Conservatives Without Conscience

sidestep the matter, though, excusing his own premarital sexual activity because it took place before he was born again. Robertson faced a similar criticism regarding inconsistent claims about his IQ, which at various times was announced as 159, then 139, and then 135, and many wondered how this Yale Law School graduate had been unable to pass the bar exam. When he lost his presidential bid—badly—Robertson formed what has become the most important of the religious right’s organizations, the Christian Coalition. He operated largely behind the scenes, hiring the less controversial Ralph Reed to run day-to-day operations. But Robertson’s desire for personal power has never waned, and with the Christian Coalition claiming millions of members and almost two thousand state and local branches, he now has a chokehold on the Republican Party.

Robertson again achieved dubious notoriety as a result of the statement he made about Ariel Sharon, shortly after Israel’s prime minister suffered a stroke. Robertson told his 700 Club viewers that the “prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who ‘divide my land.’ God considers [Israel] to be his.” Robertson insisted that Sharon’s withdrawal of troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank “was dividing God’s land. And I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations, or the United States of America. God says, ‘This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone.’”[74] His remarks were met with understandable outrage. Time magazine, among others, suggested that Robertson issue an apology because he was undermining the efforts of a group of evangelicals who were planning to build a $50 million Evangelical Heritage Center on the Sea of Galilee. Israel has agreed to provide the land and infrastructure for the project, with the funding and the center’s details left to the evangelicals. Time explained that it is potentially a highly lucrative deal for both Israel and the evangelicals, for it is anticipated that the center will host as many as a million visitors a year, who will generate $1.5 billion in revenues.[75] Robertson apologized.

Although Robertson has long supported Israel, he has a history of making anti-Semitic remarks. “In Robertson’s evangelical end-time scenario, Jews are simply pawns who help usher in the second coming of Christ,” Robert Boston wrote. Robertson “believes that a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity will occur before Jesus returns to usher in the end of the world. In Robertson’s view, the creation of Israel was a necessary component in this eschatological drama.”[76] Robertson’s anti-Semitism surfaced in his New World Order book. In typical Robertson—and Double High Authoritarian—fashion, he has claimed on one occasion that the book was ghosted, and on another that he wrote it himself. Whichever the case, he has never disavowed the book’s contents. It is a bizarre tale of conspiracy, in which Robertson claims there is a secret plot afoot by the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Affairs, the Federal Reserve, and unidentified European bankers to create a world government under the United Nations. This new government will be taken over by the Antichrist, resulting in Armageddon, with half the world’s population being eliminated. The book made the New York Times best-seller list. Michael Lind wrote a two-part review of it in the New York Review of Books exposing the book’s anti-Semitic sources, which put Robertson on the defensive, and without explanation for his anti-Semitism. Maybe the most suitable review of New World Order was from Joe Queenan in the Wall Street Journal:

The New World Order is a predictable compendium of the lunatic fringe’s greatest hits…. Mr. Robertson weaves a wild tale of international and extraterrestrial conspiracies, involving everyone from deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza to Alger Hiss to Woodrow Wilson—an unwitting tool of Satan, whose role in the establishment of the Federal Reserve eventually resulted in the nation’s abdication to the most Machiavellian creature of all time: Paul Volcker…. Still, as paranoid pinheads with a deep distrust of democracy go, he’s a bit of a disappointment…. Where, for example, is the stuff about JFK’s secret meeting with Martin Borman in the Bermuda Triangle? Where is the stuff about extraterrestrials visiting the Mayans and telling them to give the Spear of Longinus to Elvis?[77]

To dismiss Pat Robertson as a loony crank, however, would be a mistake, for he takes his mission all too seriously. Realizing that he is never going to be the president of the United States himself, nor ever fully control a president regardless of how much assistance Christian conservatives provide to get a leader of their choice elected, he exercises his considerable influence in negative ways. He and his followers can block candidates for Republican nominations at the local, state, and national level, and no issue is more important in their filtering process than a candidate’s position on judicial nominations, especially at the federal level. Of late, Robertson has focused much of his energy on the federal courts, and on the Supreme Court in particular. There is no question about his goals, which he has detailed in Courting Disaster: How the Supreme Court Is Usurping the Power of Congress and the People (2004), a cooperative writing effort with the lawyers at his American Center for Law and Justice—a sister organization he created that litigates continuously to expand the reach of religion and chip away at the wall separating church and state. The book castigates every Supreme Court decision that the Christian right does not like—those that are preventing it from imposing its religiosity on others—and was clearly written with the 2004 presidential election in mind. After describing doom and gloom, Robertson said, “[T]hings simply cannot continue as they are. Either they will get better or immeasurably worse, and in either case those who believe in the founding vision of this nation cannot afford to be passive any longer.” If George W. Bush is reelected and conservatives get more seats in Congress, said Robertson, “we may be able to accomplish some of our more important goals.” At the top of that list are “two and perhaps three” seats on the Supreme Court.[78] His prayers are being answered.

Packing Federal Courts with Judges Who Will Do God’s Work

The agenda of Christian conservatives is, relatively speaking, limited, and they believe much of it can be accomplished through the federal courts. Broadly speaking, they want to control the right of women to have abortions; to ban all forms of gay marriage; to prevent the teaching of safe sex in schools; to encourage home schooling; to ban the use of contraceptives; to halt stem cell research with human embryos; to stop the teaching of evolution and/or to start the teaching of intelligent design; to bring God into the public square and eliminate the separation of church and state; to overturn the legality of living wills; to control the sexual content of cable and network television, radio, and the Internet; and to eliminate an “activist” judiciary that limits or impinges on their agenda, by placing God-fearing judges on the bench who will promote their sincerely held beliefs.

Because they do not want to lose the support of evangelicals, or to see them withdraw from politics as their parents or grandparents did in the 1920s, Republicans must take this agenda seriously. Reagan and Bush I gave promises but failed to fully deliver; Bush II, who became one of them, has delivered. An unspoken quid pro quo has developed for their support. Republicans appoint judges and justices whose views are compatible with Christian conservatives to do what neither Congress nor the president can accomplish: to make the agenda of Christian conservatives into the law of the land. Thus the effort that began under Reagan, and was continued by Bush I, has been most aggressively pursued by Bush II, who has undertaken a deliberate and concerted effort to pack the federal judiciary with conservative judges from top to bottom. Bush II has been more successful with lower courts than with the Supreme Court, with only two appointments, but that, too, may change soon, given the age and health of several of the justices.

Seven of the nine justices currently serving on the Supreme Court have been appointed by Republicans, but three of those seven are not nearly conservative enough to satisfy Christian conservatives. Many of them consider Justices John Paul Stevens (a Ford appointee), Anthony Kennedy (a Reagan appointee), and David Souter (a Bush I appointee) to be liberals. They are not, and, in fact, there is not a single true liberal on the high Court. Clinton appointed two moderates, Justices Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, because he did not wish to spend his political capital with the Senate on trying to get a liberal confirmed. While today’s Supreme Court is more conservative than any since before the New Deal, lower federal courts are more conservative than they have ever been. By the end of 2005 “about 60 percent of the federal appeals courts were appointed by Republican presidents,” and of “the 13 circuit courts of appeal, 9 have majorities of judges named by Republican presidents.”[79] It is at the federal appellate court level that most law is made, and with the exceptions of the Second Circuit (Connecticut, New York, and Vermont) and the Ninth Circuit (Arizona, Alaska, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Oregon, and Washington), the federal circuits are more conservative than the Supreme Court. The Fourth Circuit (North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia), Fifth Circuit (Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas), and Eleventh Circuit (Alabama, Georgia, and Florida) especially have become