The fledgling U.S. Taxpayers Party opens its convention here Thursday, offering a rare national platform for the usually obscure political leaders of the far Right.
Although the nascent third party was unable to lure its favorite son, Pat Buchanan, onto its presidential ticket, it will present its views in a city where thousands of political journalists and GOP activists are gathered for the Republican National Convention.
With the higher profile is bound to come increased scrutiny of the party’s controversial positions, which are to the right of mainstream Republicanism and even the Christian Coalition.
The party is a minority within a minority of conservative thought. It attracted only 139 delegates to its inaugural convention in 1992, compared with the 4,000 delegates and alternates at the Republican National Convention.
Most Americans never have heard of the Taxpayers Party. But if they listen to its rhetoric, they would hear views in line with that of anti-government militia groups, the John Birch Society, and other organizations that fear a new world in which American sovereignty is subjugated to the United Nations and other international organizations.
The Taxpayers Party has been strongly influenced by a controversial theology called Christian Reconstructionism, which calls for remaking government and society according to Old Testament law.
Reconstructionism envisions a society in which eventually adultery, homosexuality and witchcraft, among other offenses, will be punishable by death.
“I think the average American would not go for the kind of church-state entanglement that the Taxpayers Party is putting forward,” said Joe Conn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Former Nixon administration official Howard Phillips said he founded the Taxpayers Party in 1992 because he was disillusioned with the Bush administration’s emphasis on world trade, funding of Planned Parenthood, and failure to cut the federal deficit.
