Already in 1992, however, "family values" had served as a GOP weapon in the presidential campaign. Dan Quayle attacked the television sitcom character Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlock. An entire evening of the Republican National Convention was devoted to family values, during which Patrick Buchanan delivered a prime-time speech that warned the nation about a coming "culture war." Meanwhile, the Christian Coalition, under the leadership of televangelist Pat Robertson, who ran for the presidential nomination as a Republican in 1988, attacked the Clintons as enemies of the family. "When Bill and Hillary Clinton talk about family values," stated Robertson, "they are not talking about either families or values. They are talking about a radical plan to destroy the traditional family and transfer its functions to the federal government."
The implication in the Republicans' use of the term was that the Democrats had assumed a permissive attitude toward moral standards in general and abortion, single parenthood, and homosexual rights in particular, thus undermining the institution of the family. But both political parties attempted to capture the higher moral ground in the debate over the family: the Democrats fired back in 1992, accusing the Republicans of using the term as a code phrase for intolerance and discrimination. Further, it was a Democratic Congress that passed its version of the family-leave bill in the middle of the 1992 campaign, prompting candidate Clinton to conclude that "Republicans talk about family values while Democrats value families." By election day the Republicans had adopted a new term, "traditional values."
In 1994, when the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in more than forty years, these "values" came to the fore again. Of the ten proposals included in the Republicans' "Contract with America," at least four were aimed specifically at families. Two years later, in Clinton's quest for a second term, it was the Democrats who made "Families First" their campaign slogan. Voters were reminded that the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 was the first bill ever signed by President Clinton, that George Bush had vetoed it twice, and that Clinton's 1996 opponent, Bob Dole, led the vote against the bill's passage in 1990 and 1992 while serving as majority leader of the Senate.
More recently, in the 2004 presidential campaign that should have been dominated by the war in Iraq and the sagging economy, same-sex marriage played a significant part. By election day, eleven states had ballot proposals barring these marriages, and the issue was a major point of contention in five congressional races and one Senate contest.
In North Dakota, Republican challenger Mike Liffrig used television ads to imply that the incumbent U.S. senator, Byron Dorgan, supported polygamy. The commercial displayed a series of brides and grooms kissing at an altar being replaced by two men, and then by two men and a woman. "With Senator Dorgan now supporting gay marriage-or whatever-you can kiss our North Dakota values goodbye," states the narrator. This played despite Dorgan's vote in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996 and his support of a state amendment to ban same-sex marriage in North Dakota. It was his opposition to a federal constitutional amendment that drew fire from Liffrig. John Kerry, an opponent of DOMA, was confronted with similar television ads in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and on the Fox News Channel. The ads were sponsored by Americans United to Preserve Marriage, an independent campaign organization created by Gary Bauer, the former president of the Family Research Council.
SINCE 1991, the right has created an influential think-tank network at the state level whose efforts often focus on family issues. Indeed, American family values have gone global, thanks mainly to the Howard Institute, a relatively small think tank based in the Midwest.
According to the State Policy Network, a self-described "leadership training center and resource clearinghouse for America's state-based free market think tank community," there are now forty-nine such think tanks based in forty-two states. Patterned after the Heritage Foundation and funded by right-wing foundations that include Coors, Scaife, Olin, Bradley, and Smith Richardson, many of these think tanks are credited with engineering state cuts in welfare benefits, privatizing public services, offering parents school vouchers, deregulating workplace safety standards, and reducing government programs by slashing tax revenues. For example, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, with support from the Bradley Foundation, was the leading proponent for school vouchers. The Hudson Institute, based in Indiana and funded by Bradley and the Olin Foundation, among others, has devoted much of its effort to eliminating corporate income taxes. And the Manhattan Institute, based in New York City and a favorite source of information for former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, receives funding from all of the major conservative foundations and advocates strongly for privatizing sanitation services, school vouchers, and major cuts in social welfare programs.
In addition to the State Policy Network, state think tanks are also linked to each other through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, one of the co-founders of the Heritage Foundation, ALEC's mission is to reach out and rein in state legislators on conservative issues. By the early 1990s, ALEC claimed more than 2,400 conservative officeholders in 50 states, about a third of the 7,500 state legislators nationwide. In an address before the Heritage Foundation, Don Eberly, president of the Pennsylvania-based Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives, left no doubt about ALEC's objective. "We simply will not have power on the national level until we declare war on state legislatures," he stated. To achieve this goal, ALEC has received financial support over the years from more than two hundred corporations, including Coors, IBM, Ford, Philip Morris, Exxon-Mobil, and Texaco. Keynote speakers at its annual conferences have included John Ashcroft, Tommy Thompson, and Jeb Bush. Recipients of the organization's Thomas Jefferson Freedom Award for sponsoring limited government have included Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and Zell Miller.
With respect to "family values," ALEC has produced model legislation on parental rights, paternity testing, and the privatization of child support, foster care, and adoption services. Also, the state network of conservative think tanks has been particularly active on the issue of same-sex marriage. Concerned about the same-sex marriage movement in Hawaii and Vermont's adoption of a statewide civil union law, more than two-thirds of the states have adopted their versions of DOMA laws, thus nullifying the marriages of same-sex couples that may occur in other states.
A case in point is Massachusetts, where the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI), founded in 1991 and a member of the State Policy Network, spearheaded the opposition to same-sex marriage. Despite MFI's efforts, which included filing an amicus brief, the Supreme Judicial Court in Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health ruled four to three (six of the seven judges were Republican appointees) that the state Constitution upheld the right of gay couples to marry. The court also reminded the legislature that only a federal constitutional amendment could ban such marriages. Having already authored the Marriage Protection and Affirmation Amendment prior to the court's decision, the MFI lobbied the legislature for its adoption. Under Massachusetts law, an amendment must be approved by the legislature in two consecutive sessions and then by a majority of the voters in a statewide referendum, which is expected in 2006. Meanwhile, gay couples who resided in Massachusetts began to marry legally and will likely continue to do so for approximately two years, until the amendment process is completed.
THE HOWARD CENTER for Family, Religion and Society is located a thousand miles to the west of Boston, in Rockford, Illinois. Unlike the MFI and the other forty-eight or so state-based think tanks, the Howard Center is taking family values global. Profiled in Doris Buss and Didi Herman's Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics, the Howard Center was founded in 1997 by John A. Howard and Allan C. Carlson. Howard is the former president of Rockford College, which houses the Rockford Institute, a small conservative think tank. Carlson was the principal researcher at the Rockford Institute and a prolific author. He is a former fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the National Commission on Children. In 1997, he convened the first World Congress of Families (WCF) in Prague, Czech Republic. World Congress of Families II (1999) and III (2004) were held in Geneva and Mexico City, respectively. According to Buss and Herman, the primary objective of these events has been "to form a global, orthodox community of political actors, ostensibly bringing conservative Jewish and Muslim interests into what is primarily a Christian Right (CR) movement."
To date, the major thrust of the Howard Center has been threefold: First, to counter what is perceived to be the secular/feminist/liberal "takeover" of the United Nations (the UN is seen as embracing homosexual rights as it has already done with women's and children's rights); second, to globalize the belief that "the natural family is the fundamental social unit, inscribed in human nature, and centered on the union of a man and a woman in the lifelong covenant of marriage"; and third, to put an end to the export of the "culture of death." Supporting the "global gag rule," which restricts U.S. funding of birth control abroad, the Howard Center considers any call for reproductive rights as advancing a population control agenda.
Attempting to measure influence is difficult, but the Howard Center, operating with a small staff of 18 on a budget of $500,000 a year, claims a membership database of 40,000 people; an e-mail list of 8,500 names; and 150 library subscriptions to the organization's monthly publication, The Family in America. More than three thousand people from seventy-five countries, including Mexico's first lady, Marta Sahagun de Fox, attended the World Congress of Families III in Mexico City in 2004. In an interview with the Rockford Register Star, Ellen Sauerbrey, U.S. representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, stated that the Howard Center's influence has been significant. "The academic work produced by the center, as well as the World Congresses of Families, have had a huge impact," she said. "Part of the fallout of the center's work is networking of people around the world with shared values and concerns about the deterioration of the family structure."
Almost fifteen years ago, I surveyed forty-two think tanks that dealt with the family, reviewing their annual reports, policy briefs, and special reports dealing with the family. My research was published in Family Relations, a professional journal of the National Council on Family Relations. At the time, although there was a growing literature on both family policy and think tanks, there was little effort by researchers to bring the two together. My two primary objectives were to gauge the extent to which think tanks expressed an interest in family issues and identify their efforts to shape family policy.
We know a lot more about think tanks today than we did then. At least sixty books and probably four times as many articles and position papers have been produced during that time span. A comprehensive list of liberal and conservative think tanks in the United States is available at the University of Michigan's Web site: Political Science Resources: Think Tanks (http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/psthink.html) and also at the National Institute for Research Advancement's World Directory of Think Tanks (www.nira.go.jp/). Two organizations that monitor either think tanks or foundations are the People for the American Way (www.pfaw.org) and the Capital Research Center (www.capitalresearch.org).
We also know that conservative think tanks are extremely well organized. Beyond the Washington beltway and the home of Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute, and Cato, are the State Policy Network (www.spn.org) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (www.alec.org) mentioned above. Although liberal and progressive think tanks, such as the Progressive Policy Institute and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, can sometimes hold their own in political battles inside the beltway, there is no network of liberal think tanks that can even approach the existing conservative arsenal. Indeed, according to one count by the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative (www.cbpp.org/sfai.htm), there are only twenty-three liberal think tanks in the United States, and they focus primarily on fiscal matters, not social issues.
Because of extraordinary generosity from right-wing foundations, it is estimated that conservative think tanks outspend their liberal and progressive counterparts by a five-to-one margin. That is, according to a recent report by the Center for Policy Alternatives, the major conservative think tanks in Washington-AEI, ALEC, and the Cato Institute-had a combined budget of nearly $50 million. That is in sharp contrast to the $10 million spent by liberal think tanks, including the Center for Policy Alternatives, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Economic Policy Institute. The major source of funding for conservative think tanks comes from such foundations as the Lynde and Harry Bradley, Sarah Scaife, John M. Olin, Adolph Coors, Carthage, Smith Richardson and JM. Liberal and progressive think tanks rely on the Ford, Charles Stewart Mott, Anne E. Casey, and George Soros foundations.
Conservative think tanks are also more effective at getting their message out through the media than are their counterparts on the left. According to a June 2004 report issued by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), the ongoing slant in coverage toward conservative groups and away from the left, which FAIR had reported before, was being sustained. Overall, mainstream media citations of the top twenty-five think tanks rose by 13 percent between 2002 and 2003. Those on the right received 47 percent of the citations, centrist think tanks garnered 39 percent and those on the left came in a distant third at 12 percent. The left fared even worse in electronic citations (television and cable news), receiving 11 percent of the citations compared to the right wing, which picked up 52 percent; centrists managed only 37 percent.
BUT ANOTHER point related to news coverage needs to be emphasized here. The Heritage Foundation, which convenes regular workshops for journalists on how to understand policy issues (a questionable practice in itself), has been the most widely quoted conservative think tank since FAIR began to monitor news coverage of think tanks nine years ago. Perhaps even more significant is that in its list of "Policy Experts in the Conservative Community," Heritage identifies national spokespersons on the family, many of whom are academics not recognized by reporters as being identified with a conservative think tank. These include Dan Browning of the University of Chicago, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese of Emory University, Norval Glenn of the University of Texas, and David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, both of Rutgers University, all of whom are considered to be to the right of center, to say the least. But, when quoted in news stories they are almost always identified with their particular university or research organization, and are seldom, if ever, associated with the Heritage Foundation. Non-academics on the list include David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, and Maggie Gallagher, president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy.
Finally, liberal and progressive think tanks come up short in one more important category: framing the issues. George Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, and author of Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, understands why conservatives have been successful at influencing policy over the last two decades. The right clearly defines its ideas, carefully selects the language with which to present them, and employs an established infrastructure to disseminate them through the media. By dictating the terms of the debate, conservatives have put liberals and progressives on the defensive. "Conservative think tanks have framed virtually every issue from their perspective," contends Lakoff. "They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done nothing."
Lakoff and several of his colleagues recently created the Rockridge Institute (www.RockridgeInstitute.org) to reframe the public debate and balance conservative efforts. In essence, Lakoff has appointed himself as the counterweight to pollster Frank Luntz. The Republicans have relied on Luntz to produce a five-hundred-page manual every year that covers all political issues, presenting the logic of the argument from the Republican viewpoint and then describing what the other side's logic is, how to attack it, and what language to use in doing so. It is time for liberals and leftists to stir from a deep sleep and join the battle.
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