Even Sensible Iowa Bows to the Religious Right : Politics: The state GOP, in thrall to Pat Robertson, offers voters nothing but claptrap.

The choice of preacher-politician Pat Robertson to address the Republican National Convention says a lot about the GOP’s lurch to the right. Here in the heartland, Republicans know how costly that lurch can be.

For years, the Iowa Republican Party was a model of reason. Robert Ray, five-term Republican governor, regularly attracted large numbers of independent and Democratic voters by steering the party in a fiscally conservative though moderate and enlightened direction.

Then Pat Robertson came to River City in quest of the Republican presidential nomination. In 1988, enough of his fundamentalist followers attended the caucuses for Robertson to outpoll George Bush and finish a surprising second.

Robertson’s presidential bid faded, but not the zeal of his followers. Nowadays, the once-sensible Iowa GOP spouts extremist claptrap.

These are some of the planks in the state party platform adopted in June at a convention dominated by the religious right:

Abolish the National Endowment for the Arts; dismantle the federal and state departments of education; eliminate the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; require the reporting of AIDS carriers and cap spending for AIDS research and treatment; reject any restrictions on gun ownership; mandate the teaching of “creation science”; reinstate corporal punishment in the schools; prohibit new or higher taxes except by two-thirds vote of all members of both houses of Congress or state legislatures; restrict government spending for preschools to safeguard the “God-given responsibility” of parents for their children; amend the Constitution to outlaw abortion.

There was more, of course. So preoccupied were the ideologues with condemning homosexuality, one-world government and situational ethics that poverty and urban problems escaped their notice.

Recently, Robertson advised Iowans about his views on a proposed equal-rights amendment to the state constitution. He denounced it as part of a feminist agenda, which he characterized as a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” I am not making this up.

Naturally, less radical Iowa Republicans are feeling dispossessed these days. Mary Grefe, a longtime Republican activist and former candidate for office, recently told the Des Moines Register:

“I’m a Republican without a party. I’ve been alienated and offended . . . . We’ve been generous, giving $1,000 a year to the party. That’s out the window . . . . When it comes to selling tickets again, don’t call me. I won’t do it.”

Republicans gave a man who equates feminism with witchcraft a platform at their convention because, says senior campaign adviser Charles Black, “He has a very powerful, important constituency, one we need as part of our base.”

So are the Mary Grefes an important constituency. Black and his fellow strategists seem not to have noticed that this year, the Grefes have an alternative.