Letter in Opposition to the State Department's "Commission on Unalienable Rights"

A trio of clear and present dangers to human rights.

In a post yesterday I looked at the Trump/Pence regime's dangerous and disingenuous "Commission on Inalienable Rights" which appears designed to roll back LGBT and women's rights.  The Commission's membership is full of far right Christian extremists to the exclusion of legitimate experts on human rights issues.  Now, a letter has been made available to stand in opposition to the Commission and to demand that resources be directed to legitimate and non-sectarian resources to fight human rights abuses both in America and across the globe.  The letter, which I encourage  both individuals and organizations to sign can be found here.  Follow the instructions to join the list of signatories.  Here are excerpts from the letter:

We . . . . write to express our deep concern with the Department of State’s recently announced Commission on Unalienable Rights. We object to the Commission’s stated purpose, which we find harmful to the global effort to protect the rights of all people and a waste of resources; the Commission’s make-up, which lacks ideological diversity and appears to reflect a clear interest in limiting human rights, including the rights of women and LGBTQI individuals; and the process by which the Commission came into being and is being administered, which has sidelined human rights experts in the State Department’s own Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL).

We urge you to immediately disband this body, and to focus your personal attention on the significant challenges currently facing the protection of human rights globally, including those threats to human rights generated by Trump administration policy and rhetoric.

We are likewise dismayed by the well-documented views of a significant majority of the Commission’s 10 members. Taken as a whole, the Commission clearly fails to achieve the legal requirement that a federal advisory committee “be fairly balanced in its membership in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed.” Almost all of the Commission’s members have focused their professional lives and scholarship on questions of religious freedom, and some have sought to elevate it above other fundamental rights. The right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is a fundamental right, but one of among 30 such rights enshrined in the [1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights] UDHR.

No Commissioner focuses nearly as exclusively on any other issue of pressing concern contained with the UDHR, including the right to asylum, the right to be free from torture, the right to equal protection against any discrimination, or any of the UDHR’s enumerated economic, social, and cultural rights, among other topics.

Moreover, the Commission’s chair and members are overwhelmingly clergy or scholars known for extreme positions opposing LGBTQI and reproductive rights, and some have taken public stances in support of indefensible human rights violations. The Commission’s chair has stated that marriage equality presents a danger to children. A Commission member has similarly stated that “the unavoidable message” of same-sex marriage “is a profoundly false and damaging one.” A third Commission member has argued publicly against the use of contraception even when that use is meant to limit the spread of deadly disease. A fourth has described questions of gender identity as “a matter of mental illness or some other pathology” and “a mark of a heartless culture.” A fifth has suggested that widespread outrage at the Saudi Arabian government’s premeditated murder and dismemberment of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi is grounded in U.S. domestic political considerations. A sixth has described the government of the United Arab Emirates as one “committed to tolerance…committed to civil society,” despite that government’s egregious and well-documented human rights record at home and abroad.

Rather than continue with this Commission, we urge you to use the resources of your office to take action on the great many grave human rights issues facing the world today, including those you have the power to improve directly. These include actions that have exposed children and other migrants to acute distress and, in some instances, long-lasting psychological damage. They include extreme selectivity and hypocrisy in raising human rights concerns, and rhetoric from the president and administration supportive of many of the world’s leading human rights violators, from Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin to Mohammed bin Salman. They include routine attacks on a free press and independent judiciary, behaviors emulated and applauded by strongmen worldwide. And they include policies that will exacerbate the impacts of climate change, which threatens the rights of every one of us.

Join me in signing this letter.   A piece in Slate further elaborates on the danger this commission poses to human rights. 

Trump’s Ominous Attempt to Redefine Human Rights

An idea Trump/Pence's new Commission would
seemingly like to bring back - gays
in concentration camps.

The Trump/Pence regime has established a "Commission on Unalienable Rights" that will use "natural law" to determine what rights matter.  Those appointed to the commission are a who's who of far right Christian extremists with documented histories of anti-LGBT animus and opposition to women's rights. By the composition of the Commission membership, it is clear from the start that some rights - and only some people - will matter.  The use of the term "natural law" - a favorite of the Christofascists - is a dead give away that the agenda of the Commission will be anti-gay and anti-modernity.  A column in the New York Times looks at this dangerous Commission and the farcical pretense that true protection of human rights of all people will be on the Commission's radar screen.  The move is a clear effort on Trump's part to shore up support among evangelicals who have shown themselves only too happy to look the other way from the near concentration camps Trump/Pence is operating on the southern border to deal with what lily white evangelicals view as the "brown menace."  Here are column excerpts:

For the Trump administration to establish a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” to examine the meaning of human rights, as it did this month, is a little like Saudi Arabia forming a commission on multiparty democracy or North Korea a commission on how to end famine. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so ominous.

Announcing the composition of the new body, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration “takes seriously the founders’ ideas of individual liberty and constitutional government.” He did so in the same week as President Trump demonstrated, once again, his contempt for the Constitution by tweeting that he’d leave office “in six years, or maybe 10 or 14 (just kidding).” Ha-ha.

In the same Twitter rant Trump called himself “a true Stable Genius.” Now the Genius in Chief, through his secretary of state, has determined that the time is ripe to sift through human rights claims and, in Pompeo’s words, determine “which rights are entitled to gain respect.”

Autocrats around the world, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to China’s Xi Jinping, have long cast human rights groups as Trojan horses for a liberal democratic agenda. It’s an attempt to deflect attention from their gross human rights abuses. Now it appears that Trump’s United States is preparing to join the club of human rights skeptics. A more complete disavowal of what America has stood for since Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 is hard to imagine.

This, remember, is the administration that has consistently relegated human rights in its valueless foreign policy; saw in the Saudi murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi no cause to reprimand Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; embraced North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un; kowtowed to every autocrat outside Iran and Venezuela; and separated migrant children from their families to hold them in appalling camps.

The administration has excised reproductive rights from the annual State Department Country Reports on Human Rights. It watered down a recent United Nations Security Council resolution on victims of rape in armed conflict. It has withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights Council. The United Nations Human Rights Committee and Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are both without a United States member.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, Mr. Secretary [Pompeo]. A lot of bipartisan and international consensus, consolidated over the postwar decades, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and other horrors, exists as to what human rights are and what America’s role in defending them should be.

Modern human rights are grounded on the dignity inherent in every human being. They are not God-given rights, or Trump-given rights, and they apply to people of all faiths and to those who have none. They include freedom of speech, the press, assembly and religion, and the “right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law,” as the Universal Declaration puts it. They involve combating discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, disability, gender or sexual orientation.

The intention of Pompeo, an evangelical Christian whose beliefs infuse his policy, appears to be to turn back the clock.

In May, The Federal Register said the commission would provide “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.” These “natural rights” at the time, of course, included chattel slavery and the dehumanization of black people, as well as the disenfranchisement of women.

Today, the Trump administration’s war on reproductive rights and L.G.B.T. rights is pretty clear. On gay and transgender issues, it is hostile; its attempt to dehumanize the trans community is evident.

For Pompeo, religious rights are plainly human rights; as to the rest, it’s unclear. As head of the commission, he has appointed Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard professor known as a zealous opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. Other political opinions are represented, but the body is predominantly conservative and religious.

No plausible reason for this strange initiative has been given. Trump, having shown willful neglect toward human rights, now wants to redefine them. The exercise can only reflect his contempt for the rule of law, a free press, an independent judiciary, gays, minorities, women’s reproductive rights, the safety of migrant children, truth and decency — as well as his boundless affection for human rights violators. It is, in other words, a disaster in the making.

Be very, very afraid.

Yet Another Extremist Trump Judicial Nominee

Eighty six years ago Adolph Hitler began his transformation of Germany into something horrible using three means: (i) a constant propaganda campaign of lies that played on Germans' prejudices, (ii) attacks on the free press that sought to expose him for what he was, and (iii) stacking the courts with loyal Nazi judges. Every day Germans and the world ultimately paid a terrible price for the failure of Germans to oppose Hitler when they still had the opportunity to do so.  Fast forward to 2019 America and we see the Trump/Pence regime using the Hitler playbook with too many Americans to complacent to get out and vote - studies show that it was non-voters who elected Trump - or foolishly believing that since they are not among the regime's targets, there is little risk from their doing nothing. History tells us that nothing could be further from the case.  The Trump/Pence regime is busy appointing extremist to the federal courts for lifetime appointments which will harm the rights of many Americans for generations. One of Trump's latest nominees is so extreme that even the spineless Susan Collins will oppose his nomination, even as the rest of Senate Republicans act like Germans who aided Hitler and ultimately destroyed German's democracy.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Christofascist extremist who Trump has nominated for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.  Here are excerpts:

Sen. Susan Collins said Friday she will oppose one of President Trump’s federal judicial nominees over his record opposing LGBTQ rights.

In a statement, the Republican from Maine, who faces reelection next year, voiced concerns regarding Matthew Kacsmaryk’s “alarming bias against LGBTQ Americans and disregard for Supreme Court precedents.”

“Mr. Kacsmaryk has dismissed proponents of reproductive choice as ‘sexual revolutionaries,’ and disdainfully criticized the legal foundations of Roe v. Wade,” the landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion, Collins said. “Such extreme statements reflect poorly on Mr. Kacsmaryk’s temperament and suggest an inability to respect precedent and to apply the law fairly and impartially.”

Kacsmaryk, who serves as deputy general counsel to First Liberty Institute [a Christofascist organization] , which defends religious freedom issues, was first nominated for the lifetime appointment by Trump in 2017, and had to be renominated this year when the Senate failed to confirm him before the end of the last congressional session.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Kacsmaryk’s nomination in January on a party-line vote, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has scheduled a procedural vote on the nomination next week.

LGBT and women’s rights groups are vehemently opposed to his nomination, describing him as an “anti-LGBT activist” and pointing to instances in which he defended discrimination against LGBT people, wrote disparagingly about other gay rights such as marriage and called being transgender “a mental disorder.”

“His record reveals that he will be incapable of treating LGBT litigants fairly — no matter what body of law is at issue in the cases over which he may preside — because he does not acknowledge LGBT people as having a right to exist,” wrote a coalition of 75 organizations in a letter Wednesday to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein (Calif.).

In a statement, the Republican from Maine, who faces reelection next year, voiced concerns regarding Matthew Kacsmaryk’s “alarming bias against LGBTQ Americans and disregard for Supreme Court precedents.”

In a 2015 op-ed for the National Catholic Register, he wrote that sexual revolutionaries were demolishing the four pillars of marriage law: permanence, exclusivity, procreation, and finally “sexual difference and complementarity.”

The “Catechism holds that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,’ ‘contrary to the natural law,’ and ‘do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity,’ ” he wrote. “This view of human sexuality as male and female stands in stark contrast to the opposing definitions of marriage, sexuality and so-called gender identity promulgated by most LGBT scholars and activists.”

He also signed on to a letter that called being transgender a “delusion.”

To me, that is not someone that can be impartial to millions of people in this country who are LGBTQ. That type of demonstrated bias is not ‘he was representing someone’ or ‘he was taken out of context.’ This is his worldview. This is his bias. He has not shied away from it,” said Kristine Lucius, executive vice president for policy and governmental affairs at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which has organized a campaign against Kacsmaryk’s nomination.

Collins, who is a top target for Democrats in 2020, supports same-sex marriage and reproductive rights. But she was criticized by LGBT and women’s rights groups when she became one of the deciding votes that secured Kavanaugh’s place on the Supreme Court.

At the time, Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin encouraged his members to vote out lawmakers who supported Kavanaugh, whose nomination was embroiled by sexual misconduct allegations.

Throughout Trump’s tenure, Republicans have made federal court appointments a top priority. As of Friday, the Senate had confirmed 119 federal judges nominated by Trump.

A number of these nominees have been deemed "unqualified" by the American Bar Association yet Republicans in the Senate have confirmed them as a means to pander to Christofascists and white supremacists who support Trump.  Be very afraid.

The Trump/Pence Regime Wants to Take Our Laws Back to the 1930's

Trump advisers want to return the Supreme Court to the 1930's.

Anyone who was ill-served by the nation's laws in the 1930's - e.g., blacks, gays, women, other minorities, etc. - should be terrified at the prospect of where the Trump/Pence regime and its judge whisperer want to take constitutional law in America.  It was an era where white privilege reigned supreme and life was brutal - and much shorter - for a majority of the population and Jim Crow laws were alive and well.  A piece in Slate profiles one of Trump's top advisers on judicial appointments and the future that he envisions.  It is nothing less than terrifying and one has to wonder what type of sick and perverted individuals would want to return to laws that were harmful to so many.  What's frightening, is Leonard Leo, Trump's adviser already has three of his favored jurists on the U.S. Supreme Court: Roberts, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.  Here are article highlights:

Last week, the Washington Post published a profile of Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo, focusing in part on a speech he gave to the Council for National Policy in which he warmly predicted the Supreme Court would soon return to the pre–New Deal era of “limited, constitutional government.” Leo believes, in other words, that the court’s view of the Constitution was better off 85 years ago than it is today.

“I think we stand at the threshold of an exciting moment in our republic,” Leo told the council at a closed-door meeting in February, audio of which was obtained by the Post. “This is really, I think, at least in recent memory, a newfound embrace of limited constitutional government in our country. I don’t think this has really happened since probably before the New Deal.”

The average American doesn’t know who Leo is, but as the Post piece makes clear, he‘s one of the most influential lawyers in the country. A longtime leader within the Federalist Society, Leo has had Donald Trump’s ear on judicial appointments and has been the main curator of the president’s list of Supreme Court candidates. Two of Leo’s personal picks, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, have been elevated to the highest court in the country since Trump’s election. So when Leonard Leo says he wants to return to a pre–New Deal Constitution, you should listen. And you should be alarmed.

As Leo knows, constitutional law was very different in the 1930s from what it is today. And in a word, it sucked.

In the 1930s, the courts were fully complicit in maintaining the country as a thoroughgoing ethnocracy, governed openly for the benefit of white men. Public schools in 21 states were racially segregated by law. “Separate but equal” schools had been affirmed by the Supreme Court as late as 1927, in a unanimous decision allowing Mississippi to kick a Chinese American girl out of her local “white” school for being a member of the “yellow” race. The outlawing of segregation is settled law in our country, and nobody would dare dream of returning to those antiquated judicial interpretations, you might say? Several of Trump’s judicial nominees have conspicuously, outrageously, refused to say whether they thought Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legal school segregation in 1954, was correctly decided.

In the 1930s, through a combination of discriminatory literacy tests, poll taxes, “good character” requirements, and straight-up violence, less than 1 percent of black people in the Deep South—where they represented more than a third of the population—were registered to vote. The Supreme Court had blessed these intimidation practices for decades, ever since a 1903 decision in which the court said it couldn’t do anything about Alabama’s self-described effort “to establish white supremacy in this state” by refusing to register black voters. Discriminatory voting practices of this sort weren’t banned until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most significant provision of which was gutted six years ago in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts (whom Leo also helped elevate to the court).

In the 1930s, women had no constitutional right to equality. They could legally be kept off juries, given different work hours, paid less money, and imprisoned for using birth control. It would be another four decades before the Supreme Court struck down even a single law for discriminating against women. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch—again, both products of Leo’s vetting—recently dissented from the court’s temporary blocking of a Louisiana law that would have left the entire state with just a single doctor able to perform abortions.

In the first half of the 20^th century, the police could beat confessions out of arrestees. Poor defendants had no right to a lawyer. Evidence could be illegally seized and used in prosecutions. In 1944, for example, South Carolina executed a 14-year-old black boy named George Stinney for the murders of two white girls. He was questioned alone, without his parents or a lawyer present, and convicted by an all-white jury after a two-hour trial and 10 minutes of deliberation. He wasn’t allowed to appeal. He had to sit on books to fit into the headpiece of the electric chair. Only in 2014, 70 years too late, did a circuit court judge vacate the 14-year-old Stinney’s murder conviction. The Stinney case tells you all you need to know about criminal justice in the age Leo wants to bring back.

The post–New Deal court decisions Leo wishes to repudiate are the ones that gave the government the power to enact minimum wage laws, to create unemployment insurance and Social Security, to provide health insurance to the aged and destitute, and to give workers collective bargaining rights. In the 1930s, those too old to work and too poor not to could often expect a quick but painful death. This is the human toll of “limited government.”

If we’re looking for Reagan’s shining city upon a hill, we won’t find it in America’s now-distant past. Not most of us, anyway. And if it’s what Leo is promising us, we can only hope it’s not in America’s future.

Be very, very afraid.

A Final Repudiation Of Phyllis Schlafly

I noted briefly a few nights ago that long time foe to equality Phyllis Schlafly had died.  As one might expect, many right wing and Republican outlets are praising her and some even stating that she "will be missed."  I for one will not miss her and, while I won't be drinking a champagne toast to her passing, I do think that the world became a slightly better place with her toxic message of division and hate with one less voice.  A piece on the Americans United for Separation of Church and State takes a retrospective on Schlfly and the misogyny she so long peddled.  She is a woman who wanted to re-criminalize homosexuality even though she had a gay child herself.  Not exactly a pillar of loving motherhood.  Here are some highlights from the retrospective:

“Today, Phyllis Schlafly died like she lived – with dignity and a smile,” wrote Ed Martin, president of the Eagle Forum, a group Schlafly founded. “Surrounded by her family, Phyllis passed away and entered her reward with the Lord. Her family, friends and staff will miss her. Her nation will be eternally grateful.”

Schlafly was best known for defeating the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s, but her larger  mission was one of seeking to deny people their rights – just because those people failed to live up to her religious ideals.

In recent years, Schlafly’s Eagle Forum turned its ire on the LGBT community, with a flood of hysterical op-eds and articles. At one point, Schlafly even proposed impeaching judges who upheld marriage equality and called on Congress to cut off all federal aid to any state that permitted the practice.

Her nation will be eternally grateful? Sorry, but I have to disagree. Schlafly’s vision of America was one where right-wing Christians of her stripe – she was a traditionalist Roman Catholic but often sounded like a fundamentalist, Religious Right-style evangelical – ruled the roost. Others were second-class citizens. Most Americans aren't grateful for her tireless work to roll back women’s reproductive rights or the hate she spread against those Americans she derisively called “the gays.”

 

Firmly grounded in an “Ozzie and Harriet” mythology, Schlafly was clueless about the realities of modern life. In 1981, she told a U.S. Senate committee that women who are sexually harassed have only themselves to blame. Lecherous bosses, said Schlafly, “hardly ever ask sexual favors of women from whom the certain answer is ‘No.’ Virtuous women are seldom accosted by unwelcome sexual propositions or familiarities, obscene talk or profane language.”

She opposed equal pay for women, fought efforts to make child care more affordable and plentiful and opposed programs to give young people sex education in public schools. (Sex ed., she once opined, is “a principal cause of teenage pregnancy.”)

Schlafly’s views belong to an America of the past. They’re anchored in the America she idealized – the fake 1950 vision of a white, Christian nation where school kids prayed on command and God gave us nuclear weapons to scare off the Reds.

Schlafly’s Potemkin Village of 1950s nostalgia collapsed long ago. It collapsed when some Americans had the temerity to point out that the vision didn’t include them – and noted, by the way, the 1950s weren’t so great for lots of people: blacks living in the Jim Crow South, women fighting in court for the right to work in certain professions, Jewish families seeking the right to live in neighborhoods that sought to exclude them and atheists daring to speak against the “God and country” rhetoric of the Eisenhower Era, to name a few.

Phyllis Schlafly does not represent the future. Her vision is firmly grounded in the past, and, with luck, the nation will continue speeding past it so rapidly that soon none of us will even be able to see its vague outlines.

If you doubt that, simply look at the world around you. You will see that Schlafly’s vision has been repudiated. It was repudiated this morning when millions of women suited up for work in a myriad of professions. It was repudiated all over the nation by same-sex couples, now legally married, who woke up and started another routine day.

You can see the repudiation in the eyes of immigrant families working hard to make the American Dream real for them. It’s reflected in the faces of Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist and Wiccan public school students who long ago decided they won’t accept second-class status.

Schlafly dreamed of an America based on rejection and exclusion. That is not our America. Our America is better than Phyllis Schlafly.  . . . The story of America is not the story of Phyllis Schlafly. We have repudiated her narrow and mean-spirited vision. We know that it’s a relic of a nastier, more unpleasant time.  We won't go back there.

Yes, Phyllis Schlafly helped defeat the ERA. But she lost the larger cultural war. And for that, we can be truly grateful.

As one reader noted in an e-mail to me, Bette Davis is reported to have said about Joan Crawford: Joan Crawford's death "you're only supposed to speak good of the dead... so she's dead ~ good! Phyllis Schlafly is dead. Good!  It is far past time that Schlafly be recognized for the toxic individuals that they are and for good and decent people to call them out for what they are.  Schlafly damaged many lives and enriched herself in the process. 

Ted Cruz’s Coup Against Right-Wing Queen of Hate

Over the years I have followed right wing :family values" groups to know what the enemy is up to so to speak.  One of the groups I have monitored is Eagle Forum - Phyllis Schlafly's organization that is steadfastly against women's rights, gay rights (even though Schlafy has a gay child) and which has a strong racist under current to it - like most lily white "Christian" organizations.  Moreover, Schlafly's an egomaniac with a ego as large as Donald Trumps - which is why she has been eager to endorse Trump's fascist agenda.  Now, in a delicious coup attempt, it appears that Schlafy is at risk of being dethroned from her organization by board members who support of Ted Cruz.  Making it more delicious, one of Schlafy's own children is seemingly are part of the would be palace coup.  Here are highlights from The Daily Beast:

One of the right-wing’s most prominent empires is reeling—and its president says it’s Ted Cruz’s fault.  

Eagle Forum, a conglomerate of conservative groups which anti-feminist icon PhyllisSchlafly started in 1972, has been rocked by inner turmoil over the last week that has pit family members against each other. 

And the group’s head, Ed Martin, says Cruz’s campaign is using its much-discussed “dirty tricks” to sow conflict in the organization as revenge for Schlafly’s endorsement of Donald Trump. 

Schlafly, one of conservatives’ most prominent and visible leaders, played a key role in blocking the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment, and her group claims 80,000 members.

Martin said the Cruz team set its sights on Eagle Forum when Schlafly endorsed the Texan’s opponent. And he said Cruz supporters in the organization leaked private emails to the campaign, and that Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, confronted him about statements in the leaked emails.

Since the first Republican nominating contest, the Cruz campaign has faced allegations that its staff uses underhanded and shady tactics to pull off wins. Cruz himself apologized to then-candidate Ben Carson for an email that went to Cruz supporters the day of the Iowa caucuses suggesting Carson was about to pull out of the race. And Trump regularly criticizes Cruz’s personal integrity, leading rally crowds in chants of “Lyin’ Ted! Lyin’ Ted!”

Not everyone blames Cruz, of course. Adams and other board members—allied against Martin—adamantly dispute that 2016 politicking had anything to do with recent tensions. Nevertheless, the rift shows just how tense this election cycle has become for the Schlaflys, one of the conservative movement’s founding families—and just how fast seemingly unassailable organizations can descend into chaos.

[T]he board passed resolutions to fire Martin as president of that particular organization and to take control of its bank account, which Martin said holds $4 million. When that happened, Schlafly dissented, registering her support for Martin. Martin’s leadership of a separate Eagle Forum group went unchallenged. 

Martin’s sudden firing threw Eagle Forum into chaos, with the anti-Martin board members and Schlafly herself issuing separate statements with contradictory explanations of what went down. It seems likely that more fights will come as Eagle Forum’s board and leadership struggle for power.

For some, these fights are personal. One board member who voted to depose Martin, Anne Cori, is Schlafly’s daughter. 

Cori endorsed Ted Cruz in January. Fellow board members Cathie Adams, Eunie Smith, Rosina Kovar, and Carolyn McLarty have all endorsed the Texas senator as well.

Schlafly didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from The Daily Beast. But in an interview with World Net Daily, she indicated that she thinks the group’s troubles are political payback. “This is a complete takeover attempt,” she told the site. 

In my view, Schlafy is one foul individual and the collapse of her organization would be a positive development for America.  The ultimate irony is that while she blathers about "family values," the groups actual values are akin to those of the notorious Borgia family in Italy.  

Stop Fawning Over Pope Francis

I have made the point several times that while Pope Francis has made nice sounding, conciliatory statements, the reality is that the Roman Catholic Church's position on gays, women in the Church, contraception and a host of other things has not changed.  A change in tone does not equate to a change in dogma or underlying positions.  This doesn't mean that Francis isn't a welcome change from the horrible Pope Benedict XVI.  It simply means that one cannot be deceived by nice sounding statements.  A piece in The New Republic underscores this reality.  Here are highlights:

Even if they themselves don’t believe a word of scripture, many liberals wish to see something of their own politics reflected in the outlook of the Catholic Church—hence the repeated references in recent weeks to the "progressive" Pope and the overrated idea of "liberation theology."

It is predictable that the reactionary politics of the new Pope should be played down by liberal Catholics in favour of his musings on social justice and global capitalism. What’s so depressing has been the extent to which liberal non-believers have fallen so hook, line and sinker for what is in reality nothing more than a clever repackaging exercise.

I say this because, apart from a few centrist musings about inequality, the Catholic Church—which Pope Francis heads and therefore has the power to change—stands on roughly the same political terrain as it did under the leadership of Pope Benedict. Pope Francis’s position on most issues should make the hair of every liberal curl. Instead we get article after article of saccharine from people who really should know better.

But as is so often the case, the search for a hero has resulted in people switching off their critical faculties and overlooking inconvenient truths which don’t align with their worldview. How else could the Pope come out of 2013 a "progressive" icon while at the same time holding views on women and abortion that make Jeremy Clarkson look like a radical socialist?

[T]he Pope’s popularity among the right-on surely has something to do with the fact that women and gay people are still viewed as appendages in the struggle for a better society. The new Pope has done nothing to fundamentally alter the Church’s bigoted stance on homosexuality. He has referred to gay marriage as "moral relativism." He presumably believes that men who sleep with men are going to hell. He views the all-male priesthood and the church’s prohibition of abortion as beyond debate.

[U]nder Francis little of substance has actually changed. The Catholic Church continues to vehemently discriminate against gay people and women, it’s simply sugar-coated its message with fashionable sound bites about inequality. And depressingly this has worked.  

Aside from the fact that we still hold religious figures to a lower standard than secular ones, the fawning over Pope Francis demonstrates something profoundly depressing: in the struggle for a better world, women’s and LGBT rights are still not taken seriously. 

The Core of the GOP Base: America’s Angriest White Men Up Close

The ugliness of the Republican Party base seems to be intensifying and the GOP continues to direct most of its policy formulation efforts - if one can even call it that - towards appealing to angry white men who seem primarily motivated by racism, bigotry and general hatred for everyone others than those who are similarly white and at least token conservative Protestant Christians.  Long term, the approach seems to be a slow form of political suicide given the changing demographics of the nation.  But even putting this fact aside, those whom the GOP most wants to court are not nice or decent people.  At least not in my view.  A piece in the Social Reader takes a good look at these angry white men who are the darlings of the GOP.  The picture that emerges is both ugly and frightening.  It certainly describes much of the areas of Virginia that voted for the GOP candidates in the 2013 elections.  Here are excerpts:

Who are the white supremacists? There has been no formal survey, for obvious reasons, but there are several noticeable patterns. Geographically, they come from America’s heartland—small towns, rural cities, swelling suburban sprawl outside larger Sunbelt cities. These aren’t the prosperous towns, but the single-story working-class exurbs that stretch for what feels like forever in the corridor between Long Beach and San Diego (not the San Fernando Valley), or along the southern tier of Pennsylvania, or spread all through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the vast high plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, through Idaho and Montana. There are plenty in the declining cities of the Rust Belt, in Dearborn and Flint, Buffalo and Milwaukee, in the bars that remain in the shadows of the hulking deserted factories that once were America’s manufacturing centers. And that doesn’t even touch the former states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a culturally approved symbol of “southern pride”—in the same way that wearing a swastika would be a symbol of German “heritage” (except it’s illegal in Germany to wear a swastika).

There’s a large rural component. Although “the spread of far-right groups over the last decade has not been limited to rural areas alone,” writes Osha Gray Davidson, “the social and economic unraveling of rural communities—especially in the midwest—has provided far-right groups with new audiences for their messages of hate. Some of these groups have enjoyed considerable success in their rural campaign.”  

They tap into a long history of racial and ethnic paranoia in rural America, as well as an equally long tradition of collective local action and vigilante justice. There remains a widespread notion that “Jews, African-Americans, and other minority-group members ‘do not entirely belong,’” which may, in part, “be responsible for rural people’s easy acceptance of the far right’s agenda of hate,” writes Matthew Snipp. “The far right didn’t create bigotry in the Midwest; it didn’t need to,” Davidson concludes. “It merely had to tap into the existing undercurrent of prejudice once this had been inflamed by widespread economic failure and social discontent.”

They’re certainly Christian, but not just any Christian—they’re evangelical Protestant, Pentacostalist, and members of radical sects that preach racial purity as the Word of Jesus. (Catholicism is certainly stocked with conservatives on social issues, but white supremacists tap into such a long and ignoble tradition of anti-Catholicism that they tend to have their own right-wing organizations, mostly fighting against women’s rights and gay rights.) Some belong to churches like the Christian Identity Church, which gained a foothold on the Far Right in the early 1980s. Christian Identity’s focus on racism and anti-Semitism provides the theological underpinnings to the shift from a more “traditional agrarian protest” to paramilitarism. It is from the Christian Identity movement that the Far Right gets its theological claims that Adam is the ancestor of the Caucasian race, whereas non-whites are pre-Adamic “mud people,” without souls, and Jews are the children of Satan.

A large proportion of the extreme right wing are military veterans. . . . . Some veterans believed they were sold out by the government [in Vietnam], caving in to effeminate cowardly protesters; they can no longer trust the government to fight for what is right.  . . . . Many of the younger guys are veterans of the first Gulf War, a war that they came to believe was fought for no moral principles at all, but simply to make America’s oil supply safer and to protect Israel from possible Arab attack. They feel they’ve been used, pawns in a larger political game, serving their country honorably only to be spit out and stepped on when they returned home to slashed veteran benefits, bureaucratic indifference to post-traumatic stress disorder, and general social contempt for having fought in the war in the first place. They believed they were entitled to be hailed as heroes . . .

Perhaps what binds them all together, though, is class. Rural or small town, urban or suburban, the extreme Right is populated by downwardly mobile, lower-middle-class white men. All of the men I interviewed—all—fitted this class profile. When I compared with other ethnographies and other surveys, they all had the same profile as well. 

In the United States, class is often a proxy for race. . . . Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for white people, they actually don’t mean all white people. . . . . They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is actually class consciousness without actually having to “see” class. “Race blindness” leads working-class people to turn right; if they did see class, they’d turn left and make common cause with different races in the same economic class.

American men—lacking confidence in the government and the economy, troubled by the changing relations between the sexes, uncertain of their identity or their future—began to dream, to fantasize about the powers and features of another kind of man who could retake and reorder the world. And the hero of all these dreams was the paramilitary warrior.” The contemporary white supremacist movement is the embodiment of these warrior dreams.

They cobble together a theory that explains their plight—grafting together fringe elements of evangelical Christianity, traditional anti-Semitism and racism, and general right-wing paranoia into an amalgam that is loosely held together by a nostalgic vision of hardy, independent frontier manhood. Like the guys who go postal, they externalize their rage . . . . it’s larger, more powerful, and pernicious social forces—Jews, Muslims, minorities generally, women.

So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me.   . . . . But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them.

You might think that the political ideology of the white supremacist movement is as simple as their list of enemies: put down minorities, expel immigrants, push the women out of the workplace, and round up and execute the gays and the Jews. But it’s not nearly so simple.  

There are three parts to their ideological vision. For one thing, they are ferociously procapitalist. They are firm believers in the free market and free enterprise. They just don’t like what it’s brought. They like capitalism; they just hate corporations.

Second, the extreme Right is extremely patriotic. They love their country, their flag, and everything it stands for. These are the guys who get teary at the playing of the national anthem, who choke up when they hear the word America. They have bumper stickers on their pick ups that show the flag with the slogan “These colors don’t run.”   The problem is that the America they love doesn’t happen to be the America in which they live. 

Finally, they believe themselves to be the true heirs of the real America. They are the ones who are entitled to inherit the bounty of the American system. It’s their birthright—as native-born, white American men. . . . This persistent reversal—white men as victim, the “other” as undeservedly privileged—resounds through the rhetoric of the extreme Right.

It is through a decidedly gendered and sexualized rhetoric of masculinity that this contradiction between loving America and hating its government, loving capitalism and hating its corporate iterations, is resolved. Racism, nativism, anti-Semitism, antifeminism—these discourses of hate provide an explanation for the feelings of entitlement thwarted, fixing the blame squarely on “others” whom the state must now serve at the expense of white men. The unifying theme is gender.

This is the group that the GOP has staked its future on.  Much as Hitler and the Nazis used the resentful and those seeking to blame others to fuel their rise to power.  I see it as frightening and am thankful that fast changing demographics will hopefully kill this political movement sooner rather than later. 

Ken Cuccinelli Shares Stage with Anti-Semite; Mark Obenshain Pals With Same BigotUp

Ralph Northam 9-17-2013

Tonight the boyfriend and I attended a fundraiser for Democrat Lt. Governor candidate (pictured above) at the home of Hampton Mayor Molly Ward.  One of the things that Northam stressed is that in today's competitive global economy in order to prosper Virginia needs to be welcoming to all citizens, gay and straight, male and female, black and white, minority member and white, etc.  He also said that the contrast between the GOP statewide ticket and the Democratic ticket on this issue could not be more different.  Underscoring this reality, Ken Cuccinelli shared the stage in Northern Virginia with a far right talk radio host who was making anti-Semitic jokes.  Not surprisingly, GOP Attorney General candidate Mark Obenshain was paling around with the same anti-Semitic bigot.  Virginians need to wake up to the just how extreme and divisive Ken Cuccinelli, "Bishop" Jackson, and Mark Obenshain are and just how damaging they would be to Virginia's image in America and the worldwide community.  The Washington Post looks at the open bigotry at the Northern Virginia event.  Here are highlights:

People brought yellow lawn chairs with the motto “Don’t tread on me,” and at least one tricorner hat was visible in the crowd. John Whitbeck, 10th Congressional District Republican Committee chairman, raised eyebrows when he kicked off the festivities by telling a joke in which the head of the Jewish religion presented the pope with a long, elaborate document that the Jewish leader said was a bill for the last supper.

The crowd laughed uproariously. But American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal political action committee, tweeted about Whitbeck’s “anti-Semitic” opener and the state Democratic Party later circulated a video of the joke.

Sen. David W. Marsden (D-Fairfax), in an interview before the rally, said the gathering was proof that Cuccinelli and his backers were out of step with a Virginia that had evolved into a swing state. Marsden said the definition of liberty promoted by Cuccinelli and tea party members leaves out homosexuals, women seeking abortions and others.  

“The degree of fear and paranoia and misinformation that comes out of the tea party, it’s just chilling,” Marsden said. 

As Blue Virginia reports, Democrat Attorney General candidate  Mark Herring quickly condemned the prejudice demonstrated by Cuccinelli and the his GOP/Tea Party extremists.  Here are highlights:

Democratic candidate for Attorney General Mark Herring condemned inflammatory comments made by 10^th District Republican Committee chairman John Whitbeck. Whitbeck – who has been a strong supporter of Mark Obenshain – made the offensive comments during a rally for Ken Cuccinelli. Herring released the following statement:.

“As a representative of Loudoun County, I have worked hard to foster an environment that is welcoming of people of all faiths, ethnicities and backgrounds. Mr. Whitbeck’s comments stand in stark contrast to those beliefs, and the efforts of so many in our community to promote acceptance.

“His comments were offensive, deplorable and a disgrace to Loudoun County and the Commonwealth of Virginia. Whitbeck needs to issue a public apology immediately for his statement, and every candidate on the Republican ticket should condemn these types of inflammatory comments.”

Naturally, if any apologies are forthcoming, they will be utterly insincere.  What one hears candidate say in their own intra-party gatherings and who they associate with tells the real story about their views and agenda, just as Mitt Romney's comments about "the 47%" said it all in the November 2012 presidential campaign.  The GOP statewide slate only cares about white, conservative far right Christians.  The rest of of us aren't "real Americans' and we are deemed as a problem to be criminalized, eradicated and or disenfranchised. The GOP ticket needs to be defeated and defeated badly on November 5th.

Obenshain and Anti-Semite John Witbeck

Is the Virginia GOP Facing a Blow Out Defeat in November?

The last post looked at the Virginia GOP's spittle flecked and in my view insane Lt. Governor nominee, "Bishop" E. W. Jackson.  But Jackson isn't the Virginia GOP's only problem.  Their gubernatorial candidate Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli is down in the polls and continues to be dogged by his own "Gift Gate" scandal due to his receipt of gifts from Jonnie R. Williams and Star Scientific.  Adding to Kookinelli is a possible "Gas Royalties Gate" arising from his office's improper assistance to gay company litigants trying to screw Southwest Virginia landowners out of gas royalties.  To date, Cuccinelli's explanations simply don't wash - especially give the $140,000 he received from the parent corporation of one of the gas companies - and Southwest Virginia voters seem to be rejected Kookinelli's bullshit excuses.  A column in the conservative Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the hopes of the Virginia GOP that the equally extreme Mark Obenshain will somehow save them from an across the board defeat.  Sadly, the column fails to mention that Obenshain has supported "personhood" legislation for fertilized embryos.  Here are column excerpts:

Republicans want to believe Mark Obenshain is their firewall. The GOP nominee for attorney general, Obenshain isn’t burdened by controversy on the groaning scale that afflicts the party’s candidates for governor and lieutenant governor, Ken Cuccinelli and E.W. Jackson. If they flame out, perhaps Obenshain survives, supplying Republicans a statewide voice and a gubernatorial nominee for 2017.

Not that the lugubrious Obenshain isn’t facing discomfiting questions.  

Among the questions: Obenshain’s election-year legislation — now law — making it harder for Virginians to vote and easier to keep secret that they carry a concealed gun. Obenshain also is harangued for a 2009 measure — later withdrawn — that would have required women report miscarriages to authorities within 24 hours.

Republicans tell themselves there are many reasons to view Obenshain as viable when their other nominees seem less so.

Because Obenshain, from the vote-poor Valley, and Herring, from vote-rich NoVa, are both late baby boomers, barely known outside their parties and have similarly subdued personalities, sharp distinctions in their records may be difficult for voters to comprehend.

Cuccinelli’s continuing ethics problems — and those that have Gov. Bob McDonnell in the crosshairs of federal prosecutors — force Obenshain to distance himself from his running mate. Further, they compel Obenshain to continue spelling out how he, as the state’s chief legal officer, would have prevented Cuccinelli and McDonnell from behaving badly in the first place.

The headwinds buffeting Cuccinelli and headaches caused by Jackson’s smash-mouth rhetoric leave Obenshain no option but to go it alone.

Obenshain could confront a force that not even a flood of advertising can deflect: momentum.  If voters, weary of the scandal that has trivialized Republicans, find themselves two-thirds of the way down the ballot — having already flipped the switch for McAuliffe and Ralph Northam for lieutenant governor — what’s to stop them from making it a trifecta for Democrats?

That the Virginia GOP finds itself in this sad state is due to two factions which need to be held accountable if the GOP suffers a total blow out defeat: The Family Foundation and the Tea Party.   The Virginia GOP sold its soul to these ugly extremists and it may be about to receive what it deserves for doing so.

Ken Cuccinelli’s "Fathers' Rights" Ties Alienate Women Voters

Having been through a very nasty divorce myself after coming out, I know first hand that father's sometimes get the short end of the stick, especially if they are gay and have a homophobic divorce court judge.  That said, however, I cannot understand the mindset of men who want to walk away from support obligations for their children.  It's an issue that should have nothing to do with how much one may despise the soon to be ex-wife.  Yet there are "fathers' rights" organizations around the country that critics say want to reduce child support responsibilities, distort facts about domestic violence and seek to undermine the rights of women in divorce situations.  Not surprisingly GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli has ties to these groups and won their endorsement.  Democrat, Terry McAuliffe - who already enjoys a significant lead over the woman vote - rightly has jumped on Cuccinelli's alliance which undermines his claim to be concerned about women and children.  The Washington Post looks at the unfolding story.  Here are article highlights:

Grignol is also the former leader of Fathers for Virginia, which seeks to “empower divorced fathers as equal partners in parenting,” and of a second group that contends that men are frequently victimized by false allegations of domestic abuse. Grignol did not respond to requests for comment about the groups, which some women’s rights organizations have accused of distorting the facts about domestic violence.

Fathers’ rights groups have urged states to revise their laws to grant men more time with their children in joint custody proceedings. They have been criticized by some women’s groups for seeking to reduce child support payments.

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) and Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) have both vetoed “equal parenting” bills this year that would, among other things, increase the minimum amount of time fathers get with their children in joint custody agreements. Critics of such measures say they remove too much discretion from family court judges.

McCormick said his group hopes to pass similar legislation across the country and “were Ken Cuccinelli to become the governor of Virginia, we believe he might well be receptive to signing it.”

As a state senator in 2005, Cuccinelli offered a bill that would have made it so parents initiating a no-fault divorce could have that action counted against them “when deciding custody and visitation.” The measure never came to a vote, but Cuccinelli won praise from Stephen Baskerville, then-president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, for fighting against the no-fault divorce “epidemic.”

Cuccinelli also was the lone Senate vote against legislation to increase child support payments by tying them more closely to inflation.

A National Organization for Women advisory committee on family law wrote last year that fathers’ rights groups’ “true objectives are to discriminate against, control and punish women by gaining custody of children and to denigrate the personal and economic sacrifices made by mothers for their children.”

Nationally, fathers’ rights groups also have opposed the federal Violence Against Women Act 
This year, 47 state attorneys general sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. Cuccinelli was one of three who did not sign it.

Cuccinelli may claim that he's pro-family, but in reality he is only pro one kind of families: those headed by heterosexual males (or deeply closeted and self-loathing gays like himself).   The man is a menace to Virginia's future. 

The Insanity of the Virginia GOP Slate Speaks Volumes

For years now I have been arguing that the Republican Party - especially here in Virginia - has been taken over by far right religious extremists.  Why?  Because I saw it when it first began in earnest years ago and the insanity and refusal to separate religion from the civil laws caused me to resign from the GOP.  I could not remain in a political party that sought and continues to seek to destroy the separation of church and state and impose a fear and hate based religious dogma on all citizens.   With last weeks nomination of Ken Cuccinelli, E. W. Jackson and Mark Obenshain, the Christofascist take over of the Republican Party of Virginia is complete.  The Family Foundation ("TFF") finally fully controls the levers of power in the Virginia GOP.  Sane and rational Virginians ought to be terrified.  These are NOT nice people.  They have an agenda that is anti-democracy and anti-constitutional rights for all citizens.  E.W. Jackson in particular is the perfect candidate from the perspective of the "world view" of the folks at TFF.  An article in the Washington Post looks at the GOP's extremism and what it may mean in the coming election.  Here are highlights:

As midnight approached on the eve of the Republican convention in Virginia, party loyalists were tipping beers and listening to country music at a rollicking fete hosted by Pete Snyder, a front-runner for the nomination for lieutenant governor.

Down the hall at the Marriott in Richmond, a minister also running for Virginia’s second-highest office, E.W. Jackson, was lingering at his own party, where a Bible and a cross were displayed at the entrance. The ballroom was largely empty. If the excitement at Snyder’s gathering suggested momentum, the quiet at Jackson’s spelled a looming return to obscurity. 

Twenty-four hours later, after delivering a thunderous speech that seized the convention, Jackson was the Republican nominee and the party’s first black candidate for statewide office since 1988. 

Jackson’s words — sometimes eloquent, sometimes raw, often impassioned — are causing anxiety for many Republicans as the resurfacing of his past statements about homosexuality and abortion have threatened to disrupt the campaign. 

Instead of promoting their new ticket, Republicans have answered for Jackson’s once calling gays “perverted” and “sick” and saying Planned Parenthood has been “far more lethal” to blacks “than the KKK.” 

“The Republicans I’m talking to are saying, ‘What the hell are they doing in Virginia?’ ” said Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Is this, ‘101 ways to lose an election’? You’re coming out of the gate with comments everyone has to explain. You’re wasting a lot of time and energy batting that back when you should be doing other things to get the guy known.”

Although unknown to many Republicans, Jackson in recent years has built a following among the most activist of Virginia’s conservatives, many of whom were delegates at the convention. But Republicans are now concerned, Steele said, that Jackson will turn off the party’s own voters. “You can’t have a situation where Republicans say, ‘You know what? I can’t have this’ and they stay home or vote for the other guy,” he said. 

Jackson seems uninterested in moderating himself. He paused between whirlwind campaign stops this week to tell reporters that he doesn’t have “anything to rephrase or apologize for.”  .   .   .   .  Jackson became a Republican in the early 1980s, explaining that Democrats’ embrace of the gay rights movement violated his religious beliefs. In 1989, he joined the opposition to a proposal to ban discrimination against gays and lesbians in Massachusetts.

Helena Dobson, president of Chesapeake’s local NAACP chapter, said she has no relationship with Jackson.

While much of the focus is on Jackson, Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli holds identical views - he's simply a bit more discrete in saying things in public.  A gay activist friend once went under cover to an event at Liberty University and heard Cuccinelli speaking to a closed audience and described Cuccinelli and his views as "very frightening."  One can only hope that someone will secretly film Cuccinelli as happened with Mitt Romney.  Romney would like a flaming liberal in comparison.  The extremism of this ticket needs to be fully exposed.