The post-election panic on the right isn’t limited to the Republican Party’s identity crisis. As our sister site Colorado Independent has discovered, the right-wing advocacy group Focus on the Family laid off 20 percent of its staff yesterday, even after dumping more than a half-million dollars into passing California’s Proposition 8 gay-marriage ban. The Colorado Springs-based ministry and media empire has been struggling to make ends meet in recent years, Cara DeGette writes, as it steadily lost market share for its line of evangelical books and movies to online outlets and the likes of Wal-Mart. But critics are holding up the most recent round of layoffs, as a sad commentary on the true priorities of the ministry.
Mark Lewis, a longtime Colorado Springs activist who helped organize Proposition 8 protests, put it succinctly: “I would imagine their supporters have got to be asking the question about whether their church is really practicing their theology,” he said.