great deal of political success comes down to money, and right now, the `sexual perversity movement' has more."
by CNB