Right vs Right

[Woodmonkey]

GOP's Religious Wing is Feuding With the Regulars


With less than a month to go before Election Day, the last thing the Republican Party needs is major flare-up between its Evangelical wing and the rest of the party. But as the GOP's support sags, especially among churchgoers, that's just what's breaking out.

The gap between the Bible-thumpers and the tax-cutters is nothing new. Ever since the Religious Right hit the polls in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there's been a tension built into the Republican coalition. The party needs religious voters to win elections, but many in its establishment are embarrassed to be associated with, and annoyed to have to put up with, what they see as a bunch of fundamentalist rubes. In turn, those voters perpetually feel shortchanged and disrespected.

A quick look at the polls shows that religious voters are feeling especially left in the cold by the GOP this fall: Whereas weekly churchgoers favored President Bush over Democrat John Kerry by 58 percent to 41 percent in 2004, they're splitting dead-even right now as to which party they favor to win Congress.

Why the loss of confidence in the GOP? No doubt, part of it is the Mark Foley scandal. But, at a deeper level, tension looks to be growing between an increasingly pro-government Religious Right and the rest of the party.

Witness, for instance, the escalating war of words between former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and James Dobson, the president of Focus on the Family and the most politically influential Evangelical leader in America.

Armey retired from the House in 2003, but still serves as a regular adviser to House conservatives. I interviewed him late last year for my book on the party's problems - and he laid into the growing influence of the Religious Right in the GOP and how far he thinks it's brought the party from the limited-government ideals of the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions.

"Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from?" Armey asked, referring to the extraordinary bill rushed into law by Republican congressional leaders in a (futile) bid to keep the vegetative woman on life support, against her husband's wishes. "There's not a conservative, Constitution-loving, separation-of-powers guy alive in the world that could have wanted that bill on the floor. . . . That was pure, blatant pandering to James Dobson."

"Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies," he added.

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