GOP Moderates Warn of Religious Right Takeover : Politics: Conservatives are outflanking mainstream Republicans, leaving national party at risk, senators say.

Many moderate Republicans, including veteran U.S. senators, have concluded with a mixture of alarm and amazement that the religious right--already a potent grass-roots force--is poised to take control of the national party and precipitate a political confrontation unparalleled since the rise of Barry Goldwater 30 years ago.

And, they say, middle-of-the-road Republicans have only themselves to blame: While Christian conservatives have worked tirelessly to take over party organizations at all levels from coast to coast, GOP moderates have remained passively on the sidelines, unwilling to fight with members of their own party over abortion and other explosive social policy issues that dominate the conservatives’ agenda.

Unless their own wing becomes more aggressive, these mainstream Republicans warn, the religious right will reach Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson’s stated goal of winning “a working majority of the Republican Party” by 1996. And that could alienate millions of independent voters.

“If we let this thing continue to percolate without attacking it head-on,” declared Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, a leading moderate, “we will assure President Clinton’s reelection.”

In 1964, Arizona Sen. Goldwater won the GOP presidential nomination after a grass-roots campaign by the conservative wing of the party but was mauled in the general election by Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson.

Although Specter reported some progress in a quiet campaign to persuade Republican senators to oppose addressing the abortion issue in the party’s 1996 platform, he has not convinced Republican Party Chairman Haley Barbour or other GOP leaders. They have told him that failing to include an uncompromising anti-abortion plank would alienate Christian conservatives. The 1992 GOP platform called for a “human life amendment” to the Constitution, outlawing abortion in all circumstances.

Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas, another GOP moderate, shares Specter’s assessment. The religious right “has taken over a lot in Kansas,” she said, “including my own county organization.”

“Part of the problem,” Kassebaum said, “is that moderates aren’t willing to work in the trenches, while the Christian conservatives have gone door to door and worked hard and won control fair and square. My hat’s off to them for that.”

The view is widely held that moderates have been “asleep at the switch,” in the words of former Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.). Arthur Kropp, president of the liberal People for the American Way, which issued a recent report detailing extensive religious right victories in the GOP, criticized the Republican moderates.

“I’m no fan of the religious right,” he said in an interview, “but they didn’t steal anything, they have just worked harder through the process to win the party over to their side and there has been no challenge to them by the national party.”

Already religious conservatives are far more potent than they were in 1992, when they dominated the Republican National Convention with an uncompromising platform and fiery rhetoric that--in the view of many analysts--hurt George Bush’s bid for reelection.

While it is the religious right’s unyielding anti-abortion stance that has most worried moderates in the past, Pat Robertson has won wide support for another position that is anathema to most mainstream Republicans and independents: challenging the basic American principle of separation of church and state.

Robertson has denounced the principle as “a lie of the left,” stirring Christian conservatives to action throughout the country. Specter said that he was shocked when Iowa Republicans booed him last month after he stressed church-state separation and declared the Texas GOP convention, where delegates carried signs saying “A Vote for Our Candidate is a Vote For God,” was “wrong philosophically” for defying the principle.

The Arizona Republican Assembly, recently formed to push for conservative candidates within the GOP, declared that God “has ordained moral absolutes which govern the universe” and that the Constitution is “the product of divine Providence.”

Robertson, through his own national television program and other media, has done “a tremendous job of trashing the whole idea of church-state separation,” said the Rev. Robert L. Maddux Jr., a Bethesda, Md., Baptist minister and former director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Robertson has “deliberately confused the idea of church-state separation with rhetoric about Christians participating in government,” and the idea has taken on a bad odor among most religious conservatives, Maddux declared. “It’s part of a scary movement that has duped a lot of good people with conservative leanings.”

GOP moderates are even more concerned about what the rising influence of uncompromising conservatives will do to the image of the party in the eyes of independent voters.

Rudman pointed to the recent Virginia GOP convention that nominated Iran-Contra figure Oliver L. North for the Senate as an example of what he sees as the problem when religious conservatives take over. “That Virginia convention was as representative of the Republican Party as Uganda is but those who controlled were organized and effective and nominated a far-right candidate,” he said.

The religious right has become so powerful, Rudman said, that no Republican with presidential ambitions will dare defy it. He pointed to the case of Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who balked at endorsing the North nomination until Robertson told him that an endorsement would be important to Christian conservatives in 1996. Subsequently, Dole not only endorsed North but contributed $1,000 to his campaign.

Dole “doesn’t really believe in what the religious conservatives do but he doesn’t want to alienate them,” Rudman said. “Occasionally in politics you just have to rise above principle.”

Rudman, Specter and Kassebaum, along with Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.), former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, California businessman David Packard, and then-Rep. Tom Campbell (R-Stanford) were among a group of moderates who formed the Republican Majority Coalition in December, 1992, to counteract the growing influence of the conservative Christians on the GOP. Campbell, who reported that the religious right controlled 32 of California’s 58 county Republican central committees, was named chairman.

The organization conducted several public hearings in 1993, including one in Los Angeles. It also announced that it would endorse a candidate in the 1996 nominating contest and would assemble a list of some 250,000 moderate and liberal Republicans to be used by its candidate in building a grass-roots organization.

This year, however, the group has been relatively inactive.

Specter said that he sees little inclination by moderates today to challenge the religious right. He has met behind closed doors with representatives of several women’s abortion-rights groups, including Republicans for Choice, to seek their support in an effort to strip the anti-abortion plank from the 1996 platform. “But I couldn’t get them to act. I’m not getting much help,” he said.

The religious conservatives have been challenged in strong terms recently by Democratic leaders who no doubt hope to add to the divisiveness of the GOP.

President Clinton, a frequent target of attacks from religious conservatives, declared: “Anyone who doesn’t agree with them is fair game for wild charges, no matter how false.”

And Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, assailed what he called “the fire-breathing Christian radical right.”

The Democratic attacks have touched off a barrage of counterattacks by Republican Party leaders who have defended the religious right and accused the Democrats of an orchestrated strategy of “Christian bashing” to deflect public attention from Clinton’s low standings in the polls and problems caused by the Whitewater controversy.

In a memo to GOP leaders calling Clinton’s legislative and regulatory agenda “hostile to both values and religion,” Barbour said that the Democrats’ attacks “reveal just how far out of the mainstream their own party has drifted.”

Except for defending the conservative Christians and accusing the Democrats of attacking religion, the Republican leaders have been largely silent on the issue. “I don’t know that the party could have a better strategy than to just keep accusing the Democrats of attacking religion,” said a veteran Kentucky Republican leader.

The Kentuckian, a moderate who declined to be identified, said: “In large groups of Republicans you just don’t talk about it. It’s so emotional that I look around the room to see who’s there before I say anything.”

In Kentucky’s 3rd Congressional District, Susan Stokes, a state representative who favors abortion rights, fought off the religious right to win the Republican nomination for a House seat--only to see the conservatives back a Republican running as an independent in the general election.

“They just want to make an ideological statement,” Stokes said. “I feel their tactics reflect a desperation. They used scare tactics, talked about baby killers, and sent out mailings that didn’t reflect the truth.”

In Georgia, where veteran political analyst Bill Shipp joked that “you could put all the moderate Republicans in a phone booth,” two religious right candidates--businessman Guy Milner and former Waycross Mayor John Knox--are in a runoff for the gubernatorial nomination. The candidate they defeated in the primary, Paul Heard, former state House minority leader, Shipp said, would have been a stronger opponent than either of them to face Gov. Zell Miller in the general election.

In Texas, Dolly Madison McKenna, a moderate rejected by the GOP in a congressional race and in an election for state party chairman, said that moderates “got lazy and didn’t recruit while the radical right group, manipulating people through the churches, has gained control.” A Houston businesswoman, she was booed at the Texas GOP convention this year when she declared: “There are people in this audience who want the Republican Party to be a church.”

McKenna, who plans to set up an organization to identify moderate Republicans and persuade them to become active in the party, said that activists of the far right have “recruited through the churches with gay bashing and anti-abortion crusades and other emotionally charged issues and they have taken over party organizations throughout Texas and other parts of the country.”

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