Every four years pro-life critics of the Republican Party leadership are begged to silence by well-meaning Republican friends, and a ritual of pretended blindness occurs. I have participated once, and regretted it. Politically active Christians with a pro-life posture seems to wilt under the pressure of the mainline Republican Party leadership, which always pronounces, “If we don’t elect a Republican this time it’s all over!”
This disease of the mind might be called the Echo syndrome. It descends, like a dense fog, over the eyes of the normally insightful rank and file Christian activists. Blind partisanship demands that we accept the Republican Party leader’s repeating, “He is better than what you have now.” The voices shriek in our ear, “Would you prefer Al Gore or Bill Bradley, both of whom openly boast of being for abortion?”
The Christian’s dilemma today is, “Should we accept the weak voice of a spoiled rich kid, George W. Bush, with his legacy and entourage of world government advocates, or the Marine tough and smiling, John McCain, with his equally powerful internationalist backing?” Personalities aside, both candidates have two related issues in common. In spite of pro-life professions to the contrary, both lack a record of total commitment to the unborn, and both enjoy the support of an international political machine, which indicates U.S. involvement in more foreign slaughters.
In this series of “Heads Up!” we will discuss the cause and effect of the Echo phenomena. A liberal paraphrasing of this illness might be, “Any Republican at any cost.” We will focus on a review of the last two Republican conventions, and the influence of the commercial moguls of the Christian Celebrity Right. We will examine the ill-fated nomination of both Robert Dole and Papa George Bush. In the final issues of the series we will examine what we can expect from the Celebrity Christians in the forthcoming election. In no way is this a criticism of a Christian’s involvement in politics, but it is a critical examination of Celebrity Christian leadership.
A transformation begins anew with each Republican primary election. By non-surgical lobotomy the pro-life electorate is altered to accept the “least objectionable” Republican as the “only acceptable candidate.”
In 1992, at the Republican Convention in Houston, incumbent George Herbert Walker Bush came to be accepted as the lesser of the evils to the already well-known Governor William Jefferson Clinton. Bush was incredibly unpopular and seemed to be trusted only by his Warmaker friends. Clinton‘s libertine lifestyle and pro-abortion posture was also well known. Bush was challenged by a pro-life and anti-war candidate Patrick Buchanan.
As the convention approached, seemingly logical words of compromise seemed to echo down from the clouds, whimpering in urgent hushed tones, “Accept Bush or else you may get Clinton…Don’t rock the boat and split the ticket…Bush will do…He understands… He said he was pro-life once…Nobody is perfect… Never mind what Barbara Bush tells her friends in private that she admires women who think for themselves concerning abortion…And look at the alternatives…Are you willing to chance it with Bill Clinton…?”
While compromise with the Celebrity Christian leaders was being fashioned inside the Houston conference center, determined pro-life advocates took to the Houston streets, intent upon dramatizing the abortion issue while the convention was going on. The Lifers went about their business with the joy that comes from doing something tangible in the life and death climate of the abortion mills. This author was there for that week with hundreds of Christian activists from around the country.
Operation Rescue concentrated on four or five prosperous abortion mills. There was a media blackout of every action. The Houston press avoided any coverage of those who were there to pronounce, “Life, no matter how small, is worth living.” Several leaders camped out inside city hall at the door of the Mayor’s office in an attempt to meet with her. She remained at the convention, and they refused to leave. Several protest leaders were left by the police to sleep there that night, literally locked inside that dark city hall. The police refused to remove them, apparently under orders to arrest no one to avoid the publicity that would surely have resulted from arrests.
Pro-life Republicans had no illusions about Bush. He came to the convention with more fresh blood on his hands than any prior Republican President. Not only was his abortion record blood-splattered but he was the undisputed warlord of the Persian Gulf, having just completed the railroading of the American people into the misnamed Gulf War. Many Republicans already recognized this as the most sickening, premeditated slaughter and target practice on the innocent ever carried out by an American President. Bush’s ties to pro-war internationalists were also well understood in 1992, since he had repeatedly pronounced that America was entering what Bush frequently referred to as “The New World Order.” That justifiably raised the hackle of all but the most liberal, internationalist Republicans.
Pat Robertson and the powerful Christian Coalition were also in Houston in force, but not in the streets marching for life. Robertson was the professed author of new book damning world government with an identically entitled “The New World Order.” No one could say Robertson did not understand Papa Bush’s agenda, unless he didn’t read his own book. Bush came to Houston surrounded by Council on Foreign Relations regulars and leaders of the powerful Israeli Lobby. Unknown to the American people, he had just granted a clumsily hidden and willfully denied $10 billion in U.S. taxpayer loan guarantees to Israel to pay for resettlement of Russian immigrants in the occupied territories of Palestine.
The pro-life activists were not fooled by Bush’s feeble anti-abortion claims. His record as a pseudo life advocate was quite well known and published. It brought hundreds of hard working, pro-life men, many with families, who marched through the street in the sweltering summer heat carrying their signs. We were admitted briefly and squeezed into the convention hall to cheer Pat Buchanan, the only pro-life and anti-Gulf War challenger. The Pro-lifers wanted anybody but Bush or Clinton.
The party power brokers, who refused to allow debate on the abortion issue, stilled Buchanan. While the activists and members of Operation Rescue quietly picketed and sat in the doors of abortion clinics under the Houston hot August sun, the Celebrity leaders sold out the unborn children inside the convention hall. Afflicted with
