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head of the National Association of Evangelicals, was finding God in the arms of a male prostitute, and that the vice president's daughter and her partner were violating stated Bush White House doctrine by raising a child with two mommies. But a greater factor in the decline and sullying of the Falwell-flavored religious right is its collusion in the worldly corruption ushered in by this particular presidency and Mr. Rove's now defunct Republican majority.
The felonious Jack Abramoff scandals have ensnared a remarkably large who's who of righteous politicos, led by Mr. Robertson's former consigliere at the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, who was so eager (as he put it in an e-mail) to start "humping in corporate accounts." Among the preachers who abetted (unwittingly, they all say) the bogus grass-roots "anti-gambling" campaigns staged by Mr. Abramoff to smite rivals of his own Indian casino clients were Mr. Dobson, the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association and the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition. Tom DeLay, a leader of the Schiavo putsch in Congress, was taken out by his association with Mr. Abramoff, too. Mr. DeLay's onetime chief of staff, Edwin Buckham (an evangelical minister, yet), pocketed more than $1 million, largely from Abramoff clients, that was funneled through a so-called U.S. Family Network, ostensibly dedicated to promoting "moral fitness."
The sleazy links between Washington scandal and religious-right hacks didn't end when Mr. Abramoff went to jail and Mr. DeLay went into oblivion. The first Justice Department official to plead the Fifth in this year's bottomless United States attorneys scandal - Monica Goodling, a former top Alberto Gonzales aide - is a product of Pat Robertson's Regent University School of Law, formerly known as CBN University School of Law, after the Christian Broadcasting Network. As The Boston Globe discovered, Regent's Web site boasts that some 150 of its grads were hired by the Bush administration, and not, it seems, because of merit. In Ms. Goodling's graduating class, 60 percent failed the bar exam on their first try. U.S. News & World Report ranks the school in the fourth - a k a bottom - tier.
Having been given immunity, Ms. Goodling is scheduled to testify before House inquisitors this week. We know already from The National Journal that she was so moral that she put blue drapes over the exposed breasts in the statuary in the Great Hall of the Justice Department (since removed). The Times found that she had asked civil-service job applicants, "Have you ever cheated on your wife?" Yet her strict morality did not extend to protecting the nonpartisan sanctity of the American legal system. An inexperienced lawyer just past 30, Ms. Goodling exercised her power to vet some 400 Justice Department political appointees by favoring Republican and Rovian loyalty over actual qualifications. Though the Monica at the center of the last presidential scandal did enable a husband's cheating on his wife, at least she wasn't tasked with any governmental responsibility more weighty than divvying up pizza.
Mr. Giuliani's rivals for the Republican nomination just can't leave behind the received wisdom that you still have to appease the Robertson-Dobson-Perkins axis of piety that produces the likes of a Monica Goodling. They seem oblivious to the new evangelical leaders who care more about serving the ill, the poor and the environment than grandstanding in the fading culture wars. They seem oblivious to the reality that their association with the old religious-right taskmasters diminishes them, however well it may play to some Iowa caucus voters. Mr. Romney, a former social liberal whose wife gave money to Planned Parenthood, is crudely trying to rewrite his record by showering cash on anti-abortion-rights groups; he spoke at Regent U. even as a Pat Robertson Web site mocked his religion, Mormonism, as a cult. Mr. McCain, busily trying to disown past positions unpopular with the declining base, is trapped in a squeeze play of his own making: he's failing to persuade the hard right that he's one of them even as he makes Mr. Giuliani look like a straight-talker by comparison.
"America's mayor" has so much checkered history in his closet - by which I mean Bernard Kerik, among other ticking time bombs, not the gay couple he bunked with before 9/11 - that he is hardly a certain winner of his party's nomination, let alone the presidency. But whatever his ultimate fate, the enthusiasm and poll numbers Mr. Giuliani arouses among Republicans to date are a death knell for the political orthodoxy of the Rove era. The agents of intolerance are well on their way to being forgotten, even in those cases when they, unlike Jerry Falwell, are not yet gone.
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