Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 25, 1993                   TAG: 9309060229
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RELIGIOUS RIGHT

In their continuing quest to take over the Republican Party, they say they'll start focusing on bread-and-butter issues more important to Christian fundamentalists than demagoguing about abortion and homosexuals.

The coalition's leadership says it saw the light in a poll it took, following the 1992 election, of churchgoing fundamentalist Protestants and like-minded Catholics.

To its astonishment, said the coalition's executive director, Ralph Reed Jr., the issues identified as their top concerns by those polled ``were the same as everybody else's.''

Bill Clinton could have told them that. Doubtless, so now could George Bush.

It's the economy, stupid.

And jobs, and the budget deficit, and crime, and health care, and education, and welfare, and wasteful government.

Abortion and gay rights were way down on the list.

So, Reed concludes, ``the pro-family movement has limited its effectiveness by concentrating disproportionately on issues such as abortion and homosexuality.'' The coalition isn't running away from those previous concentrations, he says, but "to win at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion . . . the pro-family movement must speak to the concerns of average voters.''

Sounds familiar - moderate Republicans in Virginia have been saying it for years.

Moderate GOP candidates for statewide office in Virginia spent months arguing that very point this year. In June, they were rejected at the Republican state convention that had been taken over by Robertson's forces. The moderates couldn't pass the religious right's litmus tests.

Well, churchgoing voters seem to be saying: Forget litmus tests.

Their primary interest, as Reed acknowledges, "is not to legislate against the sins of others, but to protect the health, welfare and financial security of their own families."

It will be interesting to see whether the power brokers of the religious right have really gotten the message. Could be.

Or it could be they simply see mainstream issues as a Trojan horse for getting faster, firmer control of the GOP before returning to a narrower, more extreme agenda.

Keywords:
POLITICS