![]() Because evangelicals make up a quarter of the population, the religious right claimed credit for giving President Bush his margin of victory. ![]() Bush took seventy-eight per cent of the white evangelical vote-a record for a Presidential candidate. In November, all the initiatives passed, and George W. Under the leadership of James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, and others, including Richard Land, the official in charge of public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention, activists organized “values voters” with the help of ballot initiatives in eleven states for constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage. ![]() In their own gatherings, they proposed such things as the abolition of the capital-gains tax, a war on radical Islam, and an end to the “myth of separation” between church and state, but they concentrated their public campaigns on gay rights and abortion, the two issues that have resonated most strongly with evangelicals and helped to bring them into the Republican Party. Just four years ago, during the last Presidential election, leaders on the religious right were the only white evangelicals whose voices were heard in the public arena. Evangelical leaders have been most divided over global warming. ![]()
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