Waiting in the wings.

Gary Bauer's presidential campaign could make him the nation's leading antigay crusader

Televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have been a formidable antigay tag team for more than two decades, building powerful national political organizations largely on the success of fund-raising appeals castigating gays. But the pair soon may be elbowed aside. Ready to take over as the nation's highest-profile antigay activist is Gary Bauer, a GOP presidential candidate and head of the Family Research Council.

Although he is stuck at less than 2% in opinion polls on the candidates, Bauer is ready to seize the opportunity presented by Falwell's and Robertson's changing fortunes. Robertson's Christian Coalition is facing budget shortfalls and tax problems, and Falwell is now expressing some regret for his long history of antigay rhetoric. Bauer's goal is to mimic Robertson's feat in his failed 1988 presidential bid by transforming his huge campaign mailing list into a conservative juggernaut. FRC, a powerful Washington, D.C., religious right group from which Bauer is on leave to run for president, stands to be the beneficiary.

"The one thing the Family Research Council has always lacked is a grassroots network," says Robert Boston, assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that monitors the religious right. "It's almost exclusively a Washington entity. The campaign trail is one of the best ways to produce a strong mailing list of local activists. This is Bauer's chance to surpass the Christian Coalition, which is in a lot of trouble."

Such a political realignment could have profound implications for gays and lesbians. While Robertson and Falwell have received the most press coverage for their antigay campaigns, FRC is perhaps the most zealous in its use of homophobia. Bauer has quietly assembled a full-time research team dedicated to disseminating antigay propaganda through special reports and fund-raising letters. The organization's Web site lists close to 100 articles on homosexuality, including such rifles as "Homosexual Activists Work to Lower the Age of Consent," "James Hormel: Mythical Man," "Sodomy Laws Set Needed Standards," and "Activists Exploiting Tragedy" about the Matthew Shepard slaying. In addition, the organization's weekly "Culture Facts" newsletter makes antigay attacks a staple of its coverage. Backing FRC in its efforts is Focus on the Family, one of the largest religions right groups in the country. Focus founder James Dobson handpicked Bauer to run FRC, which has a $14 million annual budget, providing Bauer with a national platform after having served in Ronald Reagan's administration.

Even as the nation has become more tolerant of gay men and lesbians, Bauer has remained unapologetic in his antigay appeals. The day before Falwell hosted openly gay reverend Mel White at Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church in October, FRC released a statement taking Falwell to task for appearing to embrace White, who ghostwrote Falwell's autobiography in the 1980s. "Family Research Council continues to have concerns about meetings of this nature because we believe they can be misconstrued to elevate and validate false claims," the group said in an prepared statement.

Georgetown University government professor Clyde Wilcox says Bauer's unwavering hard-line approach could boomerang on FRC. "To a certain extent, under Ralph Reed the Christian Coalition was the moderating force on the religious right," he says. "Bauer could never be described as the assimilationist Reed was. But that may also hurt his ability to appeal to a larger audience. Even among those on the religious right, Americans may see homosexuality as a sin, but they don't want to see the extreme rhetoric used against gay people either."

Ironically, Bauer in September found himself a victim of the rigid standards he promulgates for others. His campaign staff had complained that Bauer failed to live up to an unwritten rule for Christian conservative activism by meeting repeatedly behind closed doors with a 27-year-old female aide. Bauer has denied that he had an "improper relationship" with the young woman, but he had a glass door installed in his campaign office anyway. Robertson and other religious conservative leaders criticized Bauer for his behavior, which Bauer charged was made public by aides to his main competitor for the religions right vote, publishing heir Steve Forbes. "What's wonderful about Steve Forbes," said Charles Jarvis, the former national campaign chairman for Bauer who defected to work for Forbes, "is that he will never be alone with a woman. Period."

Experiencing such a smear campaign apparently has nor given Bauer qualms about tackling private behavior in public. After being introduced in early October at the Christian Coalition conference by his wife, Carol, who insisted that Bauer was a "wonderful and faithful" husband," Bauer launched into an attack on same-sex marriage. If he is elected, he promised, judges he appoints "are going to understand that marriage is between a man and a woman, not two men."

Like many antigay activists, Bauer attributes his moralistic zeal to childhood trauma. He grew up in Newport, Ky., in the 1950s, and his father, a laborer, was an alcoholic who brutalized young Gary and his family. Bauer responded first by finding God and then by leading a successful campaign against the city's notorious mob, which protected illegal gambling and prostitution businesses.

After graduating from Georgetown University Law Center, Bauer served as undersecretary of education and domestic policy adviser in the Reagan White House. Although he was generally kept at arm's length by other Reagan advisers, Bauer was a proponent of the 1982 Family Protection Act, which proposed to deny federal funding to any "entity which presents homosexuality, male or female, as an alternative lifestyle or suggests that it can be an acceptable lifestyle." (The bill eventually was defeated by the Democratic Congress.)

But perhaps Bauer's most troubling legacy is his role in shaping the federal government's early response to AIDS. According to C. Everett Koop, who served as surgeon general from 1981 to 1989, Bauer consistently opposed sexually explicit educational material aimed at preventing the spread of HIV when he was Reagan's domestic policy adviser. Koop charges that in late 1986 Bauer visited his office to urge the removal of any references to condoms from the surgeon general's report on AIDS. Koop, who describes himself as a religious fundamentalist, refused.

"Though he was not terribly influential in the White House, Bauer and others who agreed with him helped create an environment in which prevention strategies were frowned upon," says Jeff Levi, who often debated Bauer on AIDS and gay rights as executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in the mid 1980s. "He helped instill and inspire a level of bureaucratic caution on the part of the federal government in addressing AIDS head-on that we are still fighting to this day." Adds Edward Brandt, assistant secretary of health from 1981 to 1984: "There were a lot of obstacles to AIDS prevention back then. For instance, the media didn't want to use explicit language in describing how to prevent transmission, and neither did Congress. I spent a lot of my time trying to avoid setting people off. There were a lot of people who accused me of doing too much" to combat AIDS.

Bauer's role in the early days of the epidemic should relegate him to the fringes of American politics, says Levi, who is now codirector of the Center for Health Services Research and Policy at George Washington University. "The question is whether anyone wants a president of the United States who sees himself as the nation's moral arbiter," he says.

But recognizing that his presidential hopes are a long shot, Bauer may be willing to settle for the position of national moralist. In that aspiration, says Levi, he is just as likely to fail. "If you look at his role as moral arbiter during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Bauer helped make it more difficult to come to grips with the epidemic as a truly national epidemic that potentially could touch everyone," Levi says. "That's the problem--arbiters can make mistakes too."

Find more about Bauer and his presidential bid at www.advocate.com