Posts on Michael Farris

With the opening of the new Supreme Court term today, the newspapers are full of articles explaining that the future of the Court will depend on the outcome of the election, especially on the issue such as reproductive choice:

Every four years, defenders of abortion rights proclaim that the fate of Roe vs. Wade hangs on the outcome of the presidential election.

This year, they may be right.

Through most of the 1990s and until recently, the Supreme Court had a solid 6-3 majority in favor of upholding the right of a woman to choose abortion. But the margin has shrunk to one, now that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is retired and has been replaced by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

And Justice John Paul Stevens, a leader of the narrow majority for abortion rights, is 88.

"Clearly, Roe is on the line this time," said Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen, a former lawyer for NARAL Pro-Choice America. "It is quite clear they have four votes against it. If the next president appoints one more, the odds are it will be overruled."

But for Religious Right activists who just can’t wait to see how it all turns out, there is a new movie opening through which they can live out their fantasies as they watch students at Patrick Henry College (and co-starring its founder, Michael Farris) convince the Supreme Court to finally overturn Roe … or at least win a moot court competition or something:

It is the first Monday in October and a future U.S. Supreme Court tackles the reversal of Roe vs. Wade in a dramatic new pro-life movie, COME WHAT MAY (CWM). The controversial film has received rave reviews from preview audiences nationwide, drawing large crowds in Oregon where 800 moviegoers filled the Grants Pass Performing Arts Center to capacity. Six distributors are vying for CWM, including the company currently distributing the new Christian blockbuster, FIREPROOF.

"What's remarkable is that COME WHAT MAY, a 2008 Redemptive Storyteller Award winner, was largely produced by over 40 homeschooled students mentored by only a handful of professionals," according to Mac Nichols, a tax attorney who plays one of the movie's U.S. Supreme Court Justices.

Advent Film Group (AFG) produced the micro-budget movie in association with Patrick Henry College (PHC), a true-to-life powerhouse in collegiate debate and moot court competition. The movie's legal argument is solid, claims George Escobar, founder of AFG. Dr. Michael Farris, PHC founder and chancellor, wrote the film's legal framework. Farris, a constitutional attorney, has successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.

It is hard to overstate the shockwave that John McCain sent through the GOP’s right-wing base with his comments earlier this week that he would not rule out the possibility of naming a pro-choice running mate (though not a pro-gay one, of course).

Right-wing leaders were quick to denounce the statement, with Tony Perkins telling the Washington Times yesterday that “if he picks a pro-choice running mate, I don't see how he can win this race."  And today, Phyllis Schlafly weighed in, calling it a “mistake,” and others obviously share that assessment:

"If Tom Ridge is on the ticket, I will not be voting Republican," Home School Legal Defense Association President Mike Farris said told The Washington Times. He thought for a moment, then added: "I won't be voting Democratic either."

The widely influential founder and chairman of the American Family Association Chairman, Donald P. Wildmon, said a Ridge pick would be a "disaster for Republicans."

Concerned Women for America Chairman Beverly LaHaye said "many will walk" away from the Republican ticket if it includes a pro-choice vice president.

Elsewhere, state-based right-wing leaders, many of whom have had personal meetings with McCain, are likewise making their displeasure known: 

“It absolutely floored me,” said Phil Burress, head of the Ohio-based Citizens for Community Values. “It would doom him in Ohio.”

Burress emailed about a dozen “pro-family leaders” he knows outside Ohio and forwarded it to three McCain aides tasked with Christian conservative outreach.

“That choice will end his bid for the presidency and spell defeat for other Republican candidates,” Burress wrote in the message.

He and other Ohio conservatives met privately with McCain in June, and while the nominee didn’t promise them an anti-abortion rights running mate, his staff said they could “almost guarantee” that would be the case, Burress recalled.

Now, Burress said, “he’s not even sure [Christian conservatives] would vote for him let alone work for him if he picked a pro-abortion running mate.”

James Muffett, head of Michigan’s Citizens for Traditional Values, met with McCain along with a handful of other Michigan-based social conservatives Wednesday night.

…

To select a running mate who supports abortion rights would be “wrong-headed, short-sighted, fracture the Republican Party and not allow us to capitalize on the Democratic Party’s fracture right now,” Muffett argued.

“If he does that, it makes our job 100 times harder. It would dampen enthusiasm at a time when evangelicals are looking for ways to gin up enthusiasm.”

McCain, Muffett said, got that message in their meeting.

“Some people in the movement say it would be the kiss of death. He heard that in the room last night.”

Predictably, Gary Bauer - one of McCain’s earliest right-wing supporters who seems to only show up when the candidate does something to anger Bauer’s right-wing allies - appeared on the scene to assure them that there was nothing to worry about:

Gary Bauer, founder of the Campaign for Working Families, said he isn't worried.

"I’m confident that at the end of the day, the running mate will be pro-life," he told Family News in Focus.

McCain has a solid pro-life voting record on abortion issues and has promised to appoint "strict constructionists" to the Supreme Court.

Last week, there was speculation swirling that John McCain was considering choosing one-time presidential rival Mike Huckabee as his vice-presidential running mate and over the weekend, Huckabee himself made it abundantly clear that he really, really wants this job:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said yesterday he’d like to be John McCain’s running mate.

“There’s no one I would rather be on a ticket with than John McCain,” said Huckabee, who was a stronger than expected challenger against McCain for the Republican presidential nomination.

“All during the campaign when I was his rival, not a running mate, there was no one who was more complimentary of him publicly and privately. . . . I still wanted to win, but if I couldn’t, John McCain was always the guy I would have supported and have now supported.”

The conventional wisdom is that picking Huckabee would go a long way toward helping McCain shore up the right-wing base that has been somewhat reluctant to support him, given that McCain’s own outreach to that community has little to show so far beyond the controversy generated by the endorsements of John Hagee and Rod Parsely.   

Considering that McCain’s own efforts to woo the Right have been such a disaster, it might behoove his campaign to think long and hard about bringing Huckabee on board because if he climbs aboard the Straight Talk Express, he’ll be bringing his own right-wing baggage along for the ride. 

It was at a Council for National Policy meeting back in September that the Goldilocks brigade of the Religious Right, led by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, threatened to break away from the Republican Party if Rudy Giuliani won the nomination. And the CNP meeting in March was one of John McCain’s first stops after securing the GOP mantle—continuing his pandering to the fringe.

Now, Warren Cole Smith of the conservative-Christian World magazine relates a tense scene from the CNP meeting:

Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association, an early supporter of Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, chided the group for cold-shouldering his candidate until it was too late. Others, including Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, disagreed. The meeting quickly threatened to dissolve into accusations, rebuttals, and recriminations.

Then, venerable Paul Weyrich—a founder of the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the Council for National Policy (CNP)—raised his hand to speak. Weyrich is a man whose mortality is plain to see. A freak accident several years ago left him with a spinal injury, which ultimately led to both his legs being amputated in 2005. He now gets around in a motorized wheelchair. He is visibly paler and grayer than he was just a few years ago, a fact not lost on many of his friends in the room, some of whom had fought in the political trenches with him since the 1960s.

The room—which had been taken over by argument and side-conversations—became suddenly quiet. Weyrich, a Romney supporter and one of those Farris had chastised for not supporting Huckabee, steered his wheelchair to the front of the room and slowly turned to face his compatriots. In a voice barely above a whisper, he said, "Friends, before all of you and before almighty God, I want to say I was wrong."

In a quiet, brief, but passionate speech, Weyrich essentially confessed that he and the other leaders should have backed Huckabee, a candidate who shared their values more fully than any other candidate in a generation. He agreed with Farris that many conservative leaders had blown it. By chasing other candidates with greater visibility, they failed to see what many of their supporters in the trenches saw clearly: Huckabee was their guy.

Mike Huckabee’s campaign rolls on, though he seems either unwilling or unable to branch out beyond his Religious Right base of support:

Huckabee surprised by winning the Iowa caucus, but has little money and finished a distant fourth in Florida.

The former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher was in Newport Beach for a fundraiser at a supporter's home before traveling to Los Angeles for an Americans of Faith event and to Simi Valley for the GOP presidential debate.

Americans of Faith, which seems to be going by the name Operation Vote nowadays, was founded back in 2004 to register and mobilize 5 million Christian voters by Jay Sekulow, who just so happens to be Chair of Romney’s Faith and Values Steering Committee, as well as a member of Romney’s Advisory Committee On The Constitution And The Courts.

The Passion of the Religious Conservatives

1 May 2004

National Journal

Several prominent evangelical-movement leaders, as well as businessmen, social conservatives, and other like-minded believers, have put together ambitious voter-registration efforts that aim to get the Christian faithful to the polls on Election Day. Though nominally nonpartisan, these "ground- war" efforts are expected to benefit Republicans far more than Democrats because of such hot-button issues for conservatives as gay marriage and abortion.

One effort is being run by Americans of Faith, a Virginia-based tax-exempt group that is co-chaired by Bush fundraising "Pioneer" Edward Atsinger, who is president of Salem Communications, the nation's largest Christian radio broadcaster; and Jay Alan Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit launched by Pat Robertson that champions religious causes.

"I've been talking about this for the last 10 years," Sekulow said. "Evangelicals haven't been good participants in elections. We're talking about Christian civic participation." Americans of Faith hopes to raise about $800,000 and will use the Internet, Christian radio, and music festivals, as well as churches and other venues, to try to reach its goal of registering 2 million new voters from the conservative Christian community in time for the November election.

Giving extra firepower to evangelicals, the group's board includes such well-known leaders as Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council in Washington, and Frank Wright, the head of the National Religious Broadcasters.

According to a 2004 Talon News article, Americans of Faith’s Board of Directors includes, in addition to Sekulow and Perkins, the likes of Richard Land, Mike Farris, and David Barton. 

While Farris has endorsed Huckabee and Barton has been sharing the stage with him in recent weeks, Land and Perkins have been conspicuously cold toward his campaign - and considering that the organization’s founder is a key backer of Huckabee’s main rival, it is odd that Huckabee would be invited to address an Americans of Faith event, especially since the longer he stays in the race, the more damage he does to Romney.  

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.

While it is debatable that God is really responsible for Mike Huckabee’s recent rise in the polls, as he claims, it is clear that something is at work which has propelled the one-time “also ran” into a legitimate contender for the Republican presidential nomination – and that something appears to be a network of disparate but committed right-wing grassroots activists and organizations.  As the Dallas Morning News recently explained:

Mike Huckabee's political rise has been fueled by a vast network of local Christian leaders largely unknown to the general public but powerfully influential in evangelical circles.

That strategy – methodically rolling up the support of these grass-roots networks – has paid big dividends, helping catapult Mr. Huckabee ahead in Iowa and boosting his prospects in the Republican field.

"All these leaders that most of the national media don't recognize, they're all coming to Huckabee," said supporter Kelly Shackelford of Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute.

…

"You've got the home-school network. You've got the right-to-life network. You've got networks of megachurches," said John Green of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

"The Huckabee campaign apparently understands something about the evangelical community that people outside don't – that it's highly decentralized," he said.

So far, Huckabee has been rolling up an ever-growing list of B-list right-wing figures while courting even fringier figures such as Steve Hotze and John Hagee, whom Huckabee praised as "one of the great Christian leaders of our nation."  Meanwhile, his supporters were all geared up to travel around Iowa and put on “non-partisan” rallies benefiting him until they ran into problems with the weather and their tour bus.   

But Huckabee’s biggest and most active boosters, at least in Iowa, seem to be home-schoolers who are, as the Des Moines Register described them, “Republicans … united by core principles, especially their rejection of public schools in favor of their own religious-based teaching”:

"They stand for the same things, and they trust each other," said Christine Hurley, a Pleasant Hill Republican active in the state's home-school network.

"I think that's what's happening with the Huckabee thing," said Hurley, who supports Huckabee. "When you understand he's a Baptist minister, you don't have to ask what he stands for."

…

Michael Farris' endorsement of Huckabee in May, meaningless to much of the voting public, sent a strong signal to Crawford and other Christian home-school families in Iowa. Farris is founder and chairman of the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association and the national figure for Christian home-school families.

"That was sort of the icing on the cake," Crawford said of Farris' endorsement. "It wasn't the be-all and end-all. But that was the thing that got me to take Governor Huckabee seriously."

The Washington Post reported on the same phenomenon, as has the Los Angeles Times, and even CBN’s David Brody. And while Mike Farris might not be a household name, he is a longtime right-wing activist (having served as general counsel for Concerned Women for America and as executive director and general counsel of the Washington state chapter of the Moral Majority) and obviously extremely influential within the home-school movement.  

In the end, what really excites these home-schoolers about Huckabee is that he is the most “biblically qualified” candidate out there:

"[Home-school families] see it as a civic duty and it's important to try to elect leaders who hold the same values families do. They get behind a candidate and support them," said [Justin] LaVan, who supports Huckabee as a "biblically qualified" figure "who doesn't want to put up barriers or increase control over home-schooling."

The right-wing endorsements just keep pouring in for Mike Huckabee.

In addition to B-list celebrities like Chuck Norris and Ric Flair, Huckabee has also been racking up endorsements from B-list Religious Right leaders such as Rick Scarborough, Don Wildmon, and Tim and Beverly LaHaye. And now Huckabee has secured the support of Jerry Falwell, Jr.:

Former Arkansas Governor and Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee announced the personal endorsement of Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. Falwell is the son of the late Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University and Falwell Ministries.

"I knew Jerry's dad for more than 30 years and have admired the long tradition of Liberty University and the legacy for creating 'Champions for Christ'," Huckabee said. "Dr. Falwell's vision of helping students to start with nothing to believe they can change the world is exactly what our campaign is all about."

Huckabee also unveiled his Faith and Family Values Coalition which, as one would expect, is chock full of Religious Right figures of varying fame and influence:

Dr. Jerry Jenkins, best-selling author, including the Left Behind series; Colorado

Star Parker, Founder and president of CURE;* Washington D.C.

Michael Farris, Chair of Home School Legal Defense Association* and Chancellor of Patrick Henry College;* Virginia

William J. Murray, Chair of Religious Freedom Coalition,* Chair of Government is Not God PAC,* and author; Washington D.C.

Don Wildmon, Founder and Chairman of American Family Association;* Mississippi

Dr. Mark Bailey, President of Dallas Theological Seminary;* Texas

Rick Scarborough, Founder and President of Vision America;* Texas

Jerry Cox, President of Arkansas Family Council;* Arkansas

Janet Folger, President of Faith2Action;* Florida

Jim Pfaff, President and CEO of the Colorado Family Action;* Colorado

Mathew Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel*/ Dean of Liberty University Law School;* Virginia

Kelly Shackelford, Chief Counsel, Liberty Legal Institute and President of Free Market Foundation;* Texas

Phil Burress, President of Citizens for Community Values;* Ohio

As for Janet Folger, not only is she a member of the coalition, she is also serving as co-chair. This comes as no surprise, as Folger has been Huckabee's most vocal backer ever since he won the straw poll at the Values Voter Debate, which she organized.

It should also be noted that Folger personally invited the Grand Avenue Church of God choir to perform their rendition of "Why Should God Bless America?" at the debate:

In recent weeks, Folger has been going all out for Huckabee in her WorldNetDaily columns, calling Hillary Clinton "Queen of Slaughter" and claiming that, if elected, Clinton will put Christians in prison.

For that, Huckabee appears to have decided that she deserves to serve as co-chair of his Faith and Family Values Coalition.