gtk-font-name = "Times New Roman 14"
Or whatever. GNOME 2 applies its own settings to GTK2 programs with the gnome-settings-daemon. When the daemon is running, GTK2 programs will use the GNOME settings instead of those present in .gtkrc-2.0. There is also an application called gtk-theme-switch2, which you can use to adjust both appearance and font, whether you use gnome or not.