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Most national conservative groups disavow a direct role but say they monitor and advise local battles through members at the grass roots. Some, however, don't. In Salt Lake City the Utah chapter of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum spearheaded a school-board vote to ban all after-school clubs for the specific purpose of keeping a local high school from being host of an after-school club for gay teens. Last week the legislature passed a bill banning gay clubs in high schools statewide, mandating that local school boards "deny access to any student organization or club whose activity is to encourage criminal or delinquent conduct, promote bigotry or involve human sexuality." G.O.P. Governor Michael Leavitt is expected to sign the bill into law.
The grass-roots sentiments help propel the religious right's top priority for this year: to stomp out the possibility of civil marriages for gays. The furor was touched off in 1993 when the Hawaii supreme court ruled that denying marriage licenses to three gay couples appeared to violate the equal-protection clause of the state constitution. The case was remanded to a lower court, and is not expected to be thoroughly settled before 1998. But the religious right has been galvanized by fears that a gay marriage in Hawaii might, under the U.S. Constitution, have to be recognized in other states. "It will be the most important issue our country will face in this decade and perhaps for all time," says Jim Woodall, a leader of Concerned Women for America, "because it could redefine the family."
To date, 31 states have taken up the same-sex-marriage issue, with mixed results: five states--Georgia, Kansas, Idaho, South Dakota and Utah--have enacted bans, and 13 others have rejected them. Gay activists are leaning on historical precedent to quash other efforts. "In our lifetime it was illegal to marry someone of the 'wrong race,'" says Evan Wolfson, who directs the Marriage Project for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York. "Our opponents talk about marriage like it's been the same for 6,000 years." Count on the religious right's taking the issue to the G.O.P. Convention in San Diego--and trying to force into the platform a plank banning same-sex marriages.
--Reported by Sam Allis/Boston, Wendy Cole/Chicago and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles