2011 was a frustrating year for the anti-LGBT Right. Despite millions of voters and many millions of dollars generated by a loose coalition of conservative forces to oppose LGBT rights, the LGBT rights movement has made tremendous progress. While…
The hard truth: homophobia remains one of the right-wing’s most successful tools for mobilizing political support. Even as LGBT advocates celebrate recent victories—four ballot measure victories in 2012, President Obama’s public support for marriage…
In June 2010, Ned Holstein, the president of the national group Fathers and Families, appeared on a Boston call-in radio show to promote a child-custody bill before the Massachusetts legislature.
In the run-up to the August 2009 Congressional recess, TV ads on health care reform hit the airwaves. The Family Research Council’s political action committee launched a five-state effort to squash a comprehensive health care bill with their spot,…
Exactly two months before abortion provider George Tiller was assassinated in the foyer of his church in Wichita, Kansas, Janice Shaw Crouse lent her voice to the chorus of pundits criticizing Tiller’s unwavering support for women who sought his…
Last October a chartered bus rolled deep through the South, its passengers college-aged young people drawing inspiration from the Freedom Riders of the 1960s. The black vinyl advertising plastered on the side broadcast the riders’ goals, “Equality…
The Christian Right Embraces Anti-Immigrant Politics
If the September 2007 Values Voters Summit is anything to go by, the Christian Right is now nearly as worked up about illegal immigration as about abortion and same-sex marriage. At that political gathering—sponsored annually in Washington D.C. by…
The Heritage Foundation’s headquarters sits two blocks from the Capitol in Washington, D.C., a symbolic representation of its intimate access to Congress and public policymakers. Heritage’s rise to prominence has paralleled the rise to power of…
In the high-adrenaline, and heavily heterosexual, world of Beltway lobbyists, the gay Log Cabin Republicans have their work cut out for them. Ostracized by the Republican Party which continues to receive their fierce loyalty, the LCR is the group…
How Religious Conservatives Succeeded and Failed in the 2006 Elections
It was a scant five weeks until the 2006 midterm elections, and photogenic Christian Right leader Tony Perkins gripped the podium and smiled confidently at the 1700 activists gathered at the Values Voters Summit. Perkins predicted that his new…
Even as the Right fosters paranoid conspiracy theories about the United Nations implementing a “One World Government,” anti-choice agitators have found a way to use the UN to combat reproductive freedom around the globe. The report reveals how the…
The Christian Right, Values Voters, and the Culture Wars in 2006
Chip Berlet and Pam Chamberlain explore how the Christian Right fused together an external threat of “Islamofascism” and an internal boogeyman of gay rights to try to help right-wing candidates in the 2006 elections.
How Anti-Abortion Myths Feed the Christian Right Agenda
The anti-abortion movement uses B.A.D science and agenda-driven journals to back up false claims about abortions, in an effort to make abortions illegal.
“A few years ago,” the Washington Times reported in a story last year, “Jeff O’Holleran said he began to realize that he was different from the other boys he knew…. Yesterday, he said, it was time to come out of the closet. In the middle…
Excerpt from Deliberate Differences: Progressive and Conservative Campus Activism in the United States, a Political Research Associates report by Pam Chamberlain (2005). Our findings are summarized as follows:
1. Energetic College Students…
U.S. colleges and universities have a long tradition of political activism. They are centers of intellectual activity; concentrations of young people live in close proximity; and students can experience new ideas and constructs about the world at…
A woman’s ability to control her reproductive decisions—her reproductive rights—involves more than her right to safe and legal abortion. Reproductive rights encompass the right to bear and raise children, the right to access adequate reproductive…
