Uploaded by Ben Morehead, Associate Publisher of Policy Review magazine and authorized agent for the copyright owner(s). CASTING A WIDER NET Religious Conservatives Move Beyond Abortion and Homosexuality by Ralph Reed Jr. From the Summer 1993 issue of Policy Review To subscribe to Policy Review, call (800) 544-4843 During Adlai Stevenson's second losing campaign for the presidency in 1956, Harry Truman met with the embattled candidate to offer him some advice. Mr. Stevenson, then badly trailing Dwight Eisenhower, asked the former president what he was doing wrong. Mr. Truman led him to the window, pointed to a man walking down the street below, and said, "What you've got to do is figure out how to reach that man." This same dilemma now faces the pro-family movement. Though blessed with talented leadership, strong grassroots support, and enormous financial resources, it has not yet completely connected its agenda with average voters. The pro-family movement still has limited appeal even among the 40 million voters who attend church frequently, identify themselves as evangelicals or orthodox Roman Catholics, and consider themselves traditionalists on cultural issues. Developing a Broad Agenda There are many explanations for this political disconnect. One is a basic breakdown in communication. In his incisive critique of the "family values" theme of the 1992 campaign, pollster Richard Wirthlin points out that political communication proceeds on three levels: policy, personal benefit, and values. The pro-family movement's political rhetoric has often been policy-thin and value-laden, leaving many voters tuned out. Values are important to voters, but values alone are not enough. The successful candidate or movement must promote policies that personally benefit voters -- such as tax cuts, education vouchers, higher wages, or retirement benefits. Without specific policies designed to benefit families and children, appeals to family values or America's Judeo-Christian heritage will fall on deaf ears. A related shortcoming is that pro-family activists have built their movement around personalities rather than policies. Visible religious figures play a vital role in building grassroots membership and generating financial support. But their personal charisma, while an important asset, is no substitute for good policy. Prominent personalities are always critical in building social movements. Labor unions were dominated in the 1940s and 1960s by controversial figures like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers or Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters. Today, however, labor organizers are more likely to be lower-profile political professionals. The same can be said of the civil-rights movement, which no longer has one dominant figure such as Martin Luther King. A similar transition will probably occur in the pro-family movement during the coming decade. The pro-family movement in recent years has put too much emphasis on political solutions to America's social problems. Political involvement alone will not bring about cultural renewal: it is also important for the faith community to feed the hungry, teach the illiterate, provide loving care for unwed mothers, bring together families, and reawaken the spiritual life of criminals. These require cultural institutions more than election-day mobilization. The most urgent challenge for pro-family conservatives is to develop a broader issues agenda. The pro-family movement has limited its effectiveness by concentrating disproportionately on issues such as abortion and homosexuality. These are vital moral issues, and must remain an important part of the message. To win at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion, however, the pro-family movement must speak to the concerns of average voters in the areas of taxes, crime, government waste, health care, and financial security. Attracting a Majority of Voters The issues of abortion and gay rights have been important in attracting activists and building coalitions. When tactics become ends in themselves, however, social movements falter. Abolitionists spent decades in the early 19th century petitioning Congress in vain for anti-slavery laws before expanding their focus to the free soil movement. Cesar Chavez built the United Farmworkers union in the 1960s with hunger strikes and boycotts. But as he continued the same organizational tactics, membership in his union plummeted, falling to under 20,000 by the time of his death earlier this year. If the pro-family movement is not to suffer the same fate, the cluster of pro-family issues must now be expanded to attract a majority of voters. Network exit polls conducted in 1992 are instructive. Only 12 percent of voters indicated that abortion was a key issue in their voting decision. Even more startling, only 22 percent of self-identified, born-again evangelicals -- about 24 percent of the total electorate -- listed abortion as an important voting issue. And only 16 percent of all voters listed family values as one of the most important issues in their voting behavior. There is growing evidence that suggests that evangelicals and their Roman Catholic allies are concerned about the same issues as the broader electorate, but with a pro-family twist. Their primary interest is not to legislate against the sins of others, but to protect the health, welfare, and financial security of their own families. In this sense, the pro-family movement and its natural constituency have passed like two ships in the night. A recent survey by the Marketing Research Institute found that, aside from the economy, the chief concern of voters who attend church four times a month was not abortion, pornography, or prayer in school, but cutting waste in government and reducing the deficit. A poll of GOP voters by Fabrizio, McLaughlin and Associates in January, 1993, also found that the issue that most united evangelicals and fiscal conservatives was the deficit. The reason is simple. Taxes fall heaviest on middle-class families with children, who must tighten their belts and balance their checkbooks. They wonder why government cannot do the same. The furor over federal funding of the arts in 1990 and 1991 was not about censorship, but about eliminating government waste and abuse. According to exit polls, 17 percent of self-identified evangelicals in 1992 cast their ballots for Ross Perot, only two percent less than the total electorate. Perot downplayed or avoided stating his support for taxpayer funding of abortion. The centerpiece of his campaign was deficit reduction, an issue that resonates among middle-class families. Famine in Family Time Family tax relief is another important issue to churchgoing voters. Members of both political parties are beginning to understand the importance of reducing the tax penalties on savings, capital formation, and jobs creation. The family, too, exemplifies Justice John Marshall's admonition that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." In 1950 only 2 percent of the income of the average family of four in America went to pay federal income taxes. Today that figure is 24 percent. When state, local, and property taxes are included, the typical family of four spends a whopping 37 percent of its income to pay its tax bill. Higher taxes have torn at the fabric of the American family. In many families, both parents must work just to make ends meet. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the second income generates an average of only 27 percent of total household income. Because of confiscatory tax rates, therefore, mothers and fathers often work for the sole purpose of paying for taxes, meals, wardrobe expenses, and day care. Children are the main victims of this financial strain. As employers and the government encroach on the time and attention of parents, children are left to pick up the crumbs from the table. The result is a famine in family time. In 1965 parents spent 30 hours each week in direct, intimate interaction with their children. By 1985 that figure had fallen to only 17 hours per week, and today shows no signs of increasing. An essential principle that should guide tax policy is that income dedicated to the care and nurturing of children is sacrosanct and should be exempt from taxation. The standard deduction for dependents today is only $2,300. However, if the standard deduction had kept pace with inflation since World War II, its value today would be approximately $8,000. No family of four in America with an income of $32,000 or less would pay federal income tax. One promising step is a bill offered by Representatives Rod Grams and Tim Hutchinson that would provide a $500 tax credit for each child and pay for it with a cap on discretionary domestic spending. In the late 1970s, the U.S. economy labored under the twin burdens of inflation and sluggish growth. The challenge of fiscal policy at that time was to lower marginal tax rates to generate economic growth and create jobs without inflation. In the 1990s the primary objective of fiscal policy should be to make the tax code more family friendly, allowing parents to keep more income. Health care is another issue that directly affects the family's pocketbook. It is inextricably linked to the moral health of society. Good health reflects good living; poor health in many cases betrays poor living. Yet this simple fact is almost entirely missing from the current policy debate over health care on Capitol Hill. The United States spends $800 billion a year on health care, roughly 14 percent of its entire gross domestic product. As Dr. Leroy Schwartz of Health Policy International has documented, many of the most expensive items in the health care budget are directly attributable to behavioral problems. Crack babies, with intensive care costs of $63,000 per infant, cost $25 billion. Drug abuse and its associated violence cost the nation additional tens of billions of dollars. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Lung cancer claimed 146,000 lives last year; 90 percent of these victims were cigarette smokers. Recent figures indicate that the direct cost of lung cancer on the economy may be as high as $5 billion, with an additional $10.1 billion of indirect costs such as lost wages. America's 18 million alcoholics suffer from cirrhosis of the liver and a host of other costly ailments. Hospital emergency rooms overflow with the victims of gang wars, drive-by shootings, and domestic quarrels. Murder, assault, and unintentional injuries run up a bill of $100 billion a year. Sexual promiscuity imposes its own terrible costs, including hepatitis, AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases. Unless these widespread social pathologies are ameliorated, there can be no genuine solution to the health care cost crisis. Poor physiological health is often a reflection of psychological disorders such as stress, loneliness, marital discord, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, lack of exercise, or poor eating habits. The healthiest environment for persons suffering from these disorders is not a hospital, but a loving home. Protecting the Children The key to understanding evangelical and Roman Catholic voters is appreciating their devotion to their children. Voting behavior was once determined by geography or income. Today, the two most predictive demographic characteristics of conservative voting behavior are church attendance and having children present in the home. Survey data reveals that 47 percent of the electorate attends church twice or more a month. Seventy-six percent of churchgoing voters are married, and 66 percent have children. Crime is a major issue to churchgoing voters because they worry about protecting their children. Parents no longer feel that their children can safely venture more than two blocks from their homes, and no wonder. While U.S. population has increased only 41 percent since 1960, violent crime has increased 560 percent. The number of crimes has increased from 4.7 million in 1965 to 14.8 million in 1990. The U.S. violent crime rate is five times that of Europe, and our incarceration rate is the highest of any major industrialized nation in the world. The crime problem in America is largely a problem of single men raised in absentee-father households. A child growing up in a home without the father present is three times as likely to abuse alcohol or drugs, twice as likely to drop out of high school, and three times as likely to commit murder or rape. As George Gilder has pointed out in Men and Marriage, while single men comprise only 13 percent of the total population, they account for 40 percent of all criminal offenders and commit 90 percent of all violent crimes. Many of their victims are children. In Washington state last year, prison officials executed convicted murderer Wesley Alan Dodd as death penalty opponents burned candles at a silent vigil outside the penitentiary. No one bothered to light a candle for the murder victim, four-year-old Lee Iseli. Mr. Dodd was on parole after serving just four months of a 10-year sentence for child molestation when he abducted Lee Iseli from a playground just a few blocks from his home. He took the boy to his apartment, strapped him to a bed, and spent all night repeatedly suffocating him, reviving him, and brutally molesting him. As the sun rose over this horrible scene, Wesley Dodd choked the child to death, hung his body in a closet, and went to work at his job as a shipping clerk. Such violence will prevail as long as the two-parent family continues its decline as the primary socializing institution in society. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued in 1965, "from the Irish slums of the 19th century eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: [When] a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families ... that community asks for and gets chaos." Moynihan added that in such a society, "crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure -- these are not only to be expected, they are very nearly inevitable." Today one in five white children is born to an unmarried woman; two out of every three African-American children are born out of wedlock. This social calamity has produced gang violence, juvenile crime, and pathology among our youth that has no parallel in history. Our inner cities have become war zones. An African-American male between the ages of 18 and 35 in the District of Columbia has a greater chance of being killed than an American soldier did in Vietnam. Liberal solutions to crime, such as rehabilitation and early release programs have failed utterly. Nor are traditional conservative policies -- building more prisons, for example -- an adequate answer. Since 1975 the United States has quadrupled its rate of incarceration and the prison population has soared from 250,000 to 1.3 million. Yet our streets are less safe and our neighborhoods more terrorized than ever. The only true solution to crime is to restore the family. Young males raised in homes with male authority will emulate their fathers in marriage and procreation. Through their families, they will have a personal stake in creating a moral climate for their own children. Moreover, the penal system needs reform to allow for redemptive sentencing for non-violent criminals that allows them to work, pay back their victims, and make restitution to society. Make Schools Safe Education is another issue that churchgoing voters view primarily through the eyes of their children. Many observers mistakenly believe that the abortion issue gave rise to the Religious Right. In fact, the spark that ignited the modern pro-family movement was the fear of increased government regulation of church schools. When the government begins to threaten their children, evangelicals will pour into the civic arena like a flood, albeit reluctantly. The first goal of education policy should be to make schools safe. Increasing numbers of American children bring weapons to school every day. Stuffed in book bags or hidden in lockers, these weapons are turning schools into combat zones. Violence against teachers is commonplace. In Lorraine, Ohio, a female student attempted to stab her teacher to death after a dare from classmates, who promised her their lunch money if she committed the murder. The knife-wielding student was 15 years old. In part because of the breakdown in discipline in public schools, churchgoing voters strongly support choice in education. A growing parental rights movement is gaining momentum at the grassroots level. In Chicago a group of parents recently filed suit against the city for failing to provide their children with an adequate education. In Wisconsin earlier this year, Linda Cross, a parent and schoolteacher, narrowly lost her campaign for state superintendent of schools after being outspent 10-to-1 by a union-backed candidate who opposed school choice. Although powerful teachers unions oppose the parental rights movement, citizen groups are pressing for reform. In San Antonio, Texas, the Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation, a nonprofit corporation, provides school vouchers to 934 inner city students for half their tuition. The Golden Rule Insurance Company began a similar program in 1991 in Indianapolis, Indiana. These citizen efforts will soon test their strength at the ballot box. A choice initiative will be on the ballot in California in November, and both sides have pledged to spend a total of $15 million in the campaign. School choice initiatives will also appear on other state ballots in 1994. As with the tax limitation movement and the success of proposition 13, a victory in California could spawn ballot-measure victories throughout the nation. Coalition for Common Sense The parental rights movement found its most dramatic expression recently in New York City. School board elections in New York have historically been sedate affairs. But the 1993 campaign read like a subplot from Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, complete with the histrionics, bombast, and larger-than-life politics unique to the Big Apple. The controversy began with the Rainbow Curriculum, a multicultural curriculum that included instruction about the gay lifestyle to first graders. Mary Cummins, a feisty Irish grandmother and school board member in Queens, successfully resisted the imposition of this curriculum in her community district. She and other Queens school board members were then summarily fired by school Chancellor Joseph Fernandez, who later lost his own job as a result of his role in the growing controversy. The battle spilled over into the campaign for school board seats in the city's five boroughs and 32 school districts. Parents groups and pro-family organizations distributed 500,000 nonpartisan voter guides informing voters where 540 candidates stood on a broad range of issues, including school choice and more parental involvement in curriculum decisions. The ACLU hysterically called the involvement of people of faith "the greatest civil liberties crisis" in the history of New York City. The Reverend Al Sharpton denounced the parents' efforts as "racist." This campaign of fear and intolerance failed. Over half of the 130 pro-family candidates won, and several school boards in Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island are controlled by parental rights advocates. The New York City experience is important for two reasons. First, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Family-friendly education is as popular in the Big Apple as it is in the Bible belt. Second, it united a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, ecumenical coalition for common sense. Cardinal John O'Connor and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese cooperated with Protestant groups in the distribution of nonpartisan voter guides; civil rights leader Roy Innis joined with white and Hispanic parents in turning out the vote; and Orthodox Rabbi Shea Hecht of the National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education endorsed the campaign of his Christian brethren. The pro-family movement's inroads into the African-American, Hispanic, Catholic, and Jewish communities may be the most significant development since its emergence in the late 1970s. Reforming welfare to make it more conducive to family formation is an important element in a broad-based pro-family agenda. Just as the tax code penalizes marriage and children, so does the welfare system subsidize family breakup. Welfare reform has been put on the back burner by the Clinton Administration, but it is a top priority for many churchgoing voters. The number of families on welfare has risen from 1.9 million in 1970 to 4.7 million today. Of all the children born in 1980, 22.2 percent of white children and 83 percent of black children will be dependent on welfare before they reach the age of 18. Because women on welfare lose their benefits if they take a job or get married, they face a strong disincentive to work, save, and form a stable marriage. Welfare dependency is stark evidence of the economic inviability of single motherhood. Because children learn what they live, intergenerational poverty is common. This should come as no surprise. The habits that welfare subsidizes and fosters are the same habits that, when inculcated in children, make it difficult to break loose from dependency. There is a way to break the cycle: subsidize marriage and work while lowering incentives for family breakup. There are many proposals for reform: requiring welfare recipients to find a job within two years; reducing rather than eliminating benefits when a male enters the home; requiring job training or education as a condition of benefits. Probably the best immediate policy goal is to grant waivers and additional funding to states willing to experiment with welfare reform. As with the progressive reformers of the early 20th-century, pro-family activists should use the states as laboratories, and legislate at the federal level only the reforms that work. All Things to All People The pro-family movement will realize many of its objectives if it can begin to speak to the issues that concern the voters. The Bible admonishes to "divide your portion to seven, or even to eight, for you do not know what misfortune may occur on the earth." Diversifying one's investments applies to political capital as well as financial capital. Building a political agenda around a single issue is a risky proposition, because when progress lags on that issue, as it inevitably will, the viability of the entire movement is threatened. The key to success for the pro-family movement is to discuss a broader issues agenda in the language of the target audience -- churchgoers and families with children. In doing so, a social movement until now composed largely of white evangelicals can win natural allies among Catholics and racial minorities. The Apostle Paul said that he had become "all things to all people that I may by all means win some." His methodology made Christianity the dominant faith in the Western world within three centuries. The same technique can make the pro-family movement the most effective grassroots voice in America if properly followed. RALPH REED JR. is the executive director of the Christian Coalition. To reprint more than short quotations, please write or FAX Ben Morehead, Associate Publisher, Policy Review, 214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE, Washington, DC 20002, FAX (202) 675-1778.