Jerry Falwell – Memphis Flyer

For more than three decades, the Reverend Jerry Falwell guided the white evangelical masses of the South into the Republican Party, culminating in the most outwardly pious presidency in modern American history. Having first gained notoriety as a hard-line segregationist in rural Virginia, he won power as the televised prophet of a political gospel. Scarcely had he gone to his ultimate reward, however, before his friends and allies threatened to dismantle his legacy — and the dominance of the party to which he had devoted his ministry.

The late preacher can hardly be blamed, of course, for the ruinous condition of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. But with the tandem rise of Rudolph Giuliani, a pro-choice Catholic, and Mitt Romney, a highly flexible Mormon, to the forefront of the party’s potential presidential nominees, Falwell’s old flock is feeling deeply alienated. Within days after his death, the leaders of the movement he symbolized began to proclaim a message of dissension.

The most significant voice raised against the notion of a Giuliani nomination belongs to James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, which is now widely reckoned to be the nation’s largest religious-right organization. On May 17th, Dobson declared that he could not support the candidacy of the former New York mayor under any circumstances.

“Speaking as a private citizen and not on behalf of any organization or party, I cannot, and will not, vote for Rudy Giuliani in 2008,” he wrote in an essay on WorldNetDaily, a right-wing Web site. “It is an irrevocable decision.”

Richard Viguerie, the aging but still influential right-wing direct-mail impresario, shares Dobson’s disgust at the prospect of a Giuliani ticket but goes even further in his anathema. Having always preferred to identify himself as a “movement conservative” rather than a party-line Republican, Viguerie is on the verge of urging his right-wing comrades to abandon the Grand Old Party. “If the Republican Party nominates Rudy Giuliani as its candidate for either president or vice president, I will personally work to defeat the GOP ticket in 2008. … It will be time to put the GOP out of its misery.”

As a veteran of the George Wallace campaign on the American Independent Party in 1968, Viguerie certainly knows how to make mischief for the major parties. Back then, the Wallace candidacy badly harmed the candidacy of Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Forty years later, a third-party crusade on the right would do far more damage to the Republican nominee. The same Republicans who encouraged (and financed) Green candidate Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004 just might find themselves facing the business end of a spoiler campaign in November 2008. The most appropriate vehicle is the Constitution Party, a far-right, theocratic outfit that claims to be the biggest of the nation’s third parties.

Still, the Republican apocalypse is not here yet and may not arrive next year. Despite Giuliani’s momentary popularity, the party’s primary voters could find many reasons to reject him — including such colorful episodes as his humiliating flight from Gracie Mansion to the luxury apartment of gay friends who sheltered him from his wronged wife. His personal behavior and associations, notably with the corrupt former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, may be as unacceptable as his issue positions on guns, gays, and abortion.

For Dobson, a ticket led by Mitt Romney might seem like salvation — but other evangelicals are repelled by the former Massachusetts governor’s membership in the Mormon Church, which they have been taught to regard as a satanic cult. Besides, Romney is a recent convert to the tenets of the religious right and one whose eagerness to please is anything but pleasing. His nomination too could provoke a split from the right.

Now this isn’t the first time that Dobson or Viguerie have issued angry warnings to the Republican establishment about dire consequences if the party departs from righteousness. Such jeremiads are always heard in the election-year cacophony and are always dismissed as meaningless cant. Power reliably overcomes principle for these moral absolutists.

But next year might be different. For many of the true believers of the religious right, the nomination of either Giuliani or Romney would represent the ultimate humiliation. Should either of these events come to pass, then the Dobsons and the Vigueries and their followers at last will have to validate their ideological posturing with independent action. They will have to put up or shut up.

Joe Conason writes for Salon.com and The New York Observer.

Here’s a poser for all those who disapproved of state senator Rosalind Kurita’s vote last January that ousted the venerable John Wilder, her fellow Democrat, as Tennessee’s lieutenant governor and allowed Republican Ron Ramsey to win that office. Kurita has now managed to shepherd close to passage a bill to change the way the state’s constitutional officers are selected. So how do we feel about it, ladies and gents?

Kurita’s bill, which was scheduled for a climactic Senate vote this week, proposes a constitutional amendment. Should it pass, now or later, and go on to be approved by a popular referendum, as the state constitution requires, it would change the way several offices — attorney general, comptroller, treasurer, secretary of state, and, yes, lieutenant governor — are chosen. All of them would be elected by the people, meaning that it would henceforth be impossible for a rogue legislator — which is how Kurita is perceived by many of her fellow Democrats — to bargain with an aspiring Senate Speaker/lieutenant governor for his or her own advantage. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what Kurita, now Senate Speaker Pro Tem, has been accused of.

We approve. Right now, none of the aforementioned offices — each looming large in the workings of state government — are directly responsible to the people. The Senate chooses the lieutenant governor — first in line of succession to the governor — the attorney general is appointed by the state Supreme Court, and a joint session of the Tennessee House and Senate elects the treasurer, secretary of state, and comptroller. In other words, by political means but not by the people.

Not only do we approve of that change in state government, we are inclined to oppose an opposite prospect in local county government, where the courts have opened up an option allowing the offices of sheriff, trustee, and assessor, among others, to be appointed. Luckily, that change would itself require a popular vote to take effect.

Yes, voters can be fickle, but sadly, as various recent scandals have shown us, they are more to be trusted, it would surely seem, than wheeling-and-dealing officials themselves.

Jerry Falwell

It is almost always bad form to speak ill of the dead, especially when the person in question is a revered Christian leader. But this is the Reverend Jerry Falwell we’re talking about, the man whose reputation as a fundamentalist TV minister and architect of America’s Moral Majority was conspicuously not built on a platform of love.

During the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, Falwell stood shoulder to shoulder with the segregationists, publicly remarking that he questioned the “sincerity of people like Martin Luther King.” Falwell wasted no time in blaming the horrific terrorist attacks of 9/11 on pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU, the American Way, and anyone else who has ever tried to “secularize America.”

“I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen,'” Falwell said, while the subterranean fires of ground zero still raged out of control.

To be sure, Falwell may have done some good in his 73 years as a minister, political activist, and college president. Let’s hope the good reverend got himself right with the God he so frequently exploited.