It’s been a banner year for Florida’s Religious Right. In 2006, activists failed to get enough signatures to put their anti-gay marriage amendment on the ballot (despite help from the Republican Party), and its favored candidate for governor lost the GOP primary, leading one conservative commentator to declare that “the once-mighty ‘organized’ Christian-conservative voting bloc is no longer intact.”
The last few months have been a different story. In September, dozens of national religious-right activists converged on Fort Lauderdale for the Values Voter Presidential Debate, including Don Wildmon, Phyllis Schlafly, and Rick Scarborough. Even more headliners came to the state just days later for the Family Impact Summit, including Tony Perkins and Richard Land. All the attention must have paid off: Florida 4 Marriage succeeded in gathering enough signatures to put an anti-gay marriage amendment on the 2008 ballot.
Meanwhile, a CBN report warns of the threat of the “gay agenda” in Washington State, which recently passed a domestic partnership law, and in California, where anti-gay activists are in a frenzy over a recently-passed law that bars schools from promoting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. While this protection is already in effect when in comes to discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity, according to “700 Club” host Pat Robertson, when it comes to gays it’s a matter of “trying to recruit more of the straight population.”
