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RedditIt's way too early for liberal secularists to start breaking out the bubbly. But two recent Republican primaries--in Deep South states, of all places--have exposed some potentially serious cracks in the party's religious-right foundation. In Alabama and Georgia, national icons of Christian conservatism made high-profile runs for state office against old-school, Chamber of Commerce Republicans. In both cases the religious-right candidates began the race with high popularity ratings. In the end they both got clobbered.
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The Christian right had already suffered an earlier rebuke in June, when Alabama Republicans rebuffed, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, the effort by Roy Moore, the former "Ten Commandments Judge," to unseat incumbent Governor Bob Riley. The vast majority of Alabamians had cheered Moore's installment of a two-and-a-half-ton granite monument to Old Testament law in the state's judicial building when he was chief justice, and most stood by him when he was removed from office for defying court orders to remove it. But the limitations, and downright scariness, of Moore's theocratic vision became all too apparent when he ran for governor. On election day a big chunk of the Christian right stayed home. Georgia's "foot soldiers" followed suit a few weeks later--enough to make Republican strategists shudder as they look toward November.
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