The Cultural Right Is Here to Stay

By Richard Brookhiser

The day after the 1992 election was supposed to be the first day of life without the religious right. George Bush had kept faith with cultural conservatives on abortion and turned his nominating convention over to their spokesmen. Evangelical Protestants stuck with him on Election Day, but hardly anyone else did. Americans had finally, as Voltaire might have put it, crushed the infamy. The political theologians and theological politicians of the late unlamented '80s were no more. We were all philosophes now.

So why has the right refused to go away? In Oregon, members of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition continue to make inroads in the state Republican Party, losing the chairmanship by a slim margin to a "moderate" who is pro-life. That's what you might expect in a state that, once you get past the coffee bars of Portland, is still the Wild West. But in New York City, the nation's largest St. Patrick's Day parade took place without a gay contingent, a judge having ruled that its longtime sponsors were free to exclude one. The liberal Babylon also decided not to rehire its top education bureaucrat after he had promoted a curriculum suggesting that six-year-olds with questions about homosexuality be sent to sources such as Heather Has Two Mommies. An alliance of the Christian Coalition and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York then proceeded to help opponents of the curriculum win seats on local school boards. Finally, President Clinton found that he could not open the military to open gays with the stroke of a pen.

These seeming turnabouts are not examples of the people changing their mind. Rather, they are part of a process of people discovering their own mind, in response to the perceived power plays of minorities. Just because Americans didn't like the rhetoric of some of the conservatives at the Republican Convention doesn't mean they have liked the behavior of the liberals since. Each group stands convicted of the sin of bellicosity: the right for declaring - (in Patrick Buchanan's words) a cultural war, the left for waging one.

Although recent liberal defeats came on issues connected with homosexuality, the thread linking them was not sexual orientation but hubris. The left lost because it overreached, not because gays were doing the reaching. The Commander in Chief has discovered that the Congress, the people and the Pentagon also have a say in how the military is run. New York City has a large and politically potent gay subculture, which celebrates itself in a variety of venues, from Broadway plays to street theater. But the Irish Catholic establishment believed the gay right to party stopped short of crashing its party, and the courts agreed. As far as the offending curriculum was concerned, most of the parents who balked at it were surely not opposed to tolerance. "Mind your business" is a very old saw; Benjamin Franklin put it on the first American coin. Heather Has Two Mommies struck traditionalists as going beyond toleration to approbation, where they were not willing to follow. The example of failed liberal power plays supplies conservatives as far away as Oregon with ammunition and encouragement.

Many American conflicts can be defused by pluralism, though we must distinguish two kinds. The first is the bogus pluralism of multiculturalism, in which everyone is enlisted at birth in some ethnic, religious or sexual militia, which is then summoned to take its place in the army of society as a whole -- a system of regimented diversity, resembling the former Yugoslavia. Like Yugoslavia, such systems have to be maintained by constant pressure, if not coercion, and Bosnias of resentment always lurk beneath the surface.

Real pluralism is the diversity bred by decentralization and consumer choice. If parents have school choice, those who want to put their children on the sexual cutting edge and those who are content to stay put could both do so, and Heather and all her mommies and daddies would be moot as a political issue. In education, pluralism will favor the right so long as liberals take on the role of moralizers and uplifters. One contributor to a recent issue of Tikkun magazine called on the White House to push Heather nationwide, since "to eradicate antigay hatred we must start with the young." Memo to President Clinton: If you're looking for a no-brainer, this is it.

But pluralism has limits. In unitary institutions like the military, gays must be either in or out. Pluralism also falters when it attempts to define the limits of what is human. In 1858 Abraham Lincoln challenged Stephen Douglas in a Senate race and a series of debates because he rejected Douglas' belief that voters in territories should be left to decide the status of blacks. Lincoln lost the election, though he won the debates, and the ensuing Civil War. The abortion debate of the past 20 years has revolved around the question of whether women have the right to decide the fate of fetuses. When an opponent of abortion took it upon himself to decide the fate of Dr. David Gunn, pro-choicers feared it might be the first shot in a new civil war. It won't be, since sane pro-lifers believe the lives of abortionists are as sacred as those of the unborn. Given the fact that upholders of abortion rights now occupy both the White House and the majority of seats on the Supreme Court, the abortion struggle will devolve into a series of fights on subsidiary issues such as parental consent. But the underlying battle lines will remain, since the battle is about a philosophical question rather than a purely political one.

The cultural right won't disappear anytime soon. Especially since the cultural left won't let it.