Blood and Politics (34 page)

If failing to obey God’s Laws was the sin for Identity believers, according to this doctrine, then
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education
desegregation was the punishment. Peters argued that black mayors and elected officials were just one example of “aliens rising above and oppressing” whites. Interracial marriage was another, considered one of the most heinous of crimes.
³³

In this construct, people of color are not simply members of a racial nation distinct from the white Israelites. Interracial marriage is not regarded as something akin to an Italian’s marrying a Swede, deciding to have children, and live in Switzerland. Interracial sex is thought to be more like a form of bestiality, because black people are not considered human in the same way white people are. They are regarded as descendants of man before Adam, the pre-Adamites. Again, the Book of Genesis is marshaled to establish the origins of different peoples and their supposed genetic traits. Unlike the Jews, who represent the agency of Satan, in this construct nonwhite peoples are considered part of God’s creation. But they are formed
before
God makes the first white man, Adam, on the sixth day.

Having determined the origin of black people in God’s creation among the beasts before Adam, Peters still fixes the blame for white
people’s condition on their own misdeeds. It should be noted that this assertion that white people are responsible for their own racial misery challenges the liberal assumption that scapegoating and prejudice, rather than a cosmology or worldview, motivate individuals in the white supremacist movement. In this instance, Identity believers cite their own failure to live up to God’s Law as the cause for their “dispossessed” status.

“Illegal aliens, reverse discrimination, economic hardships, devastating taxes and rejection of Bible Law in America is a precise repeat of the Bible history,” Peters wrote. He claimed that “a historical cycle” had repeated itself since biblical times. Whites supposedly enjoyed peace and prosperity until they forgot their God, turned from his Laws, and were punished. To end their supposed suffering and dispossession and be redeemed, these Aryan Israelites must simply obey God’s Law, as Pete Peters understood it. First they must establish their own white Christian nation-state free of “aliens” and “strangers.” (Repealing the Fourteenth Amendment would be a start.)

They also needed to end sinful practices, such as abortion. As noted earlier, women must return to their position two steps behind men. And women and men must no longer tolerate homosexuality. Peters cited scriptural verses from Leviticus, Corinthians, and Romans and declared: “Intolerance of, discrimination against and the death penalty for homosexuals is prescribed in the Bible!” Much like enforcing male “headship” in the family or prohibiting interracial marriage, antigay discrimination fulfilled Peters’s version of God’s Law. The United States of America either enforced this law, according to Peters, or was a Baal-worshiping Sodom on the quick slope to hell. Either the death penalty for homosexuals or death and destruction would envelop the country, he reasoned. “If we as a society refuse to repent and acquire righteous government to punish this crime with the death penalty, then even more will die,” Peters wrote.
³⁴

Peters and other advocates of Christian Identity were not alone in their opposition to acceptance of homosexuality. Tens of millions of Americans cite aversion to gay men and lesbians as part of their core beliefs.
³⁵
And the politicians most identified with the issue of discriminating against gays are those influenced by the so-called Christian right, theologically driven cultural conservatives such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Pat Robertson.

February 9, 1988.
During the period when prosecutors and defendants in Fort Smith were still preparing for trial, the rest of the country was giving its attention to the presidential primaries. In Iowa, George H. W. Bush, President Reagan’s sitting vice president, was heavily favored in the Republican caucuses. Journalists expected votes for Senator Bob Dole, from the neighboring state of Kansas, and Dole did actually win. But no one predicted that the Reverend Pat Robertson would come out of right field, gather 25 percent of the GOP’s caucus vote, and place second in the pack of candidates. Before the primaries ended, Robertson had won the Washington state caucus and finished second in the Minnesota and North Dakota caucuses. He polled almost six hundred thousand votes on Super Tuesday alone and raised more money than any Republican contender other than George Bush. His candidacy collapsed in the southern primaries, but it was not a fluke showing. Rather, Robertson’s campaign proved to be a bellwether of Christian conservative electioneering to come.
¹

Marion G. “Pat” Robertson was then arguably the most successful entrepreneur among the preachers on the Christian right. He founded the Christian Broadcasting Network in the 1960s, and by 1988 its Family Channel was the eighth-largest cable network in the country.
²
He started Regents University for undergraduates and the American Center for Law and Justice as a legal advocacy institute. He wrote several substantial books enumerating his views and for a time became the preeminent religious voice for ultraconservative views outside the Republican mainstream.
³
Even as others on the Christian right foundered financially in President Reagan’s wake during the mid-1980s, Robertson prospered.
⁴
While white nationalists pressed their noses against the
glass, looking into the dining rooms of American politics, Robertson sat in the public’s living room via television and the Christian Broadcast Network.

Robertson, born in 1930, is from the same generation as Willis Carto and William Pierce. He is the patrician son of Senator A. Willis Robertson, a segregationist Virginia Democrat whose House and Senate career spanned thirty-four years. The Reverend Robertson’s father had been one of the architects of the South’s strategy of “massive resistance” to court-ordered desegregation.
⁵
But the reverend lived in a different era from his senator father. Jim Crow had been replaced by an amiable black cohost on the reverend’s daily
700 Club
television program. Although Robertson the younger supported the apartheid regime in South Africa because it was fighting godless “Communists,” he forsook the open advocacy of white supremacy in favor of ideas that were popular among Christian conservatives.
⁶

The Reverend Robertson’s Bible taught him that God had put man as the head of women; thus he opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and other measures aimed at creating gender equality. He fought anything that smacked of civil rights protection for gays and lesbians. Jeremiah
Chapter 1
Verse 5 reads: “Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee,” which Robertson interpreted as reason for overturning abortion rights.

At his core, Robertson believed that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should live under God’s Law, as understood and interpreted by men like him. This supposedly Christian nation had come undone after being placed under the despotic thumb of secular humanists. And he adapted classic conspiracy theories dating back to the French Revolution to explain how.
⁷

Robertson’s nationalism was of the Christian kind, a first cousin of the white variety. Both were similarly rooted in a mythology based on the Founding Fathers and the first moments of the Republic. The Christian right dated the moment of its dispossession to 1962, when the Supreme Court outlawed prayer in public schools, while its white nationalist cousins believed the 1954
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education
decision had stolen their national birthright. Both Christian nationalists and white nationalists regarded the United States of America as a country that was no longer theirs to control.

Despite this shared political kinship, in 1988 white supremacists such as Willis Carto could not abide Pat Robertson’s Republican candidacy, primarily because of his pro-Israel policies. On this point, Robertson’s eschatology—his version of God’s plan for the End Times—determined his politics. According to Robertson, the regathering of Jews in Israel
and the reclamation of Jerusalem, after almost two thousand years of dispersal, were a sign of events to come. It meant a Satanic one world government would arise, persecute Christians, and crush Israel. In the End, Jesus Christ would return and a remnant of Jews would convert to Christianity and be saved, along with all true believers. Everyone else would be thrown into the pit of hell. The Kingdom of God would be established. In this scenario, Christ’s Second Coming can’t occur without Jewish control of Jerusalem. As a consequence, Robertson supports the state of Israel, notwithstanding his conspiracy theories about how the Rothschilds and “international bankers” run the world.
⁸

During the early 1980s, when Robertson first became prominent, Carto’s
Spotlight
enlisted Cornelius Vanderhaggen for a series of articles on Israel and the End Times. According to the Liberty Lobby tabloid, Vanderhaggen had met Robertson in 1956 and catalyzed the latter’s born-again experience. Thus Vanderhaggen was the perfect authority to assure readers that Robertson’s view on Israel and the End Times “is totally contradicted by the Bible.” In this way, Carto first drew a line between his own camp and Robertson’s.
⁹

After Robertson made it known that he would run in the 1988 primaries, Carto faced a quandary.
The Spotlight
opined that Robertson came “closest to the populist views of most” of its readers, excepting, of course, on Israel and the Middle East.
¹⁰
So Liberty Lobby soft-pedaled its differences with Robertson during the primary season. Instead,
The Spotlight
directed most of its criticism at Senator Bob Dole (Vice President George Bush was already known to be beyond acceptance). That left Robertson untouched.

“We believe Pat Robertson does a great deal of good in his work. We saw no reason to get into a bitter shouting match with a television minister with whom we agree on almost every other issue but the Middle East,” Liberty Lobby’s secretary, Lois Peterson, reasoned.
¹¹

Robertson did not return the favor.
The Spotlight
reported that Robertson had once held the tabloid aloft on his nationally broadcast
700 Club
program and “urged his followers to stop reading” it. Robertson apparently described Carto’s crown jewel as “one of the most rabid, vicious publications and unfortunately a number of well-meaning Christians think that it is the truth and buy it.”
¹²

Shortly before the Iowa caucuses
The Spotlight
found a platform from which it could air its problems with Robertson. It published an interview with the Populist Party chair Tom McIntyre. The Populists couldn’t support any of the Republican contenders, McIntyre declared. “Pat Robertson comes close, but on the foreign policy question, he has declared himself as an all-out supporter of the state of Israel.” After all,
supporting Robertson “would be contrary to the Populist Party platform which cautions nationalism and non-intervention in U.S. foreign policy.” Robertson was dangerous,
The Spotlight
decided.
¹³

Robertson’s campaign in the Republican primaries that year paralleled a similar effort by David Duke in the Democratic camp. Robertson’s advantages over Duke included more spendable money, an only slightly off-key conservatism, and the celebrity that comes from having your own television network. His constituents flooded into the Republican Party, worked their precincts, and set up voter mobilization phone trees. They were practiced at the art of lobbying elected officials on such issues as opposition to abortion rights. And in the years to come Robertson’s supporters ensconced themselves in the heart of the Republican Party. They were ready to run for, and be elected to, everything from school board and county commission to Congress. Duke’s erstwhile supporters, by contrast, sometimes preferred to attend weekend cross burnings rather than labor dully over the little things that make a campaign go.

If the Reverend Robertson roiled the Republican waters, David Duke barely created a ripple among Democrats. His campaign relied on existing white supremacist networks for money and human matériel. He rented mailing lists of potential donors from Liberty Lobby and
The Spotlight
, paying thousands trying to prime his financial pumps. To those who contributed relatively large sums early, the David Duke for President Committee gave copies of Wilmot Robertson’s book
The Dispossessed Majority
, the same title he had sold ten years earlier from his Klan offices.
¹⁴

With these contributions, Duke paid himself office rent through a business front he called B C & E. (Duke rarely missed an opportunity to line his own pockets.) He also hired some part-time staff: Matt Anger, a college-age Virginian who fancied himself a “political soldier”; Allen Baylough, once a sharp Pennsylvania organizer for William Pierce’s National Alliance; and William Rhodes, a future Aryan Nations associate and videographer. To this crew, he added Ralph Forbes, the Arkansas state Populist Party chair, who became his campaign manager but failed to ensure that Duke met the requirements for receiving Federal Election Commission matching funds.
¹⁵
These all were relatively capable men drawn from several organizations. But Duke could have more easily hired these same people to run a Klan organization, as they all lacked significant election experience.

His major stops included a Pittsburgh Populist Party fund-raiser and
an Identity gathering in Cape Canaveral, Florida. At a motel stop outside Philadelphia, Duke handled pointed questions about his attitude toward the former California state Klan dragon Tom Metzger, who had made a noticeable mark at Fort Smith. Duke was circumspect in his response, not directly criticizing Metzger—despite the Californian’s widely broadcast and vehement denunciations of Duke as an unprincipled opportunist.
¹⁶
Such were not the kinds of questions that decided votes at the ballot box.