A who's who in the push for parochiaid By Curt Guyette e-mail feedback           FIRST IN A SERIES: The Big MAC Attack How special interest groups and their think tanks waged the real Engler Revolution. SECOND IN A SERIES: Political Casualties Inside Gov. John Engler's war against worker's compensation. THIRD IN A SERIES: Onward Christian Scholars How Gov. John Engler and the radical right are campaining to make taxpayers fund religious schools. SERIES HOME PAGE

In 1993, as the push for charter schools built toward climax, TEACH Michigan teamed up with several of the most controversial players on the religious right team to form the Coalition for Parents' Choice. Coalition members included: Eagle Forum This group was formed by Phyllis Schlafly in the early 1970s to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. "When that issue faded," writes Robert Boston in his book "Why the Religious Right Is Wrong," the ardent anti-feminist "took to attacking public education, homosexuality and separation of church and state. According to the National Education Association, her views regarding public education were summed up during a 1984 press conference. "Among the wrong things children are learning in school are how to commit suicide, how to use illegal drugs, how to engage in premarital and promiscuous sex, and how to lie, cheat, steal, and spy on their parents. This type of antimoral, antiparent education has been spread to every part of the United States by the Typhoid Marys of federal funding." The group has also spearheaded Tennessee legislation that would allow the firing of any teacher who presents evolution as fact. Concerned Women for America This blatantly homophobic Virginia-based group was founded by Beverly LaHaye, the wife of Moral Majority co-founder Rev. Tim LaHaye. "In your town and mine, school administrators and students are being indoctrinated with humanistic education propaganda disguised under seemingly innocent titles like ...'family life education,'" LaHaye declared in a fundraising letter. According to 1994 IRS forms, LaHaye earned $65,000 a year for a 15-hour work week. Michigan Family Forum This is the state affiliate of the Colorado-based Focus on the Family, one of the most powerful forces on the Christian right. "We're not an in-your-face kind of group," MFF founder Randall Hekman, recipient of Concerned Women's Christian Family Protector Award, told the Metro Times. MFF and its spin-off groups promote abstinence-based sex ed and fought to remove core curriculum from the state school code. Adhering to this advice in a Focus on the Family activists' guide, MFF keeps a lid on the rhetoric: "Avoid inflammatory and derogatory language-- for example, describing homosexuals as 'perverts' or 'sodomites,' abortionists as 'Nazi butchers' or 'baby killer' or teachers as 'secular humanists' is not effective." Despite its desire to be low-key, Focus on the Family's training manuals reveal what the Anti-Defamation League describes as a desire to refute "not merely the doctrine of separation of church and state but American religious pluralism generally." The ADL quotes Focus materials as proof: "This really was a Christian nation, and, as far as its founders were concerned, to try separating Christianity from government is virtually impossible and would result in unthinkable damage to the nation and its people. Much of the damage we see around us must be attributed to this separation." Citizens for Traditional Values This Lansing group, founded by James Muffett, can best be defined by the books it peddles. Of particular interest is "America's Providential History," which is promoted with this blurb: "Newsweek recently reported 'historians are discovering that the Bible, perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document. This book proves it.'" At seminars the group offers a "monkey madness" program that purports to offer "scientific evidence for supporting the theory of creation." The group maintains a political action committee that actively recruits, endorses and supports candidates who meet its criteria based on "traditional family values." Among the politicians endorsing the group are Michigan Senate Majority Leader Dick Posthumus and Speaker of the Michigan House Paul Hillegonds.