Legacy

The Dallas Morning News follows up on the recent “One Day Crusade” in Lufkin, Texas held by Rick Scarborough, Alan Keyes, and Gordon Klingenschmitt to organize “Patriot Pastors” and register “Values Voters” through the 2008 election. The question asked by the article is whether “traditional-value voters” will be a driving force in 2008, in the way religious-right leaders claimed them to have been in 2004.

Rudy Giuliani, anathema to these activists for his positions on social wedge issues, remains at the top of polls of Republican primary voters, and, as a 2006 Center for American Values in Public Life survey showed, abortion and gay marriage were never the determining factors for the vast majority of Evangelical voters, much less voters in general. And as the Morning News notes, some conservative Christian activists are even broadening their agendas to issues that fall outside their traditional place in the right-wing coalition.