Religious might

The Christian right comes to Mass.

Politics by Ben Geman

The Wellesley office building occupies a functional, if nondescript, swath of the tony suburb. Flanked by small shops, it houses a chiropractor's office and a hair salon, among other tenants. The glass case next to the door, free of logos, announces the offices inside and little more.

What the plain lettering doesn't reveal is that a small inside room is the nerve center for what may be a new player in state politics: the Christian right. Amid the noise of the primary season and the governor's fight, word is spreading that a new group apparently tied to the national religious right has begun working to influence state legislative races. It even mounted a strong but unsuccessful offensive to topple one of Beacon Hill's leading progressives. "This is the first I've known of this kind of organizing in Massachusetts," says Skipp Porteous of the Institute for First Amendment Studies, which monitors right-wing movements.

The building is home to the Massachusetts Independent PAC for Working Families, whose presence has been reported by the Quincy Patriot-Ledger, the Arlington Advocate, and Bay Windows. The group's state paperwork talks of cutting taxes, supporting education reform, and electing legislators committed to "family, faith, and freedom." It's hardly the red meat of a Pat Robertson speech. Yet many observers say the PAC's emergence shows that the national religious right's push to build strength at the state and local level may be gelling in Massachusetts. Already, the organization and its supporters have poured thousands of dollars into several of this year's state representative races.

In name, the group resembles another young PAC: national Christian-right leader Gary Bauer's Campaign for Working Families. The CWF, formed shortly after the 1996 elections, is explicitly anti-gay and anti-immigrant. It espouses a return to "traditional values" -- that is, those absent on PBS and NPR, which the group charges with unleashing a "drumbeat of anti-family and anti-religious programming." And the overlapping nomenclature is no coincidence. "There's a consensus among progressives monitoring the operation and this election that this is Gary Bauer's organization showing its face in Massachusetts," says one political insider who's been researching the new organizing.

Certainly, there are links between the new state group and the national religious right. Federal records show that Robert Bradley, a Wellesley investment manager who serves as the chair of the Massachusetts Independent PAC, has given several thousand dollars to CWF. State political-finance and corporate records show significant overlap between donors to the Massachusetts Independent PAC and board members of the Massachusetts Family Institute, which experts say is affiliated with Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based ministry founded by Dr. James Dobson that is active in conservative causes. (MFI literature has been included in Focus on the Family mailings in Massachusetts, according to Porteous and Chip Berlet of the Somerville-based watchdog group Political Research Associates.) "This is a network of people who have worked together for a long time," says Berlet, senior analyst with PRA. "Legally and strictly speaking, the organizations [MFI and the Massachusetts Independent PAC] may be independent, but they are part of the same social and political movement of the Christian right in this state."

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In early September, primary season in Arlington looked like a fairly sleepy affair. The town is just north of Cambridge, but it could have been thousands of miles away from the races that consumed its neighbor, including the free-for-all to replace US Representative Joseph Kennedy.

Most expected that state representative Jim Marzilli, one of Beacon Hill's strongest progressive voices, would easily ward off primary challenger Michael Keefe. But late in the afternoon of Friday, September 4, phone calls started pouring in from Marzilli's supporters, tipping him off to what was obviously a large and expensive telephone "poll" of Arlington voters. Respondents had been asked whom they were going to back in the primary and what they thought about tax cuts, private- and parochial-school vouchers, and lowering the age at which teenagers would need parental consent for abortions.

For Marzilli, who knew that a new political group had endorsed his opponent but didn't realize it was sufficiently well organized to mount a major phone campaign, the news was unsettling, to say the least. "My first reaction was one of panic," he admits. "Anyone making that level of calls has substantial resources and was clearly going to follow up." Sure enough, the poll was followed by pro-Keefe calls and reminders to vote. Marzilli thinks the timing of the survey -- which represented the PAC's first conspicuous action -- allowed the effort against him to "fly below radar." A flurry of spending just prior to the primary is undetectable in public records until after the fact; finance reports showing PAC and other expenditures between late August and mid-October won't be out until later this month. Keefe could not be reached by the Phoenix, but in a September story in the Arlington Advocate, he disavowed any connection to the poll and said that the survey was unhelpful to his campaign.

Marzilli got out a late mailing slamming the PAC and calling the election a "race to defeat the radical right wing." The Commonwealth Coalition, a group of labor unions and liberal organizations, pitched in late with volunteers to counter the new organizing. The counteroffensive succeeded, and Marzilli won the primary. Yet he remains upset by the pro- and anti-family labels that crept into the race, calling the rhetoric "obscene." "What am I trying to do?" he asks. "Go into every family and break it up?"

Marzilli's isn't the only state race in which the Massachusetts Independent PAC has been active. According to records, it has been involved in four other campaigns this year. It is backing two South Shore Republicans -- Vinny DeMacedo and his brother Olly, who's running in a nearby district -- in the general election, and it's made donations to Brian Golden, the winner of the Democratic primary to fill an open Allston-Brighton seat. Also receiving money was Hanover Democrat David Flynn, who lost in the Democratic primary for the Fifth Plymouth seat. And for state-representative races, the amount of money involved is significant. Records show that several donors who gave the maximum $500 to the PAC also gave equal sums directly to PAC-supported candidates.

To be sure, PAC involvement in five races among 160 House seats -- with just one win to date -- hardly tilts the state legislature to the right. Yet monitors say the emergence of the group could have an impact well beyond the handful of races it's seeking to influence this year. One in five is not a good batting average even for a rookie, but politics isn't sports, and observers say that a decent showing, even in a loss, gives activists something to build on. " `Almost' does count in politics," notes Berlet.

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The head of the new PAC, meanwhile, insists that the group is not an arm of the "radical" or "Christian" right but an independent and nonpartisan group that backs fiscal conservatives in the mold of Ronald Reagan and Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas Finneran.

"[We support] lowering taxes for working families, allowing working families to keep more of their money, to help families get along, which is certainly not radical," says Bradley, who notes that the group also backs vouchers for private and parochial schools. He calls the new PAC "completely independent" from Bauer's and Dobson's organizations, though he says he supports many but not all of the Campaign for Working Families' positions.

On other issues, Bradley calls the groups' views more commonsense than fringe. Regarding vouchers, for example, he argues that it's unfair for only the wealthy to have the option of placing their children in private schools if they are unhappy with the public system.

At least one candidate who received money both from the Massachusetts Independent PAC for Working Families and directly from many of the group's donors says he isn't associated with the far right and had no reason to believe that the PAC was, either. Vinny DeMacedo, a Plymouth Republican trying to unseat state representative Joseph Gallitano, says he met with several members of the group at a downtown Boston office in late spring or early summer and came away thinking they were fiscal conservatives also attracted to his pro-life stance, but hardly religious activists. "I think `religious right' would be a hard stretch, to say that's where they are going with it," says DeMacedo. "They never mentioned religion when they talked to me."

Maybe not. Bradley says he "resents" the characterization of his group as radical, arguing that critics who tar the PAC with such "ludicrous" terms "are trying to marginalize essentially mainstream views." And though he has contributed extensively to CWF, he calls it hypocritical for activists on the left to attack his group on those grounds; similar ties are common within the circle of liberal activists, he says. And to a degree, he has a point. Search the house of every member of a mainstream liberal organization and you're bound to find a dog-eared copy of Das Kapital somewhere. Communist conspiracy? Probably not.

Many progressive activists, however, say the PAC has all the trappings of a Christian-right group that will push, when possible, the agenda of Dobson and Bauer as well as that of Reagan and Finneran. One donor who gave the maximum $500 contribution to the PAC and to several candidates it's backing was quoted in a recent issue of Bay Windows, the state's leading gay and lesbian newspaper, as saying that gays are guilty of "breaking God's law." But that's not the public face. Smart organizers will push the pieces of their agenda that are likely to play well with the electorate, while keeping mum on positions likely to rile the opposition. Lower taxes, yes; open attacks on gays and lesbians, no. Republican pollster Bill McInturff boils it down nicely in the October issue of the Progressive. "Politics is about two things," he explains in a piece on voter turnout. "Mobilizing your voters, and not mobilizing the other side."

Whether or not the new PAC succeeds in getting its favored candidates elected this year, there's a sense that 1998 could mark a shift in local races, with a wealthy and well-connected core of conservative and savvy activists now a force to contend with. "I think that two years from now, in 2000, they will be in eight to ten races," predicts Karen Sharma, elections coordinator for the Commonwealth Coalition. "In the next year, when we plan for 2000, we are going to have to add this to our radar screen."

Ben Geman is a freelance writer in Boston.