Religious Right Is Not Happy With Gop Legislative Agenda Christian Conservatives Reject The Notion That They Have No Other Place To Go

Leaders of the religious and cultural right are discontented with a Republican Party legislative agenda and with a slate of prospective presidential candidates they see as failing to deal with the moral and social concerns that helped produce GOP victories last November.

“The notion (among some Republican strategists) that pro-family voters have no place to go is wrong, and that kind of thinking could destroy Republican hopes for the future if it ever became widely embraced,” said Gary L. Bauer, a former Reagan administration official who is now president of the conservative Family Research Council.

Bauer said that he and James Dobson, head of the group Focus on the Family, “made it clear in recent weeks” in meetings with Republican Party officials “that if the party wants to continue to get the pro-family and pro-life vote” they are “going to have to get over any hesitancy for making the case for family values.”

Patrick J. Buchanan, the commentator who ran unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination in 1992, Saturday told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that he would welcome the opportunity to take on those who would modify the tough anti-abortion language in the Republican Party platform.

“Anyone who tries to rip that plank out of the platform will have to come over Pat Buchanan,” he told the cheering audience.

And on Friday, Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, warned the Republican Party that evangelical Christians and anti-abortion Catholics will refuse to vote for a Republican ticket that includes at the presidential or vice presidential level a candidate who favors abortion rights.

Reed complained that in some Republican quarters, Christians and “moral” conservatives “are still being told that the social issues are losers, that we must downplay values and we must sublimate our Christianity, especially if we want to get into the White House in 1996.”

For Reed, the strong warning to the GOP marked a shift from his past role as a conciliator. It suggested that he has faced growing criticism within conservative Christian ranks for his past willingness to postpone some of the more controversial elements of the conservative social agenda, including school prayer, and his willingness to consider alteration of the language in the GOP abortion plank.

Reed, who spoke at the CPAC gathering, defended his willingness to put off social issues in favor of passage of the GOP “Contract With America,” disputing critics who “charge that the contract ignores social issues. Now we know better. It includes welfare reform; it discourages illegitimacy and encourages work and responsibility. … It includes a tougher crime bill and a tougher anti-pornography bill.”

One factor in the discontent is the decision of both former Vice President Dan Quayle and former education secretary William J. Bennett not to run for president, leaving many conservatives without a candidate with strong appeal to the Christian and social-issue right.

In addition, many people who are conservative on social issues remember the early 1980s, when they agreed to temporarily postpone action on many of their issues in order to give first priority to the Reagan administration’s tax and budget economic proposals, only to end up without strong administration support later on.

Bauer said two clear areas of concern are the “hot button” issues of abortion and religious freedom embodied in school prayer. In language stronger than Reed’s, Bauer warned that putting an abortion rights supporter on the GOP presidential ticket or abandoning the party’s anti-abortion plank “would absolutely guarantee an explosion and perhaps even a third party.”

But, he said, he and Dobson have voiced a broader concern to Republican leaders that there is a larger, and generally unaddressed, issue of “what is happening to the heart and soul of the country … the sense that our society is becoming morally base and our culture more uninspired.”