“WE’RE IN REBUILDING mode,” says Tony Perkins, the new president of the Family Research Council. “We’re planning on bringing back the FRC.” Describing himself as a “diplomat” and a “risk-taker,” Perkins, a former Louisiana legislator, says he means to restore the FRC to the position of influence it enjoyed as a pro-family lobbying force in Washington under the leadership of Gary Bauer, who left to run for president in 2000.
This will not be easy. Perkins has no Washington experience and knows few of the players inside the Beltway. Bauer had served in the Reagan administration, first in the Education Department, then as White House domestic policy chief. When he took over the FRC in 1990, Bauer was a widely known political figure often seen on TV news shows.
Perkins has ambitious plans. He wants to raise the organization’s profile, he says, by making it more responsive to the media on issues in the news, like gay marriage and abortion. He also means to develop a greater national presence. Perkins plans a bus tour around the country next summer, holding issue-related events he hopes will be covered by the local media.
And Perkins aims to reestablish a strong relationship with Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based pro-family media empire from which the FRC spun off in 1983. Perkins says he speaks with Focus on the Family president James Dobson almost every day. He sees Dobson’s half-hour radio show, broadcast daily on over 2,000 stations nationwide, as “an avenue to reach people.”
At the time Perkins was tapped for the FRC, in August, he was shooting television commercials for his campaign for insurance commissioner in Louisiana. The polls showed him ahead. It was a tough decision, he says, but he decided to bow out of the race for the opportunity to address a national audience on big cultural issues.
Center-stage at the moment is a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Though the FRC has not endorsed any particular wording, it opposes civil unions as well as same-sex marriages.
Part of its lobbying effort is a “Marriage Protection Pledge” being sent to every state and federal legislator in the country. It affirms that marriage, “whether entered into within or outside of the United States, shall consist of the legal union of one man and one woman.” So far, about 100 legislators have signed, Perkins says, and the pace of signatures has stepped up since the recent court ruling in Massachusetts allowing same-sex marriages.
Other priority issues Perkins lists are greater latitude for prayer in public schools, a ban on late-term abortions, and judicial overreach. Such concerns have preoccupied him throughout his years in government.
Elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in 1995, Perkins authored the nation’s first “covenant marriage” law. Couples who choose to enter a covenant marriage commit themselves to premarital counseling and, in case of marital breakdown, additional counseling before divorce. Although seen at the time as a promising means of discouraging divorce, covenant marriage hasn’t really taken off. Only a tiny fraction of Louisiana couples chose it in 1998, the last year for which the state Vital Records Registry has posted statistics, and Arizona and Arkansas were the only states to follow suit.
Perkins also championed a law requiring state agencies to consider the impact their regulations have on families. Another of his bills, passed in 1999, encouraged prisons to make available to inmates–at no cost to taxpayers–faith-based activities designed to help them adjust to incarceration. Perkins credits this legislation with a significant drop in recidivism in Louisiana.
In 2002, Perkins kept a pledge to serve only two terms in the legislature and mounted an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate.
But then, his career has never been entirely predictable. His public service began with several stints in the Marines and included a spell as a policeman. He was in the Marine Corps reserves for two years while studying at Louisiana State University, then ran out of money and reenlisted full time until he could afford to finish his degree, at Liberty University. He joined up once more in 1990 to serve in the Gulf War, but was assigned to work at the State Department.
Perkins’s wife and their four children will soon join him in Washington. They come to the capital at a time when family issues are as prominent as ever, but the politics surrounding them have changed. With a Republican Congress and a president in the White House who willingly signed a ban on partial-birth abortion and strongly opposes redefining marriage, even an outsider like Perkins may be able to accomplish a good deal.
Rachel DiCarlo is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
