Religious Right

by Jeremy Leaming

Religious Right activists are again itching to hobble the judiciary by threatening its ability to remain independent from heavy-handed politicos. And again, the Religious Right, not surprisingly, is targeting a state court justice who had the audacity to join a unanimous Iowa Supreme Court in finding that a statewide law banning same-sex marriage violated the state constitution’s equal protection clause.

In fall 2010 three of the Iowa Supreme Court justices involved in that pro-equality ruling were voted off the bench in so-called retention votes. The effort to oust the judges was led primarily by Religious Right organizations, such as the National Organization for Marriage, which spent at least $200,000 to help reshape the Iowa Supreme Court, by yanking from the bench justices who supported the Iowa Constitution’s protection of fundamental rights. The American Family Association, a longtime Religious Right group, dedicated to demonizing the LGBT community was also instrumental in removing the Iowa Supreme Court justices.  

Religious Right lobbyists obsessed with making life miserable for the LGBT community are mounting a concerted effort to yank Justice David Wiggins, another of the justices involved in the opinion, from the court. The Des Moines Register reports on the efforts of Bob Vander Plaats, head of the Religious Right lobbying group The Family Leader, and former presidential hopeful Rick Santorum to rally Iowans to vote Wiggins (pictured) off the bench.

Plaats and his group were also a major force in the 2010 effort to yank justices from the Iowa Supreme Court. The Family Leader describes itself as “a consistent, courageous voice in churches, in the legislature, in the media, in the courtroom, in the public square … always standing for God’s truth.”

At a rally this morning at the state capitol, former presidential hopeful Rick Santorum argued that the Iowa Supreme Court had sided with freedom over virtue, as Jens Manuel Krogstad wrote for the Register. Santorum and Plaats are on a bus tour of 17 cities to call for the ouster of Wiggins.

Unlike 2010, the Religious Right effort to remake the state Supreme Court is being answered with an effort organized in part by attorneys and elected officials. The Register noted a counter rally at the capitol where speakers defended the independence of the courts.

by Jeremy Leaming

For decades, leaders of the nation’s Religious Right have done more than just oppose equality for the LGBT community, they have tarred it as one made of hedonistic, selfish beings bent on harming children, destroying Christianity, and a host of other depraved actions. (For good measure many among the Religious Right have also sought to convince us that science says lesbians and gay men can be “cured” of their alleged afflictions.)

Within the past decade I had the great pleasure of attending numerous Religious Right gatherings in preparing articles for Church & State, a publication of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. At nearly every one of those gatherings lesbians and gay men were a prime topic of conversation. Indeed the leaders of many of the Religious Right groups that appeared at or organized those gatherings, including representatives from James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and Tony Perkin’s (pictured) the Family Research Council (FRC) were obsessed with gay people. It was not enough for these leaders to advance their tired line about the threat same-sex marriages supposedly pose to marriage. They inevitably, whether directly or through insinuation, demonized LGBT people. LGBT persons the Religious Right leaders have long claimed are at the root of everything that is supposedly wrong with this country.

For example at the 2007 “Family Impact Summit” in Tampa, Fla., a string of “workshops” centered squarely on tearing down the LGBT community. Same-sex marriage may have been the hook for some of the discussions, but the conclusions these discussions or lectures advanced were all wildly uniformed, blatantly unfair and bigoted.

A “Homosexuality/Ministry” workshop, as I reported for Church & State, was led by two people who said they had been cured of their homosexuality and featured a talk by Nancy Heche, mother of the actress Anne Heche. Nancy claimed that she had a lot of gay friends, before saying how much she cared for them and how she wished they could have “what I have.” Her condescending talk, given with great earnestness, held that gay people can be made straight and that they’ll be much healthier once they survive the conversion. She urged those in attendance to “eat with the sinners. Go befriend a gay person, build a relationship.” It was a rather nauseating affair.

Unfortunately it did not stop there. A panel discussion called “Defending Marriage: What’s at Stake,” featured FRC’s Peter Sprigg, a longtime and very loud opponent of the LGBT community and Dale O’Leary, who at the time claimed to be a writer for a Catholic-based website, as well as a researcher.