Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [95]
In Austin legislators were preparing to kill off a Bush program that exempted faith-based programs from state regulation. Among the first Bush programs to go was his deregulation of “faith-based” youth homes. In 2001 Texas lawmakers killed the faith-based alternative-accreditation agency for good reason. They were afraid that if they didn’t kill the program, the program was going to kill the kids.
Four years after Governor Dubya Bush freed Christian residential child-care facilities from state supervision, an emergency-room physician examined an eighteen-year-old boy rescued from a South Texas boys’ home by his mother. The doctor told her her son had been “tortured.” The doctor obeyed state law and called the sheriff. Bible-based discipline notwithstanding, torturing children is still against the law in Texas. We’re sentimental that way.
We saw this one coming (and wrote about it) when Governor Bush persuaded the Legislature to change a state law so that a Christian home that had been forced to leave the state quite literally under cover of darkness fourteen years earlier, could come home to Corpus Christi. (At the same time the governor kept a “Christian discipleship” drug-treatment program in business, after state-welfare agencies tried to close it because of risks to its residential clients.) The story behind the criminal conviction that sent the unregulated Christian boys’ home packing for Montana is another cautionary tale for senators who have wisely slowed Bush’s faith-based program.* It’s not likely that bad public policy in Texas is going to get any better if we make it federal law.
None of this sordid history of beating the devil out of children and Christ into them should have surprised Bush. Lester Roloff’s Anchor Home for Boys and George W. Bush are related through Bush’s political marriage to Karl Rove.* Roloff, the fundamentalist preacher, delivered the votes that gave Rove his first big political win. In 1978 Rove worked for Bill Clements, a crusty Dallas oilman who decided he wanted to be governor and had enough money to make it happen. Roloff, in addition to his radio ministry, operated homes for wayward boys, girls, and women. The Roloff homes were under investigation by attorney general John Hill, the Democratic candidate for governor.
Brother Roloff was a Texas original. The self-made hellfire-and-brimstone come-to-Jesus preacher took his Jersey cow, Marie, with him to college in Waco and sold milk to pay for his education—while he preached. (He polished up his first sermon by reciting it to Marie, making her one of the few born-again Jerseys in the history of evangelical Christianity.) Roloff graduated, worked as a pastor for small churches, and settled in Corpus Christi. There he leveraged his pastor’s gig and a daily radio program into Roloff Evangelistic Enterprises. By the sixties, his daily Family Altar radio program was bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars for Christian homes built on Roloff’s biblical model of discipline: “Withhold not correction from the child, for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.”
Nobody died, but there were some spectacular beatings, enough to attract the attention of lawmakers in Austin—and later of the attorney general. The Legislature invited girls from Roloff’s Rebekah Home to Austin to testify, and after hearing their stories, passed the Child Care Licensing Act. But Roloff was a “render nothing unto Caesar” kind of guy, and refused to submit to any secular authority. Brother Roloff used his daily radio program to openly pray for the success of “Brother Bill” Clements in the 1978 gubernatorial race against John Hill. Roloff also barnstormed around the state in his single-engine Cessna, preaching and stumping for Karl Rove’s first big-league candidate. Clements won by eighteen thousand votes. Roloff claimed he had delivered