The Pro-Cervical-Cancer Religious Right

One conference speaker was Howard Phillips, the hulking former Nixon staffer who helped midwife the new right. Years ago, Phillips, along with Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, recruited a little-known Baptist preacher named Jerry Falwell to start the Moral Majority. Though he was raised Jewish, Phillips is now an evangelical Christian who told me he was profoundly influenced by the late R.J. Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism. "Rushdoony had a tremendous impact on my thinking," Phillips said. As time goes on, he said, Rushdoony's influence is growing.

Christian Reconstructionism calls for a system that is both radically decentralized, with most government functions devolved to the county level, and socially totalitarian. It calls for the death penalty for homosexuals, abortion doctors and women guilty of "unchastity before marriage," among other moral crimes. To be fair, Phillips told me that "just because a crime is capital doesn't mean you must impose the death penalty. It means it's an option." Public humiliation, he said, could sometimes be used instead.

As if this were not controversial enough, Christian Reconstructionists also advocate an extreme vision of social policy. Citing passages from the Old Testament Books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, many Reconstructionists would institute the death penalty for a number of offenses, among them striking or cursing a parent, adultery, homosexuality, "unchastity," rape of a betrothed virgin, witchcraft, "incorrigible" juvenile delinquency, blasphemy and propagation of "false" religious doctrines. Some favor stoning as the biblically preferred means of execution.

Reconstructionists also argue that the Bible sanctions some forms of slavery and accords women a second-class status. One Reconstructionist writer, Steve Schlissel, has asserted that the "God-ordained order" places "God above all, man joyfully under God, woman lovingly under man, and the animals at bottom."