Robertson helped open floodgates on the Hill last week. By 5 p.m., more than 434,000 calls, 10 times the daily average, had inundated the congressional switchboard. The overwhelming majority opposed ending the ban against gay military service. Robertson isn’t the only Christian broadcaster using his fiber-optic pulpit to organize around the issue. Last week on his “Old Time Gospel Hour,” the Rev. Jerry Falwell asked viewers to call a 900 number (90 cents a minute) and sign a petition urging President Clinton to keep the prohibition in place. So far, Falwell says, more than 31,000 have lent their names. Other major conservative figures, including James Dobson and Paul Weyrich, have also used the airwaves and mail to sound similar alarms.
Has the Christian right manipulated the touch-tone political culture of the ’90s to create an illusory grass-roots uprising? Liberals say the lopsided numbers recorded by congressional offices last week don’t square with most opinion polls, which show the public more closely divided on the question (NEWSWEEK’S Poll found 53 percent of Americans in favor of allowing gays to serve, 42 percent opposed). “There’s no question that they have contributed significantly to leaving a false impression,” says David Crane, vice president of People for the American Way, a liberal lobbying group that favors an end to the anti-gay prohibition. The organization issued a report last week denouncing Christian broadcasters for a “campaign of intolerance” designed to bulk up fund raising and membership by exploiting the issue.
Christian activists say such charges are nonsense. They claim that they couldn’t possibly generate the kind of opposition reflected by talk-radio shows and calls to Washington last week. “This is a canard,” says Ralph Reed, executive director of Robertson’s Christian Coalition, which claims a membership of 350,000. “It’s clear that this was a spontaneous public outcry from Middle America.” Reed adds that other issues are at the top of the religious right’s agenda, like school choice and middle-class tax relief. Falwell describes People for the American Way as “just a bunch of crybabies on the left who themselves are looking for bogeymen they can raise money on. They’re hopeful that we’ll rise up like some great monster.”
Both sides may be overstating their cases. It’s unclear just how much Christian broadcasters had to do with the kind of sentiment measured in Washington last week. But their gay-bashing rhetoric, an organizing staple for many years, has certainly acted as a sort of kindling wood. Political scientist Christopher Arterton, author of two books on teledemocracy, calls it “a contagion from the right,” transmitting the issue from narrow audiences of committed Christians to mainstream talk shows and onto Washington. The heat isn’t likely to abate. For example, Randall Terry, founder of the anti-abortion Operation Rescue, has founded a new group called The Resistance to oppose gays in the military. Ultimately, lawmakers will have to decide for themselves what’s real and what’s smoke.
