Bush Renews Courtship of the Religious Right : Politics: President is trying to mend fences with key GOP constituency after being criticized for inviting gay rights activists to the White House.

As he prepares for his renomination at the Republican National Convention next week, President Bush is trying to mend fences with a key GOP constituency--the so-called religious right--which has criticized his Administration for inviting gay rights activists to the White House.

If his recent and coming engagements are an indication, Bush has decided that he needs to court religious conservatives, even though they have been a dependable Republican constituency since Ronald Reagan’s first election to the presidency in 1980.

The greatest danger Bush faces from voters who identify with the religious right is that they stay home on Election Day, said University of Virginia sociologist Jeffrey Hadden, who has written extensively about conservative evangelicals and politics.

In an interview, Hadden also speculated that Democratic nominee Bill Clinton could win some votes from conservative Democrats who have crossed party lines in recent years and who might be less absolute than leaders of the religious right on issues such as abortion and gay rights.

As part of his effort to shore up support among religious activists, Bush recently gave an exclusive interview to James Dobson, president of the conservative Christian Focus on the Family organization in Colorado Springs, scheduled to air on more than 1,900 radio stations Tuesday and Wednesday. Bush has also agreed to address the closing session of the National Affairs Briefing, a rally by the religious right to be held in Dallas on Aug. 21-22.

In recent speeches and interviews, Bush has forcefully repeated his opposition to abortion, a message embraced by conservative Protestant voters.

And the Republicans have also scheduled Pat Robertson as a speaker at their convention. Robertson, an evangelical TV broadcaster, ran against Bush in 1988.

Although religious conservatives seemingly have no one else to turn to, given that Democrat Bill Clinton strongly supports homosexual and abortion rights, leaders of their movement are trying to persuade Bush that he cannot take the support of evangelicals and fundamentalists for granted. One point of disagreement is the President’s apparent tolerance of gay rights activists.

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Bush’s support from the religious right this year is “not as solid as it was in 1988,” said Ed McAteer, chief organizer of the National Affairs Briefing.

Officials of such groups as the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission and the National Assn. of Evangelicals have denounced the Bush Administration for inviting representatives of gay rights groups to two White House ceremonies in 1990.

Conservative evangelicals were further incensed when Bush told Barbara Walters in an ABC interview in June that he had no “litmus test” that would bar gays from serving in his Cabinet.

The Rev. Robert Dugan, who heads the Washington office of the National Assn. of Evangelicals, said last month that evangelical Christian opposition to gay rights is “more nearly unanimous” than evangelical opposition to abortion.

Discussing homosexual rights in the interview with Dobson, which was taped in Colorado Springs last week, Bush said: “I think the answer is to try to be understanding, to try to be compassionate, but not to advocate those things that you just happen to feel are wrong for our society.”

At one point in the interview, Dobson told Bush: “You are the first President to allow a group to come to the White House defined by their sexual activity. Now that was very offensive to a lot of people.”

In response, Bush said: “I thought that was addressed as inadvertent, and I believe that’s correct. . . . Let me say that nobody should glean from that a condonation of behavior that I don’t agree with.”