This is the third installment on how the Christian Coalition took working control of the Republican Party between the years 1991 to 1994. The first two installments are:

Part I - The Woman in A Mink Coat

Part II - While We Were Sleeping

Part III - Angels on A Pinhead

"We think the Lord is going to give us this nation back one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one state at a time." Ralph Reed Christianity Today, April 3, 1990

Five years later:

By mobilizing eager volunteers down to the precinct (and local church) level and handing out 33 million voter guides -- often in church pews -- prior to last November's election, the Coalition is credited with providing the winning margin for perhaps half the Republicans' 52-seat gain in the House of Representatives and a sizable portion of their nine-seat pickup in the Senate."  (Time May 15, 1995)

How did the Christian Coalition provide "the winning margin" described in Timemagazine?"   We are going to look at a multli-pronged approach that included:
*    taking over the leadership at the precinct level by focusing on obscure party posts, obstructing meetings, and aggressively intimidating local leaders
*    using stealth;
*    working through sympathetic churches;
*    relying on voter apathy.

This entry will deal with #1 - Tactics for taking over the leadership at the precinct level. Future entries will discuss the other strategies.

Talking about the 1992 elections, Marc Wolin, a moderate Republican who lost the election in San Francisco, told journalist Greg Goldin:

What the Christian right spends a lot of time doing is going after obscure party posts. They try to control the party apparatus in each county. We have a lot to fear from these people. They want to set up a theocracy in America.

In 1993 Craig Berkman, former chairman of the Republican Party in Oregon, explained to Goldin:

They have acquired a very detailed and accurate understanding of how political parties are organized. Parties are very susceptible to being taken over by ideologues because lower party offices have no appeal to the vast majority of our citizenry. Many precincts are represented by no one. If you decide all of a sudden because it's your Christian duty to become a precinct representative, you only need a few votes to get elected.
Increasingly, they have the key say-so on who will be a delegate at the national convention, and who will write the party platform and nominate the presidential candidate. In a state like Oregon, with 600,000 registered Republicans, it is possible for 2000 or 3000 people to control the state party apparatus. more

What happened when members of the Christian Coalition were losing the vote? Again from Berckman:

 ... parliamentary manipulations [would] begin, and after two or three hours of discussion about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, the more reasonable people with other things to do leave, and in the wee hours of the morning, things are decided. That's how they achieve their objectives. more

Once the Christian Right had taken control of the Congressional leadership,  the "wee hours of the morning" tactic was to become a favorite tactic.
From Congressman Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio (12/11/03):

 House Republicans bend rules, press for votes during wee hours to escape the light of accountability. Never before has the House of Representatives operated in such secrecy:
At 2:54 a.m. on a Friday in March, the House cut veterans benefits by three votes.
At 2:39 a.m. on a Friday in April, the House slashed education and health care by five votes.
At 1:56 a.m. on a Friday in May, the House passed the Leave No Millionaire Behind tax-cut bill by a handful of votes.
At 2:33 a.m. on a Friday in June, the House passed the Medicare privatization and prescription drug bill by one vote.
At 12:57 a.m. on a Friday in July, the House eviscerated Head Start by one vote.
And then, after returning from summer recess, at 12:12 a.m. on a Friday in October, the House voted $87 billion for Iraq. Always in the middle of the night. Always after the press had passed their deadlines. Always after the American people had turned off the news and gone to bed.
The most sweeping changes to medicare in its 38 year history were forced through the House at 5:55 on a Saturday morning.

 
When the "angels on a pinhead" tactic didn't work, shouting took over. Writing about Harris County, TX, Fred Clarkson reports:

  Recently, the Christian Right shouted down and ousted the elected party chair Betsy Lake, and installed a theocratic activist, Steven Hotze. more

 
If you want to learn more about Dr. Steven Hotze, see Bruce Prescott's entry On Restoring America  about a video he received from Dr. Hotze in 1990.

 The video was a guide on how to 1) take over a Republican Party precinct meeting, 2) elect "Christian" delegates to the GOP District meeting, and 3) put planks supporting the theocratic agenda of Christian Reconstructionism into the party platform.

 
From Joan Lowey of Scripps-Howard News Service, reporting on the 1992 elections:

 More than a dozen county meetings to elect party officers in Washington State erupted into shouting matches in recent weeks as mainstream Republicans and religious activists battled for control. Last summer, the GOP state convention under the control of religious activists passed a party platform denouncing witchcraft and yoga, among other subjects.

 
Lowey goes on to report:

  Working at the grassroots, fundamentalist activists have either gained control or made sizable inroads into state party organization in Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Oregon, Washington and Virginia.
A loosely affiliated network of Religious Right organizations led by televangelist Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition has also mobilized millions of evangelical voters across the country. While they failed to re-elect President Bush, those voters helped to elect hundreds of religious activists and Republicans sympathetic to their conservative social agenda to school boards, city councils, state legislatures and Congress.
Now Christian Right activists are laying plans to expand their influence within the party and to target off-year election contests, particularly gubernatorial and state legislative races in New Jersey and Virginia this year. more

 
Lowey reports that in "Minnesota [Evangelicals] had been pressuring the Republicans attending precinct caucuses to state if and when they had been born again."

These news reports from 1993 create a mosaic. When read together a picture emerges of a very aggressive, well organized, and determined movement taking working control of the Republican Party from the bottom up, going precinct by precinct across various states, tying up meetings for hours with irrelevant questions until moderates left, and, when that didn't work, shouting the leaders out of office.

Yet to come - more on strategies: how the Christian Coalition ran stealth campaigns, capitalized on voter apathy, and worked through sympathetic churches to achieve their goals.

These articles can all be found at TheocracyWatch


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[ed: Joan Bokaer's four part series is:
The Woman in A Mink Coat,
While We Were Sleeping,
Angels on A Pinhead
Under Cover Of Night]