Dare to Discipline? FOF's Dobson plans to paddle GOP leaders.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and other GOP congressional leaders had better get ready for a trip to the woodshed.

Charging that conservative Christians are being betrayed by the GOP, powerful religious broadcaster James Dobson has vowed to wage a national campaign to correct the Republican Party establishment.

According to reports from the Institute for First Amendment Studies (IFAS) and The New York Times, Dobson gave a fiery speech Feb. 7 to 300 right-wing religious and political leaders in Phoenix, promising to travel the country to implement his crusade.

Addressing a closed-door meeting of the secretive Council lot National Policy, Dobson said if the Republican Congress continues to "betray" religious conservatives, he will abandon the GOP and "do everything I can to take as many people with me as possible."

Dobson, author of the best-selling child rearing book Dare To Discipline, said he was speaking as an individual, not as head of Focus on the Family, his $114 million-a-year tax-exempt religious ministry. However, he indicated he would use his radio empire as much as legally possible to spread the word that Republicans have betrayed religious conservatives who have supported the party with votes and money in recent years.

According to the news reports, Dobson ticked off a litany of alleged GOP betrayals. He included his run-in with Texas Senator and then-presidential candidate Phil Gramm who resisted Dobson's demands, 1996 GOP presidential candidate Robert Dole's dismissal of the GOP platform's hardline abortion language and Speaker Gingrich's selection of prochoice New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman to give a nationally televised response to President Bill Clinton.

Dobson said he could not bring himself to vote for Dole and instead cast a "protest vote" for Howard Phillips, candidate of the U.S. Taxpayers Party. (Phillips is a militant right-winger aligned with the Christian Reconstructionists, the most radical faction of the Religious Right.)

The response from Dobson's audience, a meeting of members of the Council for National Policy (CNP), was mixed. Two thirds of the crowd at the Arizona Biltmore gave him a two-minute standing ovation, but one third remained seated and did not applaud.

The CNP is an umbrella organization that includes the elite of the Religious Right, as well as wealthy allied business and political leaders. Many ape radical theocrats, but some are party team players. (See "Behind Closed Doors At The CNP," June 1996 Church & State.)

The CNP meets several times each year to discuss issues and plan strategy in tightly controlled settings closed to the news media and public. In addition to Dobson, others who spoke at the Phoenix meeting included former Attorney General Ed Meese, former Vice President Dan Quayle, Steve Forbes, Phyllis Schlafly and Christian Coalition President Don Hodel, The Dobson crusade moves next to the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination. Dobson says he will use his appearance on the June 9-11 Salt Lake City convention program to lambaste the Republican betrayal.