If the ’90s culture war had its opening battle, it was played out over four hot nights in Houston the week of August 17, 1992.
That year’s Republican National Convention, held in the Astrodome, featured a cast of 45,000—all intent on diverting attention from the youthful, vigorous duo of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
President George H.W. Bush was pleased to be back in the state where he’d made his political hay. But the Astrodome, to be candid, hardly projected a 21st-century vibe. By the early ’90s, the facility was already a relic. Erected in 1965 as the world’s first domed stadium, it conveyed (as did the GOP itself, said the Democrats) an antiquated vision of what a Jetsons-esque future was supposed to look like. And outside and inside the hall, the signage set the trash-the-bastards theme. T-shirts advised: Blame the Media. Stickers urged: Smile if you have had an affair with Bill Clinton. One placard bore a cannabis logo: Bill Clinton’s smoking gun. Another: Woody Allen is Clinton’s family values advisor.
Meanwhile, a rearguard challenge had been mounted by the ultraconservative commentator Patrick Buchanan, who had secured nearly a quarter of all Republican support in the primaries. Bush, who was considered far too moderate for those on his right flank, had had to appease Buchanan’s forces (religious conservatives would make up some 40 percent of the delegates) or have his convention implode.
So to shore up their base, Bush and the GOP mandarins gave over large swaths of the party platform—and prime-time airtime—to the hard-liners. The platform would be packed with a slate of provisos related to sexual mores, cultural kashrut, and the supremacy of the nuclear family. Entire passages read like war whoops: “Elements within the media, the entertainment industry, academia, and the Democratic Party are waging a guerrilla war against American values. They deny personal responsibility, disparage traditional morality, denigrate religion, and promote hostility toward the family’s way of life.”
Pro-choice Republican Tanya Melich was on hand as they hammered out the fine print. In her book The Republican War Against Women, she remembers a hush falling over the room as the committee took up the “individual rights section, the prelude to the abortion plank.” Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois at one session offered a stunning argument when discussing the need to protect the life of the fetus—at all costs. “I can’t imagine a more egregious crime than rape,” said Mr. Hyde. Even so, he added, “There is honor in having to carry to term, not exterminating the child.” And still he went on, “From a great tragedy, goodness can come.” A new concept: honor birthing.
Meanwhile, the platform, in essence, identified the deviant who was hiding under every bed. It sought to ban gay marriage, adoption by gay couples (LGBTQ wasn’t yet in public parlance), the sale of porn, and public funding that might be used to “subsidize obscenity and blasphemy masquerading as art.” It called for “a human life amendment to the Constitution”; judicial appointments for those “who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life”; and state laws that would make it a criminal act to knowingly pass along AIDS. There was even a call to overhaul the entire welfare system, which itself was phrased in sexual terms. (The current system, according to the platform, constituted an “anti-work and anti-marriage” pact with the poor that “taxes families to subsidize illegitimacy.”) Instead of allowing public schools to provide birth control or abortion service referrals, the GOP pushed “abstinence education.” To combat the spread of AIDS, the platform rejected “the distribution of clean needles and condoms” in favor of education programs that would “stress marital fidelity, abstinence, and a drug-free lifestyle.”
Extreme forces had managed to commandeer the party’s blueprint at the most critical, self-defining phase in the quadrennial election cycle. According to David Brock, then a far-right muckraker (and, come the 2000s, a leftist/progressive advocate and media watchdog), in his memoir Blinded By the Right: “The holy war broke out after four years of conservative disunity, frustration, and disappointment during the Bush presidency, in the midst of an economic downturn, a backlash against the gains of women and minorities, and a resurgent religious revival in what became known as the year of the ‘angry white male.’…Through organization and sheer force of numbers, the religious right had won control of the conservative movement, and the movement, in turn, now was dictating Republican Party policy.”