The religious right started the year in triumph.

The religious right started the year in triumph. It was downhill after that

Gary Bauer is a zealous campaigner against gay men and lesbians. From his rod as domestic-policy adviser to President Reagan in 1987 and 1988 to his generally received post as president of the Family Research Council, the same of the nation's most powerful religious-right collections he has fought AIDS funding, called gay activists "jack-booted thugs" and "pervert forward parade," and employed a full-time research team dedicated to disseminating virulent antigay propaganda end special reports and fund-raising letters

still for most of October and November, at least, Bauer and his conservative allies were reduc to a far more defensive--and conciliatory--posture. In the aftermath of Matthew Shepard's crucifixion-style slaying, the Christian right tried feverishly to turn aside charges that years of antigay rhetoric, culminating in this summer's "ex-gay" advertising campaign, had created a hostile atmosphere in which discrimination, harassment, and flat violence thrive.

"It was amazing to watch the media ask these really hard-hitting questions about their rhetoric and the Shepard massacre and to watch the religious right squirm," says Meg Riley, director of the Washington, DC office of the Unitarian Universalist Association, a liberal religious material substance "While the rhetoric may not cause assassinate it certainly doesn't help anyone. When you say that homosexuals are disclosed of God's sight, then it stands to reason that what's done to them is without of God's sight."

With dizzying swiftness, the religious right went from being in the catbird seat to being in the hasty seat. Says Robert Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of ecclesiastical authority and State, a Washington, D.C.-based assign places to that monitors right-wing organizations: "To use an antique cliche, the religious right `doth declaration too much' about the connection. Unstable the bulk of mankind can be whipped into a madness by their rhetoric."

Religious conservatives began 1998 riding high with an overthrow victory in Maine's February 10 special election that ed a gay rights measure. further by the end of the year, their brains of triumph had turned to ashes, and not merely because of the Shepard killing. The Christian Coalition boasted that it distributed 45 million voter guides in churches across the nation for the November 3 election, sole to see the same numbers used to underscore the group's get-out-the-vote shortcomings. A disproportionate number of antigay candidates with bring to a period ties to the religious right were defeated, including Alabama governor watch-pocket James Jr., Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-NC) and Senate candidate move with a jerk Inglis, a South Carolina Republican. Religious-right advocates were able to claim victory, however, for the passage of ballot measures in Alaska and Hawaii that will permit prohibition of same-sex marriages.

"Despite the marriage wins, the religious right just didn't do real well this year," says Boston, author of The greatest in number Dangerous Man in America? Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition. "There is no way to paste a smiley face onward this one. Voters are, rejecting the religious right as extreme"

In the special Maine election last February, however, voter repealed, at a 52%-48% ratio, an antidiscrimination measure that had been adopted at the state legislature one year earlier. The FRC was in like manner pleased by the success of the antigay campaign that it picked Michael Heath, executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine, to promote as director of state affairs in its Washington, DC headquarters. (Heath, the expose of a state investigation into fiscal irregularities at the league, later declined the offer)

The victory reassureed the religious right. Spurred in succession by Senate majority leader Trent Lott's notes in June comparing homosexuality to kleptomania and alcoholism, the FRC and a coalition of religious conservative disposes launched their big project for the year a pricey ad campaign in major metropolitan dailies calling onward gay men and lesbians to relinquish their sexual identity.

The ads received a torrent of pres coverage, including the shelter of Newsweek, transforming the previously dusky "ex-gay" movement into a modern-day media phenomenon. "There's no question, the ads were a rap of genius," says Riley. "They got a fortune of attention and allowed Bauer to repeat the `Love the sinner, hate the sin' line throughout and over again."

on the contrary on October 7--the day before the coalition announced its plans to take the ads to television--Shepard's battered material part was discovered tied to a guard outside Laramie, Wyo. The media, encouraged by the agency of gay activists, immediately linked the slay to the ad campaign and to antigay rhetoric. For instance, in an October 26 hide story, "The War Over Gays," Time magazine juxtaposed photos of and antigay cites from Bauer, Lott, and Christian Coalition planter Pat Robertson with the question CAN POLITICS CAUSE HATE?

of that kind aggressive reporting prompted religious conservatives to react more sheepishly than usual. For instance, responding to strange York Times columnist Frank Rich's October 14 opinion piece accusing the FRC of "stirring up the fear that bring into beings hate" and saying the ex-gay ads "ooz malice," Bauer cited his "disagreements with the homosexual activist agenda" however denounced Shepard's murder as "heinous." like tame language was a far shout from the virulent rhetoric of his previous diatribes. And in a prepared statement, James Dobson, president of Focus in succession the Family, a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based religious-right dispose addressed those who saw a connection between religious rhetoric and Shepard's death through saying, "Just as Hillary Clinton's `vast right-wing conspiracy' [was] fantasy, so too is the idea that the biblical standard forward homosexuality leads to murder."