Posts on Citizens for Community Values

For most of the election season, the Right has been anything but energized about supporting John McCain.  That had started to change in recent weeks, as their fear of a Barack Obama presidency began to overpower their principles and they initiated efforts to mobilize on his behalf.  At least until McCain suggested that he was open to the idea of naming a pro-choice running mate, at which point the Right began to freak out and, as World Magazine reports, the massive mobilization efforts they had planned came to a screeching halt:

[Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values] said McCain appeared sincere and serious about his pro-life and pro-marriage views. After the June meeting, Burress was poised to deliver for McCain in Ohio: With nearly 1 million contacts in the CCV database, Burress began planning mailings that would tout McCain’s pro-life position.

Burress told WORLD he was also in talks with other Christian groups to send material to their state mailing lists: 100,000 contacts from Focus on the Family, 100,000 from the American Family Association, and some 50,000 from the Family Research Council, according to Burress.

…

Then came August 13: When Burress heard McCain’s comments about the possibility of a pro-abortion running mate, the grassroots gears screeched to a halt. “The train has stopped in its tracks,” Burress told WORLD.

Until McCain announces his running mate, Burress says all plans for grassroots activities are on hold. Political observers say McCain will likely announce his running mate next Friday— the day after Obama delivers his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Burress and other social conservatives remain hopeful that McCain will pick a pro-life candidate, and Burress says he’s confident that evangelicals in Ohio would enthusiastically support him if he does. If he doesn’t? “It will feel like a kick in the stomach,” said Burress. “And you don’t feel like working very hard when you’ve been kicked in the stomach.”

If there is one thing Religious Right activists apparently can’t stand, it’s forums on the role of faith in public life that they don’t control.  As we noted earlier this week, Tony Perkins, Mike Huckabee, and Lou Engle are set to hold a press conference on Friday timed to coincide with joint appearance by Barack Obama and John McCain at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church where they are set to “discuss faith in public life, AIDS, the environment and other issues.”

Now, other Religious Right activists have announced that they are having their own conference call with reporters following the event on Saturday in order to provide the media with “an expanded perspective on how evangelicals see the relationship between faith and public policy” – by which they mean the right-wing perspective:   

Some of the nation's top evangelical leaders – Tom Minnery, Focus on the Family; Bishop Harry Jackson, Senior pastor, Hope Christian Church and Chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition; Janet Folger, President and Founder of Faith2Action and national radio host; Phil Burress, President of Citizens for Community Values, among others.

Martha Zoller, Talk Radio World Today Host will be the moderator.

WHAT: Press Conference Call to gauge reaction of conservatives and evangelicals to the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency, moderated by Pastor Rick Warren. The Forum takes place on Saturday, Aug. 16, 2008 and features Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill.

WHEN: Press teleconference call takes place at 10:30 EDT/7:30 PDT by calling: Toll-free: 1-888-296-6828. Passcode is: 418647# (announce name and media organization). If you would like to receive speaker bios, transcripts and/or audio versions of the interviews, please email Debbie@NewsGuests.com.

INFO: This press call event provides an opportunity for an informed response to the event at Saddleback Church, thus providing an expanded perspective on how evangelicals see the relationship between faith and public policy. The press conference call will give reporters access to alternative views on each candidate's presentation at the Saddleback Forum.

After a private meeting with John McCain, Ohio Religious Right icon Phil Burress remained a little ho-hum about the candidate he felt obligated to support, but soon enough—after McCain announced his support for California’s anti-gay marriage amendment, anyway—Burress was bubbling over with excitement:

He says McCain was courteous and took detailed notes on what the six had to say about issues such as the sanctity of life, marriage, and judges. "It was so refreshing to me because he was so different than any other politician that I have ever met," describes Burress. He says McCain is not swayed like other politicians. …

"...[I] left there a changed man," he admits.

Burress wrote to his supporters that after the meeting, “40 Ohio Pro-Family Forum leaders … have decided to move forward and start working to educate Ohio Values Voters about the vast differences between McCain and Obama.”

I was once one of those people who said "no way" to Senator John McCain as President. No longer. The stakes are too high. And if Obama wins I need to able to get up on November 5th, look at myself in the mirror, and when I pray, say, "Lord, I did all that I could."

And today, Burress joined a hundred other activists—including far-right heavyweights Phyllis Schlafly and David Barton—in Denver to commit to campaign for McCain:

"Collectively we feel that he will support and advance those moral values that we hold much greater than Obama, who in our view will decimate moral values," said Mat Staver, the chairman of Liberty Counsel, a legal advocacy group, who previously supported Mike Huckabee's candidacy. …

The group included leaders like Phyllis Schlafly, the long-time leader of Eagle Forum; Steve Strang, the publisher of Charisma magazine; Phil Burress, a prominent Ohio marriage and anti-pornography activist; David Barton, the founder of WallBuilders and Donald Hodel, a former secretary of the Interior, who previously served on the board of Focus on the Family. Jim Dobson, the head of Focus and an outspoken critic of McCain, did not attend. The McCain campaign was also not directly represented at the meeting.

A second person who attended the event, but asked not to be named, said that the group was motivated principally by a desire to defeat Barack Obama. "None of these people want to meet their maker knowing that they didn't do everything they could to keep Barack Obama from being president," the participant said. "You've got these two people running for president. One of them is going to become president. That's the perspective. That that's the whole discussion." …

On a recent swing through Ohio, McCain met with a group of religious leaders and activists, including Burress, who has previously been critical of McCain's lack of outreach to Christian conservatives. According to two participants at the Tuesday meeting in Denver, Burress spoke out strongly in favor of uniting behind McCain's candidacy.

Staver said the McCain campaign was making progress but still had more work to do. "I think that the outreach to the community has to increase significantly," he said. "There is a clear enthusiasm."

Several articles have appeared in recent months suggesting that Mike Huckabee is some sort of “new breed” of evangelical – one who is not committed only to opposing abortion and gay rights, but also cares about the environment and the poor.  And Huckabee has worked hard to play up the idea that he is nothing like traditional demagoguing Religious Right preachers such as Pat Robertson or the late Jerry Falwell.  

As Huckabee likes to say, while he may be conservative, he’s “just not angry about it” – or, to put it another way, he drinks “a different kind of Jesus juice. To the press, this seems to be enough to qualify Huckabee as a “different kind of evangelical,” and exempts him from having to explain himself when he proclaims that we need to “amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards.” 

An example of this sort of coverage appeared on the New York Times over the weekend:

Much of the national leadership of the Christian conservative movement has turned a cold shoulder to the Republican presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, wary of his populist approach to economic issues and his criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But that has only fired up Brett and Alex Harris.

The Harris brothers, 19-year-old evangelical authors and speakers who grew up steeped in the conservative Christian movement, are the creators of Huck’s Army, an online network that has connected 12,000 Huckabee campaign volunteers, including several hundred in Michigan, which votes Tuesday, and South Carolina, which votes Saturday.

They say they like Mr. Huckabee for the same reason many of their elders do not: “He reaches outside the normal Republican box,” Brett Harris said in an interview from his home near Portland, Ore.

The brothers fell for Mr. Huckabee last August when they saw him draw applause on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” for explaining that he believed in a Christian obligation to care for prenatal “life” and also education, health care, jobs and other aspects of “life.” “It is a new kind of evangelical conservative position,” Brett Harris said. Alex Harris added, “And we are not going to have to be embarrassed about him.”

The article noted how Huckabee’s rise in the polls has occurred “without the backing of, and even over the opposition of, the movement’s most visible leaders, many of whom have either criticized him or endorsed other candidates.”  While Religious Right powerbrokers like Tony Perkins, James Dobson, and Gary Bauer have credited Huckabee for energizing evangelical voters, all have made clear that they do not support his candidacy and seemingly have no intention of doing so.

But just because the most prominent right-wing activists are reluctant to climb aboard the Huckabee bandwagon doesn’t mean that those already on board are in any way moderates or representative of some sort of new, more moderate evangelical movement.  In fact, most of Huckabee’s backers are even more radical.

Max Blumenthal reports on connection between Romney charges and Thompson defense.

Adding to charges by MassResistance and others that Mitt Romney “bungled” gay marriage when he was governor of Massachusetts, the candidate is now getting grief about his business career. Romney, in his effort to secure support from social conservatives, has cited pornography as among the things he stands against, but some religious-right activists are questioning his anti-porn credentials.

Phil Burress of Citizens for Community Values says of Strickland, “we'll have the ability with our friends in the House and the Senate to kill anything that he may try.”

Peter LaBarbera, others call homosexuality “pink elephant” in AIDS room. Meanwhile: Christian Defense Coalition questions Rick Warren’s “commitment” to fighting abortion after Obama invitation.

"David Kuo? Who is he?" says Paul Weyrich.

On the first day of the Values Voter Summit, speakers discussed embryonic stem-cell research (Sen. Brownback: "If you research and you kill a human at that stage [embryo], that human doesn't have a rest of a life"), abortion (Bishop Wellington Boone: African Americans are an "endangered species" because of "black genocide" through abortion), and the war on terror (James Dobson, ever conscious of upcoming elections: "I really see that as a family issue"). But by far the greatest emphasis was placed on the supposed dangers of the "homosexual agenda."

While some speakers, such as Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Sen. George Allen (R-Virginia), asserted that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples is a "foundational value" upon which America is built, and others proclaimed the unfitness of gays to be parents (Jennifer Giroux of Citizens for Community Values: "The ultimate child abuse is placing a child in a gay home"), many speakers pushed the notion of a "homosexual agenda" to the limit. Dobson asserted that the goal of advocates of same-sex marriage is to simply "bring down marriage." (Family Research Council President Tony Perkins claimed that the divorce of the Goodridges, named in the Massachusetts case that established marriage equality in the state, proves that point. "That tells you the commitment to the institution of marriage," he said.) Princeton Professor Robert George, architect of the "Princeton Principles" against gay marriage, warned that the "forces arrayed against the conjugal conception of marriage are very powerful ... And they will strike hard."

And, beginning with Romney, speakers warned that equality for gays will lead to "repression" of Christians. "The homosexual agenda and [freedom of] religion are on a collision course," said Alan Sears of the Alliance Defense Fund, as Perkins added that "They know they must silence the church." Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colorado), sponsor of the federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, said that "If we have gay marriage, our religious liberties are gone!" And Maggie Gallagher, noting the analogy between the gay rights movement and the civil rights movement, said that "They're going to have to start enforcing" some kind of "repression," just as there is "a broad array of ways in which the law penalizes, marginalizes, and punishes racial bigots."