Evangelical Will Continue to Use Same Sex Marriage as Wedge and Money Beg

While they continue to beat the drum against abortion to shake down the sheeple in church pews for money, over the last decade the professional Christian set has turned peddling anti-gay animus into a lucrative cash cow.  Now, with marriage equality the law of the land, this cash cow is threatened and the Christofascists are seeking ways to keep the money flowing in.  Hence the cries that (i) Christians are facing persecution and that "religious freedom" must be protected and (ii) the battle to "protect marriage" is not over despite the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.  Among those leading the charge on this veiled money beg are the Heritage Foundation and the Southern Baptist Convention.  CNN looks at the effort to maintain the myth that the battle for marriage is not over.  Here are highlights:.  

Despite the Supreme Court decision in June that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, leading evangelicals vowed this week that the fight to keep marriage between a man and a woman is not over. 

"In mandating same-sex marriage for all 50 states, the Supreme Court didn't just get marriage wrong, it got government wrong," Jennifer Marshall, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a D.C.-based conservative think tank, told a gathering of evangelicals in Nashville on Wednesday.

Leading Christian and political conservatives met at the Gospel and Politics: The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission National Conference. The group is the political and policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant Christian group in the country.

The conference was the second one this week by the Christian group. Leader Russell Moore interviewed presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio at a missions conference Tuesday.

Moore, who has met with President Barack Obama, reinforced that sentiment this week, telling the crowd to stay engaged despite widespread sentiment that the fight over same-sex marriage is finished in the wake of the high court's ruling. 

Moore previously told CNN that the fight to reverse the Supreme Court's recent ruling will be a long one.

"Citizenship is an office in this country that all of us is invested in," he said. "We engage politically. We engage socially, but we don't forget who we are."   To believe that conservative Christians have lost the fight against same-sex marriage is misguided, Marshall said.

Translation: keep writing us checks and making credit card contributions so that we can continue to live the good life.

Anti-Gay Marriage Screed Slammed by Readers and Critics

Heritage Foundation homophobe

If one wants serious writing and journalism, don't expect to find it from some of the favored anti-gay authors of the far right who pontificate as if they were experts - most have zero actual credentials - yet rarely do anything more than regurgitate the same tired arguments and go through numerous contortions trying to hide the reality that their anti-gay animus ultimately traces back to religion and religious based bigotry.  Such seemingly is the case with Heritage Foundation hack Ryan T. Anderson whose new book, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom is being slammed by critics and readers.  Nonetheless, Anderson will walk away with money from the members of the shrinking anti-gay right who by the book and then use the book to boost his supposed credentials.  Think Progress looks at the panning of Anderson and his book.  Here are highlights:

“Absolutely nothing new here.”
“Ryan T. Anderson’s Checklist of Failed Arguments”
“Nothing new. Not challenging. Not entertaining. Not enlightening.”
“Pointless debate of a settled issue”
“A Tired read full of dog whistles to Anti-Gay bigotry”
“read it if you already agree with the author and just want to read something supporting your view.”

These are all negative reviews of Ryan T. Anderson’s new book, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, as found on Amazon. Anderson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has become one of the leading voices in the movement to oppose marriage equality and LGBT rights generally, and he marketed this new book to address what comes after Obergefell, the Supreme Court’s ruling bringing marriage equality to the country. 

Heritage has been concerned about all the negative reviews the book has received from what it dismissed as dishonest “activists and ideologues,” but the reality is that the reviews are right: the book has nothing new to offer, nor is it particularly convincing.

[W]hat is interesting about Truth Overruled is what happens when all of those arguments are juxtaposed so closely. The clear contradictions between them become so much more apparent that in many ways, they debunk themselves. They also reveal the systemic rejection of gay, lesbian, and bi people that persists — however sugarcoated — among social conservatives.

Rather than being an effective manifesto of all the arguments against recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages, it serves as a guide for just how weak this already-lost case is, and why continued fights — including the ongoing struggle over using “religious liberty” to justify anti-gay discrimination — will likely not prevail either.

Anderson constructs an artificial concept of what marriage is. Instead of the familiar religious and civil definitions of marriage, he develops his own hypothetical ideal of “marriage,” an abstract, philosophical notion that supposedly borrows from both the civil and religious definitions. Under the pretense of “natural law,” Anderson assumes that the traits he lays out in his ideal will be so common-sense as to be irrefutable. He makes a point of claiming he is not relying solely on religious tenets, but he simultaneously ignores much of how marriage is actually practiced in culture and the many different ways it is important to people and the government that recognizes it. He conveniently selects concepts that serve his purpose of rejecting same-sex marriage without explicitly sounding anti-gay, but in doing so presents a vision of marriage unrecognizable to just about anybody, and the anti-gay dog whistles prevalent throughout demonstrate just how conservatives constructed it.

Wolfson explained, “with the ruling in the Lawrence v. Texas case, that moral objection or moral disapproval of gay people because of who they are is not a basis for making laws to disadvantage people.” States could no longer say of gay people, “they’re icky,” “they’re scary,” “we don’t like them,” or “we don’t approve of them.” Instead, “They actually had to come up with a neutral-sounding rationale for why states were denying marriage.  . . . . The contrast was evident in the 2013 Windsor case, when opponents of marriage equality were forced to reconcile the “moral disapproval of homosexuality” lawmakers cited as their reasoning for passing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996.

Anderson relies on slippery slope warnings about polyamory, “monogamish” and open relationships, and short-termed “wedlease” marriages to show the deterioration of his marriage ideal. Of course, none of those are uniquely relevant to the issue of same-sex marriage. They may indeed be growing in popularity, and there may even be legal questions to consider in the future concerning these other kinds of relationships, but they are entirely different issues not informed by sexual orientation.

He fails to mention that Dutch researchers have clarified, “Neither the legalization of same-sex marriage nor the introduction of registered partnership have had significant negative effects on the Dutch different-sex marriage rate in the aggregate.” He makes the same claim about marriage rates dipping in early marriage equality states like Iowa, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, but leaves out the part about how those states’ marriage rates were declining at virtually the exact same rates before marriage equality arrived as after. Marriage equality actually had no effect.

[C]onservatives have had to find a way to talk about the issue of same-sex marriage without saying much about homosexuality. Try as he might not to, Anderson reveals several assumptions he holds about the inferiority of same-sex relationships — assumptions that might not be apparent at first glance but that are essential to his case against marriage equality. Inherent in his definition of marriage is a concept Anderson refers to at times as the “comprehensive act,” his euphemism for when a man inserts his penis into a woman’s vagina and releases sperm to fertilize her egg. . . . This suggests Anderson knows very little about sex, why anybody has it, how anybody has it, or just how deep, intimate, and meaningful it can be for any couple regardless of their chance of fertilizing an egg and regardless of their gender pairing.

Anderson is not particularly effective at hiding his irrational animus either. He dedicates a whole chapter to “why sexual orientation is not like race.” Taking existing racial and religious discrimination protections for granted, he decries adding sexual orientation and gender identity protections — what he calls “special privileges” — because he believes they will undermine the freedoms of speech and religion for those who oppose LGBT equality. He essentially believes that religious people, which apparently only includes conservatives who share his position and none of the people motivated by faith to support LGBT rights, should have a hecklers’ veto that overrides LGBT people’s basic right to not be fired, evicted, or denied service for who they are. He’s pointing that “special privileges” accusation in the wrong direction. . . . .

Apparently, falling in love with someone and wanting to commit to that person for life and build a family with them is a “selfish desire” — if you’re gay. . . Gays and lesbians should instead be content with “deep friendships,” which he calls “liberating.” . . . chastity is the only option he offers to people with same-sex orientations.

Anderson is insistent that discrimination against LGBT people be allowed to continue. Just this week he railed against the new Equality Act, a comprehensive LGBT nondiscrimination bill just introduced in Congress. These protections “threaten the freedom of citizens, individually and in associations, to affirm their religious or moral convictions — convictions such as that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.”

There's more, but as I said, in the end ALL of Anderson's attacks on equality and non-discrimination trace back to his religious belief that same sex love is a "sin" and his inability to admit that the Catholic Church is wrong on the issue - just as throughout history it has been wrong on many, many issues.   The only thing in Anderson's defense I can say is that, having been raised Catholic, I know too well how badly it f*cks up one's mind.  But a time comes when we all need to grow up and accept logic, reason and modern knowledge over the Church's 13th century "natural law."  Anderson unfortunately refuses to grow up due I can only assume to his own psychological/sexual hang ups.

How the GOP and Far Right Hope to Fool America

A part of the GOP propaganda campaign that the party can govern is to promote the myth that many of its so-called leaders are "moderates."  But they fail to say what standard is used to deem one a moderate.  Compared to the Republican Party of my youth and my years as a GOP city committee member, there are no moderates left.  Almost all of the current crop of would be 2016 candidates and congressional leaders of the GOP are extremists compared to their counterparts from the days of Rockefeller Republicans.  Sadly, the media for the most part ignores this reality and mere parrots the GOP talking points without question.  A piece in Salon looks at how the GOP and its far right elements hope to play the American public for suckers yet again.  Here are highlights:

After the election the Villagers all declared that the Republicans now have to “prove they can govern,” apparently meaning they would have to moderate their views, hold hands with moderate Democrats and basically be the moderate centrists all politicians surely yearn to be. There is reason to be skeptical of this scenario for a couple of reasons.

The first is that Republicans just won a large number of seats in both Houses after they pushed far right policies and engaged in unprecedented obstructionism. Perhaps they have searched their hearts and decided that no matter how much their voters approved of their behavior and rewarded them with a congressional majority, it was the wrong thing to do. But it’s doubtful.

The second reason this is unlikely is that the base of the Republican Party votes and the base of the Republican Party is extremely conservative. The Republican activists, of which their are legions, are even more conservative. 

When even staunch conservatives like Bob Bennet of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana are unceremoniously booted out of office by challengers from their right, the message is pretty clear: stray from right-wing orthodoxy at your peril.  However, that has not stopped the D.C. pundits from insisting their fantasy is coming true. 

First, let’s dispense with the ludicrous idea that Paul Ryan represents the “intellectual wing” of the Republican Party. He represents the flim-flam wing of the Republican Party, which is admittedly a very large faction, but it can hardly be defined as “intellectual.” Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are actual intellectuals. (And at this point they are practically the only ones.) But it doesn’t take an intellectual to see that policies benefiting the non-college-educated, blue-collar, “Sam’s Club” voter would be useful to a party that must win the vast majority of white votes in order to even have a dim chance at obtaining the presidency. This is the stuff of Fox News analysis, not intellectual inquiry.

The article also points out that Heritage Action has recently been ostracized in Washington for taking on the political establishment. They were even barred from attending the meetings of the Republican Study group, which is the D.C. Republican equivalent of being shunned by the Mean Girls table in the cafeteria — a kind of social death. The article characterizes this as an ideological battle between the center and the right, but it’s really a little family spat among conservatives. There is no center.

[T]here isn’t a “rebranding” going on at the Heritage Foundation. Under the mature and reasonable leadership of Jim DeMint, the Christian right ex-senator who said Obamacare would be the president’s “Waterloo,” the foundation is undergoing a bit of a face-lift. They are touting the sexy new Beltway brand called the “Reform Conservative Movement” (which strikes me as something of an oxymoron. Why would conservatism want reform?).

[I]t’s fair to guess that it means they will simply reiterate that the Invisible Hand of God will intervene once the government is drowned in the bathtub. And lest anyone think this means they won’t be going after the dreaded “entitlements,” think again. The alleged intellectual leader of the “reform conservative” movement, Paul Ryan, wants to voucherize Medicare and privatize Social Security. He just thinks they need to stop saying such mean things about poor people as they take away their food stamps.

Conservatives believe that average working families need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop asking for anyone to do anything to help them improve their lot. But apparently, they realize that in a world in which the top 1 percent is gobbling up more and more of the nation’s wealth while everyone else is dramatically falling behind, that isn’t selling as well as it used to, particularly when the demographics of presidential elections may just keep them out of the White House for a good long time unless they can attract a few more voters. So they are “rebranding.”

Conservative Groups Move To Kill Highway Trust Fund Bill

With America's highways crumbling and economic growth being stifled - here in Tidewater Virginia, the traffic gridlock restricts the growth of port operations - what are conservatives, i.e. Republicans trying to do?  Kill a bill that would replenish the depleted federal highway trust fund.  The effort is symptomatic of the wrongheaded, destructive agenda of far too many self-described conservatives who might be better described as extremists or economic saboteurs.  A piece in the Huffington Post looks at this batshitery.  Here are highlights:

The last likely opportunity for Congress to avoid completely draining the nation’s highway budget will present itself on Tuesday afternoon.

Though a Republican proposal to temporarily extend the Highway Trust Fund gained notable opposition Monday from two powerful conservative groups, leaders from both parties expressed optimism that the extension would pass. 

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives is set to vote on a bill authored by Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) that would raise nearly $11 billion to extend highway funds roughly until May 2015.

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats have derided a short-term extension (preferring, instead, a multi-year plan), but their opposition has become more ceremonial with time. With a deadline fast approaching, the White House announced on Monday that it would support the Camp bill.

Aides in the administration and in the Senate told The Huffington Post that their objective now is to build the groundwork for passing a long-term highway funding bill during the lame-duck session following the November elections. They noted the need for a quick resolution (states will begin receiving smaller, staggered payments from the federal government for interstate highway projects starting in August) and the emerging bipartisan consensus around Camp’s bill -- endorsed by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) -- as reasons to save the fight for later.

Despite the rarity of such high-level bipartisan agreement, the bill’s passage is not preordained. Its chances, in fact, took a hit on Monday afternoon, when two anti-spending groups not only came out in opposition, but also told Republicans they would score the vote. 

Club for Growth said it opposed the Highway and Transportation Funding Act of 2014 and would include it on its congressional scorecard. Heritage Action for America did the same moments earlier.

What Plantation Is Jim DeMint Living On?

Lunacy seems to be the main attribute of Republicans.  Here in Virginia we have Bob Marshall and Ken Cuccinelli and at the national level there's former - thank god it's "former - U.S. Senator Jim DeMint who now heads up the Heritage Foundation.  DeMint recently caused controversy through utterly insane statements he made about slavery and who brought freedom to American blacks.  Once upon a time the Heritage Foundation had some credibility - it came up with the blue print for Romneycare and ultimately, Obamacare - but now it has moved off into "La La Land" under DeMint.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at DeMint's batshitery.  Here are highlights:

I once had this idea for a play about God, a comedy, in which the audience would be introduced to a series of casuists and charlatans and braggarts and bloviators, and they’d be carrying on, lecturing away on topics large and small with serene self-confidence. There’d be the sound of thunder and perhaps a puff of smoke, and from the wings, God would appear. He or She would, over the course of the three acts, take on numerous corporeal forms—white man, black woman, Asian man, Arab woman, et cetera—but in each guise would admonish the speaker: “No, asshole. You’re totally wrong. How do I know? Because I’m God, and you’re wrong.” 

I don’t know if I’ve ever wished it more than I did two days ago, when Jim DeMint, the ex-senator and Heritage Foundation head who defines the words casuist and charlatan and braggart and bloviator and about 262 others that are worse, said that the federal government of the United States did nothing to end slavery. The salient words:

Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people. Unfortunately, there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God. But a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people, it did not come from the federal government.

I beg of you, don’t do DeMint the honor of thinking him merely stupid. He’s probably that, in some way. Certainly those sentences add up to a mountain of stupid, a Himalayan range of it. Yet at the same time, a statement this insane can’t be propelled merely by stupidity. A denial of reality this whole, this pure, requires, I think, some thought, some premeditation. Dwell with me on this for the moment.

Today’s radical conservatives like DeMint want to destroy government. This means in the first instance discrediting everything government does in the present. That, we’re all plenty familiar with. It’s a lot of what we fight about all the time.

But the project also includes history—proving that nothing good that ever happened in history was done by the government.
How, as a radical conservative today, and especially a Southern one, and especially one from the state (South Carolina) that started the Civil War (first to advance nullification, first to secede, first shots fired), are you supposed to explain that war? And how are you supposed to explain slavery? Tough ones. If you ever visit any of those crackpot websites I look at sometimes, you’ve seen, for example, the commonly advanced idea that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery, it was about states’ rights and economics and so on. I guarantee you that notion will show up pretty quickly in this very comment thread.

DeMint’s “conscience of the American people” x’s out of history the Emancipation Proclamation, which strikes me as an act of the federal government (a presidential order); also the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery and, as an amendment to the Constitution, was surely an action of the government. It also x’s out the war itself, fought to the end, no matter what today’s Confederate revisionists say, to wipe out slavery once and for all.

DeMint doesn’t have a legitimate difference of opinion. He has a wholly ideological one, designed not to spur historical debate but to justify his miserly posture toward contemporary politics.And so every sentence that came out of his mouth was just utter nonsense. But not just that--premeditated, pernicious, and malicious nonsense, spun to serve contemporary ends like fighting the delivery of health coverage to millions.

As I have said before, I increasingly do not see how decent people can remain Republicans.  As for DeMint, he conveniently ignores how the Southern Baptist Convention came into being - to protect and maintain slavery.

Far Right/GOP to Women: Stay Home Barefoot and Pregnant

If one wants proof that the far right elements and the GOP want to drag America back to the "good old days" of the 1950's it can be found in a new Heritage Foundation panel that recommends that women be content to be at home mothers - barefoot and pregnant if you will.  Missing from the panel discussion are (i) any recognition that women may not choose such a life and (ii) the financial reality that in the new Gilded Age economy so loved by the GOP, a married working man cannot support a family on a single income.  But then again, today's conservatives and the GOP are not living in a world connected to objective reality.  What's frightening is that Heritage is what counts as an intellectual "think tank" for today's far right.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the backward thinking.  Here are highlights:

The conservative minds of the Heritage Foundation have found a way for Republicans to shrink the gender gap: They need to persuade more women to get their MRS degrees.

The advocacy group held a gathering of women of the right Monday afternoon to mark the final day of Women’s History Month — and the consensus was that women ought to go back in history. If Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s mantra is “lean in,” these women were proposing that women lean back: get married, take care of kids and let men earn the wages.

. . . .  “feminism has done so much damage to happiness.” And the solution to this damage, it turns out, is matrimony — the same thing that will solve problems such as income inequality and the Republican Party’s standing among women.

This, they argued, also would have the felicitous effect of making women more Republican.  . . .

As a matter of statistics, this is true: President Obama’s 11-point win among women in 2012 came entirely from his 36-point advantage among unmarried women. But Republicans will be waiting a long time if they think they can improve their fortunes by persuading more women to get hitched. 

Essentially, they’re saying that Republicans aren’t the ones who need to change — women are.

There’s a running debate on the trade-offs of feminism, but this sort of traditional assault on the movement is unlikely to boost the GOP’s standing among women. If Republicans want to appeal to more unmarried women, they might reconsider the no-exception opposition to abortion and, increasingly, birth control that dominates the party. Otherwise, a throwback strategy of convincing unmarried women that they have been misled by feminism is tantamount to convincing Hispanics that they have been led astray by immigration advocates or telling young voters that they have been deceived by the gay rights movement.

The reality, the panelists at Heritage said, is that women are less happy than they were before the feminist movement, that women enjoy domestic work, and that most moms would prefer not to work full time, if at all.

Maybe so. But it will take some convincing. The audience for these pronouncements Monday was small and mostly male, many of them apparently Heritage interns.

“Wow,” said John Hilboldt, Heritage’s lectures director, as he opened the session. “Where are all the ladies?”  It’s a question Republicans may be asking for a long time.

While not mentioned, I suspect the panel also would like to see gays to once again become invisible and for blacks to once again "know their place" and be content with domestic work and blue collar jobs.  These people are living in a fantasy world.

House Republicans Propose Nationwide Religious Based "‘License To Discriminate"

Proving once again that today's Republican Party is caught in the stranglehold of the Christofascists and hate groups like Family Research Council, etc., Republicans in the House of Representatives led by Raul Labrador (pictured above) have introduced a bill that would allow far right Christians to discriminate at will against those they deem offensive to their narrow, hate and fear based religious beliefs.  Naturally gays and also unmarried heterosexual couples "living in sin" are targets.  It's a recipe for chaos and arguably seeks to set up conservative Christianity as America's established religion.  So much for the U. S. Constitution and non-discrimination laws.  As I have repeated over and over again, the Christofascists are nasty, selfish, self-centered people who do not give a damn about the rights of others.  The rest of society needs to see them for the foul force in society that they are.  Think Progress looks at this dangerous batshitery.  Here are highlights:

A group of House Republicans, led by Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-ID), has proposed a new bill that would provide a nationwide “license to discriminate” against married same-sex couples. Though Labrador claims the bill protects “religious liberty,” it is nothing less than a blanket invitation to deny benefits to same-sex couples that they are entitled to under law.

According to the draft of the bill (HR 3133), there would be no consequences for any organization or individual that chooses not to recognize a same-sex marriage:

The Federal Government shall not take an adverse action against a person, on the basis that such person acts in accordance with a religious belief that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or that sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.

Under the guise of “religious freedom,” this bill specifically endorses one particular set of religious beliefs without concern for any others, a pretty clear violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The consequences of this legislation would be immense, such that a few individuals could short-circuit the rights of gay and lesbian couples across the country. Given its prudish inclusion of opposition to premarital sex, these consequences could likely apply to many straight couples as well. Here are a few possible examples of the potential for abuse:

• Businesses could refuse to provide leave for an employee to take care of a sick same-sex spouse.
• Federal workers processing tax returns, visa applications, or Social Security filings could refuse to do their job if it meant providing benefits to a same-sex couple.
• Federally funded programs like homeless shelters and substance abuse programs could turn away LGBT people.
• A church-run hospital could refuse to provide visitation privileges to a married same-sex couple without fear of endangering their tax-exempt status.

[T]he National Organization for Marriage has enthusiastically endorsed the legislation and the Heritage Foundation claimed it will “encourage tolerance.”

As for Rep. Labrador, one can only wonder how long it will be before we learn that he's been busted in a sting for soliciting a blow job in a rest room somewhere.

The Inside Story Of Richwine's Dissertation That Became Too Racist For Heritage Foundation

Jason Richwine - An Equivalent to Paul Cameron?

There are some that will argue that IQ differences can be documented to exist between racial groups.  One recently in the news is now former Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Jason Richwine (pictured above) who co-authored a Heritage Foundation hatchet job on immigration reform.    It now seems that as time goes by, even more questions have arisen concerning his racist dissertation at Harvard and how Richwine was allowed to produce such seemingly flawed work.  In the interest of full disclosure, my late mother fits Richwine's definition of "Hispanic" - she was born in Honduras, raised Catholic and yet ostensibly considered herself as "white" - via Think Progress:

This is the chapter’s full definition of the term Hispanic and defense of its use:

Over 56% of immigrants living in the U.S. in 2006 were Hispanic — that is, born in either Mexico (32% of total immigrants), Central American [sic] and the Caribbean (17%), or South America (7%)…Hispanics are not a monolithic group either ethnically or culturally, but the category still has real meaning. Hispanics can be of any race, but they are most often “Mestizo” — a mixture of European and Amerindian background. Mexico, for example, is 60% Mestizo (LV 2006, 241). Hispanics also share ethno-cultural tendencies that are different from the majority Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States (Huntington 2004, 253-255). Most come from Spanish-speaking nations with cultures heavily influence by Catholicism. And many Hispanics choose to identify themselves as such, as the existence of groups like the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the National Council of La Raza (“the race” or “the people”), and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus readily demonstrates.

  From this definition onward the criticisms of Richwine expolde.  Here are excerpts:

Von Vacano sees this as fatally inadequate. “Any serious work at the doctoral level on these issues (even if mainly quantitative or policy-oriented),” he told me, “requires a substantive component of analysis from the qualitative, historical, cultural, normative, and theoretical perspectives (at least one or two dissertation chapters).”

These are not merely scholarly niceties: what Richwine means by “Hispanic” is critical to the success of both of his two core arguments. First, to prove that “from the perspective of Americans alive today, the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent,” he needs to show that one can speak meaningfully about“Hispanic” IQ. Richwine needs this claim to be true for the entire third section of his dissertation, the one that spells out the dangers of low IQ Hispanic immigration, to succeed. Establishing the negative consequences of Hispanic immigration means first establishing there’s such a thing as “Hispanic immigration” in a scientifically useful sense.

Because Hispanic identity is so hotly contested among scholars of race and ethnicity, that means both providing a clear account of why people from an arbitrary set of geographic locations are homogenous enough for generalizations about them are meaningful, controlled social science. Richwine fails to do so.

First, Richwine asserts Hispanics are mostly some “Mestizo” mix of Native American and European, making them genetically similar. But in the unnerving world of race and IQ research, what mix they are matters. Richwine believes that “socioeconomic hierarchies correlate consistently with race all across the world” because some races are biologically smarter; “there are no countries,” he writes, “in which ethnic Chinese are less successful than Amerindians.” It stands to reason, on his theory, that “mixed” Hispanics with more European or  Asian DNA will be concomitantly smarter, on average, than more heavily Amerindian or African ones. But Richwine doesn’t attempt to show that the mix of racial DNA inside any one “Hispanic” subgroup is consistent enough for generalization, let alone the category as a whole.

Even a cursory examination of research on Latin American genetics uncovers an impossibly complex genetic admixture, one that varies widely from country to country or even region to region.    . . . .  As von Vacano puts it, “there is no literature that can meaningfully support the idea that ‘Hispanic’ is a genetic category,” let alone one that can be equated with the colonially-superimposed “Mestizo” identifier...

Second, Richwine asserts that Hispanics share a similar culture that’s distinct from so-called “Anglo” culture. Richwine’s only support for this claim is a citation of Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, a book that warns of a wave of Hispanic immigration irrevocably altering American culture for the worse. Huntington’s claims about Hispanic inability to assimilate have been subjected to serious quantitative challenge, but more to the point, citing a polemic tract about immigration does not constitute explaining what the purportedly unified Hispanic culture is and why the fact that it involves a lot of Spanish-speaking and Catholicism might be seen as allowing one to make generalized claims about the group.

There's much more that deserves a full read.  The point is that, like Paul Cameron and his bogus "studies" on gays, Richwine seemingly has set his definitions so as to support his preordained conclusion.   It's sloppy scholarship at best and a deliberate effort to malign an entire social group at worst.    Richwine's "research" is all too familiar to those of us who have followed faux Chritofacist "research" for many years.  The goal was to malign Hispanics and the definitions and facts were manipulated to achieve the predetermined conclusion. 

Hispanic Outreach Director Explains Why He Left the GOP and Joined Democrats

A previous post looked briefly at the decision Pablo Pantoja, former GOP Hispanic Outreach Director for Florida, to not only reign from his post but register as a Democrat.   Now, Pantoja is talking more about his decision and it ought to be setting off alarm bells across the GOP - especially given new reports that Hispanics have not yet begun to fully flex their voting strength.  Will the GOP listen?  Probably not given the reality that the grassroots of the party is controlled by the Christofascists and Tea Party, both of which groups have high levels of racism mixed in with their religious extremism.  An article in The Daily Beast looks at Pantoja's defection - note that he has realized that the GOP does in fact see minorities as" lesser human beings".  Here are highlights:

Conservatives should consider this a warning sign. The Republican National Committee’s former Hispanic outreach director for Florida has left the GOP and registered as a Democrat, citing a “culture of intolerance.”

Pablo Pantoja is a decorated Iraq war vet who began his brief career with the GOP by volunteering for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and serving as field director for Marco Rubio’s triumphant 2010 senate campaign. He says he was originally drawn to the GOP “because of my business-minded mentality. Fiscal issues are important for all families—Hispanics and non-Hispanics.”

But a recent anti-immigration report from the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation sent the Puerto Rican–born Pantoja heading for bluer pastures this week. Not only did the paper tally the cost of immigration form at an absurdly high $6.3 trillion, but its author, Jason Richwine, was found to have written an overtly racist dissertation in 2009 that labeled American immigrants as having lower IQs than those of white natives.

“This report form Heritage really hit me,” Pantoja, 33, says about his decision to decamp from the party, which he first announced to friends on Facebook. “It hit me. Immigration has made America great before and it will continue to do so. But when you look at their report, you start wondering, Wait a minute, is it really about the $6.3 trillion, or is it because they believe that Hispanics have a lower IQ and they're less of a human being?”

“I was hopeful after the [RNC] autopsy report, but where was the strong condemnation? Are they afraid to stand up to Heritage?” Pantoja asks. “Those comments, that research, is just completely, completely, completely unacceptable.”

The “culture of intolerance” that concerns Pablo Pantoja does not characterize the entire party, but it has surfaced too much for him to dismiss it as a coincidence: “There was the incident with the black reporter who got some peanuts thrown at her [at the RNC convention] in Tampa. Now, you can look at it and say, ‘That was just one person.’ But then you look at what happened at CPAC with this other guy that said slaves should be thankful because they got food and shelter ... So is it really one person—or is it really the base? Is it really the culture of intolerance? That’s what I view as what's going on.”

Just as critical to Pantoja is some party leaders’ refusal to confront these voices. Even worse is when they cater to them. “You've got people who feel that they have to be, quite frankly, a little bit ‘out there’ to appeal to the base.”

“Hopefully they'll renounce this kind of culture of intolerance overall,” Pantoja says. “Maybe the rhetoric will change. I don't see it happening. But somebody's got to take a stand.”

RNC Director Of Hispanic Outreach Quits Party And Registers As A Democrat

Former RNC Florida Hispanic Outreach Director 

Pablo Pantoja. Credit: Tampa Bay Times

We've heard a great deal of late about the Republican Party's alleged outreach to Hispanic voters even as the white supremacists in the party base seem Hell bent on torpedoing any meaningful immigration reform and only too willing to demonize Hispanics whenever possible - e.g., the Heritage Foundation's recent report on the lower IQ of Hispanic immigrants.  In Florida - obviously a key state - the outreach effort seemingly is in a complete downward spiral where the State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee has not only resigned but also registered as a Democrat.  Think Progress looks at this embarrassment for the RNC.  Here are highlights:

When Republicans appointed Pablo Pantoja to State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee, they hoped he would be able to bridge the sizable gap that only expanded during the 2012 elections, when the state’s 4.3 million Hispanic voters supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a 20 percent margin.

But after months of inaction by Congressional Republicans on comprehensive immigration reform and stiff resistance by Republican-leaning groups like the Heritage Foundation, Pantoja has had enough; on Monday, he announced via email that he was leaving the party and registering as a Democrat:

Friend,
Yes, I have changed my political affiliation to the Democratic Party.
It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others. Look no further; a well-known organization recently confirms the intolerance of that which seems different or strange to them.

Pantoja goes on to specifically cite last week’s revelation — that an author of Heritage’s false report on the cost of the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill wrote a dissertation in which he suggested that Hispanics are at a permanent disadvantage because they have lower IQs — as the final straw in his political evolution.

Republicans have for months tried to find ways to make inroads with the country’s growing hispanic population, especially in the swing state of Florida. Hispanics there turned out to vote at a rate of more than 62 percent in 2012, significantly higher than the national turnout rate of 48 percent and the highest rate of Hispanic turnout in the country.

The Christofascists and white supremacists of the GOP base (which often correlate to a high degree)  will yet be the death of the party.   Hate and bigotry may play well with the angry elderly white crowd, but it will not win elections, especially at the national level.

Anti-Hispanic Racist Resigns from Hertitage Foundation

As noted before, the Heritage Foundation's first big venture under Jim DeMint - a homophobic racist in my estimation - on immigration reform continues to be a disaster for the organization.  Now, as damage control continues Jason Richwine, one of the authors of the much attacked report, has resigned.   Making the situation even more damaging for the Heritage Foundation is new information that Richwine also wrote pieces for a white "nationalist" website where he tried to depict Hispanics as more prone to committing crimes and criminal conduct.  Combined with his previously announced views that Hispanics will never have the intellect and intelligence of white American, the new revelations paint a telling picture.  Sadly, Richwine seems to have worked to put forth a mindset that would be popular with the racists and white supremacists who populate much of the GOP base.  Here are highlights from two Washington Post stories:

Jason Richwine, the co-author of a controversial immigration study released this week by the Heritage Foundation, tells Post Politics that he has resigned his position with the organization.

“Yes, that’s right,” Richwine wrote in a brief e-mail. Heritage confirmed that he resigned.

Complicating matters were a series of revelations about Richwine, including that he had written a doctoral thesis at Harvard University arguing that the United States should focus its immigration efforts on those with high IQs and that he had written for a Web site that describes itself as “nationalist.”

Yahoo’s Chris Moody has the story:

Heritage Foundation Analyst Jason Richwine, the co-author of a study claiming the immigration reform bill pending in the Senate would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion, wrote two articles in 2010 for a website founded by Richard Spencer, a self-described “nationalist” who writes frequently about race and against “the abstract notion of human equality.”

Spencer is now the chairman of the Montana-based National Policy Institute, an organization that describes itself as a think tank for “White Americans.”

Richwine’s articles for AlternativeRight.com, “Model Minority,” published on March 3, 2010, and “More on Hispanics and Crime,” published the next day, push back on an American Conservative essay that argued that some conservatives have over-hyped the crime rate among Hispanics.

 

Heritage Foundation Does Damage Control

As noted in a recent post, the Heritage Foundation - which seems to be dumbing itself down in parallel with the GOP base - released an anti-immigration reform report that was supposed to win high praise among the right.  Instead, it has blown up in Heritage's face - especially now that the racist, anti-Hispanic views of one of its authors have been widely publicized.  Indeed, the organization may be on the verge of hiring an outside PR firm to try to minimize the longer term damage.  Candidly, the type of batshitery that was contained in the report should come as no surprise seeing that the Heritage Foundation hired extremist, racist, homophobe Jim DeMint as its new leader. As with Mitt Romney's "the 47%" statement, when people truly discover what the right really believes, the blow back can be powerful.   Politico looks at the efforts to manage the shit storm the report has triggered.  Here are highlights:

The Heritage Foundation has gone into damage-control mode in the last few days, after coming under fire from Republicans and conservative outside groups over a report it published that puts the price tag of immigration reform at $6.3 trillion.

The conservative think tank is considering hiring a high-profile public relations firm to help deal with the fallout of the report that was supposed to be their big play in the immigration debate, according to two sources familiar with Heritage.

The group has also come under scrutiny after it was reported that one of the authors of the report asserted previously that white Americans have higher IQs than immigrants.

The rollout was supposed to be a coming out party of sorts for Jim DeMint, who took the helm of the organization last month, after giving up his Senate seat to take the job. While DeMint was expected to give the group a higher profile, the backlash and controversy are not the kind of attention the group was hoping to garner.

One Republican operative who works on immigration reform said that hiring a crisis communications firm could help stop the bleeding with donors or other supporters. Heritage’s efforts to get traction for its immigration report could be hampered, the operative said, if it gets lumped in with groups like FAIR, NumbersUSA or CIS, which are considered pure opposition to the immigration reform effort.

Heritage has stood by its findings that an immigration overhaul would cost $6.3 trillion despite many conservative groups and lawmakers, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), calling the findings inaccurate.

The group has also been fending off attacks over one of the report’s coauthors, Jason Richwine. As part of his Harvard dissertation, Richwine, who is now a senior policy analyst at the think tank, argued that there was a long-standing difference between the IQ of white Americans and immigrants.  .   .   .  

Heritage’s Gonzalez wrote in a blog post that the Harvard paper does not represent Heritage’s position.    “It’s findings do not reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation or the conclusions of our study on the cost of amnesty to U.S. taxpayers, as race and ethnicity are not part of Heritage immigration policy recommendations,” Gonzalez wrote, adding that Richwine provided quantitative support to the lead author Robert Rector.

All in all, it is fun to watch the far right self destruct when it slips up and lets the world see its real racism and bigotry.   So much for wooing the Hispanic vote.

Heritage Foundation Anti-Immigration Reform Paper Author Says "Some Races More Intelligent Than Others"

I catch a great deal of grief at times for maintaining that the GOP - a party for which I was once an activist and city committee member and precinct captain - now has racism as one of its twin pillars (the other pillar of the GOP is religious extremism).   But, from all I see and read, I believe I am on target.  This blog recently noted that the Heritage Foundation now headed by knuckle dragging Neanderthal, former GOP Senator Jim DeMint, had issued a position paper arguing against comprehensive immigration reform.  I should have known that the other shoe would soon drop, and sure enough, one of the authors of the Heritage paper (pictured at left) is on record as believing that "some races are more intelligent than others."  I think we all know which race he champions.  Media Matters looks at the mindset behind the Heritage Foundation report.  Yes, Hispanics - indeed all minorities - need to run screaming from the GOP.   Here are some article highlights:

A co-author of the Heritage Foundation's new immigration report, which right-wing media have hyped despite even conservative criticism about its methodology, has long promoted inflammatory theories about the relationship between race and IQ in Hispanic immigrants, an unsurprising fact given his ties to extremist anti-immigrant organizations.

Dylan Matthews of The Washington Post's Wonkblog reported that Jason Richwine, a co-author of the Heritage report, asserts in his 2009 doctoral dissertation titled "IQ and Immigration Policy" that "there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races." Matthews wrote [emphasis added]:

While it's clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics -- "the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ" -- he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, "No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against."

Matthews also included Richwine's dissertation abstract, which forwards the idea that the U.S. should not only select its immigrant pool based on IQ, but that immigrants and their future generations are not apt to obtain his desired level of intelligence [emphasis added]:

The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.

His dissertation, however, was not the first time Richwine promoted these offensive claims. In July 2008, while Richwine was a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he said in a panel discussion of the book The New Case Against Immigration, broadcast on C-SPAN, that "races differ in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ."

Richwine's anti-immigrant language is reminiscent of that used by the Pioneer Fund, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group that "funds studies of race and intelligence, as well as eugenics, the 'science' of breeding superior human beings that was discredited by various Nazi atrocities."

There is more, but I will let readers check out the rest of the articles for themselves.  The bottom line is that this prevalent mindset in the GOP and far right elements.  And it's ugly, it's racist and it is contrary to everything that supposed Christians ought to be supporting.

Far Right Heritage Foundation Report Distorts Immigration Reform

While I am glad he's out of the United States Senate, Jim DeMint is still busy peddling his lies and insanity from the pulpit of the Heritage Foundation - an organization that seems Hell bent on losing all credibility outside of Kool-Aid drinking circles.   How else to explain its new position paper on the consequences of immigration reform and looks more like the work of the KKK or other white supremacists groups.  The truth is that the far right wants no immigration reform because its spittle flecked angry white base cannot abide the fact that whites are headed toward losing majority status in America and with that change many of the privileges that they have enjoyed for centuries.   Both the Washington Post editorial board and an op-ed slam the factual flaws in the report. Here are excerpts from the Post editorial:

FORMER SENATOR Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), now leader of the Heritage Foundation, knows that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is likely to judge that immigration reform — including eventual citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants — will be a shot in the arm for the U.S. economy. After all, the CBO has done so with previous such legislation. That explains why Mr. DeMint, a bitter opponent of legalization, has launched a preemptive attack on the CBO — “puppets of the Congress,” he called the office the other day — and why Heritage has issued a study slamming amnesty for unauthorized immigrants as a drain on taxpayers.

The Heritage paper, chock-full of assumptions that most economists dispute, is a blatant attempt to twist the immigration debate.  .  .  .  .   Influential Republicans, including Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, rolled their eyes at the Heritage report with varying degrees of politeness.

The far right elements in the GOP are becoming uglier and uglier in their racism and bigotry.  It's something that certainly will not help the GOP win over Hispanic voters.  Here are some highlights from the op-ed column:

“There’s a statement at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty,” said the former Republican senator who just took over as chief of the powerful think tank. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses . . . ”    He and his colleagues then went on to outline their version of immigration reform: No poor and huddled need apply.

“We feel that the best immigration system is one that focuses on bringing high school [graduate] immigrants in,” said Robert Rector, the Heritage scholar seated beside DeMint for the rollout of a new study on the costs of immigration.

Latinos have been suspicious of Republicans in part because they assume that conservatives’ desire to crack down on illegal immigration may extend to legal immigration as well. Republicans invariably proclaim that they are big fans of legal immigration. But the Heritage doctrine undermines that, because it would sharply curtail Hispanic immigration — legal and illegal alike. 

Of the Mexican-born people in the United States age 25 and older, nearly 60 percent didn’t graduate from high school, according to a Pew Hispanic Center compilation of census data. Among Central Americans, the figure is 50 percent. To shun those without high school diplomas would dramatically reduce eligibility among Latinos.

When I asked at Monday’s news conference whether his [Robert Rector] conclusions would apply to legal immigrants, he answered “yes” even before I could get the whole question out. 

If Republicans don’t find a way to deal with illegal immigrants in the country, they risk political oblivion as the swelling ranks of Latino voters turn against them. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) recognized this in reaching a bipartisan agreement to allow legalization — a proposal being denounced by the right.

Never mind the rest of that Lazarus inscription DeMint cited, the bit about accepting “the wretched refuse” and the “homeless, tempest-tossed.” Now they’ll need a diploma.  

What truly sickens me about folks like DeMint is that they constantly pat themselves on the back for the piety and religiosity.  Meanwhile, if Christ were suddenly to reappear his attacks on the biblical Pharisees would probably seem mild compared to his judgment of the "godly Christian" crowd of today.  As I have said many times before, these folks are NOT nice people and they comprise the best argument around for why one would want to walk away from Christianity.