A Brewing Fight on the Right

A demonstrator who opposes abortion outside the Supreme Court.

Beyond that, all this back and forth raises a larger point, says Fabrizio. People in the conservative Christian community "are waking up and realizing that the born-again evangelical community is not monolithic. Not everyone in the movement identifies with the politics that Dobson and others are promoting." A recent poll of his showed that 53 percent of Republicans believed their party spent too much time focusing on moral issues at the expense of economic ones.

Perkins acknowledged that the evangelical movement is changing but said its unifying struggle remains banning gay marriage and legal abortion. There's no middle ground. So as the folks in the hotel meeting room were promoting their culture wars truce, mailboxes across the country were being filled with a fundraising pitch from Dobson that included a column he wrote rejecting the "social experiment" of Vice President Cheney's daughter, Mary, who had a baby with her lesbian partner. Some divides are harder to bridge than others.