Religious Right Yields Limelight in GOP--for Now

“It’s a lovely party,” religious right activist Beverly LaHaye told hundreds of cheering antiabortion Republicans gathered in a makeshift tent structure at Sea World this week. “I only wish one thing: that this could be held on the floor of the Republican National Convention.”

Moments later, Gary Bauer, another religious right standard-bearer, predicted that LaHaye’s wish will come true four years from now, at the next GOP convention.

If religious right activists “stay the course,” Bauer told the party-goers, “we’ll have this party on the floor of the Republican National Convention in the year 2000.”

It was a one-two punch the crowd loved. And it summed up the religious right’s attitude toward Bob Dole, Jack Kemp and Campaign ‘96, as the Republicans ended their national convention Thursday.

In short, the religious conservatives’ strategy is to fade into the background for now, to allow the Republican Party to appeal to GOP moderates and independent swing voters in the effort to defeat President Clinton in November.

After the election, however, conservative leaders say the movement will resurface in GOP ranks, and will be stronger than ever.

“This movement is growing more and more solid and is nowhere near peaking,” said Bauer, president of the Family Research Council. “It wrote the party platform and got just what it wanted in there. No matter what happens in November, we’re the future of the Republican Party.”

Conservatives say the religious right has emerged from the Republican National Convention with more influence within the party than it has ever had, despite its disappearance this week from the prime-time spotlight.

Religious conservatives have “demonstrated their ability to work the system,” said analyst John Green, head of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. “They’re not about to let go now that they have shown they are the party’s most committed core and their numbers are growing.”

Dole was not the first choice as presidential candidate for most religious conservatives. But the antiabortion stance of both Dole and running mate Kemp has allowed the religious right to support the ticket without compromising its position on its most important political issue.

“I would have been happier with Pat Buchanan heading the ticket,” said Roger Lichtenberger, a religious right backer from the San Diego suburb of Bonita. “It would have been a better ticket. But anything’s better than what we’ve got” in incumbent Clinton.

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And the religious right prevailed at the convention where it counted--influencing the party’s campaign platform, as well as Dole’s choice of an antiabortion running mate.

During last week’s writing of the Republican platform, religious conservatives were everywhere, making sure that the document’s support for a constitutional amendment banning abortion remained in place, and that so-called “tolerance language” incorporating the views of more moderate supporters of abortion rights was relegated to an appendix.

This week, with the convention on nightly television, religious conservatives--primarily evangelical Protestants and some tradition-oriented Roman Catholics--agreed to stay out of the limelight, to avoid scaring off moderates and others Dole needs to win the election.

“If I had to choose between a prime-time speech and controlling the committee that writes the platform, I’ll take the latter any day,” said Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition and the religious right’s leading political operative.

“Conservative religious people are sophisticated enough to know you don’t always get what you want politically,” Reed said. “It’s a long-haul struggle. The Republican Party is not a church. It’s a political party, and the point of a political party is to win elections.”

Instead of hearing their leaders speak from the convention center podium--as both Buchanan and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson did at the 1992 Republican convention in Houston--religious conservatives contented themselves this time around with rallies at Sea World and Balboa Park and a Buchanan mini-convention in Escondido.

Ending abortion has been the primary goal of conservative political operatives. But now they are emphasizing other aspects of the Republican mandate as well, trying to appeal to fiscal conservatives who may not share their strong opposition to abortion and support for so-called “family values” and personal morality issues.

This week, in support of Dole, they spoke often in public about the candidate’s call for a 15% tax cut--which has become the centerpiece of the Republican presidential campaign--lauding it as a boon to financially strapped families.

But they also made clear that they do not intend to let Dole stray too far from the party platform they fought so hard for.

“In case you haven’t heard it from the [convention] podium the last two days, let me say it so there will be no doubt,” Reed told about 4,000 religious right supporters Wednesday in an amphitheater at Balboa Park. “The Republican Party is a pro-life party and will always be that, so long as we are here.”