From: emarsh@hernes-sun.Eng.Sun.COM (Eric Marsh)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: `Christian Coalition' skirting edges of tex law
Date: 11 Oct 92 00:49:27 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, Ca.
NNTP-Posting-Host: hernes-sun


      `Christian Coalition' Skirting Edges of Tax Law
 
                     By Michael Isikoff
                      Washington Post
 
CHESAPEAKE, Va.
 
It's been done under the aegis of a tax-exempt and
supposedly non-partisan "citizen action" organization. But
television evangelist Pat Robertson has raised more than $13
million for a quietly ambitious foray into politics aimed at
electing "pro-family Christians" to Congress and achieving
"working" control of the Republican Party by 1996.
 
Since it was founded in 1989, Robertson's Christian
Coalition has in many ways eclipsed the impact of the
defunct Moral Majority, achieving majorities or near-
majorities on Republican central committees in more than a
half a dozen states and sending 300 members as delegates to
last month's Republican National Convention.
 
Now Robertson, an unsuccessful GOP presidential candidate in
1988, is backing a massive. get-out-the-vote effort for this
year's November elections, which have included "in-pew"
registration at churches, the distribution of up to 40
million "voter guides" on "family" issues and the use of
computer-assisted telephone banks to help elect favored
candidates in key races.
 
"I think this will be most effective coordinated activity by
evangelical Christians that we've ever seen," said Ralph
Reed Jr., executive director of the Christian Coalition,
which claims 250,000 members in 49 states. "I don't want to
belittle Jerry Falwell or the Moral Majority. But the
Christian Coalition as a model represents a more mature,
more developed and more politically sophisticated vehicle
for Christian political activism."
 
The group also is backing anti-gay-rights initiatives in
Oregon and Colorado and working to defeat a proposed equal
rights amendment in Iowa that Robertson suggested would
advance "a feminist agenda ... that encourages women to
leave their husbands, kill their children, practice
witchcraft, destroy capitalism. and become lesbians."
 
Some GOP strategists, while privately embarrassed by some of
Robertson's language, acknowledge his activities may be
decisive in bringing out Republican voters in some Southern
and border states.
 
Critics of the organization, however, contend that at least
some of the Christian Coalition's activities have become so
openly partisan they violate Internal Revenue Service rules.
In addition, Robertson's increasingly hard-line rhetoric has
alarmed moderate Republicans who fear his aggressive agenda
is turning off voters and threatening the future of the
party.
 
"What they're doing along the way is antagonizing the hell
out of mainstream Republicans who have just gotten fed up,"
said John Treen, the Republican Party chairman in Jeffergon
Parish, La. He estimated that more than half of the party's
central committee in Louisiana is now in the hands of
Christian Coalition members.
 
The coalition was incorporated as a nonprofit 50lC(4) group
under the tax code, which grants tax-exempt status to
charitable, educational or social-welfare groups so long as
they do not engage in partisan politics as their "primary"
activity. Reed has said the group has fulfilled this
requirement because its actions are generally aimed st
influencing "the public policy process" without regard to
party affiliation.
 
But tax records and Christian Coalition documents show
extensive financial and political ties to national and local
Republican Party organizations, connections that are being
reviewed by IRS auditors.
 
Although most of the Christian Coalition's money comes from
direct-mail fund-raising, for example, records show that the
largest single contributor has been the National Re publican
Senatorial Committee, which gave $64,000 - described by Reed
as "seed money" - in October 1990.
 
But even more important than its electoral efforts, some
critics say, has been the Christian Coalition's thinly
disguised grass-roots attempts to win control of local,
state and ultimately the national Republican parties.
 
"We want ... as soon as possible to see a working majority
of the Republican Party in the hands of pro-family
Christians by 1996," Robertson told delegates at last year's
"Road to Victory" conference.
 
Robertson's supporters have followed that agenda, pouring
out in extraordinary numbers at local caucuses and other
party meetings to elect state GOP committee members and
national convention delegates, Party officials say.
 
"Their only purpose for existence as far as we've been able
to determine is to take over the Republican Party from the
bottom on up," said Robert Boston, a spokesman for the
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a
frequent critic of Robertson and the Christian Coalition.
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc