The San Diego Model: A Community Battles the Religious Right Matthew Freeman People For the American Way Washington, D.C. This article discusses 1992 efforts by the San Diego-based Community for Responsible Education to combat a Religious Right attempt to take over local school boards. The group used a three-prong strategy: organizing mainstream activists and organizations, raising voter awareness of Religious Right efforts, and denying the Religious Right its presumed base the religious community by organizing local mainstream clergy to oppose the takeover effort. The following is excerpted from "The San Diego Model: A Community Battles the Religious Right," published by People For the American Way. The booklet seeks to tell the story of one community's courageous battle to defeat an attempt by Religious Right activists to seize control of local school boards. It is the product of extensive research, including interviews with most, if not all, of the significant players in the political mainstream's campaign. The booklet highlights the work of three San Diego area mainstream organizations the Community for Responsible Education, the Mainstream Voters Project and the Community Coalition Network, each of which played a vital role in the 1992 elections. Solely for reasons of space, this excerpt focuses on just one of these groups, the Community for Responsible Education. Setting the Stage In 1990, San Diego, California became a testing ground for a new Religious Right tactic, the stealth campaign. That year, leaders of the Christian Coalition joined forces with a number of other Religious Right groups and individuals to field and then work to elect a slate of like-minded candidates. Among the offices for which these candidates ran were a handful of state legislative seats, and a host of positions on hospital planning boards, city councils, water districts, and, most significantly, school boards. Altogether, these forces fielded some 90 candidates in 1990, nearly two-thirds of whom were ultimately elected. Apart from ideology, what distinguished these candidates from all others was their method of campaigning. While most candidates seek opportunities to meet the voters, these candidates rarely ventured beyond the safety of their church communities. They came, in fact, to be referred to as "stealth candidates," and one longtime school board member would say of an elected slate member, "Nobody laid eyes on her till the day she was sworn in."1 The movement's successes in 1990 put it within striking distance of a still more significant victory in 1992: in a number of school districts throughout the county, Religious Right forces, with at least one board seat already safely in their control, were poised to seize voting control of the board with just modest gains in 1992's elections. With control of school boards would come virtual carte blanche for the Religious Right to enact its extreme agenda for the schools, which often includes censoring selected novels and textbooks, teaching Creationism alongside evolution in biology classrooms, gutting sex education programs, and ending school breakfast programs and daycare, on the grounds that such programs undercut the family. Because of the efforts of a number of San Diego residents concerned about the Religious Right's efforts, the movement's drive for control was largely although not completely defeated. This case study that follows seeks to tell the story of one part of that effort, the work of the Community for Responsible Education. Mobilizing to Defeat the Religious Right Almost immediately after the 1990 elections, awareness of and opposition to the Religious Right's efforts in San Diego began to emerge. Mindful that the movement would seek to continue in 1992 the takeover effort it launched in 1990, local citizens moved to fight back. In the process, several new organizations were formed, and several existing ones added the issue to their own agendas. Though the groups did not, by and large, work together as a formal coalition, their combined efforts turned the tide in 1992. Without question, these mainstream efforts were the difference between the 1990 and 1992 experiences. The first organization established to do battle with the Religious Right was the Community for Responsible Education (CRE). Founded in January, 1991 by former La Mesa-Spring Valley board member Carroll Albright in the wake of her defeat by a Religious Right slate-member, CRE organized as a political action group. Albright was later joined as co-chair by Ken Blalack, a local parent, management consultant and self-described "Goldwater conservative." Although Albright and Blalack would come to be personally active in a number of school district races in the eastern part of the county, CRE focused its activities on the La Mesa-Spring Valley school district, where it felt the presence of 1990 slate-members Don Smith (San Diego Christian Coalition co-chair) and Cheryl Jones personified the Religious Right takeover threat in a way that lent itself to county-wide concern. CRE's principal contributions to the battle were two-fold. First, the group sought to take on the Religious Right in a direct and hard-hitting way, to some degree sparing individual candidates that largely negative task. CRE, for example, worked to force 1990 slate members Smith and Jones as well as their 1992 counterparts to answer for the broader record of the Religious Right, thereby putting their slate on the political defensive. Second, by the time 1992 election campaigns were in high gear, members of CRE followed the organization's lead in developing campaigns for individual candidates that reflected the broader values and no-nonsense tactics of the group. These campaigns were independent of CRE, but both their approach and the remarkable degree of organization were plainly in tune with CRE's efforts. Early on, CRE mapped out a three-part approach to the 1992 elections: organize the mainstream opposition raise voter awareness to the Religious Right threat cut off the Religious Right from its political base the religious community. Organizing the Mainstream In accomplishing its first objective, CRE immediately went about the business of establishing its credentials as a nonpartisan organization independent of special interests. It was important, said CRE's Blalack, "that we not be perceived as a stalking horse for some partisan political agenda." The group's mission, therefore, was to work to ensure that a "school board majority would not fall to any narrow interest group."2 Beginning in 1991, the group began monitoring school board meetings to be certain that Smith and Jones would not be able to escape community scrutiny while serving on the school board, as they had while running for office. While the three-member moderate majority on the school board sought opportunities to force Smith and Jones to state their extremist views publicly, CRE representatives dutifully documented the record. By the summer of 1992, the two had provided CRE with more than enough examples to build a case against electing a third slate member to join them. At roughly the same time, CRE endorsed a series of candidates from among the existing 1992 field in La Mesa-Spring Valley. These candidates would later run their campaigns in a coordinated fashion, appearing together at forums, printing signs and other campaign literature jointly. CRE's candidate-selection process coincided with similar endorsement decisions by the two major education unions in the district. Although the three groups made independent judgments, the deliberations of each group appear to have been informed by one another. In the end, all three endorsed the same set of three candidates from among a double-digit field. Blalack and Albright described the various organizations' ability to arrive at a single slate as important to the mainstream candidates' overall margin of victory.3 Raising Voter Awareness CRE was able to help all the candidates by laying groundwork for their efforts with a concerted voter awareness initiative that sought to portray the extent of the Religious Right threat. That involved several distinct initiatives. First was a public relations effort that included a steady stream of press releases, letters to the editor, op-eds, opinion pieces, and media appearances. Next was participation by slate candidates in a series of candidate forums sponsored by a diverse group of organizations. By the reckoning of one CRE-slate candidate, "the forums didn't really change anybody's mind,"4 but they did generate a considerable amount of media attention, feeding the voter awareness effort still further. Spurred by the Religious Right controversy, hundreds of local citizens turned out for forums, in sharp contrast to sparse attendance in previous years. With the Religious Right's efforts exposed, the candidates were able to set about the business of framing the alternative. Toward that end, for example, La Mesa resident Ellen Yaffa resigned from CRE to take charge of the La Mesa- Spring Valley moderate slates' efforts. She and the candidates were able to fashion a remarkably efficient series of voter-awareness efforts that included many of the traditional hallmarks of precinct-level grassroots campaigning: lawn signs, door-knocking by candidates, phone banking, T-shirts, and enormous mailings. This broad outreach effort relied substantially on personal contacts between candidates and voters, and between neighbors. In its attempt to reach out to citizens in La Mesa-Spring Valley, the campaign conducted an effort that displayed extraordinary energy and thoroughness.5 Denying the Religious Right Its Base The third prong of CRE's effort was a classic stratagem of political campaigning: work to deny the opposition its political base. Commonly, that effort involves conservatives seeking to cut into progressives' core voter groups, or vice-versa. In this case, it involved an effort by CRE to organize San Diego's mainstream religious community to condemn the blatant politicking of their fellow religious leaders, or at minimum to disavow it. This effort was spearheaded by Blalack himself, who carefully tapped into a network of religious leaders in the community through an exhaustive series of one-on-one meetings, speeches to congregations, and efforts to counteract anticipated Religious Right leafletting at churches. In all, some 100 ministers joined the effort in some capacity. By working with individual leaders as well as ministerial associations, CRE was able to blunt the misperception that the Religious Right spoke for religious men and women. Albright and Blalack have subsequently formed the Organization of Mainstream Activists. For more information on OMA's work, call Ken Blalack at 619-698- 1334. =================================================== How to Win: A Practical Guide for Defeating the Radical Right in Your Community Copyright 1994 by Radical Right Task Force Permission is granted to reproduce this publication in whole or in part. All other rights reserved. For more information contact: Pat Lewis National Jewish Democratic Council 711 Second Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20002 (202) 544-7636 =================================================== This document is from the Politics section of the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com/11/Politics/ Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .