[Dialogue] Spong 1/25 revised essay.

[KroegerD at aol.com]

A note from my publisher: 
Due to a production error on our  part, this week's edition of Bishop Spong's 
newsletter was mistakenly sent out  before the text was finalized. We deeply 
regret the error and the embarrassment  it caused to the Bishop, and we 
apologize to him and to his readers. The final  version of the essay appears below.  
January 23, 2008 
Governor Huckabee: A Second  Generation Evangelical Politician  

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson managed to get through the Congress of the  
United States a national Voting Rights Act. It was not an easy task since  
Johnson had to maneuver the bill through a Senate controlled by old line  
Southern Democrats still wedded to segregation. To achieve this victory, he  
employed his prodigious reputation for arm twisting. Working primarily with  Everett 
Dirksen of Illinois, the minority leader of the Senate, Johnson  separated the 
Republican conservatives from their negativity to any law that  would 
increase the power of the federal government; and working with moderate  and border 
state Democrats, he peeled away these traditional “fellow travelers”  from the 
hard core racism of the deep South. The final vote in the Senate was  47-17 
among the Democrats and 30-2 among the Republicans. This tally indicated  that 
the “no” votes did not even include all of the senators from the states  that 
had once formed the Confederacy. It was a massive achievement, signaling a  
new day for America that brought into full voting citizenship vast numbers of  
heretofore disenfranchised black people.  
Bill Moyers, who was at that time serving as Johnson’s Chief of Staff,  
entered the Oval Office to bring his congratulations to the President on this  
victory, expecting to find him in a celebratory frame of mind. Instead, as  Moyers 
relates in his memoirs, he found the President in a mood of abject  
depression. “Bill,” he said, “I have just handed the South to the Republican  Party 
for the next fifty years.” He was remarkably correct.  
Racism had been chiseled deeply into the Southern character and was fixed  
indelibly in the Southern soul by the ravages of the Civil War. When racism was  
socially acceptable, it was quite overt. One has only to read the speeches of 
 southern politicians prior to the Civil War or even prior to the Civil 
Rights  revolution. When racism loses its aura of respectability, however, it doesn’
t  disappear, it simply becomes covert. Code words are developed. “States’ 
Rights,”  for example, really means: “We believe the state has the right to 
discriminate  without the interference of the Federal Government.” “Strict 
Constructionist  Judges” really means judges who confuse constitutional democracy 
with monocracy  and who will not extend constitutional rights to unpopular 
minorities.  
Johnson understood that newly enfranchised black voters would identify  
themselves primarily with the Democratic Party, which would in turn mean that  the 
old white southern establishment would inevitably preserve its covert racism  
by becoming Republican. In Virginia, Mills Godwin, who was the Conservative  
Democratic governor of Virginia from 1965-1969, was elected the Republican  
Governor of Virginia in 1973. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Phil Graham of  
Texas, Richard Shelby of Alabama and many others changed party allegiances  
without sacrificing their seats in the Senate. Richard Nixon went to school on  
Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful Southern strategy in 1964, adapting it in 1968 
to  sweep what had once been the solid Democratic South. In the pre-Voting 
Rights  Act era that solid Democratic South had rested on three political 
foundations:  protecting white supremacy, keeping a strong military (which was well 
rewarded  by the location of numerous military bases in the South) and 
supporting liberal  economic measures that would benefit the poor and middle class 
white southern  voters. These three positions reflected the values of the South 
that elected  them. First, by restricting black voters, segregation kept 
political power in  the hands of the white establishment. Second, during the period 
of slavery,  which was based on subjugating significant numbers of people, 
Southerners  cultivated the military virtues, identifying them with chivalry and 
good manners  (note the number of military schools in the South including The 
Citadel in South  Carolina and VMI in Virginia). Third, the poverty of the 
white South made  economic populism a political necessity. While the value of 
Southern land was  considerable, this wealth was in the hands of a relatively few 
people. As long  as Southern politicians could keep segregation intact, they 
tended to support  the working class values of such liberal Democratic 
presidents as Woodrow  Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and even John F. 
Kennedy.  
When segregation fell, however, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 probably  
more than anything else brought it down, Southern old line white Democratic  
voters found themselves willing to abandon populism as the price of their  
Republican identification. Racism always trumps bread and butter issues. Former  
Democrats began to portray themselves as “Values Voters,” to whom the National  
Republican leadership threw the emotional bones of making abortion a major  
political issue, attaching it to the liberal breakdown in sexual morality, and  
by campaigning against homosexual people, who were, they said, “threatening  
marriage and the family.” In this manner the conservative establishment wedded 
 the heretofore populist southern white voters with their right wing,  
wealth-oriented economic policies. This new political coalition became so  powerful 
that only two Democrats could break the Republican control of the White  House 
from 1968 to 2008. One of these two was a “born again” Georgia Governor  
whose rise to power was helped by Watergate, and the second was a Bible toting  
Arkansas Governor whose path to the White House was made easier by an economic  
downturn.  
The last Republican president in this era, George W. Bush, rode into power in 
 2000 by cultivating evangelical voters quite overtly with his own “born again
”  story. He governed, however, as an economic conservative. The Bush tax 
cuts did  not benefit the poor or the middle class. His lessening of restrictions 
on big  business gave us the huge and expensive scandals in Enron, World Com 
and Tyco of  the early 2000’s and the housing sub prime market of today. His 
military  adventures in Iraq made the cost of gasoline, health care and 
education  skyrocket. The wealthy might have been well served by this administration, 
but  the poor and middle classes came under heavy pressure. Next, religious 
scandals  tore at the integrity of the “values voter.” In the Roman Catholic 
Church it was  child abuse; in evangelical circles, it featured the bizarre 
sexual escapades of  Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, making the use 
of religious  politics appear to be little more than cynical jargon. Slowly 
but surely the old  political alliance of Southern evangelical whites and the 
Republican party of  wealthy conservatives that Lyndon Johnson had rightly 
predicted in 1965 began to  show signs of stress. It was waiting for a candidate 
who could see that “the  right to life” does not stop at birth, but that it is 
important even for the  children of evangelicals after birth to be educated, 
to have health care, to  find jobs that have not been exported to Mexico, 
India or China. Even the  specter of “gay marriage” did not seem so scary or even 
so partisan when a  Republican congressman from Florida who was overtly 
anti-gay was revealed to  have acted inappropriately with twisting. pages, a 
homosexual-hating Republican  senator from Idaho was caught soliciting homosexual 
favors in a public toilet  and the ordained head of the largest Evangelical 
Network in America was  discovered to have carried on a long term sexual 
relationship with a male  prostitute in Colorado. The former Republican coalition that 
combined “family  values,” pro-military patriotism and right wing economics 
began to wobble. The  stage was thus set for someone new to arise in the 
Republican Party. Enter  Michael Huckabee.  
A former Baptist preacher, Huckabee became governor of Arkansas when, as the  
Republican Lieutenant Governor, he succeeded the Democrat Jim Guy Tucker, who 
 was convicted and imprisoned for fraud. Governing as a Populist, he sought 
to  provide good education for the poor, including the children of illegal  
immigrants, and to make health care available to the poor, including the sizable  
black population of Arkansas. He was not afraid to criticize the Bush  
administration’s incompetent management of the war in Iraq. All of these things  he 
did while touching the usual bases of evangelical concern — evolution,  
abortion and homosexuality.  
Suddenly the face of America’s ruling political coalition began to reveal  
just how deeply Southern evangelicals had been both used and manipulated. When  
Huckabee decided to seek the Presidency the traditional economic conservatives 
 ignored him until he won the Iowa Caucuses. Then they turned on him with a  
vehemence that was quite unusual for these usually smooth operators. Rush  
Limbaugh accused Huckabee of employing the tactics of “class warfare,” not  
acknowledging that the Republicans have used class warfare against the poor for  
decades and that they had won. The Wall Street Journal called Huckabee  a 
member of the “Religious Left.” Fred Thompson, literally recruited by the old  
Republican coalition because they did not want a Mormon; a twice-divorced,  
pro-abortion mayor; a maverick pro-war senator that they never trusted or this  
Republican William Jennings Bryan preacher from Arkansas, said that Huckabee was  
a Christian leader with “liberal economic policies and liberal foreign policy.
”  The word “liberal” has come to mean anti-God.  
All that had really happened, however, was that Governor Huckabee had  
reclaimed the liberal southern economic policies that Southerners had tried to  
reject when they allowed racism to make them allies with the party of big  
business and Wall Street wealth. He was a second generation Evangelical who had  
combined “family values,” military might and long repressed southern bread and  
butter politics. In the process he began to threaten the powerful ruling  
political coalition. Can Huckabee or his position win? I do not think so. Can  the 
Republican Party win without this Southern evangelical part of their voting  
constituency? I do not think so.  
It has been 43 years since the Voting Rights Act became law. The 50-year gift 
 of the South to the Republican Party, about which Lyndon Johnson spoke, is  
nearing its end.  
– John Shelby Spong 



**************Biggest Grammy Award surprises of all time on AOL Music.     
(http://music.aol.com/grammys/pictures/never-won-a-grammy?NCID=aolcmp003000000025
48)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20080125/ad5dc8ca/attachment.html