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Watching the Right: Other People & Groups Worth Watching  ** Watching the Right: Organizations   Watching the Right: Congresspeople   Resources for Fighting the Right

March 1999

Watching the Right: Organizations

By Giacomo Tramontagna

American Center for Law and Justice-- The ACLJ has been described in the New York Times and elsewhere in the mainstream press as a kind of conservative Christian analog of the ACLU, dedicated simply to the preservation of religious freedom. Press accounts of its activities hardly ever mention that it is the legal arm of the Christian Coalition, or that it was, like the Christian Coalition, founded in 1990 by Pat Robertson. Its Chief Counsel is Jay Sekulow, who holds a law degree from Mercer University, a 4000-student Baptist institution in Macon, Georgia. Host of a national radio call-in talk show, Sekulow is also a frequent guest on Pat Robertson's 700 Club, the venue in which Paula Jones, after coaching by Sekulow and others, first revealed her alleged sexual harassment by Bill Clinton. The ACLJ, which gave up on the Paula Jones case before the Rutherford Institute took it over, is currently engaged in litigation across the country.

ACLJ cases include an appeal to the New Jersey Supreme Court on behalf of the Boy Scouts of America, seeking to overturn a lower court ruling that the Scouts had violated state law by firing a gay assistant Scoutmaster. In December 1998, the ACLJ obtained a preliminary injunction preventing the City of Boston from implementing its domestic partners ordinance.

Citizens for Honest Government-- Pat Matrisciana, the founder and president of CFHG, also heads Jeremiah Films, which produced the conspiracist video The Clinton Chronicles and the accompanying Clinton Chronicles Book. Both were aggressively marketed by Jerry Falwell, with whom Mastriciana has long been associated.

Before he began cranking out documentaries unmasking the horror of Bill Clinton, Matrisciana produced propaganda videos like Gay Rights, Special Rights for use as teaching (and fundraising) tools by the Traditional Values Coalition and similar groups.

Citizens for Honest Government is a conduit for the fantasies of bottom-feeding conspiracy theorist Christopher Ruddy, erstwhile editor of the New York Guardian, a reactionary Catholic tabloid, and author of the influential Strange Death of Vincent Foster. Fund-raising appeals are built around such Ruddy bombshells as the allegation that Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes is part of the intricate Clinton plot to cover up murder and drug deals.

Apart from raising money, CFHG's principal activity is publication of Citizen's Intelligence Digest, edited by John Wheeler, a former editor of Christian American, the Christian Coalition's newsletter.

Council on National Policy-- Hatched by San Diego televangelist Tim LaHaye, former executive director of the Moral Majority, the secretive CNP works to maintain a low profile. In closed meetings held three times a year, it brings together an elite cross-section of the theocratic right for networking, fund raising, and strategy sessions. Its more than 400 members include Pat Matrisciana, Jesse Helms, Trent Lott, Dick Armey, Dan Burton, Tom DeLay, Jay Sekulow, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Oliver North, Gary Bauer, James Dobson, John Whitehead, and the inimitable R.J. Rushdoony (see below).

Family Research Council-- The FRC, which Gary Bauer founded in 1980, was absorbed by James Dobson's Focus on the Family eight years later and served as its lobbying arm, overstepping the bounds of its non-profit tax-exempt status until the IRS intervened. Severed from Dobson only in a legal sense, the FRC set up shop in Washington, DC. The operation is far more concerned with power, money, and Gary Bauer than it is with families. Often represented by the mainstream press as a serious social research agency, the FRC is even less concerned with research. Its propaganda mill keeps doggedly recycling statistics cooked by uncredentialed homophobic zealots like Paul Cameron and Judith Reisman.

Fixated on the gay menace, Bauer was a key endorser of the Pentecostal Springs of Life Ministry's Gay Agenda hate videos, promoting them as accurate accounts of "what gay liberation has meant in major American cities as tens of thousands succumb to disease and death." In an unrelenting stream of mailings, the FRC markets Christmas ornaments, inspirational paraphernalia, publications like the Coming Out of Homosexuality: Hope and Healing video and guide, and political action kits.

Every year the Family Research Council mass-mails a Bauer family Christmas card showing Bauer with his perky blond wife, Carol, and their three apple-cheeked children.

Bauer recently announced his decision to relinquish the presidency of the FRC to concentrate on a bid for the Presidency of the United States.

Focus on the Family-- Founded in 1977 by Christian family counselor James Dobson, FOTF promotes a benign, cuddly image through frequent noncontroversial missives to a mailing list of 3.5 million. Donors and supporters with a documented record of commitment receive more pointedly right-wing mailings. The organization is now based in Colorado Springs, where it moved from Pomona, California in 1991 in time to lend support to Amendment 2, the anti-gay state ballot initiative struck down in 1997 by the Supreme Court.

From its 700-employee compound, Focus on the Family has helped sustain Colorado for Family Values (CFV); brokered the evangelical men's movement called Promise Keepers into being (with rabidly homophobic CFV board member Bill McCartney at the helm); and created loose local affiliates in the form of "family institutes" nationwide.

With the aid of the Family Research Council, FOTF frequently generates effective call-in and letter-writing campaigns on Capitol Hill. Dr. Dobson, who served in 1985 to '86 on the discredited porn-busting Meese Commission, is a longtime anti-smut activist. In 1997, Dobson helped mobilize a nationwide effort, orchestrated by anti-abortion zealot Randall Terry, to have retail outlets like Barnes and Noble indicted on child pornography charges for selling books of fine-art photography by Jock Sturges and others.

Dobson's juggernaut now has an annual budget of about $100 million. His media empire includes a daily half-hour radio show carried by 3400 stations worldwide, about 14 magazines, and a large merchandising wing.

In 1997, Gil Alexander-Moegerle, co-founder of FOTF, published an exposé called James Dobson's War on America (Prometheus Books, $25.95), and apologized to the gay and lesbian community for the harm inflicted on it by the Dobson conglomerate.

The Rutherford Institute-- This Charlottesville, Virginia operation has been variously described by the mainstream press as a "think tank" and a Christian legal resource focused on religious freedom. It was named for 17th-century Scottish cleric Samuel Rutherford, who proclaimed that God's laws were higher than the king's. John Whitehead, who helped found the institute, serves as its president. Among Rutherford's other founding board members was venerable right-wing theologian R.J. Rushdoony, author of Institutes of Biblical Law and guru of the Christian Reconstructionist movement. Rutherford still distributes tapes by Rushdoony, who believes that Christians must "take dominion"-- that is, assume power by force, if necessary. Rushdoony advocates imposing the death penalty for homosexual activity, adultery, and blasphemy.

A Rushdoony protégé, Whitehead now disavows the extremes of the Christian Reconstructionist agenda. While pursuing legal initiatives to end sex education, stop condom distribution, permit school prayer, and prevent the teaching of tolerance for gay people, the Rutherford Institute achieved its greatest notoriety by legally representing Paula Jones. Its relations with ex-client Jones, whom Rutherford lawyers say misused funds the institute helped raise for her, have been less than cordial.