The real rainbow coalition - multi-ethnic opposition to New York, New York's liberal school curriculum that included sympathetic books for the gay lifestyle - Editorial

National Review, July 19, 1993

ONE OF the catchier phrases produced by American liberalism in the 1980s was Jesse Jackson's label, "The Rainbow Coalition." New York Mayor David Dinkins's milder slogan, "the gorgeous mosaic," referred to the same concept: the coalition of disaffected races and religions, a Yugoslavia of the mind, all marching left. New York City, of all places, has witnessed the emergence of a very different multi-ethnic coalition, which achieved its first victory in ending the career of Schools Chancellor Joseph Fernandez, patron of Heather Has Two Mommies, then went on to win a clear majority of the city's local school-board elections. The results represented a triumph for social conservatives.

The leaders of the social conservatives who made it into the papers were Mary Cummins, the Irish grandmother from Queens; John Cardinal O'Connor; and Pat Robertson, whose Christian Coalition printed voter guides to candidates' opinions. All safely white and right: Archie Bunkers at prayer. But the movement was multilingual and multihued. A third of New York's Hispanics are evangelical Protestants; many of them worship in storefront churches with names longer than their frontage: Zion Assembly Pentecostal Temple of God in Christ. They hated the gay propaganda the bureaucrats proposed forcing down their children's throats, and rallied to the cause. Mary Cummins's own school district is heavily Chinese, and Asian-Americans were part of the alliance. Half the black churches in New York are welfare agencies (i.e., on the take), but the rest are independent, and they loathed Heather and her mommies as well. Orthodox Jews, far from the sleek temples of the Upper West Side, joined in; one rabbi told all who called him to vote against any candidate with a Jewish name (on the likelihood that they would all be liberal activists).

Ironically, the gay-cheerleading curriculum they opposed was called the Rainbow Curriculum. But the opponents were the real rainbow, united not as fellow grievance-mongers raiding the public treasury, but as individuals resistant to the schemes of bureaucrats and social engineers. They were not political people, perhaps not even reliably conservative. But when the Left provokes them, they will march. Jesse Jackson should do so well.