Making Waves in Redondo : Controversy Swirls Around ‘Born-Again’ Mayor

When Brad Parton was running for mayor of Redondo Beach, he talked about gridlock and development. New Age religion, pornography, and beer in city parks didn’t come up in his campaign pronouncements.

So imagine the surprise in this South Bay city when, after his election in April, the freshman mayor suddenly launched an attack on vice. Never mind that his agenda also included such things as synchronized stoplights and recycling. As a result, Parton has stirred more controversy in the last eight months than the previous Redondo Beach mayor did in eight years.

In September, Parton said X-rated tabloids should be banned from news racks. Then he wanted to halt beer drinking at charity picnics in parks. Then he asked the local adult school to cancel a class on “New Age healing” after a voter complained that her proposed Bible study course had been disallowed.

A deluge of letters to City Hall has ensued. There have been charges of censorship and prohibition. Since Parton’s public acknowledgement this fall that he is a “born-again” Christian, South Bay newspaper columnists have accused the 29-year-old Republican of blurring the line between religion and politics.

“People seem to think I’m just some right-wing Christian radical fanatic,” Parton said, smiling good-naturedly, “and I’m not.”

Despite such denials, he has become a local lightning rod for the debate over the growing involvement of fundamentalist Christians in local government.

From school boards, where church groups have opposed textbooks they deem spiritually inappropriate, to city governments, where they have fought gay rights, religious conservatives nationwide are increasingly exerting pressure at the grass roots.

Michael Hudson, western director of People for the American Way--a nonprofit group that monitors First Amendment issues--said that at the end of the Reagan Administration, national leaders of the religious right launched the strategy, reasoning that the lack of a broad, local political base “was the reason their moral agenda didn’t do better.”

In Parton’s city, such groups acknowledge that they are promoting church involvement in civic affairs. For example, the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, whose Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition in November backed several anti-gay rights initiatives in the state, said he conducts seminars in the beach cities aimed at teaching Christian congregations how to lobby local government. In turn, these churches have campaigned vigorously in recent months for everything from city land on which to serve the South Bay’s homeless to a ban on grade school readers they deem satanic and violent.

It is in this context that Parton’s critics say he ran on one platform only to promote another.

Says Frank Bostrom, an architect whom Parton beat out for the mayoral post: “If the people of Redondo Beach had known what his personal agenda would be once he got elected, he wouldn’t be in office today.”

But Parton’s supporters say the whole thing has been misunderstood and overblown. The mayor, they say, is just a naive young Republican who happens to go to church.

Though Parton had been appointed to the Parks and Recreation Commission, and had waged an unsuccessful 1988 campaign for a vacant council seat, he never held elective office until he became mayor, his advocates note.

“When you get someone in office who’s new and unpolitical, they have a tendency to do things that get them headlines because they don’t know what the limits of their office should be,” said Tim Carey, executive director of the pro-development Southern California Caucus, which backed Parton because of his positive stands on business and growth.

Carey said Parton “is a political neophyte who doesn’t know how to keep himself from being railroaded in an interview.” Because he talked to the press about his religious views after his election, he ended up being portrayed “as a religious zealot out to put crucifixes on every building--and that’s not the case,” Carey said.

If anything, longtime friends of the mayor say, it is politics he is zealous about.

“He’s been telling people he wanted to be President since he was a Cub Scout,” said David Douthit, a businessman who grew up with Parton in Campbell, a middle-class suburb of San Jose.

In high school, he led a drive to oust a math teacher he felt was leaving him and other students unprepared to pass their college-entrance exams. And as a business major at San Diego State and president pro-tem of the Associated Student Council, Parton wanted to make up for campus-wide budget cuts by putting student fees into tutorials instead of recreational programs, friends said.

But after graduation, when Parton took a job in Redondo Beach and won a seat on the 51st Assembly District Republican Central Committee, his political and spiritual lives intertwined. The catalyst, he said, was then-congressional candidate Rob Scribner--a pension planner, former professional football player and lay minister at the Lighthouse Four-Square Gospel Church in Santa Monica.

Scribner met Parton at a GOP organizational meeting, and invited him to walk precincts for his campaign. Though Scribner subsequently lost to incumbent U.S. Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica) in 1984 and again in 1986, for Parton, the meeting paid off. Scribner helped Parton start his own financial management business and took him on as a partner in a series of real estate deals.

Under Scribner’s influence, Parton also became a “born-again” Christian in 1987, an event that he said profoundly affected his political life.

Parton said it confounds him that he has image problems. When he proposed the ban on beer in city parks, for example, his intention was to enforce an existing ordinance that had been undercut as the City Council issued one exemption after another to charities that wanted to sell beer at fund-raisers, he explained.