Rev. Donald Wildmon founded the American Family Association in 1977 and has made headlines recently for boycotts targeting such corporations as Ford Motor Co. and Procter & Gamble.
RELIGIOUS RIGHT TURNOVER Since the rise of conservative Christians as a potent political force in the late 1970s, a succession of lobbying groups have rotated as the focal point for hot-button social controversies.
Moral Majority
Founded in1979 by Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority played a critical role getting social conservatives elected during the1980 elections. Major issues included prayer and teaching creationism in schools, outlawing abortion and opposing gay rights. The organization mobilized 8.5 million new voters, largely through church-based voter registration drives, and raised $70 million to support its candidates.
Falwell led the group from 1979-1987 before the Moral Majority was dissolved in 1989. In November 2004, Falwell organized the Moral Majority Coalition for get-out-the-vote efforts in the 2006 and 2008 elections.
Christian Coalition
Now considered a shell of its former self, the Christian Coalition of America was once a formidable political force with Ralph Reed at its helm. Reed led the group, founded in 1989 by Pat Robertson, as executive director between 1989 and 1997. The Christian Coalition is credited with recruiting millions of evangelical voters and helping Republicans win control of Congress in 1994.
Concerned Women for America
Beverly LaHaye was best known for "The Act of Marriage," an anti-feminist bestseller she co-authored with her husband, Tim, when she founded Concerned Women for America in 1979. In 2001, LaHaye hired two of America’s most prominent anti-gay leaders, Robert Knight and Peter LaBarbera, to launch CWA’s Culture & Family Institute.
Family Research Council
In 1988, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family mega-ministry merged with the Family Research Council, a small Washington think tank headed by Gary Bauer, a former Republican presidential candidate. With Focus’ millions behind it, FRC’s profile shot up as Bauer brought Dobson’s anti-gay, anti-abortion and anti-sex education messages to leaders on Capitol Hill. But when FRC’s lobbying threatened Focus’ tax-exempt status in 1992, the groups severed their legal ties.
Focus on the Family
James Dobson, a former child development professor, founded Focus on the Family in 1977. Focus’ 47-acre campus in Colorado Springs is large enough to warrant its own zip code. The organization has about 1,300 employees.
American Family Association
Tupelo, Miss.-based AFA is best known for leading boycotts of advertisers in the mass media, including Disney, Procter & Gamble, Kraft and Ford. Its leader is Rev. Donald Wildmon, a former Methodist minister who has led a series of religious-right groups since 1976.
Wildmon founded the American Family Association in 1977 and it now includes a 200-station radio network, about 100 employees and a monthly AFA Journal"sent to 180,000 people.
Sources: Southern Poverty Law Center, Southern Voice, organizations' websites
After years in the second tier of organizations that gay activists like to call “the Religious Right,” the American Family Association has in the last several months finally hit the big time.
A provocative, high-profile boycott of Ford Motor Company elicited promises from the auto giant not to advertise in gay publications, sparking a controversy that left many gays angry, Ford sullied, and the AFA in headlines across the country.
Since then, the group claimed credit for knocking off the air “Book of Daniel,” an NBC series about an Episcopal priest with a gay son, and now the group has its sights set on a constitutional amendment to ban gays from marrying (see sidebar, page 21).
But the AFA and its founder aren’t recent arrivals to the frontlines of the Culture Wars.
In July 2004, when a who’s-who of conservative Christian leaders met in Arlington, Va., to combine efforts to push for a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, they had one man to thank for initiating the group dialogue: AFA founder Donald Wildmon.
Wildmon, who founded the Tupelo, Miss.-based group in 1977, had already earned a reputation among social conservatives for boycotting corporations and television networks for their support of gay issues.
He told the Arlington gathering that it was time to join forces on the proposed amendment by taking the issue to black and Hispanic churches that would, in their eyes, ensure the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush.
That first meeting took place in the Virginia suburb home of Sandy Rios, president of Concerned Women of America, and attracted such conservative Christian leaders as James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values, Bill Bennett of Empower America, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation.
Together, the Christian right leaders became known as the Arlington Group.
“All we knew was we were going to get together and see if there were some issues of concern that we could agree on and combine our efforts,” Wildmon told the New York Times in February 2004. “The first thing that popped up was the federal marriage amendment.”
Repeated calls to AFA for comment for this article were not returned.
After Bush’s re-election, Wildmon and the Arlington Group flexed its political muscle in February 2005, putting pressure on the White House, urging Bush strategist Karl Rove to relay their concerns to have Bush urge Congress to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment.
The pressure worked and on Feb. 24, 2005, the president called for Congress to pass the proposed amendment banning same-sex marriage.
While the amendment eventually failed to get the necessary votes in the House and Senate, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said last week he plans to bring the issue to the floor again on June 5, after weeks of pressure from the AFA, which was quick to trumpet Frist’s announcement.
Wildmon’s decision to organize that meeting two years ago has been credited by some conservative Christian leaders as being the force that revitalized their movement.
Wildmon “correctly said if we all went our separate ways, we would not amount to much. However, if we could all sing off the same sheet of music, we could be a significant force,” Weyrich wrote in December 2004 in a Free Congress Foundation piece. “Neither Wildmon nor any of the rest of us had any idea if this effort to get the principals of the Religious Right together for the purpose of working together would succeed.”
‘Wildmon no James Dobson’ While it may seem from recent headlines that Wildmon has political clout, scholars say his message is “too far right” and that Bush likely tries to distance himself from Wildmon and the AFA.
“The AFA is just one more of the hard right Christian groups that I consider more political than Christian,” said Alan Wolfe, professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion & American Public Life at Boston College. “You don’t really hear about them that much, and I imagine Bush tries to keep a little distance from them, like he does with Pat Robertson.”
Wildmon hardly has the political pull of someone like, say, James Dobson, whose Focus on the Family in Colorado is so large it has its own zip code, said John Bruce, associate professor of political science at the University of Mississippi who studies religion’s role in public policy.
“They are not powerful, nor weak, but they are savvy,” Bruce said. “Their savviness comes because they pick targets they know will mobilize their base, and they are also savvy when they portray their ‘success.’”
Boycott successes? Last April, Wildmon and the AFA sent an e-mail alert to members listing a litany of gay-friendly positions Procter & Gamble supposedly abandoned as a result of the AFA’s boycott of the company.
When the AFA launched its boycott against P&G products, most notably Tide detergent and Crest toothpaste, it cited the Cincinnati-based company’s support for the campaign to repeal Article 12, a section of the city’s charter that prohibited laws based on sexual orientation, including nondiscrimination and domestic partner benefit policies.
Then, in May, the AFA initiated another boycotts — one of which included a boycott against Disney for supporting “Gay Days” at Disney World — against Ford Motor Co. in response to the company’s support of gay groups, advertising in gay publications, gay-inclusive workplace policies and sponsorship of Pride festivals.
Less than a week after the boycott began, the AFA called it off after the owner of a Ford dealership in Dallas was alerted to the boycott and grew concerned that it might impact his business. Reynolds said he contacted AFA Executive Director Tim Wildmon, Donald Wildmon’s son, and arranged a meeting between the AFA and concerned dealers and helped broker the suspension of the boycott.
But then in early December, the AFA reported Ford made a deal with the organization to cease some advertising in gay publications and support for gay organizations to avoid a boycott. Media reports said Ford had agreed to not advertise its Jaguar and Land Rover brands in gay publications.
After meeting with several gay groups, Ford reversed its decision to suspend advertising in gay publications.
But by giving the AFA so much media attention that it clearly does not deserve, the anti-gay organization’s credibility was raised, said Neil G. Giuliano, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
“As we saw when the AFA declared a false victory after the failure of their Disney boycott, their claims of success often have little if any relationship to reality,” he said. “And their misinformation about Ford late last year was yet another strong caution to the media that they should not accept as fact the self-aggrandizing spin coming out of such anti-gay organizations.”
Bruce, of the University of Mississippi, said the AFA has mastered the ability to play on people’s emotions when it comes to issues such as sex and violence on TV.
“What’s noteworthy about the AFA is its ability to get the message out about its causes,” Bruce said. “[Wildmon] claims success in a boycott, but, for example, the cancellation of the ‘Book of Daniel’ was likely because nobody was watching it.
“But when they make these kinds of noises, people pick them up and it gets them publicity and adds to their clout.”
The AFA did indeed make national headlines after clamoring for, and claming credit for, the NBC cancellation of the “Book of Daniel,” a show written by gay writer Jack Kenny that featured an Episcopalian priest with a gay son and lesbian secretary.
Wolfe, the Boston College professor, said television networks, especially local affiliates, are easy targets.
“It’s not that hard to pressure them — they are typically pretty timid and don’t like controversy,” he said.
Tactics used for fundraising? Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which watches extremist groups and began watching conservative Christian advocacy groups like the AFA after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the nation’s sodomy laws, said the AFA’s media savviness in targeting well-known corporations and TV shows is simply a way to raise money.
“Boycotts like theirs do chase some advertisers away, but they are replaced by other advertisers,” Potok said. “But it helps them raise money.”
And while the AFA itself is not necessarily a major threat to public policy, groups like it fuel hatred toward homosexuals, Potok added.
“The AFA and all of the similar groups are really quite frightening,” Potok said. “While they don’t actually beat gays with a baseball bat, they justify it — they give people looking for the moral authority to beat gays with a baseball bat. That’s their role — to make it all right to hate homosexuals.”
In e-mails to a vast list of some 3 million members, the American Family Association is always sure to make a plug for a donation to help the organization. And the plan seems to work. According to the AFA’s federal 990 tax forms from 2003-2004, the organization has net assets of more than $20.5 million.
Wildmon, as the chair of the organization, took home a $58,010 salary plus a $39,200 expense account. His son, Tim Wildmon, who serves as its president, had an annual salary of $76,542.
The group also claims on the tax form that it spent only $76,448 in “lobbying expenditures to influence public opinion” for grassroots lobbying. But between 2000-2003, the AFA reported spending more than $2.8 million in tax-exempt lobbying efforts.
The AFA lists on its IRS forms as its primary tax-exempt purpose as being to “Promote the Biblical ethic of decency in American society” and states under program service accomplishments that the “AFA continues efforts to end television’s exploitation of sex, violence, profanity, and anti-Christian bigotry.”
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