Ralph Reed v. Pat Robertson

May 23, 1996 -- For Immediate Release
Contact: Mary Conway, Dorothy Lohmann
         Peter Montgomery (202) 467-4999

Ralph Reed v. Pat Robertson:
Christian Coalition Director Calls For Civility And Tolerance
While His Boss Rips Opponents And Preaches Extremism

People For the American Way releases The Two Faces
       of the Christian Coalition."Two Voices
of One Movement"

The opening publicity salvo for 
Christian Coalition Executive
Director Ralph Reed's new book features his call for humility
and tolerance in public debate; but the organization he leads
is one of the nation's foremost practitioners of the rhetorical
divisiveness and extremism he criticizes in others. People For
the American Way today released a brief comparison of Reed's new
book and the record of Christian Coalition President Pat Robertson
and other spokespersons.

"Ralph Reed's attempt to position the Christian Coalition
as a champion of rhetorical moderation and tolerance is either
the political season's most dramatic conversion story or its most
brazen act of chutzpah," said People For the American Way
President Carole Shields. "Reed's message, if sincere, is
surely welcome. The American political dialogue could do with
a dose of generosity and humility. But as long as his boss Pat
Robertson is polluting the airwaves with ugly intolerance, Reed's
gentle words will reek of pure political calculation." 

Shields noted that the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson's powerful
political group, has spoken with two voices for years. To members,
activists and recipients of direct mail, the organization has
employed stern, sometimes shrill rhetoric, righteously condemning
political adversaries (including the President of the United States),
openly hostile to gays and lesbians, vitriolic on abortion-related
issues and more. Typically, that correspondence has been signed
by Pat Robertson, the group's president. Similarly, on his daily
television program, Robertson has routinely employed rhetoric
that can only be considered extremist.

To more mainstream audiences, however, the group has a much gentler
voice, and it belongs to executive director Ralph Reed. Since
embarrassing himself with quotes boasting of the group's "stealth"
campaign strategies, Reed has reformed his rhetoric, and now is
a study in how to describe an extreme agenda in mild tones. With
the publication of his new book, Active Faith, Reed takes
this strategy one step further: promoting himself as the champion
of rhetorical moderation, he chastises his Religious Right colleagues
for employing harsh rhetoric against gays, for personally attacking
the President of the United States, and for seeking to impose
their own moral principles on the rest of America. Ironically,
his message might most usefully have been delivered to his own
organization.

Read The Two Faces
       of the Christian Coalition.
The following selections represent only a fraction of the Christian Coalition's  long and well-documented record of intolerance.   Significantly, for all of Reed’s bluster about rhetorical moderation, Pat Robertson has never repudiated any of the statements in the report that follows; from all available evidence, the statements still represent his views.

For more information,  contact the People For the American Way's communications department at  (202)467-4999. People For the American Way is a 300,000 member  nonpartisan civil liberties organization that opposes the divisive agenda of the  Religious Right political movement.

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Ralph Reed vs. Pat Robertson

Two Voices of One Movement

Ralph Reed

Christian Coalition executive 
director
Pat Robertson

Christian Coalition president

"As a community of faith, we stand at a crossroads. 
Down one path lies the fate of many other great religiously-inspired 
political movements of the past: irrelevance and obscurity. It is a 
path defined by its spiritual arrogance and by its faulty assumption 
that the most efficacious way to change hearts is through the coercive 
power of the state...To get there, religious conservatives must shun 
harsh language on critical issues -- chiefly abortion, Clinton-bashing, 
and homosexuality -- and learn to speak of our opponents with 
charity."

-- Ralph Reed in Active Faith, as excerpted 
in Newsweek magazine

"What Planned Parenthood is doing is absolutely 
contrary to everything Christian. It is teaching kids to fornicate, 
teaching people to have adultery, teaching people to get involved 
in every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism -- everything 
that the Bible condemns. And teaching us to be without absolutely 
any moral constraint."

-- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 4-9-91

"[It's] incredible that those who claim to be liberal 
have got blood on their hands. They've got this desire to murder."

-- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 3-3-90

"When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing 
will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people 
involved in Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were 
homosexuals -- the two things seem to go together."

-- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 1-21-93.

"We will be judged by history and by our God not 
according to the political victories we achieve but by whether our 
words and our deeds reflect His love. When one of the nation's leading 
evangelical preachers suggests that the president may be a murderer, 
when a pro-life leader says that to vote for Clinton is to sin against 
God, and when conservative talk-show hosts lampoon the sexual 
behavior of the leader of the free world, their speech reflects 
poorly on the gospel and on our faith."

-- Ralph Reed in Active Faith

"The president is the leader of the country. He is 
supposed to be the role model for every human being in this nation. 
We set him on a pedestal, maybe beyond what we should. But you 
don't expect the President to be a sleazy liar."

-- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 12-23-93.

"[T]hese socialists and they're in there now, starting 
with the President and his associates...they want to squeeze out 
religion because if people read the Bible, they can't be enslaved. 
You'll never have a socialist government where everybody's Christian."

-- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 2-18-94.

"God and morality, the Clinton administration wants out 
of the country."

-- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 12-23-93.

"Calling gays 'perverts' or announcing that AIDS is 
'God's judgment' on the gay community is not consistent with our 
Christian call to mercy."

-- Ralph Reed in Active Faith

"Many observers say that AIDS is the hammer and gun 
of the homosexual movement, an effective vehicle to propel the 
homosexual agenda throughout every phase of our society."

-- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 6-20-90.

"It's one thing to say, 'We have rights to jobs...we have 
rights to be left alone in out little corner of the world to do our thing.' It's an entirely different thing to say, well, 'We're not only going to go into the schools and we're going to take your children and your grandchildren and turn them into homosexuals.' Now that's wrong."

-- Pat Robertson on The 700 Club, 9-17-92.

"I am absolutely persuaded one of the reasons so many 
lesbians are at the forefront of the pro-choice movement is because 
being a mother is the unique characteristic of womanhood, and these 
lesbians will never be mothers naturally, so they don't want anybody 
else to have that privilege either."

-- Pat Robertson on The 700 Club, 5-18-93.

"I have known few homosexuals who did not practice their 
tendencies. Such people are sinning against God and will lead to 
the ultimate destruction of the family and our nation. I am 
unalterably opposed to such things, and will do everything I can 
to restrict the freedom of these people to spread their contagious 
infection to the youth of our nation."

-- Pat Robertson, May 24, 1994 letter

"To change public attitudes, we must also repudiate 
the demonization of women who are pregnant out of wedlock...and 
pour our greatest efforts into education, persuasion, and prayer -- 
not politics alone."

-- Ralph Reed in Active Faith

"These girls are not stupid. If you want to pay them 
five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred dollars a 
month, or whatever it is, to have a baby, they'll have babies. And 
if they'll stop paying them, they'll stop having babies. It's that 
simple. It's not heartless, it's not cruel, it's an intelligent 
use of money."

-- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 8-7-95.

"If religious conservatives are wise, they will 
resist the temptation to replace the social engineering of the 
left with the social engineering of the right by forcing compliance 
with the moral principles that motivate us so deeply."

-- Ralph Reed in Active Faith
"If Christian people work together, they can succeed 
during this decade in winning back control of the institutions 
that have been taken from them over the past 70 years. Expect 
confrontations that will be not only unpleasant but at times 
physically bloody...This decade will not be for the faint of 
heart, but the resolute. Institutions will be plunged into 
wrenching change. We will be living through one of the most 
tumultuous periods of human history. When it is over, I am 
convinced God's people will emerge victorious."

-- Pat Robertson's Perspective, Oct/Nov, 1992

Ralph Reed

Christian Coalition 
Leaders

"We have all been guilty of excessive hyperbole in 
fund-raising letters (the harangues against conservative Christians 
by groups on the left are notorious), but I would hope both 
sides will resist attacking individuals and stick to policy 
differences."

Ralph Reed in Active Faith
"This is the United States of America. Christians, 
like all other Americans, have the constitutionally guaranteed 
right to freedom of religion. But a small minority of godless 
liberals are working hard to take away our rights."

-- Dick Weinhold, Chairman of the Texas Christian 
Coalition in a May 12, 1994 letter.

"The 40-year reign of a liberal Congress allowed every 
wind of humanistic doctrine to occupy the high places of authority 
and seats of influence in this country. Liberal dogma seeped 
through our culture via legislation, the media and press, our 
churches and schools, the courts and our entertainment industry. 
Like possessed apostles, they have turned the American dream into 
an American nightmare. They protect the profane while profaning our 
God."

-- Missouri Christian Coalition newsletter - July 1995

"As government liberalism tries to tighten its immoral 
hold on America's families, the time has never been better for 
the forces of God to stand up for our religious and other freedoms. 
Just watch...as the anti-God forces incrementally try to eliminate 
all traces of God from schools and other public arenas...they will 
also try to rid our country of Churches through taxation laws. WE 
CAN PUT THEM TO FLIGHT!"

-- Sara DiVito Hardman, state director of the California 
Christian Coalition (no date)

Bill Clinton's inauguration was "a repudiation of our 
founding fathers' covenant with God."

-- Attributed to the Christian Coalition, the New 
York Times, 7-5-94

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(202) 467-4999 

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All Rights Reserved. 

Last Modified 7/31/96

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