http://www.euthanasia.com/mccain99.htmlThe religious right has always distrusted John McCain.
The Arizona Senator's votes and statements have departed from the straight and narrow on occasion, but the larger factor is a visceral instinct on the part of many Christian conservatives - based on considerable evidence - that McCain is indifferent or hostile to political, moral, and religious orthodoxies.
The adversarial relationship between McCain and the religious wing of the GOP raises doubts as to how effective Monday's decision by Focus on the Family honcho James Dobson will be to abandon his opposition to McCain.
At the same time, such hard-right religious leaders as Dobson, 72, and televangelist Pat Robertson, 78, (Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell died in 2007) are being supplanted by younger and more tolerant Christian leaders who are less likely to become adamant opponents of Democratic candidates. Both McCain and Barack Obama, for example, are scheduled to appear on August 16 at separate Q and A sessions with Rick Warren, 54, pastor of the massive evangelical Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California.
Perhaps conceived as a countermove to the growing influence of such younger pastors, the transformation of Dobson's stand on McCain is remarkable. On February 5 this year, Dobson voiced what seemed to be his true feelings toward McCain.
"I'm deeply disappointed the Republican Party seems poised to select a nominee who did not support a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage, who voted for embryonic stem cell research to kill nascent human beings, who opposed tax cuts that ended the marriage penalty, and who has little regard for freedom of speech, who organized the Gang of 14 to preserve filibusters, and has a legendary temper and often uses foul and obscene language," Dobson declared during an appearance on Laura Ingraham's conservative talk radio show. "Given these and many other concerns, a spoonful of sugar does not make the medicine go down. I cannot, and I will not vote for Sen. John McCain, as a matter of conscience."
As is so often the case with those who make profound declarations of conscience, Dobson shifted gears, placing partisanship ahead of morality, telling listeners to his radio show on Monday :
I never thought I would hear myself saying this...While I am not endorsing Senator John McCain, the possibility is there that I might.
Dobson tried to explain his shift to the Associated Press:
There's nothing dishonorable in a person rethinking his or her positions, especially in a constantly changing political context. Barack Obama contradicts and threatens everything I believe about the institution of the family and what is best for the nation. His radical positions on life, marriage and national security force me to reevaluate the candidacy of our only other choice, John McCain.
In a revealing aside, Dobson said that McCain "seems to enjoy frustrating conservatives," noting that McCain voted for stem cell research which, to Dobson, is "the killing of babies, very tiny babies," and voted against the Marriage Protection Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage."
There are additional factors driving a wedge between McCain and the Religious Right.
Jim Guth, a political scientist at Furman University who studies the intersection of religion and politics, observed:
I've never thought that his [McCain's] basic problem was issues--George Bush differed from a lot of religious conservatives on a number of issues, but he had a real facility with religious language and could talk about a shared religious experience. McCain, on the other hand, is totally tone deaf religiously and seemingly devoid of any religious experience. Even with years of attendance at North Phoenix Baptist Church with his wife, he seems not to have learned any evangelical vocabulary or any nuance of religious expression. And from what I can tell, he has always seemed uninterested in learning.
John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron who studies the political dimensions of religiosity, made a related point: "Issues aside, I think temperament is part of the problem. Many conservative Christian leaders have developed a distrust of McCain's independent style. The fact that this style has brought about praise for McCain from parts of the news media that conservative Christian leaders distrust may be a factor as well."
In addition to McCain's famous critique of religious right leaders -- voiced at the end of his failed 2000 bid for the GOP nomination: "Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right" - McCain has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to defy conservative ground rules.
He has, for example, called for amending the Republican Party's abortion platform to allow exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother.
In an unguarded moment in 1999, McCain told the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board that "in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade," only to retract that statement in response to an uproar from right-to-life forces. He provoked another controversy in New Hampshire in 2000, when he said that if his then-teenage daughter got pregnant, he would leave it up to her to decide whether to have an abortion.
In 2004, he voted against a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, declaring that the amendment "strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans....It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them."
McCain's divergence from the religious right reflects the diminishing clout of the movement that has been so important to the GOP since the 1970s when the Moral Majority was first formed, through the elections in 2000 and 2004 of George W. Bush.
Trends running counter to the moral objectives of religious conservatives can be seen in data compiled by the Pew Center showing support for traditional Democratic social programs and social spending is on the rise, while traditional Republican "family values" issues and religiosity are both diminishing.
Equally important, there has been a steady, if modest, growth in the number of secular voters - atheists, agnostics or those with no religious beliefs. The growth, however, has been concentrated entirely among Democrats and independents, in effect isolating religiously conservative Republicans:
The Pew survey found a striking decline in
support for traditional or conservative social values, in such areas as homosexuality and the role of women in society.... In 1987, about half of the survey's respondents (49%) gave conservative answers to at least four of the six questions. In 2007, just 30% did so. This trend has occurred in all major social, political, and demographic groups in the population. While Republicans remain significantly more conservative than Democrats or independents on social values, they too have become substantially less conservative over this period.
The study found that the
largest individual changes have occurred on questions relating to sexuality....The public is increasingly accepting of homosexuality. In the current study, only 28% of respondents agreed that school boards should have the right to fire teachers who are known to be homosexual; 66% disagreed. In 1987 when this question was first asked, a majority of 51% agreed with the statement. Similarly, there has been a sharp decline through the period in the number of people who agree with the statement that 'AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behavior.' Just 23% now agree with the statement; 72% disagree. When this question was first asked in 1987, public opinion was divided on the question, with 43% agreeing and 47% disagreeing.
McCain's reluctance to support a constitutional ban on gay marriage reflects one of the dilemmas of the Republican Party as the electorate becomes increasingly tolerant of homosexuality. President Bush and the Republican Party used the proposed constitutional amendment as a central weapon in the 2004 elections, with some analysts making the case that the tactic delivered crucial swing states - particularly Ohio. Long-range trends, however, suggest not only that sexual mores have become liberalized, but that other more pressing issues have intervened - the war in Iraq and the economy. The tactic of using gay rights as a mobilizing issue may have become superannuated.
The Gallup Poll in June 2008 found a growing willingness to accept homosexual relations,
Similarly, Gallup found:
These trends has resulted in a steady decline in the opposition by the public to civil unions and same-sex marriage:
The Pew survey found that support for civil unions -- legal agreements that would give same-sex couples many of the same legal rights as married couples - grew from 45 percent in 2003 to 51 percent this year.
The net result of these trends puts McCain in a strategically difficult position: he alienates the right by failing to toe the line, and he alienates moderates by failing to repudiate the right. McCain, predictably, is commanding less support among white evangelicals at this stage in the campaign than did Bush, who was far more deferent to religious leaders, at the same point in the 2004 campaign. The following chart illustrates the differences.
