Pro Prop. 174 Campaign Shows Vouchers Make Strange Bedfellows

Big names from the conservative Christian movement are boosting the campaign for the school voucher initiative by airing radio commercials and trying to mobilize their followers.

In the process, the high-profile evangelicals have allied themselves with libertarians, whose social agenda includes legalization of drugs and prostitution, and permissive attitudes toward homosexuality and pornography, all of which run counter to conservative Christian beliefs.

“This is a matter of practical politics,” said the Rev. Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition in Anaheim. He is letting proponents of Proposition 174 use his office for campaign work, and intends to distribute 500,000 flyers to conservative churches and other supporters.

“The greatest adversary to the average Christian parent has become the public schools curriculum on social values,” he said, citing schools that make condoms available and “teach that homosexuality is viable.”

By supporting the voucher campaign, “the Traditional Values Coalition gets what it really believes in and libertarians get what they want,” Sheldon said. “We have agreed to set aside any differences to gain this victory.”

Sheldon is known in California and nationally for his stands against gay rights, pornography and abortion. But he noted that like libertarians, whose philosophy revolves around a belief in the virtues of a free market, he is “very free enterprise.”

The Christian Coalition, the Virginia-based political action group headed by television evangelist Pat Robertson, has announced plans to spend $250,000 on radio spots endorsing the initiative, and to distribute 2 million voter guides touting Proposition 174.

The radio spots will air in the final two weeks before the Nov. 2 election on stations in Los Angeles and Sacramento. They include a Spanish-language commercial in which a speaker says: “We need school choice to let us choose what schools our kids attend. We’d get a tuition voucher that would even be good at parochial schools.”

Political scientist Paul Gottfried, author of the book “The Conservative Movement,” noted that conservatives are deeply divided over the issue of vouchers, with some opposing them because they fear that with government funds will come government restrictions on private school curriculum.

Gottfried called the alliance of neoconservatives, libertarians and religious conservatives fragile, given their differences on social issues.