Paul Weyrich, the blunt cultural warrior who helped to engineer the union between the Republican Party and the Christian Right, coined the phrase “moral majority” and was a driving force behind some of the conservative movement’s leading institutions, has died. He was 66.
Weyrich died early Thursday at a northern Virginia hospital, according to Lee Edwards, a distinguished fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation who knew Weyrich for 41 years. The cause of death was not immediately known, but Weyrich recently had faced a number of medical crises, including diabetes and the amputation of both legs in 2005.
“Paul was a pioneer, a visionary and a tough enforcer of conservative principle,” David Keene, chairman of the grassroots American Conservative Union, said in a statement Thursday.
Weyrich battled anyone who did not hew to core conservative beliefs. He frequently criticized President Ronald Reagan for ideological insufficiencies on such issues as school prayer and abortion. He famously torpedoed the nomination of former Republican Sen. John Tower as secretary of defense by calling attention to Tower’s drinking habits and fondness for women “to whom he is not married.”
At a Washington roast in 1991, Weyrich was teased by syndicated columnist Robert Novak for having alienated so many people that “he gets hate mail from Mother Teresa.”
Weyrich’s role in the Tower fight underscored the nature of his conservatism: It was not just political but was acutely cultural, concerned with such matters as whether children are taught evolution or creationism in school, or whether homosexuality is portrayed as natural or profane.
Weyrich became a news director in Denver in the mid-1960s, where he attracted the attention of Republican Sen. Gordon Allot, who hired Weyrich for his Washington staff. His Colorado connections led him to Joseph Coors, the conservative beer magnate, who donated $250,000 to launch the Heritage Foundation in 1973. Weyrich became its first president in 1977. The think tank is credited as the intellectual engine of the Reagan Revolution, particularly through a 1981 treatise on limited government called “Mandate for Leadership.”
In 1979, Weyrich was in a discussion with the Rev. Jerry Falwell when he remarked that there was a “moral majority” of Americans ready to be called to political action. Falwell “turned to his people and said, ‘That’s the name of our organization,’ ” Weyrich recalled in an interview last year with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The Moral Majority mobilized evangelical Christians into one of the most potent political forces of the Reagan era.
