AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now!, Pacifica Radio’s daily, grassroots election show. And yes, folks, it is Election Day. I’m Amy Goodman, here in Washington. Juan González, columnist for the Daily News, joins us from New York City.

Some critics have challenged the legality of the Christian Coalition voter guides. This past Sunday, the Christian Coalition distributed millions of voter guides in churches around the United States, encouraging conservative Christians to go to the polls to help Congress in Republican hands — to help keep Congress in Republican hands. Here’s Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed speaking last month at the National Press Club here in Washington, D.C.

RALPH REED JR.: There is a deep and profound spiritual hunger that is driving the American people back to a closer relationship with God. Now, it is ironic that in the midst of all this spiritual and religious ferment that, until recently, people of faith who poured into the public square and into the precincts were treated as oddities or, even worse, as objects of fear. When the religious conservative movement burst upon the national scene seemingly out of nowhere to much in the press corps, its leaders were mocked at, its values scoffed, and its adherents were dismissed with the sneering verdict that they were poor, uneducated and easy to command. They were denounced as mongers of hate, caricatured as snake oil salesmen. They were falsely accused of anti-Semitism and intolerance. And they were derided by one columnist as the American equivalent of Shiite Muslims, managing in a single stroke of a pen to not only offend 40 million Americans, but 100 million Muslims all over the world.

Today, happily, that is beginning to change. Religious conservatives have crossed the threshold of legitimacy. They have cleared the bar of credibility in our public life, and they have gained the place at the table that they have sought for so many years. They are not the only voice, but they are an important voice in the conversation that we call democracy. And whether one means them well or ill, they are indisputably going to be a permanent fixture on the American political landscape probably for the rest of our lives.

You see, the American people are hungering for moral answers to moral problems. And that is why the Christian Coalition is poised in the coming weeks to launch the largest single voter education and get-out-the-vote effort in the history of our organization. Between now and November 5th, we will distribute 45 million nonpartisan voter guides in 120,000 churches, an effort that will involve an estimated 100,000 volunteers. They will contact 3 to 5 million voters, by letter, by phone or in person. And there will be an estimated 1 million newly registered evangelical or pro-life Roman Catholic voters who will cast their first ballot 14 days from today. Our voter guides will be distributed across the country, not only in churches, but in synagogues and union halls, at shopping centers and at polling locations — wherever voters can be found. They will accurately report the positions of the candidates on the key issues facing our country, not just the issues that we work on as an organization, but taxes, a balanced budget, term limits and education. They will not endorse any candidate. They will not urge any voter to join a particular political party. But they will give voters the education and information they need to cast an informed and intelligent ballot.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Ralph Reed, director of the Christian Coalition. We made several requests inviting a national spokesperson from the coalition to join us on today’s program, but the group did not make any of its staff available.

Joining us now to discuss the Christian Coalition’s voter guides and their own are two people. We’re talking about the power of the Christian Coalition as a political force in 1996. We’re joined by Jill Hanauer. She is executive director of the Interfaith Alliance, which distributed its own voter guides this year, the Interfaith Alliance, a faith-based counter voice to religious and political extremists, as they describe themselves. And Matt Freeman joins us. He is vice president of People for the American Way, the 300,000-member citizens’ organization in this country. We are also joined by Juan González of the Daily News.

Matt, your response to what Ralph Reed has just been saying?

MATTHEW FREEMAN: Well, there was a whole lot there to respond to, but on the question of voters’ guides, if Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson and the rest of the Christian Coalition were passing out truly nonpartisan voters’ guides that told the voters the truth about the candidates’ positions about the issues, I’d help them pass them out myself. But what they’re doing is something quite different. When you look at their voters’ guides, you see distortion piled upon distortion. They have distorted the issues themselves. They’ve boiled them down into barely recognizable little blurbs that deliberately deceive voters. They’ve even — they’ve distorted the candidates’ positions on those issues. And they’ve even tried to deceive voters into thinking that they’ve actually gotten genuine responses from the candidates themselves to help them fill out these voters’ guides, when, in fact, in about half of the cases, they have made up answers for the Democratic candidates on their voters’ guides, some of which bear little, if any, relationship to the truth. So, from top to bottom, these voters’ guides are a series of distortions intended specifically to help elect Republican candidates to office.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you give examples of that, saying they made up answers for Democratic candidates?

MATTHEW FREEMAN: Sure. Well, at the very — they acknowledge right there in their voters’ guides, although they have it in the tiniest little type, buried by an asterisk, but if the candidates don’t respond to the questionnaires, they just go ahead and fill in answers for them. Well, you know, the Christian Coalition has a very different view of a lot of issues than many folks, and so when they go to make up those answers, they come from a different sort of reality. So, for example, they say in the presidential voters’ guide, that was included in every voters’ guide that they passed out anywhere in the country, that Bill Clinton opposes public school choice. Well, that’s not his position. He said it in the presidential debates that he favors public school choice. Whatever you may think of the issue, it’s not his position. They also say that he opposes — or, that he opposes a ban on the so-called partial-birth abortion. Well, the president vetoed a bill that was a so-called partial-birth abortion bill. But he said the reason he did it was because it didn’t have a meaningful exception to save the life of the woman or to protect her health, and that if they sent him one that did have that exception, he’d sign it. He said that over and over again. A lot of people I know disagree with that position, but that’s his position. But the Christian Coalition boils that down to simply “opposes the partial-birth abortion ban,” and that’s not a fair representation of his position.

AMY GOODMAN: Jill Hanauer, how are your voter guides any different? Where have you distributed them? And how do you get your information when candidates don’t respond?

JILL HANAUER: Well, what we did with our voters’ guide was try to talk about family values issues, real issues that affect American families, and those issues that we felt were the most important issues debated in the 104th Congress that affected women and their children in American families. Unlike the Christian Coalition, who cares more about so-called obscene funding of art — or, funding of obscene art or term limits, we think the kind of issues that affect American families are things like Medicaid and Medicare, welfare reform, the environmental protection regulations that were cut back by this last Congress, and other issues like that. What we did, we distributed 5 million voter guides through both the mail and through grassroots distribution. We have 109 chapters in 36 states. And we mailed out those voter guides to low- and middle-income men and women in this country.

The other thing that is very important to remember is, is that Ralph Reed constantly talks about being persecuted and that Christians are being persecuted. And that’s absolutely wrong. Mainstream people of faith joined together with the Interfaith Alliance and other organizations, like People for the American Way, to say, “Wait a minute. Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson’s agenda is a political agenda masked in religious garb.” And that’s all it is. So, when Ralph Reed talks about spiritual hunger, as we heard at the beginning of this program, we think that what Americans are hungering is truth. And that’s something that the Christian Coalition does not give the American public.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Matt Freeman, Ralph Reed also seems to suggest that this religious conservative movement is a new movement on the American scene. And clearly, anybody who knows anything about American history, going back from the Puritans to the temperance movement of the early part of this century, knows that there’s been constant revivals of political religious conservative movements within the country. To what degree is the Christian Coalition the mainstay now of the Republican Party? And has that actually hurt Bob Dole in his quest for the presidency this year?

MATTHEW FREEMAN: Well, I think the Christian Coalition and the religious right are very much a mainstream of the Republican Party, Juan. And I think, frankly, that is one of the things that’s hurt Bob Dole tremendously. I think the biggest millstone that Bob Dole is carrying around his neck is Newt Gingrich and Republican House of Representatives this past year, and particularly closing down the federal government because of their dispute over the budget. They did that because they were emboldened by their victories in 1994, driven largely by the Christian Coalition and some of these other far-right-wing organizations. And they thought they had a certain invincibility to them that would help them get away with some of those issues and to fool the American voters into thinking that those really were mainstream positions. Well, now Bob Dole is paying the price for that, and it looks like it’s going to be a pretty severe one, indeed.

JILL HANAUER: Let me also point out that the Christian Coalition claimed victory for 38, quote, “pro-family” freshmen members of Congress in 1994, and many of those may not win their reelection. And so, what we’ve seen is, is, like Matt said, it hurt the presidential. It’s hurting these congressional races in a number of primaries, where ultraconservative Republicans defeated their moderate opponents in Republican primaries for the U.S. Senate. Those Republicans are now going on to be defeated. We’re seeing that in Illinois. We’re seeing that in Georgia. So, they really have hurt the ticket up and down.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jill Hanauer, what’s been the impact of the Christian Coalition on Catholic voters and on Catholic stands on many of the races?

JILL HANAUER: It’s a very good question. Ralph Reed, last year, created an organization called the Catholic Alliance, which was specifically designed to reach out to so-called conservative Catholic voters. What’s happened is, is he’s learned that the Catholic vote is not monolithic, just as the Christian or Jewish vote is not monolithic. And the Catholic Alliance has really been stalled. We’re going to see millions of voter guides — or, we saw millions of voter guides distributed this Sunday at Catholic Churches, focusing on the abortion issue and issues affecting lesbians and gays. But overall, the Catholic vote looks like it’s going to split for Democrats and particularly for President Clinton. Just as we’re seeing now that the white evangelical Christian vote is going probably 35 to 40% to President Clinton.

MATTHEW FREEMAN: I also thought the Catholic Alliance bid by the Christian Coalition represented a certain naïveté on the part of the Christian Coalition and Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson. They treated the Catholic voter as if abortion was the only issue that he or she cared about. And, in fact, Catholics are just about as pro-choice as the rest of the American public is. The polling suggests that Catholics are no more anti-choice than anybody else. So, they’ve really bet on the wrong horse with the Catholic Alliance. It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out in coming years.

AMY GOODMAN: I believe, in terms of actual numbers, Catholics disproportionately have — get abortions, as well. That’s a little-known fact. Jill, do you give out the voter guides that the interfaith coalition has developed? Do you give them out, the Interfaith Alliance’s voter guides, to churches, as well?

JILL HANAUER: No. That’s a very good question. In fact, on our voter guides, we have printed, “Not to be distributed in houses of worship.” One of the things that we so disagree with the Christian Coalition is how they abuse those folks that go to churches and the institution of churches, because they distribute them in churches. They get them inserted in the programs. A lot of ministers have no idea who the Christian Coalition is. They say that “We’re Christian.” They think they are official, from the church or from their denomination. And so, we have sent, in fact, 50,000 letters across the country to Christian ministers, educating them who the Christian Coalition is and asking them not to distribute their voter guides.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Freeman of People for the American Way, what happened? A couple months ago, we heard that churches were threatened with losing their tax-exempt status if they gave out these voter guides, because in fact they were partisan. Now, what’s happened here? Does this all go the way of campaign finance threats, that if you engage in any kind of illegalities around campaign finance, that you get a slap on the wrist a couple years down the line and maybe have to pay a small fine? What is the law here?

MATTHEW FREEMAN: Well, the law is that churches have a certain tax status. I don’t want to drag us into the peculiarities of the IRS code, but they have a certain tax status that prohibits them from engaging in partisan electoral activity. Well, that’s what these voters’ guides are all about. They are designed for the specific purpose of electing specific candidates. So, if churches are led by the nose — or, by the Christian Coalition to passing out these voters’ guides, they are very much exposing themselves to the wrath of the IRS. And there are a number of watchdog organizations that are taking a close look at that. The Americans United for Separation of Church and State, for example, I know is working very hard on that issue. And we at People for the American Way and Americans United have all — have both sent out letters to churches — I think the Interfaith Alliance did the same — warning them about the danger that the Christian Coalition’s voters’ guides would pose for them. I’d imagine after the election that we are going to see some enforcement actions against some of the churches that passed out these voters’ guides. And it’s one of the sad and cruel ironies that the Christian Coalition, in the name of God, is dragging some of these churches into this sort of exposure.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, 45 million went out this past Sunday.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Matt Freeman, in those guides, one of the most interesting things in your analysis to me was how they handled the issue, the very volatile issue especially in the West and the South, of restrictions on firearms and assault weapons or semiautomatic weapons. How did they distort that particular issue, according to you?

MATTHEW FREEMAN: Yeah, that’s a wonderful question, because what the Christian Coalition did was that in their questionnaires to candidates, they asked them if they opposed or supported the federal ban on semiautomatic weapons. And then, when they — and about half of the candidates didn’t respond to their questionnaire, almost all of them Democrats. So they get back these responses from the Republicans and no responses from the Democrats. And then, when they print out their voters’ guides, they do two things. First, they make up answers for the Democrats. They just — they divine them out of whole cloth, or they look at their voting record and then distort that. And then, when they put it on the guide, what was asked is about — or, candidates were asked about semiautomatic weapons. And instead, it translates somehow into a federal ban on firearms. Well, if you’re a hunter, there’s quite a big difference there. You can go out and get your shotgun or rifle and go hunt if there’s a ban on semiautomatic weapons. But you can’t do it if there’s a federal ban on firearms. So, you’re exactly right. They’re focusing those in states where hunting is a big issue, because they think they can get out the vote for Republicans that way.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And they explicitly wanted the guides to go out on the last Sunday before the election so that there wouldn’t be much time to respond?

MATTHEW FREEMAN: That’s exactly right. In fact, there was a letter from the president of the Alabama Christian Coalition that went out to churches in that state saying that they were not permitted to pass out the voters’ guides until two days before the election, on this Sunday. We only got some of these voters’ guides because we made phone calls to state Christian Coalitions and asked them to mail them in advance. And to be perfectly candid, we didn’t always tell them we were with People for the American Way. And they sent them out to us. And so, we actually got some of these voters’ guides in advance. But if you didn’t think to do that, there’s no chance you’d see these voters’ guides until about 48 hours before the election.

JILL HANAUER: One thing I want to point out is, what we’re hearing is, while Ralph Reed is saying they’re distributing 45 million and there’s been an increase in the demand, we’re finding that a lot of churches aren’t distributing them. And we had folks in North Carolina attend Christian Coalition meetings just last week where activists were complaining that clergy weren’t willing to take these guides.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s get your phone numbers. If people want to get in touch with the Interfaith Alliance, Jill Hanauer, where do they call?

JILL HANAUER: If you’re in the D.C. area, it’s (202) 639-6370; across the country, 1-(800)-510-0969.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s 1-(800)-510-0969. And People for the American Way, Matt?

MATTHEW FREEMAN: You can call us at (202) 467-4999, or if you’re a web browser type, you can check out our webpage at www.pfaw.org. And when you get there, you can take a look at our report on the Christian Coalition’s voters’ guides.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both very much for joining us, Matt Freeman, vice president of People for the American Way, and Jill Hanauer, executive director of the Interfaith Alliance. And, Juan González, thanks for being with us, Juan González of the New York Daily News.

You’re listening to Democracy Now! Up next, we talk with first-time voters. Stay with us.