LISTEN, DO YOU HEAR IT?

THERE'S AN EARTHQUAKE COMING

I'm going to tell you a secret now.

There's an earthquake coming, and if you stand very still and block out the noise of Iraq and the economy and Scott Peterson and Bill O'Reilly and everything else that passes for news these days, you can hear it. The ground is humming softly, all over Red America. The sound gets louder on Sundays and Wednesdays, and mid-week Thursdays, but then it softens for a bit.

But it's still there. And on November 2, everyone will hear it.

There's a campaign out there--actually, probably thousands of them--among pro-family voters to register new voters and get them to the polls. And the issue isn't Bush. It isn't Iraq. And it isn't the economy.

The issue is gay marriage.

You can tell that the Democrats are starting to hear the hum, but they're not quite sure what it is or how dangerous. Lately, they've been trying to push it back into the ground, to cover our ears, and pretend it's not there by saying it's something else: "partisan politics," maybe, or "a wedge issue," or a "distraction." In two debates, the Democratic nominees tried to defuse the issue by dragging and dropping Mary Cheney into their Republican Hypocrisy file. But it didn't work.

Make no mistake: this is a grass roots movement if ever there were one. The Kerry nationals and the gay rights people are trying to spin this issue as something the Administration stirred up to shore up the base. But that's not what happened. What happened is that the culture got to be too much. What happened is that Christians got fed up. What happened is that Courts started doing things that Red Staters think the Court shouldn't be allowed to do--like overrun the will of 78% of the people of Louisiana and declare their desire to protect marriage illegitimate.

That won't stand.

Hundreds of independent Christian groups across the country, some usually political, others not, are emailing and snail-mailing alerts to their members. Pastors everywhere are preaching on the subject. Megachurches are mobilizing to hand out voter guides, informing their people as to where the candidates stand on the issue

Even in traditionally Democratic churches, pro-family voters are putting aside their concerns about the war and the economy. They are not forgiving on these issues, but those things are transitory and temporal. The question of marriage, they believe, touches on eternal truths that simply cannot be compromised.

Black democratic operatives like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (both illegitimate on the issue because they are pro-gay marriage) have been dispatched to calm the black evangelicals back into the barn. But that won't work either. Black pastors across the country are up in arms. They have already held their own rallies calling for support for the Federal Marriage Amendment. More than 40 national Black pastors recently signed an open letter to Congress, begging them to pass the FMA. Blacks and whites, Baptists, and Pentecostals, are all on the same team this year, and it's Team Bush. This year, even the Amish want to vote.

I can tell you that the ground forces of the right are activated and ready. This month, all over the nation, it's what's you might call "Marriage Preservation Month." It's going by a variety of project names and sermon series, but the idea is the same. The people of God have had enough. Get out and vote.

The only person I've seen in media that is catching on to this is marginalized Democratic strategist Pat Caddell---and nobody's listening to him. The other night on FoxNews, he said the gay marriage issue is "a category 5 hurricane," just about to make landfall.

And he's right.

In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton was warmly received at the annual meeting of the Church of God in Christ, the largest Black Pentecostal body in America. This year, COGIC pastors are telling their people that Bush may have screwed up the economy, but he's our only chance to save marriage in America.

The weekend before the election, watch the cable skies. Every evangelist from Jerry Falwell to T.D. Jakes to Juanita Bynum to Joel Osteen will be preaching some variation of the "Christian Patriotism" sermon. You may not know those folks, and that's okay. You don't have to. But you might want to know that Osteen's church is now leasing the 16,000-seat Compaq Center for their regular church services.

I remind you that the last election was decided by just over 500 votes in one state.

In the 1980 election, a force arose in the electorate that the media didn't know was coming. It was the force of moral anguish, and it was triggered primarily by abortion and the nascent gay rights movement. In that year, Ronald Reagan ascended from obscurity, and the evangelicals began their move into the center of the political world. This year, as in that, we, people of faith who have grown complacent with a fat and happy culture, are acting on our convictions and our guilt.

We didn't fight when Hollywood slid further and further toward the abyss, celebrating illicit sex, drugs, homosexuality, lesbianism, witchcraft, prostitution, gambling, and all manner of immorality. We slightly stirred when advertisers targeted our children with barely dressed models in incomprehensible ads for clothing. We slept on while public schools normalized gay sex and adoption.

But we are awake now.

We are looking around us and seeing degeneracy. We see Janet Jackson and the many sins of CBS. We see Michael Moore and the anti-war movement that, whatever one thinks of the war itself, reaches new lows in the unpatriotic and the crass. We see the media's rejection of The Passion of the Christ and clearly see the contempt the cultural gatekeepers have for people of faith.

We see, most of all, Gavin Newsom marrying men to men and women to women in illegal San Francisco ceremonies. We see the Massachusetts Court declaring it unconstitutional to restrict marriage to one man and one woman. We see the Supreme Court authorizing homosexual sodomy as a constitutional right. We see the society around us falling to pieces, and the culture aiming its poisonous relativism at OUR families, OUR communities, OUR nation.

No one expected Ronald Reagan to win the 1980 election. No one but the prophets of the religious right.

The prophets are back this year. And on November 3, we'll know if there's been an earthquake.