Mission to Iowa Broadens Fight Over Moral Agenda : Politics: Man’s crusade against gay issues in school vote has national effect. Gramm is seen as a beneficiary.

The morning before Bill Horn set off to establish his new missionary outpost, worshipers at the Springs of Life Ministries in Lancaster, Calif., asked God to give him courage.

Their prayers on that February morning in 1994 were not unlike those other congregations across America offer as missionaries embark for Rwanda, Bolivia or the Philippines.

But Springs of Life members believe there is now a more important front in the war between good and evil.

So the next day, Horn and his wife, Staci, herded their five children into their Toyota Previa van and pointed it across the desert toward Iowa. Horn’s mission: to make a stand against the moral decay he sees gnawing from the East and West coasts into the heartland.

Eighteen months later, Horn has certainly made his mark.

On Sept. 12, Des Moines residents will vote in a school board election that Horn helped turn into a battle over what he terms “the homosexual agenda” to undermine the American family. The tone of that contest is reflected by the fact that one candidate wears a bulletproof vest.

Unlikely as it might seem, Horn’s crusade is shaking up the presidential race as well--a bit of leverage brought about by the fact that Iowa’s caucuses next February will be the first balloting in the 1996 contest. A public alliance with Horn appears to have helped Texas Sen. Phil Gramm achieve a surprise draw with Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas in a mid-August straw poll conducted by the Iowa Republican Party. Presidential candidate and former commentator Patrick J. Buchanan has also praised Horn for leadership in the “fight for the soul of America.”

As Republican candidates flock here to campaign, it is beginning to look as if their position on gay rights may become yet another loyalty test in the often-bitter so-called culture war that increasingly shapes the nation’s politics. Horn’s story illustrates both the impact that a committed activist can have on politics and the deep emotions raised by the politics of culture.

Missionary Tools

The church that sent Horn on what its members see as a mission to defend America’s moral center is housed in a green-and-pink industrial complex in a stretch of Lancaster where there is still plenty of acreage strewn with Joshua trees and realtors’ signs.

But inside the cinder-block building are the tools of modern missionary work: A sophisticated sound stage, television cameras and shelves displaying the professional-quality videos produced under the name “The Report.”

Ty Beeson, Springs of Life’s white-haired pastor, created the multimedia enterprise to counter what he saw as a mainstream media that mocked and belittled “anyone who stood for absolute morals.”

Horn, who joined Springs of Life in 1986, decided his pastor had a point.

With blue eyes, curly blond hair and a frame built for snagging line drives, the 36-year-old Horn still looks like the athlete he was while playing baseball and rising to the rank of sergeant in the Army.

The Army taught the Mattoon, Ill., native the broadcasting trade, and by 1990, Horn had two children and did not like what he saw in their future, he said. He went to work for “The Report.”

“I figured it was time to stop being a spectator and get on the playing field. . . . This is one of the missions that I’ve been tapped to do.”

Three years later, when a newly elected President Clinton moved forward with his promise to eliminate discrimination against gays in the armed forces, “The Report” blanketed the military hierarchy and Congress with a controversial videotape entitled “The Gay Agenda,” which had been shot at gay marches and gay-pride parades.

The videotape helped to derail Clinton’s efforts, and “The Report” pressed ahead with similar productions, including “The Gay Agenda in Education.” “What we saw going on in the schools,” Horn said, “was very alarming.”

Ten months after arriving in Iowa, Horn said, he discovered what he saw as a problem in Des Moines. A math teacher showed Horn a draft of a proposed curriculum change. The three-page document urged the school board to pursue such goals as equality and justice for all people, the avoidance of “heterosexual bias” in language, “discussion of the nature of families including same-gender families and parenting,” and the promotion of “student awareness of homophobic thinking and behavior.”

To Horn, this “Proposal for Infusion of Sexual Orientation Issues in the Multicultural Nonsexist Education Plan” smacked of what he regarded as the misguided, politically correct excesses that had undermined public schools in such places as Los Angeles and New York.

“Look at test scores of California students and compare them to Iowa,” he said. “Iowa is in the top three in ACT scores. California is near the bottom. California is very proud it has Gay Pride Month in the L.A. schools. But their kids can’t read or write.”

Horn wanted to sound an alarm to Iowans. As a Christian, he said, he believes in love for every individual, regardless of his or her “sins.” At the same time, however, “there are certain behaviors as a society we should not tolerate. . . . There is nothing wrong with saying that you don’t want your fourth-grade son’s schoolteacher to come to school in high heels and a wig because he’s a cross-dresser and we need to be tolerant,” he said.

But Horn believed he faced a problem: He did not trust mainstream media outlets, some of which recruit gays and lesbians as reporters as part of their commitment to diversity.

So he contacted talk-radio host Jan Mickelson.

‘Limbaugh Wanna-Be’

Mickelson says that when people want to disparage him, they call him “a Rush Limbaugh wanna-be.” He brushes off that comparison, as well as the suggestion that his broadcasts about the sexual-orientation proposal inflamed people over a routine board issue.

“Most of us in Iowa advocate tolerance,” Mickelson said on a steamy August afternoon at the Iowa State Fair--the temporary home of his WHO radio show. “That means I’m willing to put up with those things I find disagreeable or repugnant in others if they’ll put up with me--that’s how you have peace in the public square.

“What the school board proposal did was say: ‘Tolerance is not enough--you will accept what we say. If you don’t, we’ll say you are psychologically repressed--homophobic--and have your view excluded from the public square.’ ”

Callers to Mickelson’s show clamored for a confrontation with the school board. On Jan. 2, more than 3,000 people met in a church auditorium. The next night 1,500 crammed a school board meeting.

In a meeting that lasted till 1:30 a.m., gay activists tried to convince the group that there is an urgent need to teach students tolerance for a minority that the mainstream culture has routinely attacked and harassed. Some said that their Jesus condemned hatred, not homosexuality.

But many parents felt the proposal went beyond tolerance to encourage a “lifestyle” they considered sinful.

DeAnne Sikes was among those Iowans who saw the school board proposal as just one of the societal forces that are eroding the values her family cherishes.

Sikes said she became involved in “pro-family” issues in 1986, when she sent her oldest boy to public school in Indianola, Iowa.

“I had no idea what had happened to public schools since I had left,” she said. “A tremendous part of the school day was given over to teaching emotional and family issues.” Concern about the state of public education led Sikes to teach her children at home and to become active in Concerned Women for America, a nondenominational, conservative organization that claims 600,000 members nationwide.

Sikes’ home office reflects her new brand of activism. The windows offer views of the corn and soybean fields surrounding her upscale home, and the walls are adorned with neatly framed biblical sayings.

But her Formica-topped desk space is all-business, sporting the new computer, copier, telephone, and fax machine she uses as Iowa president of Concerned Women to gently besiege fellow activists, pastors, legislators--and now, the spectrum of Republican presidential hopefuls--on everything from family tax credits to promoting school vouchers.

Rumors Circulated

Christian values were not alien to school board member Jonathan C. Wilson. His father is a Methodist minister. So is his sister. He said that as a boy he thought about becoming a minister himself.

Instead, Wilson went to law school, married, raised two children, joined a prestigious Des Moines law firm and spent 12 years on the school board.

In January, as debate about the proposal turned feverish, rumors that had long circulated about Wilson began to boil. Wilson made a decision.

At the crowded Jan. 24 board meeting, with his two children, father and sister in the front row and his ex-wife seated in the back, he stood and read a prepared text:

“The negative things that have been said in recent weeks about gay people--the awful stereotypes--are lies. I know they are lies because I am a gay person. . . .”

Wilson, 50, now sometimes wears body armor as he campaigns against eight other candidates for one of two school board seats up for election. He said he sees what is happening in Des Moines as part of the national struggle over crucial educational issues.

Public schools, Wilson said, cannot back away entirely from teaching values. Teachers, for example, must be free to say it is wrong to steal, even though there might be parents who say otherwise, he said.

By the same token, he said, “there are those who teach that it’s OK to discriminate against someone because of their sexual orientation, or because of interracial dating. [But] public schools should teach tolerance, even though it puts them in conflict with some moms and dads.”

Pointing to the involvement of the Iowa Christian Coalition and other conservative groups in the school board race, Wilson said he fears that Des Moines is a steppingstone in the religious right’s effort to capture the nation’s schools.

“My conviction,” he said, “is that my detractors are essentially hostile to public education. . . . I believe that Bill Horn, called by God or otherwise, came to Iowa for that broader political agenda.”

Horn has denied that his move to Iowa had such ulterior motives. But there is no denying that the local and national races have become entangled.

On the eve of the straw poll, at the urging of the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Anaheim, Calif.-based Traditional Values Coalition, Gramm mailed a letter to 6,000 Iowa subscribers to “The Report.” It said: “Thank God for Bill and the thousands of parents who would not be intimidated by the liberal media or the radical homosexual community.”

The lesson that public opposition to gays can benefit a Republican candidate has clearly spread. A few days after the Iowa straw poll, Dole publicly returned a $1,000 contribution his campaign had received months earlier from a gay GOP group. A Buchanan spokesman, knowing of a reporter’s interest in the Des Moines events, called recently to volunteer that his candidate was more sincerely committed to combatting the “gay agenda” than Gramm or Dole.

Kathleen DeBold, deputy director of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund in Washington, said she is not surprised. Conservative groups, she said, “are making a fortune off gay-baiting.”

“It’s a known fund-raiser for the radical right. It’s the bogyman thing. . . . When people are frightened, they’re more likely to open their wallets.”

In DeBold’s view, the charges of a “gay agenda” are really a smoke screen for a “right-wing agenda” that would “control the country by imposing a certain religious and moral philosophy on everyone, rather than [permitting] the democratic right to choose.”

Horn and those who share his views said choice is the issue. They think Des Moines parents this month will choose to reject the teaching of non-traditional values. Next year, they think, voters will choose a President who reflects those parents’ beliefs.

Back in Lancaster, the Springs of Life Ministries displays a tapestry of George Washington kneeling in prayer before a fluttering red, white and blue flag. Horn said he is fully confident in the words on that flag: “America Shall Be Saved.”