Getting Religion, Republican Style

The Terri Schiavo saga has prompted yet another round of fears that the Republican Party has been hijacked by religious conservatives. The truth, however, is just the opposite: Religious conservatives have been hijacked by the Republican Party.

The odd thing is how many people continue to believe that the religious right pulls the strings in the White House and Congress. John Danforth, a moderate former GOP senator from Missouri, expressed this fear the other day in a New York Times Op-Ed article.

The traditional Republican agenda, he wrote, has "become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around."

There is a remarkable amount of illogic packed into that paragraph. I suspect Danforth didn't worry about gay marriage in his Senate days because it didn't exist yet. And today, the Republicans don't care about holding down the deficit not because they don't care about fiscal issues but because their fiscal agenda consists of things that make the deficit larger rather than smaller. If President Bush had a more ambitious economic agenda, the deficit would be even higher.

But the larger fallacy here is the idea that the conservative social agenda has subordinated the conservative economic agenda. How much time has Bush spent worrying about gay marriage? Not very much. In January, a reporter asked Bush about the prospects of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which he has said he supports. But Bush just shrugged and said it didn't have enough votes in the Senate. "Until that changes," he observed, "nothing will happen in the Senate." For his part, Bush did nothing to move it along.

Gay marriage isn't the only Bush priority that lacks support in Congress. Social Security privatization doesn't have the votes to pass either. Rather than throw up his hands, though, Bush has persuaded business groups to raise millions of dollars to lobby for privatization, twisted the arms of recalcitrant lawmakers and barnstormed the country for weeks touting his approach and threatening dire consequences for those who stand in his way. And even as support for his approach has plummeted from already low levels, he's vowed to keep on fighting. On Social Security privatization, he's Winston Churchill. On gay marriage, he's Neville Chamberlain.