Christian Lobbyists Boost Conservatism : Concerrned Women for America Session Aims at Winning Family-Oriented Goals

When Concerned Women for America meet, they usually pray together in members’ homes. In fact, they claim that more than half a million members, mostly evangelical Christians, are praying nationwide for legislators to support their conservative agenda, which includes amendments to the U.S. Constitution banning abortion and allowing voluntary prayer in public schools; opposition to an equal rights amendment, comparable-worth legislation and laws protecting homosexuals, and strict enforcement of laws against pornography, alcohol and substance abuse.

But Sunday, the Orange County branch of the Washington-based CWA held an activist symposium for about 100 men and women at the Marriott Hotel in Newport Beach to offer ammunition in the fight against what they consider three specific threats to family life: “global education” (a teaching approach that stresses a view of the world as “interdependent”); sex education in public schools including school-based health clinics; and child pornography.

“Evil abounds because good men do nothing,” said Norma DeRossett of Newport Beach, the area coordinator for CWA. “We know there are issues that seek to destroy the family unit. If we know what they are, I believe that people will take action.”

In addition to overseeing 2,500 prayer-action chapters, national CWA pays a legal staff of six full-time attorneys and is now training volunteer lobbyists to make monthly calls on each of the 535 legislators in Washington, said Jane Chastain, a former television reporter who moderated the Orange County symposium. Half of that volunteer force is now in the field, said Chastain, who sits on CWA’s national board.

“Our goal is that when one of our volunteer lobbyists calls on a representative in Washington and our goals and objectives are ignored, that our lobbyist in Washington picks up the phone to the home district and talks to our correspondent and the next day we have 100,000 letters on his desk.”

CWA lobbyists in every state capital also communicate with the Washington lobbyists, DeRossett said.

Members of CWA, started seven years ago by Beverly LaHaye, an El Cajon pastor’s wife, see themselves as a popular alternative to the National Organization for Women.

To applause, Chastain told the gathering that CWA’s membership of 540,000 is three times that of NOW. On the other hand, NOW’s membership of 150,000 represents documented, paying members while CWA’s does not, said a NOW spokesperson.

“We’re the organization that likes men,” Chastain added, smiling. “We have over 70,000 male members.” She also pointed out that members do not believe all women should be homemakers.

Patti Headland-Wauson, North Orange County NOW chapter coordinator, called “absurd, ironic and ludicrous” CWA’s charges that NOW members are anti-family. “NOW has been in the forefront not only to protect women’s rights to abortion and reproductive freedom but in the forefront to save social programs that help all women,” Headland-Wauson said. “We never see these groups that accuse us all the time (in that area). It’s frustrating. They project an image of us as murderers or anti-family, and actually we’re fighting the hardest in all areas for women’s rights. . . .”

Speaker Robert Simonds, president of the Costa Mesa-based Citizens for Excellence in Education, told the group that “God’s plan has always been” that parents educate their children at home. “It’s really unfortunate the situation has evolved in our country where that’s very difficult to do,” said Simonds, who is also founder of the National Assn. of Christian Educators, also based in Costa Mesa.

Simonds denounced public education as “atheistic, secular humanism” and said that it has produced an “immoral and cultic curriculum.” He said his organization is investigating “witchcraft” in the Irvine Unified School District, referring to a textbook that uses stories about witches to teach spelling.

“We don’t have enough time to spend on basic academics anymore in public education because we now have supplementary curricula introduced that takes up 49% of the time in education class. That’s not good, that’s bad.”

He decried the teaching of “values clarification” and “global education” that, he said, emphasize grays rather than the blacks and whites of right and wrong. He called global education “wicked” and “anti-God.”

(Global education is a multidisciplinary approach to teaching that can emphasize cross-cultural awareness; the social, economic, scientific and political interdependence of nations and groups of people, human rights, and peace and war issues, according to Nina Winn, administrator for the curriculum and instruction unit at the Orange County Department of Education. Educators at Chapman College are working with teachers countywide to develop a global education curriculum for kindergarten through the 12th grade, she said. A bill that would allow teachers to study nuclear medicine, energy and weaponry to be better informed in the classroom has also been drafted by Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara.)

‘Eastern Mysticism’

Global education “sounds perfect” on the surface but underneath advocates a “total totalitarian system” and promotes “universal socialism,” said Eric Buehrer, executive vice president of the Citizens for Excellence group. He also warned members of the audience that teachers are advocating “Eastern mysticism” with such techniques as meditation, centering, focusing, or “calm-down” time in class.

Simonds said nuclear war education causes depression in students and is partly to blame for the teen-age suicide rate.

He and Buehrer suggested that Christians, rather than pulling their children out of public school, should instead “take back” public education by lobbying and running for local school boards.

In a question-and-answer session later, a man asked Simonds whether efforts might be better spent building up Christian schools. “Ninety percent of evangelical children go to public schools,” Simonds replied. “Our idea is to get secular humanism out of public schools. Forty-four million children have been abandoned by the Christian church.”

To claps and cries of “Amen,” Simonds concluded: “With God on our side, who can be against us?”

Simonds also offered what he called “good news”:

“The enemies of freedom and religious faith and the enemies of our children, the Christian community and, really, our nation are beginning to lose the battle, finally,” he said.

“Thanks to CWA and Eagle Forum (a conservative group led by Phyllis Schlafly) and our Citizens for Excellence in Education, a nationwide parents’ group, the NEA (National Education Assn.) the American Civil Liberties Union and the JDL (Jewish Defense League) are on the run. They’re in fact paranoid right now. They’re running full pages all over the country on us trying to tell people how bad we are and, in so doing, telling them what we believe. God is confusing our enemies . . . and we thank God for that.”

Beverly Cielnicky, president of Crusade for Life, the evangelical arm of the national anti-abortion movement, also outlined action parents can take against sex education in schools, literature such as young adult books by popular author Judy Blume or Planned Parenthood pamphlets such as “Changing Bodies, Changing Minds,” or high school-based health clinics such as those approved by the Los Angeles and San Diego unified school districts.

Parental Consent

Cielnicky, who lives in Fountain Valley, urged parents to bring resolutions before local school boards to require parental consent before school officials can arrange or administer any medical care--specifically abortions.

Whenever she is aware of a public school presentation by Planned Parenthood, Cielnicky said she calls the school and demands equal time. “The more they get into schools, the more promiscuity and abortion occurs,” she said.

Planned Parenthood response

School-based health clinics that distribute or arrange for contraception also promote sexual activity, Cielnicky claimed. “Clinics would make sure there are more and more abortions,” she said. Teen-agers on birth control may feel protected but may not use the method responsibly or reliably, she said.

School-based health clinics in other parts of the country have reduced teen births but not teen pregnancies, Cielnicky said.

Sharon Lovick, director of the Support Center for School-Based Clinics, a project of the Washington-based Center for Population Options, called Cielnicky’s claims “a distortion of the valuable services of a number of committed adults who represent a variety of organizations and work with schools and parents to help young people.”

Pregnancy data, due to its personal nature, is difficult to obtain, Lovick said. However, preliminary data from a study of 52 school-based clinics nationwide shows that they do not promote sexual activity, she said.

Sally Seaver, a CWA member from Irvine, asked Cielnicky why health clinics are bad. Birth control won’t affect morals, she said, and those with bad morals need birth control to prevent abortions, she argued. Cielnicky repeated that her organization’s goal is to reduce sexual activity as well as abortions. Chastain added that studies in Canada have shown that a high percentage of teen-agers who undergo abortions have problem pregnancies later on.

Pregnancies to Term

In fact, recent data has shown there is a slight increase in carrying pregnancies to term among those who have had at least four abortions, said William Benbow Thompson, chairman of the gynecology division of the obstetrics and gynecology department at UCI Medical Center. The potential for problems is also linked to the skill of the person performing the abortion, he said.

Arguing for parental consent for school-based abortion services to teen-agers, Chastain said parents need not only the right to counsel their pregnant daughters, but also if an abortion is to take place, the right to decide where it should be performed.

Cielnicky said neither CWA nor Crusade for Life has taken a stand on birth control per se.

She passed out a list of alternatives to public school sex education programs that included “Sex Respect,” a chastity-oriented program for high school students; “Preparing for Adolescence” a book by Dr. James Dobson, and Concordia’s Sex Education series, a set of six Christian-oriented books for parents and children age 3 through high school.

Speaker David Balsiger of Costa Mesa, author of “In Search of Noah’s Ark,” described what he said are rings of satanic cults that kill and abuse children nationwide.

Though many believe such stories to be isolated and exaggerated, Balsiger said, he warned parents to be “extremely cautious” in placing children in day care. Often, he said, satanists pose as Christians. “You can’t make any assumptions today.”

His own research, he said, had produced hundreds of examples of child pornography in Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler magazines.

‘Big Lies’ About Pornography

He outlined what he called the “seventeen big lies” about pornography and his answers to them. They included: “I’d rather see people make love, not violence.”

“There is no love in pornography,” he said. “Violence is inherent in pornography. The majority of the serial killers have been users of pornography. Probably in the vicinity of 75%.”

Rosemarie Avila of Santa Ana, a mother of four daughters, said she was glad to hear specific strategies at the symposium. “It’s overwhelming,” she said of sex education in the schools, literature she finds offensive and global education.

“These issues hit close to home,” she said. “My father lived under communism (in Czechoslovakia). I’m from Central America, and we’ve been fighting communism for years. . . . I don’t want my daughters rushed off to have an abortion.”

Robert E. Thomas, a prosecutor for the Orange County district attorney’s office, said he had been part of the “silent majority” until the last election when he ran for--and lost--the office of judge of the Harbor Municipal Court. “The more conservative side needs to be heard so the policy that is eventually derived is a more balanced policy,” he said.

“I’m glad there is an alternative to NOW--it didn’t represent my values,” said Seaver of Irvine, a 28-year-old single mother and UC Irvine student, after the symposium. “But I’d like to see it done responsibly. I like to see different sides of things. Not just a prejudiced view.

“It’s hard for me to hear talk about black and white. I do think there’s a right and wrong, but I think it’s important to see two sides. If not three or four.”