Trump's Actions and Christofascist Rants Undercut Alleged Push to Decriminalize Homosexuality

Trump and homo-con, Richard Grenell who
announced the alleged decriminalization effort.

Not to sound like a broken record, but evidence continues to suggest that the alleged Trump/Pence regime to decriminalize homosexuality is little more than a charade aimed at harassing Iran on human rights issues, yet ignore the murder of gays in Saudi Arabia.  A piece in OutinJersey reminds us of the Trump/Pence regime's anti-LGBT agenda, an agenda seemingly at odds with the effort first reported earlier this week.  Meanwhile, the Christofascists are beginning to rant against the alleged effort to decriminalize homosexuality which they are maligning as "cultural imperialism" even though the very same Christofascists groups have worked diligently to foster anti-LGBT attitudes in Africa and elsewhere.  First, this reminder of Trump's anti-gay agenda:

Two years into the presidency of Donald Trump [regime], one thing has become abundantly clear: his statement declaring that he would be a friend to the LGBT community was categorically and undeniably false. In 2018, Trump did plenty to stack the deck against members of the LGBT community. He pushed to ban transgender soldiers and sailors from serving in the military and created a Religious Freedom task force, Trump wasted little time in dismantling the rights earned by the LGBT community in order to appease his most ardent followers.

The biggest 2018 effort from Trump has been the banning of transgender men and women from serving in the military. . . . .Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis rolled out an implementation plan in March. It would have forcefully discharged those who were diagnosed with either “gender dysphoria” or had undergone a “gender transition,” including received hormones or gender confirmation therapy.

On the religious liberty front, anti-LGBT activists have stepped up their attacks on LGBT rights, seemingly emboldened by the Supreme Court decision that sided with Masterpiece Bake Shop in denying a same-sex couple a wedding cake. The rallying cry for these anti-LGBT activists is that religious “freedoms” are being infringed upon or imperiled by having to treat members of the LGBT community as equals, especially when it comes to supplying services or goods.

On July 30th, former Attorney Jeff Sessions, an outspoken opponent of LGBT rights, announced the task force’s formation. The task force would enforce a 2017 Department of Justice memo that ordered federal agencies to take the broadest interpretation of “religious liberty” when enforcing federal law. This would include prohibiting the IRS from taking away the tax-exempt status of any religious organization that lobbied on behalf of a political candidate, something not allowed by the Johnson Amendment. Sessions said the task force was necessary to stop secularism.

Though the task force will only enforce the memo’s guidelines, Session used his moment at the podium to paint a picture of America as a Christian nation under attack. The message was clear, and a continuation of the perverse rhetoric of the Trump campaign, using the federal government as a way to preserve and protect Christian America.

As for the Christofascists' conniption fit over any effort to decriminalize homosexuality, a press release issued by Family Research Council, a leading anti-gay, extremist "Christian" hate group sums up the push back very well.  Here are excerpts:

An “exclusive report” from NBC News said, “The Trump administration is launching a global campaign to end the criminalization of homosexuality.” There’s just one problem – besides the ambassador, it doesn’t seem that President Trump – or anyone else in the administration – authorized this “campaign.”

For the last eight years, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton bludgeoned foreign capitals with “diplomacy” designed to advance an LGBT agenda around the world and in the United Nations — doing damage to our relations with many countries as a result. The Trump administration should be ending such efforts, not making them a priority.

As our own Travis Weber points out, some may try to argue that protecting LGBT rights is a way of protecting human rights. Yet this misleadingly implies “that same-sex-attracted and transgendered persons do not currently enjoy human rights protections.”

According to NBC, there are eight countries which permit the death penalty for homosexuality — most of them also known as abusers of religious freedom and other rights, and supporters of terrorism.

An end to those laws, and other physical punishments such as flogging, is a legitimate goal. Let’s find common ground in calling for an end to all forms of physical violence against homosexuals — but refrain from imposing the values of the sexual revolution on the rest of the world.

The hypocrisy of FRC is stunning.  It pushes to for a license Christofascists to openly discriminate against LGBT individuals, including firing them from their jobs, denying housing and accommodations, and, of course, baking them a cake.  FRC may not be advocating for our murder, but he and his organization want to make our lives a living hell. 

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Supreme Court Wrongly Hands Victory to Christian Extremist

Jack Phillips - the face of bigotry and hate hiding behind the smoke screen of "religious freedom".

While the majority ruled in Masterpiece Cakeshop on a narrow basis for Christian extremists Jack Phillips - and, in my view, court manufactured finding that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s ruling against Phillips had been "infected by religious animus" - virulently anti-gay Christofascists are nonetheless celebrating the ruling as a wide ranging victory.  Individuals like Family Research Council ("FRC") president Tony Perkins, a man with a well documented ties to white supremacists groups, who parades around as a "godly Christian" while fleecing the bigoted and gullible, a crowing about the "victory" and no doubt looking for the next hand picked plaintiff to continue the assault on LGBT rights.  The irony, of course, is that the Court found the Civil Rights Commission's supposed "religious animus" to be improper, yet Phillips' religious based anti-gay animus was given a pass.   The even large issue is who else will now be subject to targeting by white Christofascists?  Non-Christians? Interracial couples?  Muslims?   A piece in the New York Times looks at this wrong-headed ruling The full opinion is here).  Here are article excerpts:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who had refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple. The court’s decision was narrow, and it left open the larger question of whether a business can discriminate against gay men and lesbians based on rights protected by the First Amendment.

The court passed on an opportunity to either bolster the right to same-sex marriage or explain how far the government can go in regulating businesses run on religious principles. Instead, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion turned on the argument that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which originally ruled against the baker, had been shown to be hostile to religion because of the remarks of one of its members.

At the same time, Justice Kennedy strongly reaffirmed protections for gay rights. “The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts,” he wrote, “all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.”

On the one hand, Justice Kennedy has written every major Supreme Court decision protecting gay men and lesbians. On the other, he is the court’s most ardent defender of free speech.  On Monday, Justice Kennedy chose a third path, one that seemed to apply only to the case before the court.

Writing for the majority in the 7-to-2 decision, he said the Civil Rights Commission’s ruling against the baker, Jack Phillips, had been infected by religious animus. He cited what he said were “inappropriate and dismissive comments” from one commissioner in saying that the panel had acted inappropriately and that its decision should be overturned.

“The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection.”

That passage echoed his plea for tolerance in his majority opinion in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In that decision, he called for “an open and searching debate” between those who opposed same-sex marriage on religious grounds and those who considered such unions “proper or indeed essential.”

The breadth of the court’s majority was a testament to the narrowness of the decision’s reasoning. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Elena Kagan and Neil M. Gorsuch joined Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas voted with the majority but would have adopted broader reasons.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented.

Some gay rights groups took a darker view of the decision. “The court today has offered dangerous encouragement to those who would deny civil rights to L.G.B.T. people,” said Rachel B. Tiven, the chief executive of Lambda Legal. “We will fiercely resist the coming effort that will seek to turn this ruling into a broad license to discriminate.”

Rest assured, a broader attack on LGBT rights will be coming. The ultimate irony is that when one looks at non-discrimination and public accommodation laws, all of the protected categories - age, race, sexual orientation, national origin, age,  - are things that one cannot control.  Only one category - religion - is something that is changeable and relies on a conscious decision - an option, if you will - to embrace a particular dogma and form of ignorance and/or bigotry.  If anything should be forced to yield to immutable characteristics, it should be religious belief which all to often is based on myths and legends.   

Charity Database Tags "Family Values" Organizations as Hate Groups

Tony Perkins - the white supremacist president of Family Research Council ("FRC") who is pictured above - is livid that charity database group Guidestar has tagged his organization and similar Christofascists groups a hate groups.  For those unfamiliar with Guidestar, it posts publicly available tax documents for charities to enable would donors to see which organizations make the best use of donated dollars and other information that is relevant to making charitable donations.  FRC is not the only "family values" organization that pretends to be an educational charity to receive the hate group designation even as it disseminates lies and untruths about gays and others.   Having followed the activities of FRC for roughly 20 years, there are few more dishonest organizations other than perhaps The American Family Association and Traditional Values Coalition.  All three are designated hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center which tracks hate groups across America due to the virulent lies and propaganda they publish (some have used Nazi like propaganda against LGBT individuals).  The Raw Story looks at these groups finally being exposed for what they are (The Family Foundation in Richmond needs to be added to the list).  Here are story highlights:

A non-profit resource that posts publicly available tax documents for charities has infuriated anti-gay Christian and conservative nonprofits by  using a widely available database at the Southern Poverty Law Center and tagging  each of them as a “hate group.” 

Charity database  GuideStar— which bills itself as “the world’s largest source of information on nonprofit organizations” — now includes information provided by the SPLC.

Among the putative Christian non-profits with a political bent who made the “hate group”  list are the Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Counsel, Family Research Council, and the American Family Association — all of whom promote anti-LGBTQ policies,

Also being tagged with the “hate group” designation is the anti-Muslim group American Freedom Defense Initiative, headed by conservative gadfly Pam Geller.

As Guidestar notes on their website: “The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a respected hate group watchdog. There is disagreement on some of SPLC’s specific choices, but on balance GuideStar believes the analysis is strong enough to share. We leave it to you to come to your own conclusions.”

Fearful that the “hate group” designation may be cutting into their non-profit cash haul, the groups are lashing out at Guidestar for “liberal bias.”

 

FRC vice president Jerry Boykin also blasted Guidestar, calling bet use of the database, “another attack on conservative Christian organizations and individuals.”

Greg Scott, the spokesperson for the Alliance Defending Freedom said his organization would like to ignore it, and attempted to dismiss the civil rights watchdog SPLC as a “tabloid’ operation.

Several of the organizations have pushed back at Guidestar, writing a letter at letter to CEO Jacob Harold that attacks the SPLC, saying it incited violence. . . .

“Despite its denials to the contrary, this highly refined method of ostracism and dehumanization practiced by the SPLC isn’t just about verbal debate – it can foreseeably lead to violence,” the letter read.

In truth, the only ones seeking to incite violence are these false charities.  It is long past time that they public be informed of their true toxic nature.  Kudos to Guidestar..   

“Christian Advocate” , FRC Celebrates Budget Cuts Harming the Poor

While there are many faces to the Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who preach a foul belief system that is the antithesis of the true Gospel message, one that wraps them all in one hideous hate filled package is Family Research Council (which has ties to The Family Foundation, Virginia's leading hate group) and its white supremacist loving president, Tony Perkins.  If one needs a motivation to walk away form Christianity, Perkins and FRC are prime examples, although there are many others, including FRC affiliates scattered across America.  Franklin Graham is another reason to walk away.  In response to Der Trumpenführer proposed budget that would devastate programs for the poor and working class Americans,  In a press release, hate minister Perkins praised the brutal budget.  Here are excerpts:

There’s a new sheriff in town, and the White House’s budget proves it with deep cuts to some of the government’s bloated spending. Although the proposal is more of an exercise in vision-casting, plenty of Republicans would be happy to take Trump’s pared down projects seriously. To the cheers of fiscal hawks, the administration suggests cutting the EPA by 31 percent and the State Department by a similar amount.

A longer list of programs like community development block grants, the Weatherization Assistance Program, and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program would be cut 100 percent. Included in that bunch are two longtime targets of the GOP: the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The latter, home to the Left’s pet media outlets NPR and PBS, would finally lose the crutch of millions of taxpayer dollars.

President Trump boosted funding, along with a dramatic shift in favor of school choice programs. While he slashes $9.2 billion from the Department of Education overall, he makes good on his campaign promise to expand charter schools and vouchers by 50 percent.

When the administration fills in the blanks of the budget later this month, we’ll also see if the White House rewards sexual risk avoidance programs with a bump in abstinence education dollars.

As Joe Jervis notes, The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Plan provides up to $300 to year to help poor families pay their heating and utility bills during the winter months. But who needs heat or electricity when you’ve got White Jesus to keep you warm?

Note the boost in school vouchers that will benefit segregated "Christian" schools and shift funds from public schools.  Note that Perkins wants to boost funding for abstinence only sex ed which has been documented to fail horrifically.  I also suspect such "education" programs would include a heavy dose of anti-LGBT propaganda as well not to mention cuts in HIV/AIDS funding which FRC likely views as a means to kill off gays and many in the black community where HIV/AIDS is a huge heterosexual crisis..  

Donald Trump Is Mortally Dangerous To LGBT Equality

Not only is Donald Trump a crooked businessman prone to lies and demagoguery, but he poses a mortal threat towards LGBT rights and equality as he courts the leaders of virulently anti-gay "family values" organizations, a number of which have been certified as hate groups, including Family Research Council ("FRC").  Trump will make a pact with the devil to further his self-promotion, and there is nothing that the Christofascists demand more than special rights for themselves and the denigration of LGBT individuals and their families.  A column in Huffington Post looks at the threat that Trump poses.  Here are excerpts:

Contrary to those in the media and elsewhere who claimed he was “far more accepting” on LGBT issues than other GOP candidates, Donald Trump is proving that he very much will be a force against LGBT equality if elected president. And he’s doing it in a more insidious, under-the-radar way than any previous GOP presidential nominee.

Though he rarely raises his positions against LGBT rights on the campaign trail, Trump is making pacts with anti-LGBT forces. Today, Trump spoke at the Road to the Majority summit in Washington, an event attended by Christian right activists and sponsored by the Faith and Freedom Coalition and Concerned Women for America, both of which fight against LGBT rights. “I’m with you 100 percent,” he said, and, knowing the event was televised live on the cable networks, he spoke with a dog whistle on LGBT rights, alluding to attacks on “marriage and family” and championing “religious freedom,” which of course has been the term used by evangelicals to deny LGBT people of rights. The crowd roared with approval.

And on June 21, in New York, Trump will have a private meeting with over 400 of the most bigoted, most homophobic and most influential anti-LGBT advocates in the United States — from Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins to James Dobson, founder of the Focus on the Family — the bedrock of the religious right, which has been a prominent part of the base of the Republican Party for decades. Many of these groups, like Family Research Council, have been labeled as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. No GOP president in roughly five decades has been elected without the religious right turning out in big numbers. No GOP president has been elected in modern times without evangelical pastors railing from pulpits across the country, telling followers that the only way to save the country is to support the GOP presidential candidate. Ben Carson, who has taken a prominent role in Trump’s campaign, will moderate the discussion between Trump and the hundreds of anti-LGBT activists, which is closed to the media and thus tightly controlled.

Trump had already quietly made pacts with some anti-LGBT forces, and promised to do what he can to overturn the Supreme Court’s historic Obergefell ruling, which he called, “shocking.” He promised he’d appoint justices to the Supreme Court who might do that, and certainly the list of extreme judges he provided recently shouldn’t give LGBT people any comfort.

Though he opposes marriage equality and supports a bill in Congress that will allow religious exemptions for anti-gay individuals and businesses that don’t want to provide services to LGBT people, The New York Times, for example, focused on Trump’s sending a congratulations note to Elton John eleven years ago on his civil union as one among several weak examples that supposedly show him to be more gay-friendly.

As I pointed out a few weeks ago, simply having Ben Carson prominent in his campaign — a man who compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia — is an affront to LGBT people. And as RightWingWatch’s Brian Tashman noted, Trump has also “partnered with Harlem’s notorious ‘stone homos‘ pastor James David Manning and far-right radio show host Alex Jones, who thinks the LGBT rights movement is a ‘suicide cult’ bent on the destruction of humanity.”

Christian right leaders got behind Ronald Reagan, who was divorced, and George H. W. Bush, who formerly supported abortion rights, after they were romanced a bit and quietly forged pacts with the candidates, including regarding stopping advancement on gay rights. That process is happening right now with Trump. His campaign, and certainly Republican leaders, know he cannot win without motivating a large portion of evangelicals. And right now anti-LGBT laws and measures meant to blunt equality are animating religious conservatives in a big way, . . .

No matter what Trump has said in the past, or what the media or desperate gay Republicans may say now, there’s no question that Trump must bow to an anti-LGBT agenda if he wants to win the presidency. That makes him a mortal danger to LGBT equality.

Segregation, Not Abortion, Formed the Christian Right

FRC president, Tony Perkins addressing a White supremacy group

I have often said that if one scratches the surface of the misnamed Christian Right - including the hater merchants at The Family Foundation ("TFF"), Virginia's leading hate group - one will often find unreformed segregationists.  For the more than two decades that I have been following the "professional Christian class" and the various "family values" organizations, beneath the surface of feigned religiosity and piety there has always been an undercurrent of racism and bigotry.  Tony Perkins, the president of Family Research Council ("FRC"), a Southern Poverty Law Center certified hate group, has documented white supremacist ties, and the only time The Family Foundation seeming cares for blacks is when it seeks to manipulate black pastors into carrying TFF's political water by lobbying legislators as if they were trained circus dogs.   Once the political lobbying effort is over, the lily white TFF reverts back to its white exclusivity.  A piece in Slate looks at the real history of the Christian Taliban Right  and notes the research done by Dartmouth professor Randall Balmer (his article is a must read).  Here are article excerpts:

The modern religious right formed, practically overnight, as a rapid response to the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade. Or, at least, that's how the story goes. The reality, Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth professor writing for Politico Magazine, says, is actually a little less savory to 21^st century Americans: The religious right, who liked to call themselves the "moral majority" at the time, actually organized around fighting to protect Christian schools from being desegregated. It wasn't Roe v. Wade that woke the sleeping dragon of the evangelical vote. It was Green v. Kennedy, a 1970 decision stripping tax-exempt status from "segregation academies"—private Christian schools that were set up in response to Brown v. Board of Education, where the practice of barring black students continued. 

As Balmer shows, feelings about Roe v. Wade were mixed in the conservative Christian community in the early 1970s, with quite a few evangelical leaders agreeing with the court that abortion is a private matter. Desegregation, however, was a different issue altogether. Anger about forced desegregation of private schools galvanized conservative Christians. Bob Jones University stalled and resisted admitting black students, forcing the IRS to strip its tax exempt status in 1976, an event that spurred evangelical leaders to action. Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, two conservative activists who had been seeking a way to marshal evangelicals into a Republican voting bloc, pounced. Balmer writes:

Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.

The argument they used to defend school segregation will sound familiar to anyone following the lawsuits against mandatory contraception coverage in health insurance plans or the battles over whether businesses have a right to refuse gay customers: "religious freedom."

How did abortion eclipse pro-segregation as the rallying cause of the evangelical right? Balmer argues that Weyrich, in particular, was a sharp enough political thinker to realize that pro-segregation sentiment was enough to get the ball rolling, "but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale." They took their new coalition of evangelicals and pointed them in the direction of fighting abortion.

Balmer suggests that "the spike in legal abortions" after Roe was the shock to their system that made them realize that women really were going to use this new right they’d been granted. There was also a more concentrated effort to put out anti-abortion propaganda that framed the procedure as "murder" and suggested the next step was legal infanticide. 

Balmer doesn't mention it, but there was one other shift in the public consciousness going on at the time. The "Stop ERA" campaign, headed up by Christian right leader Phyllis Schlafly to kill the Equal Rights Amendment banning sex discrimination, got moving in 1972. By the time male Christian conservative leaders like Weyrich and Falwell decided to make abortion a centerpiece issue, Schlafly had done the yeoman's work of convincing huge numbers of evangelical Christians that feminists were a threat to the very fabric of society. 

Balmer notes at the top of his piece that it's common for anti-choicers to compare themselves to abolitionists. Once you know the pro-segregationist history of the religious right, however, it becomes clear that this comparison is not only obnoxious, but offensive. 

I strongly recommend a full read of Balmer's article.  Here is the shocking background of Green v. Kennedy, referenced above:

In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.

Yes, you read it correctly, NO white students attended public schools. The bottom line is that right wing Christians are offensive period.  In general, they are selfish, lie incessantly to further their theocratic goals, contemptuous toward the rights and beliefs of others, and, as was they case with their forebears, they use the Bible and claims of protecting "religious liberty" to discrimination and bigotry across society.  Decent, moral people need to shun them and cease giving religion undue deference.

Is Jeb Bush Trying to Have it Both Ways on Gay Rights?

Perhaps having anticipated the severe blow back that Scott Walker brought down on himself with his remarks that the soon to be defunct Boy Scouts of America ban on gay leaders "protected children" from gay predators, Jeb "Jebbie" Bush seems to be trying to play it both ways on gay rights and has seemingly said that he supports the passage of state employment non-discrimination laws to protect LGBT individuals.  No doubt leaders of hate groups like Tony Perkins of FRC and Victoria Cobb of The Family Foundation and rabid anti-gay Republicans in Virginia must be blowing gaskets over Bush's remarks.  Despite how much I detest Jebbie, he apparently seems to understand that totally prostituting himself to the Christofascists to win in primaries in states such as Iowa could mean he's DOA in the general election.  Time looks at Jebbies fast dancing and possible double speak on this issue.  Here are highlights:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush indicated Thursday that he thinks existing laws sufficient to ensure men and women are paid equally for the same work, but that he would back legislation in the states to prevent workplace and housing discrimination against LGBT Americans.

An employee who identified himself to Bush as being gay asked about Bush’s position on legislation to ban discrimination of LGBT Americans. “I don’t think you should be discriminated because of your sexual orientation. Period. Over and out,” he replied.

Citing the frequently-used example by religious freedom advocates, Bush said that in the case of a florist approached by a gay couple, “you should be obligated to sell them flowers, doing otherwise would be discriminatory.” But he said that the objecting florist should not be required to participate in the wedding, a fine line that he hopes will appeal to all sides of the debate.

When the employee followed up to ask specifically whether he would support anti-discrimination laws for LGBT Americans for their housing and employment—the next target for gay rights marriage advocates—Bush said he would at the state level.  “I think this should be done state-by-state, I totally agree with that,” he said.

It will be interesting to watch the "godly folk" go berserk over any suggestion that they should not have the special right to discriminate against and abuse LGBT individuals.  Jebbie best fasten his seat belt.

Planet Fitness Terminated Membership of Woman Who Complained About A Transgender Member

When the husband and I go to the gym - something we don't do often enough - we go to a local Planet Fitness because (i) it's conveniently located, (ii) the cost is reasonable, and (iii) it has a "no judgment zone" policy, unlike some local gyms filled with gym bunnies who do all but mock those of us less obsessed with working out.  Now, Planet Fitness has demonstrated that it truly stands behind its no judgment, no discrimination policy by terminating the membership of a woman who went off over a transgender woman at a company facility.  Huffington Post has details.  Here are highlights:

Planet Fitness says its staff stood by the company mantra of being a "Judgement Free Zone" when they canceled the membership of a woman who "inappropriately" responded to the presence of a transgender woman in the locker room. 

Member Yvette Cormier complained to a front desk employee after seeing a transgender woman in the women's locker room at the Planet Fitness in Midland, Michigan, according to ABC News. But after the employee told her it is company policy to allow members to use whichever locker room associates with their gender identity, Cormier said she decided to tell "everyone in the locker room what happened."

In turn, Planet Fitness canceled her membership because of the "inappropriate" way in which she went about dealing with the situation, CNN reported.

McCall Gosselin, director of public relations at Planet Fitness Corporate, released a statement to The Huffington Post on the decision: 

Planet Fitness is committed to creating a non-intimidating, welcoming environment for our members. Our gender identity non-discrimination policy states that members and guests may use all gym facilities based on their sincere self-reported gender identity. The membership of the member in question was not cancelled as a result of complaints about the policy, as we welcome all feedback from our members. Rather, the manner in which she expressed her concerns about the policy exhibited behavior that club management deemed inappropriate and disruptive to other members, which is a violation of the membership agreement and as a result her membership was cancelled.

As Huffington Post reports, the usual hate merchants were up in arms over Planet Fitness' policy of treating all people respectfully:

Some conservatives, however, are troubled by Planet Fitness' response. In a blog post, the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council said Planet Fitness is "no longer part of the rational universe" and urged members to go to gyms "where the atmosphere will be more conducive to moral sanity." 

Hate Group Voters Value Summit Provides Cavalcade of Lunacy

Click image to enlarge

Having followed right wing organizations since the late 1990's - a number of which have now garnered much deserved hate group designations - several things have become quickly apparent: (i) these groups and their followers want to establish a Christian theocracy, (ii) they spend millions on disseminating lies and engendering hatred towards others but participate on no real charitable works, and (iii) many of the leaders as well as their followers are nothing short of insane/mentally disturbed.  Few gathers provide a better glimpse at the frightening agenda and unhinged insanity of these organizations that the so-called "Value Voters Summit" orchestrated by the hate group Family Research Council.  This years coven gathering provided a bumper crop of lunacy and ought to terrify the GOP establishment in turns of who these folks selected via straw poll as their preferred presidential candidate Jeb Bush and Chris Christie received 2% and 1% of the votes, respectively, in the straw poll).  A piece in Slate looks at the presidential straw poll results.  Here are highlights:

Radical religious conservatives at this weekend's annual Values Voter Summit chose Ted Cruz as their standard bearer. The son of an anti-gay anti-science anti-women Christian pastor, Cruz's embrace of religious rhetoric and his habitual grenade-throwing has endeared him to the Christian conservative crowd.  So what's shocking?

Ben Carson, the man who equates gay people with pedophiles from NAMBLA, came in second, with nearly 20 percent of the vote. That says a lot more than Cruz coming in first.  Carson, by the way, last month formed a presidential run exploratory committee. He believes white liberals are "the most racist" people in America, and abortion is "human sacrifice."

Straw poll voters also said their top priority was “protecting religious liberty." Second-most important was fighting abortion, followed by “protecting natural marriage.”

Coming in third was Christian Dominionist Mike Huckabee who has admitted on national television that he would replace the U.S. Constitution with the Bible as the nation's governing document and apply "biblical law."   If you check your dictionaries, Huckabee is potentially guilty of treason and sedition. 

Alaskan white trash

But the straw poll was only the tip of the iceberg of unhinged insanity as demonstrated by numerous speakers, including Alaska mental midget Sarah Palin who said she wanted to "bring truth to 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue."  This cretin is so stupid that she doesn't even know that the White House is a 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  John McCain should face some sort of criminal negligence prosecution for every nominating this ignoramus as his vice presidential teammate.  About the only thing one can ask about Palin is whether she's dumber than Michele Bachmann.

It goes without saying that the gay haters were out in force at the summit and spreading their usual messages of hate even as some like the reality untethered Mat Staver - who with Liberty University is a blight on Virginia - whined about being labeled as "anti-gay."  Here's what Right Wing Watch reports about Staver:

Mat Staver spent a good portion of his speech at the Values Voter Summit today fuming over a letter sent by People For the American Way, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and five other civil rights and LGBT organizations to Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus, asking members of the GOP not to participate in the conference, citing the anti-gay extremism of its sponsors.

Staver's organization, Liberty Counsel, is among those very sponsors and he is not very happy about being labeled an anti-gay extremist, despite this long and documented record of being one. Staver fumed that he is being attacked merely for believing "in God's natural created order of male and and female and marriage as the union of one man and one woman."

In an effort to prove that he is not an extremist, Staver then went on to liken himself to Jesus when he turned over the tables of the money changers in the temple before declaring that marriage equality teaches that children do not need mothers or fathers.  "That is an absolute lie from the very pit of Hell," he said

That anyone in the Republican Party listens to a word these organizations has to say, much that numerous GOP officials attend the event, is an indictment of how low the GOP has fallen.  There was once a time when such people would have been addressed with a wink and a nod and then totally ignored.  Now individuals like Ted Cruz go an prostitute themselves to these lunatics and enemies of the U. S. Constitution.

 

Civil Rights Groups Call on GOP to Denounce Hate Group Summit

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The GOP war on gays, women, contraception, non-whites, and religious freedom for all Americans continues unabated even though long term the hate and bigotry that these policies embody are increasingly disavowed by America's changing population.  Picking up on this reality, a group of civil rights and leading LGBT rights organizations have run a full page ad (see the ad above) in the Washington Post calling on the GOP to denounce the upcoming gathering of hate merchants sponsored by Family Research Council, a designated hate group, that disingenuously goes by the name "Values Voter Summit."   The reality is that this summit will be little more than a gathering of white supremacists, religious extremists, homophobes and those who seek to have women subordinated to men.  Here are excerpts from the add:

Dear Mr. Priebus, Fifteen years ago, your predecessor called for party members to shun the Council of Conservative Citizens because of the group’s “racist views.” “A member of the party of Lincoln should not belong to such an organization,” GOP Chairman Jim Nicholson said. His comments had their intended effect: Senior members of Congress distanced themselves from the group. Today, Chairman Priebus, we ask that you take a similar stand and call upon Republican officials to disassociate themselves from the groups behind the upcoming Values Voter Summit.

The reason is simple: These groups engage in repeated, groundless demonization of LGBT people — portraying them as sick, vile, incestuous, violent, perverted, and a danger to the nation. The Family Research Council, the summit’s host, is vigorously opposed to extending equal rights to the LGBT community. Its president, Tony Perkins, has repeatedly claimed that pedophilia is a “homosexual problem." He has called the “It Gets Better” campaign — designed to give LGBT students hope for a better tomorrow — “disgusting” and a “concerted effort” to “recruit” children into the gay “lifestyle.”

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, a summit sponsor, has said the U.S. needs to “be more like Russia,” which enacted a law criminalizing the distribution of LGBT “propaganda.” He has also said, "Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine, and six million dead Jews.” Similarly, Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel, another summit sponsor, has compared those who do not denounce same-sex marriage to those who remained silent during the Holocaust.

This kind of extremism should not be legitimized by elected officials, because it is contrary to our nation’s highest ideals. . . .  Yet, as in years past, several prominent members of your party — including U.S. Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — are currently planning to address the Values Voter Summit that begins on Thursday in Washington. So, the question now is: Will you live up to your own words and tell the members of your party to shun groups that demean other people and deny them dignity?

Will the GOP listen?  I'm not holding my breath.  The GOP has become an ugly sectarian party and rank and file Republicans have prostituted themselves to the Christofascist to such an extent that tawdry whores look virtuous in comparison.

The Secret Antigay U.S. Money Behind The Global Evangelical War on LGBT Rights

I and - others - increasingly believe that supposedly religious "charities" that blatantly violate the ban on political activities under the Internal Revenue Code need to lose their tax exempt status.  Many of the organizations under close analysis do little or no charitable work and instead funnel huge amounts of money into anti-gay (and sometimes anti-minority) political activities.  American taxpayers should not be forced to indirectly underwrite the activities of what are little more than hate groups.   The piece in TwoCare.org looks at the money flowing from supposed "Christian" charities to fund a global war against LGBT rights and which, in the process whip up hate and homophobia that often leans to anti-gay violence.  Pieces kike this one underscore why conservative "Christians" need to become social pariahs in America. They are anything but nice and decent people.  Their mindset is separated from ISIS only by the degree of violence they use on those who refuse to conform to the ugly version of religious belief.  Here are article highlights:

Note to readers: this is the first installment in a Twocare.org/Center Against Religious Extremism series that will examine extensive ties - both financial, organizational, and ideological - between the community of philanthropists, evangelical leaders, and Christian organizations that revolve around the event known as The Gathering and evangelical promotion of anti-gay hatred and anti-LGBT rights activism on a global scale, from Uganda to Russia.

"The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today" (B&H Publishing Group, 2003), which states "[homosexual] activists have followed a strategy akin to what Hitler used back in the 1920s and 1930s to take over Germany” and is currently distributed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the top American organizations participating in WCF events. The ADF is linked to anti-LGBT rights activism in nations spanning three continents, from the United States and Belize to Russia. In 2012, ADF received over 25% of its funding from the National Christian Foundation; . . . . .

A Twocare.org analysis shows that out of the 101-odd American speakers featured at major World Congress of Families congresses from WCF I, held in Prague in 1997, to WCF VI, held in Madrid in 2012, 48 of those speakers, almost half, were attached to organizations that have been funded by the National Christian Foundation, the biggest foundation at the yearly event known as The Gathering (featured in the April 2014 Twocare.org special report The Gathering: The Religious Right’s Cash Cow) – an event at which leaders of top Christian right anti-LGBT groups such as the Family Research Council, Focus on The Family, and the Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly the Alliance Defense Fund) frequently mingle with billionaire financiers of the religious right, representatives from the right-wing DeVos, Coors, Friess, Ahmanson, Prince, DeMoss, and MacLellan families and the rapidly growing National Christian Foundation – now America’s 12th biggest charity according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy and which funds multiple “ex-gay” ministries.

By its own description, the event known as The Gathering – whose attending nonprofit foundations give out, according to a Twocare.org analysis, over $1 billion dollars a year in grants – was launched in 1985 from a meeting at the Arlington, Virginia headquarters of The Fellowship, which hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast.  

Speakers scheduled this year for The Gathering 2014 include NYT columnist David Brooks,  . . . . . Among those Joining Brooks at The Gathering 2014 will be Terry Parker, co-founder and board member of the National Christian Foundation, which since 2005 has given over $1.5 million dollars to the His Servants ministry of Don Schmierer, producer and vendor of a Fieldstead & Company-commissioned line of “ex-gay” books and curricula translated into dozens of languages . . . 

In 2006 Family Research Council head Tony Perkins told The Gathering that the “second greatest threat:” to America, besides “radical Islamists” was “radical homosexuals”. 

Despite ongoing critical media coverage of the World Congress of Families, that over the past decade has come to the fore as a leading U.S.-based initiative which has helped export the culture war agenda of the American religious right – including anti-LGBT hatred and hostility to reproductive freedoms – to Russia and Eastern Europe, one transcendent question has largely been neglected: who funds the American nonprofits that have comprised the dominant presence at WCF events ? And, are the efforts of these nonprofits uncoordinated or are there traceable strategic and leadership connections between these groups ?

The answer to both questions points directly to the elite annual event known as The Gathering and to its biggest nonprofit foundation, the National Christian Foundation, exposed in an ongoing Twocare.org investigation of NCF 990 tax forms from 2001-2012 as probably the biggest – and without a doubt the most prolific – anti-LGBT rights funder in America.

$10,065,726: that’s the amount of funding that the Alliance Defending Freedom – whose leaders have spoken at and helped organize four major World Congress of Families events, and is “easily the most active antigay legal group” according to Human Rights Campaign Vice President Frederick Sainz – received in 2012 from the National Christian Foundation . . . . 

Consider the following quotes, from the Alliance Defending Freedom’s top leaders: . . . . “[Homosexual] activists have followed a strategy akin to what Hitler used back in the 1920s and 1930s to take over Germany… The very future of our nation is at risk if the homosexual agenda continues to advance unchecked.” — from pages 27-28 of The Homosexual Agenda, a 2003 book by ADF President Alan Sears and Craig Osten currently offered for free by the ADF to contributors who donate over $10

[A]s detailed in the Twocare.org special report The Gathering: The Religious Right’s Cash Cow, from 2001-2012 the National Christian Foundation provided $163,384,988 in funding to the ADF, FoF, FRC, and five other major anti-LGBT rights activist groups: the Alliance For Marriage, the American Center For Law and Justice, the American Family Association, Campus Crusade For Christ, and the National Organization For Marriage.  

In a column in the Summer 2012 The Gathering newsletter, President of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit The Gathering Fred Smith discussed the results of a survey done by a private consultant hired to ask Gathering participants “what makes them reluctant to recommend people they meet to The Gathering.” More than a few participants, it seems based on Smith’s column, considered The Gathering to be a “secret society”. 

But judging by a survey of audio recordings from The Gathering, it is not hard to understand why participants might hold such a view; Gathering speakers often describe the need to “infiltrate” secular society: the use of stealth and deceit to further the dominionist “Seven Mountains” mandate, the goal of bringing the seven major spheres of society – government, business, education, media, arts and entertainment, religion, and the family – under the influence of control of “the kingdom” and its ranks of “believers”.

Such an anti-democratic and anti-pluralist, religious supremacist ethic – which has influenced disturbingly wide swaths of the global evangelical missions movement – is interwoven through the culture of The Gathering. 

There is more and readers should read the entire piece.  These organizations not only further a global war against LGBT individuals but ultimately, would overthrow the U.S. Constitution.  In my view, that is tantamount to treason and should be dealt with accordingly.  These are not decent organizations.  They and their agenda are frightening.