Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [96]
Four years later, on the same November day Bill Clements lost to another Democratic attorney general, Brother Roloff piloted his Cessna into the hereafter. Roloff was often a reckless flier who believed “the touch of an unseen hand” would bring him back to earth. He often flew into bad weather and crowded airports without fear, because God was his copilot. When his plane went down in East Texas, he took with him four of the “Singing Honeybees” from his Rebekah Home choir.
In 1985, three years after Roloff’s death, the state caught up with his schools. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of a state court ruling that the schools had to be licensed. Roloff’s heir, the Reverend Wiley Cameron, loaded the kids onto a bus late at night and started a trip that would take them to a new Roloff home in Missouri. Years later they would flee farther north, to Montana.
There it is. Roloff, Rove, Clements, and Bush all working together in the Republican takeover of Texas. Even if Rove didn’t much care for the ardent Christianity practiced by Roloff and Bush, he did all the policy-and-politics thinking for his boss. So Rove and Bush knew what they were getting into when they pressed the Legislature to pass a 1997 law that liberated the Lester Roloffs of the world from state licensing. No more criminal-background checks for counselors. No more standards and professional-training requirements for counselors. No more bureaucrats bringing vanloads of whining, wayward girls to Austin to tell tales of beatings with belts and days locked alone in stark rooms where Brother Roloff’s taped sermons played around the clock. State senator Carlos Truan of Corpus Christi pleaded with his colleagues and the governor not to drag the state back into the regulatory dark ages.
The Roloff schools returned to Texas in 1999, after Bush’s faith-based bill passed the Texas Lege and the new Christian alternative-oversight agency was created. By the time the boys from Roloff’s Anchor Home were spirited out of Texas for a second time, Bush was preaching faith-based social services to Congress. This time Roloff’s successors left because Anchor’s Corpus Christi headmaster was convicted of abusing two boys, including the one described as “tortured.” The headmaster’s wife was permanently banned from working in any child-care facility in the state because of her treatment of a girl at the Rebekah Home, which closed its doors rather than apply for a state license. (The girl, DeAnne Dawsey, was bound with duct tape, kicked in the ribs, and locked in solitary for thirty-two straight hours of taped Roloff sermons.) What was once the Anchor Home for Boys in Corpus Christi is now the Anchor Academy for Boys in Maiden, Montana. The new headmaster is a twenty-six-year-old who learned the ropes at the Anchor school in Corpus Christi. The Texas Association for Christian Child Care Agencies—the model for one of Bush’s federal faith-based programs—died a quiet death in the Texas Legislature.
THESE LESSONS—and there are more—are ignored by President Bush, who seems hell-bent on imposing a failed Texas model on the nation. When he orders federal agencies to eliminate barriers that bar or discourage faith-based groups from getting federal funds, he’s beginning the deregulation process that failed when he was governor.
So what’s this all about? It is in part Karl Rove’s project to reelect his boss. Rove admits he doesn’t share the faith that makes White House Bible-study groups almost compulsory. (“I’m an Episcopalian. Faith is not a requirement.”) But the political consultant who made Bush our governor and your president understands that today’s Republican Party wins elections only if Christian conservatives are accommodated.
So they get accommodated.
When Bush proposed former Montana governor Marc Racicot as attorney general, Rove vetoed the choice and made the case for John Ashcroft—certain to please extremist Christians.