Freedom Writer - November 1995 Right triumphs in DesMoines By Adele M. Stan IOWA — Ever si

Freedom Writer - November 1995

Right triumphs in DesMoines

By Adele M. Stan

IOWA — Ever since the Christian Coalition seized control 
of the Iowa Republican Party last year, even local 
politics here have taken a sharp turn to the right. 
With the state's bellwether caucuses looming in the 
upcoming presidential election year, a local issue 
can take on national proportions — especially if tweaked 
by powerful interest groups — which is what happened 
when Jonathan Wilson, a respected 12-year veteran of 
the Des Moines school board, announced his bid for 
re-election after it became publicly known that he 
is gay.

"This particular election is significant," Wilson says, 
"because my detractors abandoned their traditional 
stealth strategy and announced right out of the shoot...that 
they were going to challenge me in this race."

In March of last year, less than a year before Wilson 
announced his candidacy for another term on the school 
board, full-time Christian right activist Bill Horn 
moved his wife and five kids with him from California 
to Altoona, a Des Moines suburb, to open the "Midwest 
regional office" of The Report, an offshoot of the 
Rev. Ty Beeson's Springs of Life Ministries based in 
Horn's home state. (It was in Beeson's church that 
the Rev. Jim Bakker, after being defrocked in the wake 
of his sex and financial scandals, was ordained, again, 
as a minister.) Before his move to the corn belt, Horn's 
claim to fame was the 19-minute hate video, "The Gay 
Agenda," which he produced under Beeson's wing. Filled 
with sexually explicit footage and discredited statistics, 
the tape first made waves when it found its way to 
the joint chiefs of staff during the debate on gays 
in the military in the early days of the Clinton administration.

An early booster of Horn's video career was James Dobson, 
Ph.D., the sociologist who heads the Focus on the Family 
media empire based in Colorado Springs. "The Gay Agenda" 
had an earlier, cruder, precursor, first aired in 1991 
as a segment of The Report's cable TV show. Dobson 
snapped up some 8,000 copies of Horn's "Sexual Orientation 
or Sexual Deviation: You Decide" and arranged to have 
them distributed throughout California. But Horn's 
biggest break came when Pat Robertson pitched "The 
Gay Agenda" in February 1993 on his daily television 
show, "The 700 Club," which claims more than a million 
viewers. So far, Horn says he's sold hundreds of thousands 
of copies of "The Gay Agenda" at $13.95 a pop, and 
has since followed it up with two more anti-homosexual 
video screeds. His success allowed Horn, a 36-year-old 
former sportscaster, to quit his job and become a full-time 
activist.

Back in Des Moines at WHO radio, the station that launched 
Ronald Reagan's broadcast career, local right-wing 
Christian shock jock Jan Mickelson introduced Horn 
to his dittoheads during the "don't ask, don't tell" 
debate. It wasn't long before Horn made his move to 
the heartland. Horn had barely plunked down in Iowa 
when, around Christmas 1994, school district employee 
Tom Lutz used his office fax to leak to Horn an early 
draft of a proposal for infusing information about 
sexual orientation in Des Moines' progressive multicultural 
curriculum. Mickelson, for whom hot buttons are stock 
in trade, put Horn and the proposal out over the airwaves, 
causing Pat Buchanan, presidential hopeful and the 
wannabe poster-boy of the Christian right, to denounce 
the curriculum proposal as "a moral lie."

Ever since his 1991 divorce, rumors about Jonathan 
Wilson's sexual orientation had run rife in Des Moines 
political circles. As the anti-gay rhetoric of the 
right's offensive reached a fever pitch (thanks to 
Mickelson), Wilson, a handsome, 50-year-old lawyer, 
began to receive death threats, even though the school 
board had not been involved in the controversial proposal. 
The Des Moines police had Wilson wearing a bullet-proof 
vest for a time. Still, Wilson worried that speculation 
about him left the board vulnerable to attack, so, 
at a school board meeting attended by his father and 
sister, both Methodist ministers, as well as his ex-wife 
and two grown children, Wilson seized the issue from 
his detractors. "I said, okay, I'll show 'em...I can 
take this threat of exposure away," Wilson explains. 
"I have the power."

At the board meeting, Wilson played to a packed house. 
"The negative things that have been said in recent 
weeks about gay people — the awful stereotypes — are 
lies," Wilson announced. "I know this because I am 
a gay person. Now this community knows that they are 
lies, too, because this community has known me for 
more than a quarter of a century."

Sitting in his cluttered offices at the WHO studios, 
Jan Mickelson, minimized the impact of Wilson's revelation. 
"There will always be a segment that likes the little-boy-lost 
Wilson routine," he asserted. "He flashed his baby 
blues and says, 'I'm a victim,' and 'Come rescue me.' 
And there's going to be a number of soft-headed people 
who will fall for that. But he is not really the issue. 
The issue is bigger than his own agenda."

To Mickelson, a neo-Christian Reconstructionist and 
self-described Calvinist, the issue is the entire education 
establishment, which he sees as presided over by liberals 
who seek to foist their anti-Christian values on an 
unsuspecting public. Mickelson counts himself to the 
right of the Christian Coalition, which he believes 
has traded Christian principles for political power. 
But The Report, the enterprise headed by his friend 
Bill Horn, competes with the Coalition for contributions 
from local evangelicals, and Mickelson himself penned 
a fundraising letter for Horn's outfit.

Of course, the Christian Coalition latched onto the 
anti-Wilson cause for its own fundraising purposes. 
In a letter to potential contributors sent last June, 
Iowa Christian Coalition president Ione R. Dilley targeted 
the Des Moines school board race for action, singling 
out Wilson for criticism.

In June, Wilson began his campaign with confidence, 
hiring two Democratic pros to run his organization. 
He filled his war chest with some $60,000, around six 
times the usual cost of running a school board race 
here; of the total, only $15,000 came from out of state, 
thanks to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. With the 
endorsements of _The_Des_Moines_Register_, two major 
unions, a corps of dedicated volunteers, professional 
polling efforts, and Wilson's own outreach to area 
ministers, the candidate's prospects looked good. By 
any political playbook, Wilson made all the right moves 
— and lost.

In the end, Wilson's organization proved to be no match 
for the national megastructure of the Christian right, 
especially the Christian Coalition, which papered local 
churches with its infamous voter guides. Though he 
says he answered every question on the Coalition's 
survey, the guides showed Wilson as giving no response 
on several. On the eve of Iowa's August straw poll, 
presidential contender Phil Gramm sent out a letter 
to Iowa voters, paid for by his campaign, soliciting 
money for Bill Horn's outfit as Horn stirred the pot 
against Wilson. Then, in testament to the power of 
the right, Des Moines Mayor John Dorrian and two city 
councilmen endorsed Wilson's foes, hand-selected to 
run from a committee of area ministers — a move unprecedented 
here, where city officials have traditionally remained 
aloof from school board politics. After a dozen years 
of education advocacy at both the local and national 
levels, Jonathan Wilson was trounced in one of the 
highest turnouts ever for a Des Moines school board 
race. (Some 30,000 votes were counted.) And the right's 
victory in the school board race is seen as a mere 
opening salvo for the next year's mayoral contest.

"I hope this serves as a wake-up call to the thinking 
people of Des Moines," says Sue Luethens, who chaired 
Wilson's campaign and served for eight years on the 
school board with him. Linda Powers, a Wilson campaign 
volunteer and mother of four, feels that the battle 
has just begun. She's already signing up Wilson volunteers 
to monitor the actions of the new school board. "We 
can't let it end here," she says.

Despite his success at raising campaign funds, Wilson 
has a $6,000 campaign debt. Contributions are still 
being accepted by the Wilson Campaign Fund, 2500 Financial 
Center, Des Moines, IA 50309.	

_Adele_M._Stan_was_on_assignment_in_Des_Moines_for_
Mother_Jones._Her_story_on_the_Christian_right_can_
be_read_in_the_[ref001]online edition of the magazine._

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Freedom Writer / ifas@berkshire.net

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