Trump Judicial Nominees Seek to Roll Back LGBT Rights

Trump nominee opposes LGBT rights and criticizes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 .

Under the toxic and foul Trump/Pence regime, there is so much destruction being done to regulations that protect public safety, the stability of the banking system, and the legal protections of consumers.  In the dizzying cycles of Trump's latest out rage or the swirling Russiagate investigation, one are that poses a danger to many citizens and LGBT citizens in particular is what Trump is doing to the federal judiciary where he is appointing ideologues and religious zealots to lifetime appointment judge ships.  One pending nominee even has announced hostility to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  These appointees - which Republican lap dogs in the U.S. Senate are mostly confirming - believe in preferential rights for whites and special rights for Christofascists a majority of whom , in my view, are racists and seek to trample n the religious freedoms of other citizens.  A piece in The Daily Beast raises the alarm about what is happening mostly under the radar.  Here are excerpts:

It’s time to sound the alarm again on another bunch of Trump judges queuing up for confirmation by the U.S. Senate. Like the earlier nominees, they are overwhelmingly white and male. One in three has something explicit in their record and/or their writings that is hostile to LGBTQ rights.

“They’re still fighting over whether same sex couples should have the right to marry and have children,” says Sharon McGowan, director of strategy at Lambda Legal, which litigates on behalf of LGBTQ people. “This is a real concerted effort to take back ground that has been lost not only in the law but in public opinion, by putting people on the court that have these views.”

With just 51 votes needed (and yes, it was the Democrats who changed the rule, back in 2013), the GOP can wave through on mostly partisan votes just about everybody the White House sends up.

The only tool the opposition has is to highlight the worst of the worst, and shame some Republican senators into withdrawing their support. Three nominees withdrew last year after negative media coverage (Jeff Mateer, Bret Talley, and Matthew Petersen). Mateer had called transgender children the “spawn of Satan;” Talley had a taste for the paranormal, and Petersen’s inability to answer basic questions about the law went viral.

Heading the list for this season’s worst of the worst is Kyle Duncan, nominated for the 5th Circuit (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi) and the “go-to guy for the anti-LGBTQ movement,” says McGowan. “He has spent the last decade plus crafting their arguments and seeking out experts to defend them.” . . . . he has advanced similar arguments against broad-based LGBTQ rights. Duncan says he has a “conscience-based” opposition to what he doesn’t consider “real marriage,” and that he is defending the “age-old bedrock” of traditional marriage.

He was the lawyer advising the North Carolina legislature on its passage of House Bill 2, the so-called bathroom bill, that required people to use the restroom of the gender on their birth certificate. “He recruits experts who say that individuals who have gender identity different from what was assigned at birth are victims of some delusion, and that it’s not a legitimate health situation that science recognizes,” McGowan told The Daily Beast.

All that’s standing between Duncan and a lifetime appointment on the 5th Circuit is a Senate vote. Born in 1972, if confirmed, he could serve 30 or 40 years on the court.

Another nominee with an anti-LGBTQ record awaiting Senate action is Howard Nielson, who turns 50 this year and is teed up for a seat on the federal District Court of Utah. He was part of the legal team in California that defended Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage.

A third nominee, Gordon Giampietro, appeared headed to an easy confirmation as a district judge in Wisconsin until two audio recordings from 2015 surfaced in which he says marriage equality is “against God’s plan,” and LGBTQ people are “troubled” and unfit to be parents. He declares that Justice Anthony Kennedy, the deciding vote on marriage equality in the Supreme Court, “went off the rails years ago.”

He says the new definition of marriage “actually focuses marriage on the sex act. Because if it were simply that we wanted to honor the love of two people, we would allow sons to marry their mothers, brothers to marry their sisters, for example, to get them healthcare.

In online writings that have just surfaced, Giampietro criticizes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as an “intrusion into private business,” and says that “calls for diversity” are “code for relaxed standards.”

With so much to pay attention to in every news cycle, the steady stream of Trump judges gets overlooked. They shouldn’t get a free pass. “If we don’t protect the courts, the courts won’t protect us,” says McGowan. “We can hold our breath and make it through four years, but these are lifetime appointments.”

Under Trump/Pence, It’s Church Over State

The regime  of Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, and Mike Pence is relentlessly striving to place far right Christian beliefs above the laws that govern the rest of society.  Since last week, real or feigned extremist religious belief allow companies to role back contraception coverage in their employee health insurance plans and allows individuals to make a mockery of non-discrimination laws that bar discrimination based on religion or religious belief.  Yet, now, if one is LGBT and does not adhere to Christofascist dogma, you can be fired, denied service and refused accommodations and housing by the self-anointed "godly folk."  The irony on the war on contraception coverage is that it will increase the number of unwanted pregnancies and increase demand for abortions, something the same "godly Christians" to whom Trump and Pence are prostituting themselves also claim to abhor with even more fervor.  As numerous studies have shown, the USA has the highest unwanted pregnancy rate of any advanced industrial nation specifically because of the restrictions on access to contraception and the lunatic abstinence only sex education programs so loved by Christofascists.  Everyone who believes in religious freedom and equality under the laws should be concerned.  Today it's contraception and gays, but tomorrow it could be those who are Jewish, non-Christian who the Christofascists also dislike and hate. An op-ed in the New York Times attacks this exultation of one religion over the civil rights of citizens and the law.  Here are excerpts:

Saudi women are gaining the right to drive. American women are losing the right to employer-provided birth control.

The first development signifies a theocratic kingdom’s bow to the inexorable onslaught of modernity. The second is a cynical bow to the forces of reaction against modernity.

It would be too far a stretch to see in Saudi Arabia even the glimmer of the emergence of civil society. But it’s not much of a stretch to see in the rules issued by the Trump administration last week the fraying of civil society as the United States has known it. Ours is a diverse society in which all are expected, with limited and precisely defined exceptions, to abide by the rules that apply to all. The alternative, as Justice Antonin Scalia observed decades ago, “would be courting anarchy.”

The new rules, which went into immediate effect, create exceptions that are anything but limited. They are, in fact, there for the taking. Any “entities” that claim not only religious but also “moral” objections to birth control are entitled to refuse to comply with the federal contraception mandate that until last Friday was enabling 55 million women to receive birth control without charge as part of their work- or college-related health insurance coverage.

The list of religious objectors includes churches and religious orders (which from the beginning have been completely exempt from the mandate anyway); nonprofit organizations; a “closely held for-profit entity;” a “for-profit entity that is not closely held” (including publicly traded companies); and ”any other nongovernmental employer” along with institutions of higher education.

We are talking, in other words, about the American workplace.

It’s hard to overstate the radical nature of what has just happened. Just three years ago, in the Hobby Lobby case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Obama administration could not impose the mandate on a closely held for-profit business owned by a family with religious objections to birth control.

Now the Trump administration has played the Supreme Court justices for chumps. The accommodation, carefully worked out and fought over, is a thing of the past. In its place is a flat-out exemption, with no requirement that women be offered any alternative route to coverage.

The administration says the average price of a year’s birth control is $584. That’s probably low . . .  but that’s not really the point. Others have called attention to the administration’s truly astonishing effort to show that birth control really isn’t all that important and may even be counterproductive. Statements like the one on page 46 of the religious exemption document, “Contraception’s association with positive health effects might also be partially offset by an association with negative health effects,” are hogwash, the result of careful cherry-picking of the literature, some of it quite dubious.

The real point is that the Trump administration has outsourced a crucially important building block of national health care policy, enabling a fanatical fringe of the Republican base to exercise raw political power, clothed in religiosity under cover of the grandiloquently named Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That 1993 law, passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities and signed by President Bill Clinton, is the object of growing buyer’s remorse on the part of liberal and moderate Americans — and should be.

The Obama administration did as the Supreme Court said and offered the accommodation as Justice Alito described it. But a group of religiously affiliated nonprofits, mainly but not exclusively Catholic-run schools, colleges, nursing homes and other social service organizations, refused to accept it. Not good enough, they said, claiming that they would still be complicit in the sin of contraception, even if the employees’ receipt of the benefit required no action on the employer’s part beyond notifying the government that it was opting out. Only the complete exemption offered to actual churches would suffice.

Extending the rescission to employers with “moral” objections has no statutory basis. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act at least requires a claim that has something to do, however implausibly, with religion.

Conservatives, even the publicly pious ones, don’t seem to have a problem with limiting the size of their families. (Vice President Mike Pence has two children, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has three. Need I say more?) The problem they have is with what birth control signifies: empowering women — in school, on the job, in the home — to determine their life course. That’s what they don’t want to normalize. It comes as no surprise which side Donald Trump is on. . . 

Women in Virginia should be very worried.  Republican attorney general candidate John Adams is a religious freedom fanatic and a darling of Christofascists.  If elected, he would champion special rights for Christian extremists over the rights of all others.  Get out and vote for Mark Herring for attorney general, Ralph Northam for Governor, and Justin Fairfax for Lt. Governor.  The extreme Trump/Pence must be stopped. 

The "Christian" Enemies of LGBT Americans

Having followed the "Christian Right", the "Christofascists," the "Professional Christians" or whatever you may care to call these hate-filled throcrats for the better part of 20 years now, what continues to be unknown to the vast majority of Americans is just how complex and intertwined and full funded these enemies of freedom and equality are in fact.   And while much of their focus is to denigrate and criminalize LGBT citizens, all these groups are also racist and white supremacist oriented and want the unfettered right to discriminate against others based on their claimed religious beliefs.  Thankfully, a column in the Washington Post looks at who some of these groups are and the sources of their funding.  These folks are not isolated, simple church attendees.  They are vicious and relentless in their quest to impose a Christian theocracy on America.  Here are column highlights:

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Americans know in their bones there is a “vast right-wing conspiracy” out to deny them their humanity and dignity. A conservative cabal actively working the levers of power to block their rights. Well, now we have the evidence that one actually exists.

Freedom for All Americans (FFAA) is a “bipartisan campaign seeking nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people nationwide” that was created last year in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage. FFAA executive director Matt McTighe told me that the immediate backlash against that historic decision, such as Indiana’s so-called religious freedom law, was expected. But he said that it was the emerging coordination of the resistance that pushed his organization to sift through public filings to unearth the ties that bind anti-LGBT efforts around the country.

“We started seeing bills that looked 80 to 90 percent identical in language start to pop up around the country,” McTighe said. “The language was so clearly being coordinated.” In a report to be released on Thursday called “Enemies of Equality,” FFAA shows that 17 bills in 14 states that target transgender Americans “used almost identical language and it’s based off of a model policy ADF started pushing four or five months ago.” All told, there are more than 200 anti-LGBT bills pending in 34 states.

According to FFAA’s research, one of the hubs of this coordination is Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a 22-year-old group that “advocates for your right to freely live out your faith.” Another is the National Christian Foundation (NCF), which funds a lot of the groups aggressively working to chip away at the equal rights of LGBT Americans. One of them is Family Research Council (FRC), which is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an “extremist group.”

Another is Liberty Council. Listed as an “extremist group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, . . . But the National Christian Foundation also received funding, notably from the owners of Hobby Lobby. That’s the company at the center of the 2014 Supreme Court case that ruled the sincerely held religious beliefs of corporation owners are protected by the Constitution. And the interconnectedness revealed by FFAA is several layers deep.

For instance, James Dobson is founder of the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defending Freedom and Focus on the Family. Tom Minnery is a board member at ADF and senior vice president of policy at Focus on the Family, which gets money from NCF and the family of Forbes 400 billionaire Richard DeVos, founder of Amway. He and his family have given money to all of the organizations founded by Dobson.

McTighe of FFAA said of his group’s effort to expose the intricate web of anti-LGBT interests. “We expect that this will be even more pronounced in the coming legislative session and that the ADF and the groups that it has sway over will continue to get more engaged and will continue to file more and more anti-LGBT bills that are being coordinated…by…national organization[s] with a clear anti-LGBT agenda.”

Read the entire piece.  What is even more sicken is the fact that many of the leaders of these organizations make an extremely lucrative living peddling hatred and preying on the fears of the ignorant and uninformed, often by disseminating deliberate lies. 

Evengelical Propaganda - the "Museum of the Bible"

While Syrian children are dying while fleeing civil war and religious extremism, American evangelicals - in particular, the founders of Hobby Lobby - are squandering millions of dollars building a massive propaganda vehicle in Washington, D.C., just a short way south of the National Mall.  For me, it's a symbol of the misplace values of the "godly folk" whose only real agenda is to force their childish beliefs on all of us whether we like it or not.  For these folks, the Gospel message of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless doesn't exist.  Instead, the engage in conduct that makes the Pharisees of the Bible sound upright and the height of morality.  The Washington Post looks at this travesty being built in the nation's capital.  Here are excerpts:

To many in the scholarly community, the museum seems like an oversize piece of evangelical claptrap. Some academics and curators also worry about the origins of its collection — the more than 40,000 biblical artifacts were amassed in a remarkably short time by Hobby Lobby President Steve Green.

Why did Green want to turn his private collection into a museum? A number of academics have questioned his family’s motives. “I don’t expect the Bible Museum to be anything other than a tax-deductible kitsch attempt at spreading Christian fundamentalist propaganda,” archaeologist Dorothy King said. In an interview with NPR, Jacques Berlinerblau, a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University, questioned the location of the museum, two blocks south of the Mall, where it might overlook periodic rallies opposing abortion or same-sex marriage, offering brick-and-mortar moral support to conservative causes. Sarah Posner concurred, writing in Talking Points Memo: “The museum will be a living, breathing testament to how American evangelicalism can at once claim it is under siege from secularists, the LGBT rights movement, or feminism — yet also boast of acquiring a prime private perch, strategically located at the nation’s epicenter of law and politics.”  

There also have been questions about what approach to the Bible the museum will take. Green has promoted a public school curriculum based on the Bible as a factual historical text. Another ideological red flag: Museum President Cary Summers consulted for the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which teaches creationism as fact, with didactic material showing dinosaurs and humans living side by side on a 6,000-year-old planet Earth. The Summers link has prompted unflattering comparisons of the two museums.

The Green family’s initial public line on the Museum of the Bible seemed to confirm some of the concerns. The museum’s 501(c)(3) filing in 2011 declared that its mission would be “to bring to life the living Word of God, to tell its compelling story of preservation, and to inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible.”

Beyond the possible motives for the Museum of the Bible, some scholars question the collection itself. Green began spending heavily on it in 2009. He had amassed more than 30,000 items by June 2010 and has added 10,000 more since.

That 40,000 number, however, is suspicious to Roberta Mazza, a leading scholar and professor at University of Manchester in Britain. The UNESCO convention controls the export of antiquities and makes it bureaucratically difficult to legally sell abroad objects that were excavated after 1970. Mazza wonders how Green managed to collect so much “in such a brief period of time and in the context, in theory, of a strictly regulated antiquities market?” 

Heightening their skepticism, Mazza and other scholars identified one item in the Green Collection — a Coptic papyrus fragment with lines from Galatians 2 — that was once advertised on eBay by a seller who was later banned from the site for allegedly selling looted antiquities.

Apparently mindful of skeptics, the Greens hired David Trobisch, a prominent liberal academic, to head its collection.  If Trobisch doesn't sell his soul for money, then the museum will document that there is no "official version" of the Bible and that the text was re-written at will over the centuries after first being authored by ignorant goat and sheep herders in the case of the Old Testament.  If done right, the museum would show that the Bible is anything but the "inerrant word of god."  I suspect, however, that this is not the Greens' agenda to tell the truth.  Propaganda is the real goal, in my view.

The Far Right’s “Religious Freedom” Push is Just the Beginning

Under the regime of the Shah of Iran, Iran rapidly modernized and embraced education and modernity.   Critics called the Shah's regime brutal and America largely sat back as religious extremists swept into power ostensibly to bring more democracy and freedom - something, that, of course never materialized, and the Shah quickly appeared to be a gentle charity worker compared to those who took control of the country.  Iran symbolizes how religion can drag a country back in time and revive Medieval mindsets.  Here in America, evangelical Christians seek to do something similar as well as grant themselves special rights and privileges.   Their agenda is to undermine the U.S. Constitution and, unfortunately, opportunists and political whores in the Republican Party are only too willing to cooperate as the true concept of religious freedom is under daily attack by the "godly folk" and their sycophants.  A piece in Salon looks at how the problem of the far right is perhaps just beginning.  Here are highlights:

By now, it’s clear that Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act was crafted to empower piously bigoted entrepreneurs and companies desirous of freelancing with their own “Jim Crow for gays” restrictions, and to let them cite as legal justification for doing so their precious religious sensibilities.  The RFRA, said the original text, sought to give judicial succor to those who found that their “exercise of religion . . . has been substantially burdened,” or was just “likely to be substantially burdened” by performing services for people their faith’s sacred credos enjoin them to abhor (gays, in this case). 

The danger, however, has by no means passed.  RFRAs already exist in 21 other states (in three of which, bills are pending to fortify them), and three more are considering adopting similar measures.  The RFRA just passed last week in Arkansas may allow faith-based discrimination; we now await a test case.  

Yet the real menace to our priceless heritage of secular governance comes from the Supreme Court, which a year ago (in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby) ruled that corporations, on the basis of their religious convictions (yes, the Court decided corporations have those), can exempt themselves from the Affordable Care Act’s relevant articles and refuse to pay for contraceptives in their employee health plans.  

RFRAs don’t define religion or specify to which religion they pertain.  But a lot hinges on how we define religion.  Everyone knows what dictionaries say it is.  We’re also all too familiar with another definition, one by which faith is an entirely spiritual affair, a matter of transcendental, miraculously elastic interpretation never to be held accountable for the witless antics, casual brutality and gross atrocities committed by its practitioners. . . . Both definitions lend an aura of dignity and gravitas to what is essentially sordid gibberish that we should dismiss out of hand, as we now do necromancy, phrenology or alchemy, or simply laugh off.

Yet religion is far too dangerous to our liberties to be laughed off or mischaracterized as harmless.  In its Abrahamic strain, it is a triad of antiquated, largely pernicious ideologies of control and exclusion suffusing various “holy” books that detail a phony cosmogony, a fairy-tale version of humankind’s origins, and a plethora of strictures meant to regulate and restrict our behavior. . . . . A fictitious celestial tyrant superintends the almost ceaseless slaughter playing out in the Bronze-Age phantasmagoria of his alleged creation.

His pronouncements are regarded as binding on all humans.  Hence, if the fictitious tyrant says, for instance, that gay sex is an abomination, it just is, and gays have to be abominated, like it or not.  Nothing personal – it’s just what the magic book says.

[U]nknown humans came up with these magic books in a time before people knew what germs were, what gravity was, or that the earth orbited the sun, or that the earth was round.  But the magic books, because they are magic, have to be believed.  Why?  Because the magic books say so.  Failure to believe in said magic books is a great sin.  Why?  So the magic books themselves decree.  According to one of the magic books, those who announce they’ve stopped believing in it deserve to die. 

How would this restaurateur prove to a judge that he actually believes what’s written in his magic book?  After all, most of it is pretty crazy stuff – talking snakes, burning bushes, suns standing still, virgin births, walking dead folk, and so on.  A lawyer for the gay plaintiffs might challenge the restaurateur to present concrete evidence that he really does believe, and so has truly been “burdened.” 

Given that RFRAs don’t specify to which religion they pertain, if they do legalize discrimination, they will do so ecumenically, offering adherents of all denominations a chance to bully both rationalists and believers of other cults.  Presumably followers of the Torah, say, could deny service to those who have performed any of thirty-nine types of activity forbidden on the Sabbath.   . . . Jews and Christians might wish to unite in denying service to Muslims, because, obviously, neither of their magic books recognizes the Islamic magic book.. . . .How long would it be before Christians revive the age-old charge of deicide against the Jews and halt all service to the “murderers of Christ?”  Muslims, in turn, could deny service to Jews and Christians for having rejected the Prophet Muhammad.

Such are the farcical dilemmas and rank absurdities with which religion threatens to swamp us if it infests our judicial system and trumps secular law, as any RFRA legalizing faith-based discrimination would do.  The ghastly morass to which RFRAs will one day probably lead speaks to nothing but the ahistorical ignorance of their drafters. 

The Founding Fathers never meant for religion to play a role in our affairs of state.  . . .
James Madison declared that “An alliance or coalition between Government and religion cannot be too carefully guarded against,” and thought that “Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.”

John Adams authored a treaty, signed by none other than George Washington, proclaiming that the United States was “not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.“  

Thomas Jefferson, one of the architects of the Constitution and the author of the “wall of separation between church and state,” had this un-Christian prediction to proffer about Christianity: “the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.“  The Book of Revelation he dismissed as “merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.”

These days, sadly, with the godly on the legislative march, and the Roberts Court sitting in Washington ready to back them up, we find ourselves facing an unprecedented threat to what remains of our democracy. 

Would religious folk, if they succeed in passing laws that empower them to use their faith as a bludgeon, prove restrained in invoking them?

In answer to the last question, one need look no farther than Iran, Saudi Arabia and other countries where religion is joined with the supposed civil laws.  It's ugly and down right dangerous for non-believers and those who embrace knowledge and science.  Yet this is what the "godly folk" and the GOP want to bring to America.  They must be stopped. 

Most Americans Oppose LGBT Employment Discrimination by Churches

The results of a new survey contain bad news for Christofascists who believe that they should be above non-discrimination laws: a majority of Americans oppose anti-LGBT employment discrimination even by churches and only 30% of respondents believe privately held business corporations citing "religious beliefs" should be able to discriminate against gays.  Thus, while shrieks of "religious freedom" and/or "persecution of Christians" may play well in Christofascist and professional right wing Christian circles - and, of course, among political whores in the Republican Party - most Americans are not impressed.  The survey also found support for a federal ENDA law.  A post at The New Civil Rights Movement looks at the survey findings:

Fifty-five percent of Americans believe no employer, not even a church, should be allowed to discriminate in the employment of LGBT people if a federal law, like ENDA, were passed. A new Harris poll which surveyed over 2500 people found that just 35 percent of Americans think religious institutions, like churches, should be allowed to discriminate on religious grounds. Even less, just three in ten Americans, think privately-held businesses should be allowed to discriminate. 

And about one in five people think publicly held businesses (21 percent) or small businesses (19 percent) should be exempt if they cite religious beliefs.

"Americans simply don't believe that employer exemptions are justified when it comes to basic workplace safeguards for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Americans," The Harris Poll reports.

The survey also showed continued support for federal policies that end job discrimination for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals, as well as transgender employees. Two-thirds (65%) of American adults agree that federal law should be expanded to include protection from job discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Also, when it comes to protections for transgender employees, more than half (54%) of all adults strongly agree that transgender workers should be treated equally and fairly as all other workers. 

 Hopefully, more and more Americans are coming to see far right Christians for the mean, self-centered, hypocrites that they are in fact. 

The Right's New Strategy After Gay Marriage Loss

While still reeling - and thrashing around in spittle flecked convulsions - over this weeks tidal wave of new marriage equality states, some in the Christofascist ranks, especially the professional Christian crowd which sees its lucrative livelihood seriously threatened as marriage equity spreads,  are seeking new approaches to keep their income streams alive and to work to denigrate and discriminate against LGBT citizens.  In a column at Huffington Post, Michelangelo Signorile calls this effort "Finding the Gay 'Partial Birth Abortion'."  Here are column highlights:

A little over a week ago at the Values Voters Summit (VVS), I spoke with Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), and he was positively certain that the Supreme Court would take one of the marriage cases it rejected yesterday  . . . . Not only that, he was pretty sure that, since the high court had stayed decisions and stopped gay marriages from proceeding in Utah and Virginia after lower courts had rule those states' bans unconstitutional, marriage equality opponents would prevail after the court took the case, upholding gay marriage bans all across the country. 

Instead, the court not only brought marriage equality instantly to five states by not hearing the appeals of the lower court rulings; in short order another six states in the circuits affected will likely have marriage equality. And today, Brian Brown is furious and stunned at the decision. But he and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and others are vowing to fight on. They are delusional if not just doing fundraising -- claiming they can still win at the high court -- but they're also being pragmatic, looking to the future. And it's on that last note that we had better pay attention.

The plan now is to turn themselves into the victims, persecuted as their "religious liberties" are under terrible assault, and to use the dangerous Hobby Lobby decision from the Supreme Court to discriminate in the name of religious liberties. We've of course seen some of this rhetoric both before and after Hobby Lobby. Expect it just to intensify big time.

On a panel at VVS titled "The Future of Marriage," Frank Schubert, the mastermind strategist of the Proposition 8 campaign and other marriage ban campaigns across the country, said that if by chance marriage equality opponents lost at the high court, as pretty much happened yesterday, they would have to go the route they did with abortion after Roe v. Wade. They'd have to seek "incremental" wins, he said, as they did then, chipping away slowly at abortion rights, which of course has been very successful. Schubert then said they'd have to the find the gay "version" of "partial birth abortion." I almost fell off my seat on that one.

[H]e talked about "conscience clauses" and "religious liberties," which brings us back to Hobby Lobby, businesses that don't want to serve gays, adoption by gay parents, and lots of other issues. Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association told me at VVS that they aren't giving up and, persistent as he is, he tweeted that to me last night as well. 

Nobody should think that they won't regroup and find different ways to attack LGBT people and other groups, armed with a new plan. It's simply what they do.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Why I Can’t Resign Now

In some respects one of the most important aspects of presidential elections in America is the power of the president to nominate appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court.  But that power of appointment is not unlimited.  Nominees still must pass approval by the U.S. Senate.  Something that is not as assured as it once was given the non-stop obstruction of today's Congressional Republicans.  A piece in Politico looks at Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's explanation of why she will not retire for as long as possible.  Here are article excerpts:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is pushing back against suggestions that she should soon retire, saying President Barack Obama would be unable to get a justice like her through the Senate.

“Who do you think President Obama could appoint at this very day, given the boundaries that we have?” the 81-year-old justice told Elle Magazine in an interview excerpt released Tuesday. The wide-ranging interview portrays Ginsburg — seen as a member of the court’s liberal wing — as attuned to the dynamics in Congress and some of the greater political and social discussions in the U.S.

In the interview, she suggested that Senate Republicans would likely block any potential nominee like her.

“If I resign any time this year, he could not successfully appoint anyone I would like to see in the court,” the oldest member of the high court said. “[A]nybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they’re misguided,” later adding that she can “do the job full steam.”

Tuesday’s excerpt focused largely on the court’s conservative shift in recent years and Ginsburg’s disappointment with its rulings on women’s issues.

When asked why the court has become “very conservative” on women’s rights, Ginsburg singled out a particular justice.

“To be frank, it’s one person who made the difference: Justice [Anthony] Kennedy,” she said, the justice often seen as the court’s swing vote given the court’s relatively entrenched liberal and conservative camps of four justices each. Ginsburg said that since upholding Roe v. Wade, Kennedy has been largely responsible for the upholding of several abortion restrictions.

When asked which decisions she thinks will be considered most significant 50 years from now, Ginsburg pointed to June’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the court said corporations could use religious exemptions to avoid paying for contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

“Well, I think 50 years from now, people will not be able to understand Hobby Lobby,” said the justice, who wrote a blistering dissent in the case.

What Religious Conservatives Really Want Out Of Hobby Lobby

I have noted from time to time that the ultimate objective of the Christofascists is to overturn the U.S. Supreme court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut which first upheld the right of couples to use contraception and began the line of rulings expanding on citizens' right to privacy.  Some scoff at this assertion, but if one follows the Christofascists' websites and statements, ending contraception and not just abortion is the goal.  In the short term, if the ultimate goal cannot be achieved, the fall back agenda is to limit contraception as much as possible, especially through sabotaging  contraception coverage under the Affordable Health Care Act.  A piece in Think Progress looks at these shorter term efforts.  Here are highlights:

For two and a half years, the Obama Administration has tried to strike a balance between the health needs of workers and the sensibilities of employers who object to contraceptive care on religious grounds. Just last month, the administration announced its most recent accommodation for these religious objectors — an employer can exempt itself completely from the federal rule requiring employer-provided health plans to cover birth control, so long as it informs the government that it seeks a religious exemption and tells them which company administers their health plan.

Yet, according to a court document filed earlier this month by a leading religious conservative litigation shop, even this degree of accommodation is insufficient to satisfy the most vehement objectors to birth control. Indeed, if the courts ultimately accept the arguments presented by this court filing, that would leave the administration largely powerless to ensure that workers whose employers object to birth control still receive contraceptive coverage. The alleged rights of the employer would trump the rights of the employee.

The court filing is a motion filed by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty — the same Becket Fund that represented Hobby Lobby in its successful lawsuit in the Supreme Court — on behalf of Ave Maria University, a conservative Catholic school which claims that “any action ‘specifically intended to prevent procreation’ — including contraception and sterilization — is morally wrong.”

What’s unusual about this motion, however, is that it specifically denies that the Obama Administration’s latest accommodation for religious objectors is sufficient. “Rather than simply requiring notice that Ave Maria is a religious nonprofit with a religious objection,” the motion complains, “the augmented rule would require Ave Marie [sic] to provide its insurance company’s name and contact information for the specific purpose of allowing HHS to issue a notice requiring the insurer to provide the exact same items through Ave Maria’s healthcare plan as if Ave Maria had given the insurer Form 700 directly.”

Once the government has this form in hand, they would then contact this insurance company and arrange for it to provide contraceptive coverage to the religious objector’s employees without requiring the objector to provide this coverage itself. Notably, the Supreme Court’s opinion in Hobby Lobby strongly suggests that the just-fill-out-this-form accommodation is sufficient to overcome any legal objections to the overall regime for providing birth control to employees.

Nevertheless, several religious employers objected to the fill-out-the-form solution, so the Obama Administration granted them a further accommodation — permitting them to exempt themselves from the birth control rules without having to fill out any particular form at all, so long as the government learns who their insurance administrator is.

Ave Maria’s objection is not exactly surprising, as we explained shortly after the Obama Administration announced its latest accommodation, “employers who have raised the staunchest objections to birth control have often claimed that they cannot take any action that will set in motion a chain of events that leads to someone receiving contraception, as doing so would make them ‘complicit’ in the act of providing birth control,” but their objection is nonetheless significant because it reveals what the stakes actually are in the follow-up cases to Hobby Lobby. 

Discrimination is Un-Christian

As noted many times on this blog, modern conservative Christianity is best known for hate and bigotry and an agenda of imposing Christofascist dogma on all Americans.  Not only does this agenda fly directly against the founding principle of freedom of religion in the United States Constitution, but it also goes against the supposed Gospel value of not judging others lest one be also judged.  Like so much of the Gospel message, the Christofascists have excised this concept from the perverse and toxic form of Christianity.  Like gays, women are always the perennial targets of Christofascists obsessed with controlling the sex lives of others.  A column in the New York Times looks at this discrimination and effort to police other people's sex lives:

Much to the chagrin of women’s rights advocates, Hobby Lobby has won its legal battle — but claims of “victory” for religious freedom must be emended. Make no mistake: This is no victory for the freedom to exercise Christian principles. Though employers like Hobby Lobby are now free to deny women access to contraceptives through their employer-subsidized health plans on the basis of religious objection, they will be violating their own purported Christian principles if they do. While Christians are not compelled by their faith to engage in religious practices that impose upon the freedoms of others, they are compelled — by their belief that all persons, men and women, are created in the image of God — to oppose discrimination.

There is very little sense to be made of claims that your freedom of religion is substantially burdened by someone else’s providing services that you do not want to provide yourself. This suggests that the legal challenges are not merely aimed at allowing corporations to abstain from facilitating behavior they deem immoral but instead are seeking to effectively prevent women from engaging in that “immoral” behavior by keeping financial barriers for women, and administrative barriers for the government, in place.

This is economic coercion. Opponents to the contraceptive mandate have insisted that women remain free to purchase whatever health care services they choose, but this is woefully insensitive to the reality that low-income women and families face. For these women, there is a very large difference between what is available to them for purchase in principle and in effect. It is easy for those who do not regularly face desperate decisions due to financial insecurity or medical complexities to forget the difference.

This kind of economic coercion is distinctly at odds with Christian principles. There is only one incident described in the Christian scriptures where Jesus is represented as employing coercive force, and it was not used to prevent people from engaging in sin. It was used, instead, to prevent people from dishonoring God by exploiting religious practice for personal gain.

Recently, Hobby Lobby has faced legal trouble for false advertising. It has built a fortune, in large part, by selling goods manufactured in China, infamous for its poor labor conditions and related human rights violations. These are the practices of a corporation that will emphasize the Christian faith of its owners when convenient and profitable, but set that faith aside when it would be costly to do otherwise.

The more pressing question religious corporations should ask themselves is whether denying women comprehensive health care while providing it to men, and so failing to respect women’s inherent dignity and equality, is consistent with their religious values.

Why Are Republicans Going to War Against Birth Control?

The answer to the question poised in the captioned post is actually pretty easy; Christofascists now control the Republican Party and the Christofascists simply cannot stand anyone other than drearily married heterosexuals engaging in sex or worse, enjoying it.  Dan Savage summed it up well:

W]hy are conservatives fighting so hard to make contraception harder for women to obtain? Because they don’t think people—young people, poor people, unmarried people, gay people—should be able to enjoy “consequence-free sex.” Because it’s sex that they hate—it’s sex for pleasure that they hate—and they hate that kind of sex more than they hate abortion, teen moms, and welfare spending combined. Knowing that some people are having sex for pleasure without having their futures disrupted by an unplanned pregnancy or having their health compromised by a sexually transmitted infection or having to run a traumatizing gauntlet of shrieking “sidewalk counselors” to get to an abortion clinic keeps them up at night.

 But this obsession with pandering and prostituting themselves to the Christofascists is short sighted - in my view at least - when one recognizes how this war on contraception can quickly becomes perceived as a war on women.    And this war on women could well play into the hands of Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections.  A piece in Hot Air looks at how Republicans may be shooting themselves.  Here are excerpts:

Some core Democratic voters who were thus far chronically unresponsive to stimuli designed to get them enthused about the upcoming midterm elections, have been energized by the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby. The left continues to wring their hands over last Monday’s Supreme Court decision; their reactions ranging from dismay over the establishment of an American theocracy to the decrying the outlawing of contraception altogether. 

Democrats want to lure Republicans into a fight over birth control with legislation to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision that ObamaCare may not require certain businesses to include contraception in their employee health coverage,” The Hill’s Elise Viebeck reported.

Democrats are expected to introduce the measures prior to Congress’s August recess as part of an effort to recalibrate the party’s election-year messaging. Their hope is to turn out female voters by casting the court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby as a strike against reproductive rights.

And that’s a fight conservatives may welcome. No matter how justified, no matter how righteous, no matter how wrong-headed their opposition may be; Republicans will be stepping into a trap of Democratic design if they allow themselves to be cast as the party opposed to all forms of family planning. 

[I]f Republicans get into a rhetorical war with Democrats over access to or the morality of various forms of birth control — from common contraceptives to emergency pharmaceuticals — it will play directly into Democratic hands by motivating their formerly dispirited female constituency. 

So far, Republicans have done a good job of failing to provide Democrats with a sound bite or course of action which plays into the War on Women narrative, but the party in power is going to push Republicans to their breaking point. Congressional Republicans would be better served by offering women a positive rather than a negative agenda on birth control which is a medical necessity for many women. 

While not addressed, the war on women also translates directly into the continued GOP war on gays who, like the "promiscuous sluts" fantasized about by Rush Limbaugh, are anathema to Christofascist who want sex to be miserable and aimed solely for procreation.   Personally, I hope the Republicans fall into the Democrat trap.

LGBT Rights Groups Drop Support for ENDA

Rea Carey

In the wake of the ruling in Hobby Lobby which radically expanded religious based rights to discriminate, leading LGBT Rights groups have dropped their support for the Senate passed version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act ("ENDA") which includes an expansive religious exemption.  The fear is that if the Hobby Lobby rational is applied to the exemption, ENDA could become a license to discriminate against LGBT employees - the total opposite of the Act's objective.  Rea Carey of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has an op-ed in The Advocate that lays out why the NGLTF has dropped its support for ENDA.  Here are highlights:

The morning the sun rose after the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, we all woke up in a changed and intensified landscape of religious exemptions being used as an excuse to discriminate. The reality is that while politics is about compromise, some compromises are too great.

After much soul searching, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund has decided to withdraw its support for the current version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. As one of the lead advocates on this bill for 20 years, we do not take this move lightly but we do take it unequivocally — we now oppose this version of ENDA because of its too-broad religious exemption.

Frankly, it is becoming harder and harder for me, for us, to tolerate our own moral and political inconsistencies by protesting the Hobby Lobby decision, then advocating for the current ENDA with its broad religious exemption, and then insisting that the president not include a broad exemption in the upcoming executive order protecting LGBT people working for federal contractors. How can we demand that a woman have coverage for reproductive healthcare at a company but support a bill that allows a lesbian cafeteria worker in the religiously affiliated hospital next door to be fired from her job?

In the last year alone, we have seen a wave of attempted and successful efforts at imposing religious exemptions on issues of reproductive health and LGBT equality on the local, state, and federal level. And it is crystal clear in the week following the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision that the momentum is building on religious exemptions. Not 48 hours after the decision, Pastor Rick Warren joined other faith leaders in a letter to the president asking that he include a broad religious exemption in the contractor executive order. We cannot be complicit in writing such exemptions into federal law.

There is a better alternative: federal nondiscrimination legislation that contains a reasonable religious accommodation. LGBT people should have the same protections as those contained in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Legal equality is legal equality. 

The campaign to create broad religious exemptions for employment protections repeats a pattern we’ve seen before in methodically undermining voting rights, women’s access to reproductive health, and affirmative action.

We are also deeply concerned that ENDA’s broad religious exemption will serve as a template — a new floor, not a ceiling — not only for our work on LGBT nondiscrimination across the country, but also for other issues that affect our community deeply including marriage, access to HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, and access to other reproductive health services. We are well aware that there are many states with zero protections for LGBT people. This weighs on us heavily, as does the fact that many LGBT people would be at risk of having no protections with this broad religious exemption. We will all need to double down to move forward on nondiscrimination laws in the states where none exist as we push for federal protections with a fair and equal religious accommodation.

There is nothing inherently inconsistent between religion and living our lives freely as LGBT people. We do not need to settle for a law that has a loophole this large, that will embolden our opposition and that has the potential to curb our progress on other federal, state, and local laws protecting LGBT people and their families.

Carey is 100% on the money in her analysis.  We cannot afford to see passage of a law that could perversely become a vehicle for anti-gay discrimination.

Will the Hobby Lobby Ruling Come to Haunt Republicans?

I for one hope that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hobby Lobby granting special rights to Christofascists will help fuel a major backlash against the self-centered, hypocrisy and hate filled "godly folks."  It is far past time that average Americans recognize the reality that today's conservative Christians are neither nice, decent, or in the last analysis even true Christians.   In the political sphere, some are suggesting that the triumph of special rights for Christofascists could come back to haunt the Republican Party both in the 2014 midterms and in the 2016 presidential contest.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at one such prediction.  Here are excerpts:

Many conservatives were celebrating when the court recently ruled that Hobby Lobby and other "closely held" corporations cannot be required to cover contraception for employees under the Affordable Care Act. Speaking on Sunday's "Meet the Press," however, Todd warned that the decision could potentially backfire for Republicans. 

The ruling gives Democrats an issue to campaign on, he said.

"Normally ... the social conservative movement used to quietly hope for losses on the Supreme Court because it gave them a political reason for existing, it gave them something to campaign for, it gave them somebody to beat up on the courts. What was fascinating post-Hobby Lobby is how frankly excited Democratic campaigns are acting, where it's like 'We have something to run on here on the left,'" Todd said.

Todd suggested the backlash is already apparent among white women ages 40 to 55, who will be crucial swing voters in this year's midterm elections. "These are the women that in 2010, they were leaning Republican at this time," he said. "This time, they haven't been."

As the image below highlights, it is the Christofascists who are daily persecuting others yet the moment they have someone stand up to their abuse they are immediatley crying and carrying on claiming that they are the ones being persecuted.   They are, in my view, disgusting and despicable people.