Paul Michael Weyrich (; October 7, 1942 – December 18, 2008) was an American conservative political activist and commentator associated with the New Right. He co-founded The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, National Empowerment Television, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, and coined the term "moral majority," co-founding an organization of the same name in 1979 with Jerry Falwell. His father was a German immigrant. Weyrich graduated from St. Catherine's High School in 1960 and attended the University of Wisconsin–Racine for two years. in radio as a reporter for WAXO-FM in Kenosha, Wisconsin, WLIP-AM, and as news director of KQXI in Denver.
Ordination
After the Second Vatican Council, Weyrich transferred from the Latin Church of the Catholic Church to the Melkite Greek Catholic Church and was ordained as a deacon for the Melkite Greek Catholic Eparchy of Newton.
Political activism
thumb|Weyrich in 2007
Weyrich foresaw a potential to organize conservative Christians into a voting bloc in the early 1960s, and reportedly started trying to do so during the 1964 presidential election campaign. Throughout the 1960s, he tried several wedge issues, including abortion, pornography, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, and school prayer, without success. In 1966, Weyrich became press secretary to Republican U.S. Senator Gordon L. Allott of Colorado. While serving in this capacity, he met Jack Wilson, an aide of Joseph Coors, patriarch of the Coors brewing family. Frustrated with the state of public policy research, they founded Analysis and Research Inc. in 1971, but the organization failed to gain traction.
In 1973, persuading Joseph Coors to support it financially, Weyrich and Edwin Feulner co-founded The Heritage Foundation as a think tank a former leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party in Hungary, which had collaborated with Hitler's Third Reich. After serving two years in prison for his Arrow Cross activities, Pasztor found his way to the United States, where he was instrumental in establishing the ethnic-outreach arm of the Republican national Committee," author Martin Lee wrote in 1997. Under Weyrich, the CSFC proved highly innovative. It was among the first grassroots organizations to raise funds extensively through direct mail campaigns. It also was one of the first organizations to tap into evangelical Christian churches as places to recruit and cultivate activists and support for social conservative causes. Over the next two decades, Weyrich founded, co-founded, or held prominent roles in a number of other notable conservative organizations, including founding the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of state legislators, co-founding the Council for National Policy, a strategy-formulating organization for social conservatives, co-publishing Conservative Digest, a conservative magazine, and serving as national chairman of Coalitions for America, an association of conservative activist organizations. He also later reorganized CSFC into the Free Congress Foundation (FCF).
In the early 1970s, Weyrich was first able to politically mobilize conservative Protestants after federal courts ruled segregation academies ineligible for tax exemption, and the Internal Revenue Service began revoking tax exemptions of these schools. Most of these private schools were church sponsored and had been founded to serve white students who abandoned public schools after they were integrated. At this time, conservative Protestants were not an organized voting bloc, and many of them supported both major political parties. These court cases and actions by the IRS reportedly caught the ire of several evangelical leaders, including Jerry Falwell. Weyrich sought to frame the IRS crackdown on segregation academics as an issue of government intrusion and attacks on religious freedom, effectively diverting attention from the racial aspect of the issue. The largest institution targeted was fundamentalist Christian college Bob Jones University, which lost its tax exemption in 1976 due to a policy prohibiting interracial dating. This action further enraged evangelical leaders, many of whom believed that the IRS was overstepping its legal authority.
In 1977, Weyrich co-founded Christian Voice with Robert Grant. The following year, the IRS proposed a new rule that would have revoked the tax exemption of private schools based on their racial demographic composition relative to that of their respective communities. Weyrich later cited this as the beginnings of the religious right, but realized that another wedge issue would be required to keep evangelical Christians mobilized. The unexpected success of predominantly Catholic anti-abortion activists in the 1978 midterms convinced Weyrich that opposition to abortion might work as a wedge issue to keep evangelicals politically mobilized. Prior to this time, the Catholic Church was the only Christian denomination that was staunchly anti-abortion, with many Protestant and evangelical denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention, either supporting legalization of the procedure, or not taking a stance on the issue. Many evangelical leaders were hesitant to embrace opposition to abortion as a wedge issue, believing that its stereotype amongst evangelicals as a "Catholic issue" would hinder its ability to politically mobilize them, but conservative Christians began joining the anti-abortion movement in large numbers by the early 1980s. In 1979, Weyrich co-founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. The organization was credited with mobilizing evangelical Protestants to support Ronald Reagan, and electing him to the presidency in 1980.
In 1997, under the auspices of the Free Congress Foundation, Weyrich founded the Washington, D.C.–based satellite television station National Empowerment Television (NET), later relaunched as the for-profit channel "America's Voice" in 1997. That same year, Weyrich was forced out of the network he had founded when the network's head persuaded its board to force out Weyrich in a hostile takeover. Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates said this was, "apparently for his divisive behavior in attacking GOP pragmatists". From 1989 to 1996, he was also president of the Krieble Institute, a unit of the FCF that trained activists to support democracy movements and establish small businesses in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
By 1997, The Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation were two of the top five biggest and best funded conservative think tanks.
Rail transit activism
In contrast with many conservatives, Weyrich had a long history of ardent support for rail mass transit. He opposed "bus rapid transit" (a particular type of bus transit with higher capacity but also higher costs than ordinary bus transit), and instead supported rail transit as a more effective alternative. In 1988, he co-founded a quarterly magazine on the subject of urban rail transit, called The New Electric Railway Journal, which, until 1996, was published by FCF, and he was its publisher.
He wrote an opinion column for most issues and contributed a few feature articles. FCF discontinued its affiliation with TNERJ in 1996, but the magazine continued being produced, under a different publishing company, about a year after the last magazine was published, Weyrich and William S. Lind (who had been the magazine's associate publisher until 1996) launched a website where they could continue to post their views and news about rail transit. They called the webpage "The New New Electric Railway Journal",
Weyrich also served on the national board of Amtrak from 1987 to 1993 the Amtrak Reform Council, and on local and regional rail transit advocacy organizations.
Views
As a key figure of the New Right—Harper's Magazine noted that he was "often described by his admirers as 'the Lenin of social conservatism'"—Weyrich positioned himself as a defender of traditionalist sociopolitical values, states' rights, marriage, anti-communism, and as a staunch opponent of the New Left.
In Thy Kingdom Come, Randall Balmer recounts comments that Weyrich, whom he describes as "one of the architects of the Religious Right in the late 1970s", made at a conference sponsored by a religious right organization that they both attended in Washington in 1990:
Bob Jones University had policies that refused black students enrollment until 1971, admitted only married blacks from 1971 to 1975, and prohibited interracial dating and marriage between 1975 and 2000.
Weyrich was a supporter of voter suppression, saying in 1980: "I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
In October 1997, The New Republic published an article "Robespierre of the Right—What I Ate at the Revolution" by David Grann, which portrayed Weyrich as highly effective at creating a conservative establishment but also a volatile and tempestuous figure. Weyrich, supported by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, sued the magazine and others for libel; the case was dismissed, then remanded in January 2001, then dropped by Weyrich.
Weyrich abhorred Political Correctness which he called Cultural Marxism, seeing it as a deliberate effort to undermine what he believed was "our traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture" and the conservative agenda in American society. In 1999, writing that he believed "we have lost the culture war", he suggested "a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture.... we need to drop out of this [alien and hostile] culture, and find places, even if it is where we physically are right now, where we can live godly, righteous and sober lives."
In response to a 1999 controversy covered by the press concerning a group of Wiccans in the United States military who were holding religious rituals and services on the grounds of the bases they were assigned to, Weyrich sought to exempt Wiccans from the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and bar them from serving in the military altogether. Weyrich, as president of the Free Congress Foundation, led a coalition of ten religious right organizations that attempted a Christian boycott on joining the military until all Wiccans were removed from the services, saying: