Left’s Muddled Assault on the Religious Right : Liberals lose sight of the spirit of tolerance they profess to embody in attacks that lack consistency and common sense.

Liberals are cooking up new attacks on religious conservatives, but their recipe is missing a couple of ingredients: consistency and common sense.

Rep. Vic Fazio (D-Sacramento), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told the National Press Club last week that the “radical right” is seeking “to carry views that are distinctly religious over into the government and to try to impose those as laws.” On the same day, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Kathleen Brown told a Sacramento press conference that her opposition to capital punishment is rooted in her Catholicism. Although she said she would enforce current law, presumably she would veto legislation extending the death penalty, thereby “imposing” her beliefs on California.

Why aren’t liberals damning Brown? Fazio’s comments hardly clarify the issue. Religious people may take part in politics, he said, “but should they come together as a force to change the direction of their party?” Oh, so religious influence becomes objectionable only when it turns into group action. The civil-rights movement surely flunks this test, since it has relied on organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as well as countless local churches. So, might liberals tell the Rev. Jesse Jackson to leave the Democratic Party?

Fazio denounced “stealth” politicians, referring to Christian conservatives who purportedly run for office without publicly emphasizing their religious ties. Indeed, candidates ought to disclose their affiliations, but not just their sectarian ones. If liberal politicians took this principle seriously, they would start every speech to business groups by listing all their campaign contributions from organized labor. Fazio, of course, rejected any analogy between labor and the religious right. “Well, I think the organized labor movement in the Democratic Party comes at most of its issues on the basis of personal beliefs.” Huh?

Fazio veered deepest into Wonderland when he approvingly cited a book titled “The Culture of Disbelief” by Stephen Carter. Although Carter criticized the religious right, he made a crucial distinction that Fazio ignored: “If the Christian Coalition is wrong for America, it must be because its message is wrong on the issues, not because its message is religious.”

Fazio’s attack is not an isolated incident, but part of a larger effort to demonize religious conservatives in the eyes of the public. Two years ago, when Pat Buchanan spoke of a “religious war,” liberals accused him of breaching the bounds of civil discourse. A few weeks ago, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California sent out a fund-raising letter that began: “This country is at war over whether we will remain a democracy or become a theocracy with our laws based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.” So much for civil discourse. And it got worse. “Already, fundamentalist Christians have won seats on over 2,000 school boards throughout this country.” If one substituted Catholics or Jews for fundamentalist Christians, it would sound like a letter from a fringe nativist group of the 1920s.

The ACLU letter offers further examples of the tortured logic underlying the assault on the religious right. Among other things, it noted that Christian conservatives have won a majority on the school board of Vista, Calif.--and that the board now prays before its meetings. But so do the Democratically controlled House and Senate, not exactly hotbeds of revivalism. The letter also said that the Vista board has curtailed school bus service, but what do budget cuts have to do with religion? The Clinton Administration boasts of slashing the budget and eliminating 252,000 federal jobs. Does this mean that Alice Rivlin is a snake handler?

The letter accused religious conservatives of trying “to take over state government.” Unless the ACLU has evidence of a military coup in the works, I gather that it was referring to Christian participation in the electoral process. Yes, there is a word for this dastardly effort. It is called democracy.

Whether through calculation or mere insensitivity, such attacks are profoundly offensive and utterly inconsistent with the spirit of tolerance that liberalism professes to. Liberals should pick up the debate, lay down the smears and heed Stephen Carter’s warning that “It is easy to be McCarthyite about the Christian right.”