Right Wing Lunacy Reigns at CPAC

Wayne LaPierre, NRA propagandist ,at CPAC

If one wants a front row seat observing what's wrong with America, a good place to start is at CPAC - the Conservative Political Action Conference - which might better stand for Crazy People Acting Crazy.  The confab is featuring a who's who of hate merchants and, of course, gave a prominent speaking platform to Wayne LaPierre of the NRA who wants every school in America turned into a "hardened site" with heavily armed teachers (the NRA is a "presenting sponsor of the event). Anything rather than adopt common sense gun control measures and a ban of assault weapons. LaPierre clearly puts gun manufacturers' profits ahead of America's school children.  As NPR noted, LaPierre ended his speech, to a standing ovation, by reprising comments he made just over five years ago after the mass-shooting tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut : "To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun."

Also featured as a speaker is French Fascist Marion Maréchal-Le Pen who compared Brexit and the French anti-gay hate group La Manif Pour Tous with the election of Trump, citing all three as examples of the global rise of the right.

In attendance too is the falsely named "Constitution Party" which wants to turn America into a theocracy based on that unhinged group's reading of the Bible.  As might be expected, gays are high on the target list of the Constitution Party:

The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence  . . .  We reject the notion that homosexuals, transgenders or those who are sexually deviant are deserving of legal favor or special protection, and affirm the rights of states and localities to proscribe offensive sexual behavior. We oppose all efforts to impose a new sexual legal order through any courts or legislatures.  Finally, we oppose any legal recognition of homosexual or civil unions. 

Among other "key issues" for the Constitution Party  - and CPAC attendees generally are the following:

• end federal funding of public education
• no infringement on gun ownership
• end binding precedent of court rulings on non-parties to the litigation
• the privatization of Healthcare and Social Security, with Social Security being phased out
• American withdrawal from the United Nations
• anti-immigrant policies

These people are NOT mainstream and are downright frightening.  Oh, and did I mention that the majority of CPAC attendees are Trump supporters?

Christofascists Lobbied Trump for Transgender Ban

While many are news outlets are reporting that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der  Trumpenführer, tweeted ban against transgender Americans serving in the military "came out of the blue," the reality is that the supposed ban was part of Trump's effort to (i) deliver on promises made to evangelical Christian and hate group leaders in June, 2016, and (ii) change the topic from the Russiagate investigations that seem to be turning out more and more potentially damaging information on Trump and his sycophants.   CNN is now reporting that Trump's action was anything but "out of the blue" and that conservative members of Congress have been lobbying long and hard for the transgender ban (and I suspect, the Justice Department filing arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1064 affords no protections to LGBT Americans).  My main complaint with the CNN piece is that it refers to those who lobbied for Trump's action as "conservatives."  These people members of Congress and their masters are not conservatives.  The correct labels for them include theocrats, Christofascists, Christian Taliban, hate merchants, and religious extremists, among others.   Locally, Congressman Rob Wittman seems to be clicking his heels and saluting Trump on this issue.  I have sought to secure an official comment from Wittman's office but have been rebuffed so far.  Here are highlights from CNN's coverage:

Republicans on Capitol Hill are scrambling to respond to President Donald Trump's announcement Wednesday to reinstitute a ban on transgender people serving in the military after conservatives who lobbied the White House say they were pushing only to prevent the Pentagon from paying for medical costs associated with gender confirmation -- not an outright ban.

Trump's decision, announced Wednesday on Twitter and sparking bipartisan outrage on Capitol Hill, comes after the White House was lobbied by conservatives on the issue, including Rep. Vicky Hartzler, who proposed an amendment on the defense authorization bill to ban the Pentagon from paying what Hartzler called "transition surgeries," as well as hormone therapy. The Missouri Republican lobbied the White House in recent weeks to do something on the issue, a GOP congressional aide familiar with the situation told CNN. House Republican leaders knew the White House was already looking to change policy related to transgender people, but only as it relates to how or whether taxpayer money is being used for medical treatments, two Republican leadership sources told CNN. Trump's announcement on a total ban of transgender people serving in the US military was "far beyond leaders' expectations and caught many by surprise," one of those sources told CNN.
 Hartzler tried to engage with Defense Secretary James Mattis on service members' gender-related medical costs before the House took up the defense authorization bill, the aide said. When her amendment to that bill failed, she went to the White House to "address the issue" before the security spending bill was brought to the floor, a GOP congressional aide familiar with the situation told CNN.

News of conservatives lobbying Trump on transgender issues was first reported by Politico. . . . The House defeated Hartzler's amendment 209-214 on the defense authorization bill earlier this month, with 24 Republicans joining with Democrats to defeat the measure.

Some conservatives, such as Rep. Mark Meadows and others in the Freedom Caucus, had been threatening to try to kill the spending package if the transgender health provision was not included, but Republican leadership was confident they had the votes to get the bill over the finish line, according to congressional aides. House conservatives were trying to avoid a roll-call vote, too, pushing leadership to add the amendment banning medical expenses for trans service members as a "self-executing" provision to the House Rule for the security bill, which would have avoided a specific vote, according to a senior GOP aide. But leadership rejected that idea.
 House armed services committee Chairman Mac Thornberry told CNN Trump's decision appeared to catch the Pentagon by surprise, too, in addition to Congress.

"It was a complete surprise, not only to us but to the Pentagon apparently," Thornberry said.
  

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. 

Christofascists: Only Christian Males Are Eligible For Public Office

As the GOP presidential nomination circus descends into crazy land, the Christofascists are coming forward to underscore just how insane and anti-democracy oriented the GOP base has become.   The misnamed Christian Anti-Defamation Commission - which wants a license for "Christians" to discriminate against others who do not subscribe to their misogynous beliefs -  is now pontificating that only Christians are eligible to hold public office and that uppity women should be barred from public office.  Right Wing Watch  has details.  Here are highlights:

Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission released a new video today aimed at helping his fellow right-wing Christians understand "the biblical qualifications for political office," by which he meant that all of our elected leaders must be Christians ... and men.

"What should be look for in our elected officials?" Cass asked, rhetorically. "The first qualification is they must be a Christian ... What a candidate professes about God is absolutely critical, it will profoundly shape his leadership. Genuine reverence for the Lord is the foundation of knowledge ... so we need a leader who is alive spiritually and who will lead in the fear of God."  And those leaders, Cass explained, must be men.

"The biblical biological requirement for office is you must be male," he stated. "Civil leadership should be conceived of as an extension of the family and God's created order. God established man as the head of the woman and the woman as his helpmate ... In society, the same roles apply as is ordained in the family and in the church."

"The ministry of justice that God has given to the state is generally a man's job," Cass continued. "Yet, there are exceptions in the Bible where God has raised up women like Deborah to judge and even deliver Israel. But it's considered an indictment when there's no strong, godly men to lead and protect their families and society." 

What can I say?  These people have based their world and political views on the writings of anonymous authors/herders from more than 2000 years ago, who knew NOTHING of modern knowledge, science, and sexuality.   A Harry Potter story or a Lord of the Rings story has as much substance to back it up as do the Old Testament writings.

The Republican Fringe Festival

GOP clown bus contenders

As Christofascists and Tea Party loons - who are 85% Christofascists masquerading under a different moniker - have taken control of the Republican Party base, driving sane people out of the party, the quality of Republican candidates has taken on the appearance of a carnival of freak shows.  The likes of Dwight Eisenhower or even Ronald Reagan could never be serious contenders now that the embrace of ignorance and every imaginable conspiracy theory is the norm within the GOP base.  I know so many former Republicans and the few moderates who are left are mostly women who built their social lives around Republican women's clubs and seemingly try to ignore the insanity swirling around them.  (Yes, Karen, I am talking about you).  A piece in the New York Times looks at the freak fringe festival that is the GOP presidential candidate pool.  Here are excerpts:

In 2008, Mike Huckabee ran for president as a likable chucklehead who had lost 100 pounds. And you can, too! Now he’s running for president as a grievance–burdened theocrat who has lost his mind. In the interim, he lent his name to infomercials hawking a dubious diabetes treatment of cinnamon and some other concoction, putting the Huckster in Huckabee.

In 2005, Carly Fiorina was fired as chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard, after laying off nearly 30,000 people and overseeing the collapse of the company’s stock price. She left with a $21 million severance package. She then lost a Senate race in California by a million votes. Now she’s running for president. And why not? Rewarded for failure in business, she’s trying it in politics.

 

Up until 2013, Dr. Ben Carson was known mainly as a celebrated neurosurgeon, much in demand on the speaking circuit for his inspirational talks. But then he compared President Obama to a psychopath, said expanding health care was the worst thing to happen to this country since slavery, and claimed homosexuality was a choice, because “people go into prison straight — and when they come out, they’re gay.” Of course, he’s now running for the highest office in the land.

Last election cycle, the Republican presidential field was a clown car, holding the thrice-married Newt Gingrich lecturing about values, the pizza magnate Herman Cain fending off sexual harassment claims, and Michele Bachmann confusing John Wayne with a serial killer. That was just the front seat. This time around it’s a clown bus, with as many as 17 Republicans expected to compete for the nomination.

Most of them are unelectable, to say the least. But can any of them get out of the party’s winnowing period without saying things they picked up in the far right netherworld? Probably not. As previous gaffe-a-matics have shown, it pays to be crazy. And for many Republicans, crazy is the new mainstream.

There is no ceiling for crazy in Texas, nor political consequence. This year, the Lone Star State’s most odious export is Senator Ted Cruz, who also has some concern about the nefarious designs of our military, and those Walmart tunnels. He couldn’t just say, as the Pentagon did, that our troops would soon be conducting a long-planned field operation, called Jade Helm 15. He had to dog-whistle to the mouth frothers.

If you don’t think the inability to distinguish a military exercise from a totalitarian takeover disqualifies you from leading the free world, Fox News has a hosting chair for you in its studios. That’s where Mike Huckabee promoted his brand of Gomer Pyle politics over the last few years, building a following for quack health remedies and Christian victimhood.

Since moving out of the Fox nursing home, he’s gone ever deeper and darker, all while traveling by private jet and building a palace in Florida. . . . . Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister who learned his shtick on the traveling preacher circuit, has become an outright theocrat, attacking the constitutional foundation against state-sanctioned religion.

Ben Carson, like Huckabee, sees the secular world through Scripture. He makes much of his standing as a Seventh-day Adventist . . . But the Adventists, to their credit, are distancing themselves from Carson. Following his presidential announcement, the church released a statement warning officials that the pulpit should remain neutral in politics, based on “our historical position of separation of church and state.”

[I]n the last week Republicans have gained two people whose political philosophy could find a home among Iran’s governing ayatollahs, and a failed chief executive who thinks driving a great company into the ground is a good business model. All are featured prominently in conservative media.What this shows is that, if you’re on television long enough, you start to think you’d make a good president.

I shake my head in dismay over what has become of a political party that once valued, logic, reason, science and staying out of people's bedrooms and allowing citizens to follow their own religious beliefs or no religious beliefs.  The rest of the world must think Americans have gone insane.

Quarantines for AIDS Victims: The Mike Huckabee You May Not Remember

Yesterday one of the foulest of GOP presidential candidates formally announced his candidacy: Mike Huckabee.  While he tried to come off as folksy and concerned about average Americans, he had total amnesia as to how those same Americans have come to find themselves in financial straits: failed GOP policies, George W. Bush/Dick Cheney's unfunded wars, and unfettered Wall Street greed that the GOP endorsed.  Huckabee - at least from the portions of his speech that I heard - tried to stay away from "social issues" but it is important to remember that his views have not changed and that he has not "evolved" whatsoever.  A piece in Mother Jones reminds us what Huckabee is really all about.  Here are highlights:

Mike Huckabee . . . . . launched his second bid for the White House in his hometown of Hope, Arkansas, vowing to stop the "slaughter" of abortion and calling for the protection of the "laws of nature" from the "the false God of judicial supremacy." 

Huckabee is joining a GOP field that's bigger and more competitive than the one he out-hustled to win the Iowa caucuses seven years ago. The Christian conservatives who flocked to the former Baptist preacher in 2008 can now turn toward other evangelical-minded candidates in the GOP presidential race.

Since dropping out of the 2008 race, he's flaunted a more combative, occasionally conspiratorial brand of politics—flirting with birtherism, advising prospective enlistees to avoid joining the armed forces until President Barack Obama has left office, and, just last month, warning social conservatives that the United States is "moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity."

Huckabee is staying true to the kinds of red-meat issues he first entered politics to promote, in a long-shot 1992 bid for Senate against Democratic incumbent Dale Bumpers.

Huckabee, then a Baptist pastor who operated a small television station out of his Arkadelphia church, made sex and morality the centerpieces of his '92 campaign—and he preached as fiery a message from the stump as he did from the pulpit. The novice politician let loose with eyebrow-raising tirades that occasionally put him to the right of the most fire-breathing conservatives. He endorsed quarantining AIDS patients, condemned efforts to shield homosexuals from discrimination, and called for the death penalty to be imposed on big-time drug dealers.

He endorsed quarantining AIDS patients from the rest of society—a radical view even among conservatives at the time—while arguing that the severity of the epidemic had been exaggerated because gay people wielded so much political clout. The federal government should spend less money on AIDS, he insisted, and more on diseases that the afflicted had not brought on themselves, such as cancer.

He attacked his opponent for supporting the Americans with Disabilities Act (because it included protections for AIDS patients) and a 1991 civil rights bill that would have prohibited housing discrimination based on sexual orientation.

According to Huckabee, being gay wasn't just a sin—it should be a criminal offense. . . .
calling for enforcement of state sodomy laws," which made gay sex a felony "crime against nature" in many states.

"I think he's the same guy who started out," says Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times, who covered the 1992 race. "He's got a penchant for sort of cheap-shot quips. He thinks a lot of himself. He thinks he can talk himself out of anything. The main thing I still marvel at is how many people think he's a nice guy, because he's got a real mean streak."

But at this point, after spending the years since the 2008 election feeding red meat to his base, the tapes may not even matter much. In just the last six months, he's urged states to ignore a possible Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage and attacked Jay-Z for "arguably  crossing the line from husband to pimp by exploiting his wife [Beyonce] as a sex object." Researchers won't have to scour church basements for dusty VHS cassettes containing his stem-winding sermons. They can just turn on the television.

The man was and remains an extremist.  One can only hope that the mainstream media will get off its lazy ass and expose Huckabee for the foul individual that he is.

The GOP’s "Post-racial" Fantasy World

For a party that increasingly uses "dog whistle" sound bites to stir up support among the growing number of white supremacists in the GOP base, many of which are members of supposedly Christian "family values" groups, it defies belief when Republicans criticize Democrats for focusing on race.  These Republicans claim that we are now in  - or should be in - a post racial society even as their actions indicate something very, very different - and very racist.   Never let it be said that hypocrisy isn't one of the main attributes of today's GOP!  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP's real view of "post racial" means and it is pretty ugly.  Here are excerpts:

Rand Paul is not alone. It’s not just the Kentucky senator complaining about folks at MSNBC [Rachel Maddow et al.] who “misrepresent” his past viewpoint opposing the Civil Rights Act by replaying videotape of him refusing to support it. It’s a malady affecting the GOP as a whole as its racial incoherence reaches a new high.

On the one hand, there’s Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, blasting Democrats for waging a “war on whites”—it’s only Republicans who are “beyond race,” as he made plain in a follow-up interview.

Then there’s the Maryland GOP, which has its hands full with a wealthy, self-funded county council candidate, Michael Peroutka, who’s a past leader of the League of the South, a group that thinks the wrong side won the Civil War, and whose president, Michael Hill, recently openly fantasized about creating their own three- to five-man death squads. The squads’ “primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite.” There’s even a videotape of Peroutka leading a meeting of the League of the South in singing “the national anthem,” as he introduced it—yes, “Dixie.”

Peroutka himself uses exactly the same sort of rhetoric that Brooks uses—he’s not the racist, he explains, the Democrats are! They’re the real haters, the real dividers of America—despite the fact that Michael Hill, founder and president of the League of the South recently wrote:

It is clear, then, that God intended men to live separately with their own languages, kith and kin, and nations. Therefore, nations (i.e. peoples) have a Biblical mandate to exist and thereby to protect their interests from those who would destroy them either by war or more subtle means.

Because of a resurgence of godless multiculturalism and universalism (the new Tower of Babel), white Western Christians are threatened with extinction as a separate and identifiable people because of their own weakness and lack of Biblical understanding about the God-ordained principles of nationhood. While all other “nations” (i.e. groups based on race and ethnicity and “blood and soil”) are encouraged to preserve themselves and their cultures, white Christians in the West (the descendants of Japheth) are told that we must give up everything we have in order to placate those different from ourselves and who bear some alleged grievance toward us (i.e. slavery, “racism,” hatred, etc.)

It’s the language of theocratic white nationalism–which is a great deal more specific. It’s surely not the case that every Republican is a secret white supremacist à la Michael Hill—far from it.  . . . Yet, it is true that strikingly similar arguments are made by Republicans of all different stripes—including those in the League of the South—absolving themselves of any racial animus and shifting blame to everyone else instead. And those same arguments persist right alongside recurrent racist incidents.

That’s why Rand Paul’s racial incoherence is not just the image problem of one leading presidential contender, it’s why Mo Brooks is not just an isolated congressperson, and why Michael Peroutka is not just an obscure local candidate. They are all actors in a much broader drama . . .

The GOP’s continued dependence on Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy is an inescapable fact of life—even affirmed by insiders like Lee Atwater—although sophisticates like RealClearPolitics senior analyst Sean Trende have tried to argue that the South’s shift is driven by economics, not race. 

America’s overt anti-racist consensus is so powerful, however, that Republicans simply can’t handle that truth, which is why they’ve developed elaborate conceptual workarounds that allow them to pretend that they’re the real anti-racists, no matter what.

Brooks’ claim that Democrats were fomenting a “war on whites” can be read as a perfect illustration of Corey Robin’s thesis in “The Reactionary Mind,” that “all rightwing ideologies, from the eighteenth century through today, are historical improvisations on a theme: the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”

Today’s conservatives are particularly keen on feeling the felt experience. They all want to impeach Obama—but no one’s really sure what for. There’s just this felt experience that he deserves it somehow—a felt experience that him being in the White House steals something essential from them—the “real Americans.”

It might seem bizarre that an advocate of Southern secession would claim to be anti-racist, but that’s exactly the line that Peroutka would take, when questioned—showing just how far this feigned posture of wounded innocence can go. The “American View” website, sponsored by Peroutka’s law firm, even contains a 1956 article defending segregation, which begins, à la Rand Paul 2010, “Whereas liberty is a prerequisite to happiness, the unrestricted right to discriminate is in turn a prerequisite to liberty,” and goes on to say, “We see no reason why men should not discriminate on grounds of religion, race, or nationality, if they wish.” Such are Peroutka’s anti-racist bona fides.

The rhetorical strategy here is quite clear: If you can rebrand the party of racial equality as the party of racial animus, then you can blame them for anything. And since the GOP can’t rebrand itself, rebranding the Democrats as “the real racists” is the only option they have. Peroutka may indeed be so extreme that even calling him “ultra-conservative” is a form of camouflage, but the rhetorical strategies he uses are more or less commonplace throughout today’s GOP. Their racial incoherence reflects a broader rhetorical, moral and ideological incoherence that’s extremely difficult to pin down, precisely because its so omnipresent, though rarely in such malignant forms as those discussed above.

It's all very, very ugly.  And it should be frightening for gays as well since these extremists hate us almost as much - or more in some instances - than they hate blacks.

Imposing Religion on Workers

In addition to the presence of a well educated population, one of the reasons that religion has withered in Western Europe is because the memory of the excesses of religion in the past are still remembered.  Wars of religion, the special rights granted to the Church and general behavior that was the antithesis of true Christian conduct soured the populace on a political-religion merger that generally worked against the interest of the majority and favored a powerful elite.  As often seems to be the case, America - and conservatives in particular - never learn from history or the experiences of others.  A main editorial in the New York Times looks at yesterday's horrific Supreme Court ruling that now allows employers to impose their religious beliefs on workers, the majority of whom likely hold contrary beliefs.  One can only hope the blow back is swift and extreme.  Here are excerpts:

The Supreme Court’s deeply dismaying decision on Monday in the Hobby Lobby case swept aside accepted principles of corporate law and religious liberty to grant owners of closely held, for-profit companies an unprecedented right to impose their religious views on employees.

It was the first time the court has allowed commercial business owners to deny employees a federal benefit to which they are entitled by law based on the owners’ religious beliefs, and it was a radical departure from the court’s history of resisting claims for religious exemptions from neutral laws of general applicability when the exemptions would hurt other people.

[T]he immediate effect, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in a powerful dissent, was to deny many thousands of women contraceptive coverage vital to their well-being and reproductive freedom. It also invites, she said, other “for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faiths.” 

Nothing in the contraceptive coverage rule prevented the companies’ owners from worshiping as they choose or advocating against coverage and use of the contraceptives they don’t like.

Mr. Alito’s ruling and a concurrence by Justice Anthony Kennedy portray the decision as a narrow one without broader application, like denying vaccine coverage or job discrimination. But that is not reassuring coming from justices who missed the point that denying women access to full health benefits is discrimination.

Perhaps the owners of Hobby Lobby should recall what happened to high church clerics in the Place de la Concorde in Paris and those who demanded special rights based on religion.   Similar lessons come from the Spanish Civil War when many clerics suffered for the Church's abuse of the majority in favor of the few.  Demanding special rights sometimes leads to extreme consequences.

Chief Justice John Roberts, an Abysmal Failure

Chief Justice John Roberts once stated that he wanted to restore the image of the United States Supreme Court with the American public.  Instead, he has led the Court to historic lows in public approval and seems hell bent on crafting majority opinions that history will view as horrifically wrong.  While Roberts Court's rulings may sit well with big business and theocrats, they ought to send shivers down the backs of most Americans.  A piece in Salon looks at the sinking image of the Supreme Court and the ways in which Roberts will be remembered, absent huge changes, as an abysmal failure by history.  Here are article highlights:

It wasn’t quite March 6, 1857, or Dec. 12, 2000, but make no mistake: June 30, 2014, was not a good day for the U.S. Supreme Court. Not simply because it saw the court once again unveil two major decisions decided by a slim majority along partisan lines, but because the argument offered by the majority in the more controversial and closely followed of the two decisions was so conspicuously unprincipled that it will almost surely further erode public confidence in the nation’s highest court. As a Gallup poll also released Monday morning showed, it was already low; I bet it’s about to sink even lower.

In order to understand why Monday was such an important — and unfortunate — day for one of the United States’ most hallowed institutions, it’s necessary to revisit something Chief Justice John Roberts said in an interview way back in 2006. After crediting John Marshall’s legendary diplomatic skills for maintaining the unity and establishing the credibility of the court during its crucial early years, Roberts argued that, after 30-odd years of discord and squabbling, the Supreme Court was “ripe for a similar refocus on functioning as an institution” rather than as a collection of individuals with their separate politics, prejudices and philosophies. If the court failed to come together under his leadership, Roberts warned, it would “lose its credibility and legitimacy as an institution.”

Remember now, this was in 2006, when 5-4 splits on major, hot-button decisions was not yet the norm. 

[I]t’s hard to conclude that John Roberts is, by the standards he established in 2006, anything more than an abysmal failure. More than at any time since perhaps the Lochner Era, the court is not only seen as a political actor, but is considered a particularly ideological and combative one at that. . . . . In 2005, Gallup asked Americans how much confidence they had in the Supreme Court: 41 percent said “a great deal” or “quite a lot.” That number today? A paltry 30 percent. 

 It’s in this context that Monday’s two big rulings — Harris v. Quinn and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. — are most properly understood.

So when Justice Alito, who was the chief author of both of this term’s blockbuster decisions, relies on arguments as transparently political as those he wielded to decide Harris and Hobby Lobby, it makes Roberts’ work toward improving the court’s image that much harder. 

In Roberts’ court, it’s not abstract ideas of justice and law and republican government that win the day — it’s corporations, religious conservatives, employers and anyone who worries first and foremost about the interests of the powerful and the elite. Unless John Roberts’ goals were other than those he outlined in 2006, Monday’s decisions can only be interpreted as yet another saddening defeat.

 When the vast majority of the public loses confidence in the Supreme Court, it does not bode well for the rule of law.  

Hobby Lobby Founder Seeks to Enforce a Christian Nation

As readers of this blog know very well, I hold nothing but contempt for Christofascists - especially those who claim to support the U.S. Constitution while in fact seeking to subvert it and destroy the rights of others.  A case in point: the evangelical owners of Hobby Lobby founder which has brought a lawsuit challenging the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act.  A piece in Politico looks at the theocratic agenda of these people and their goal of limiting the constitutional rights of others.  It is another example of how the disingenuous cry of "religious liberty" is being used to deprive others of the religious liberty that the Christofascists want only for themselves.  Here are article excerpts:

The evangelical owners of Hobby Lobby made a fortune selling crafts supplies and made headlines fighting government-mandated birth control coverage. They’re also using their billions to sell the American public on the literal truth of Scripture — through a public-school Bible curriculum, a huge museum around the corner from the Smithsonian and public forums on the faith of the founding fathers.

The Green family may be best known in secular circles for their lawsuit against Obamacare, a high-stakes — and highly political — case that could undercut the administration’s goal of setting minimum standards for health care coverage. By the end of this month, the Supreme Court will decide if the federal government can force the Greens to include methods of contraception they deem sinful as part of employees’ health insurance.

The pending Hobby Lobby ruling has thrust the Greens into the national spotlight, but the family’s mission is far bigger than a single court case. They’re spending hundreds of millions on a quiet but audacious bid to teach a wayward nation to trust, cherish — and heed — the Bible.

Most provocatively, they’ve funded a multimillion-dollar effort to write a Bible curriculum they hope to place in public schools nationwide. It will debut next fall as an elective in Mustang High School, a few miles from Hobby Lobby’s Oklahoma City headquarters.

A draft of the textbook for the first of four planned yearlong courses presents Adam and Eve as historical figures and introduces God as “faithful and good,” “gracious and compassionate” and “an ever-present help in times of trouble.” A list of “curses for disobeying the Lord” warns of defeat, fever and “disaster and panic in everything you do.”

Hobby Lobby founders David and Barbara Green and their three adult children — sons Steve and Mart and daughter Darcee Lett — have donated generously to Christian institutions over the years, but these projects are on another scale entirely. A source close to the family estimates the museum alone will end up costing as much as $800 million, including the acquisition of thousands of ancient artifacts.

The family’s vision is beginning to stir concern, not just among the ACLU and atheist groups such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation, but even from some Bible scholars.

The plans that have been made public so far — including the high school curriculum — seem aimed at portraying Scripture as historically accurate and an unequivocal force for good, said John Kutsko, executive director of the international Society of Biblical Literature, the oldest and largest organization dedicated to Biblical scholarship.

That approach fails to incorporate the latest scholarship, acknowledge that the Bible has also played a role as a tool of oppression or recognize different religious viewpoints, Kutsko said.

“It’s a simple, superficial, literal reading of the Bible,” Kutsko said.

As presented, the curriculum is “startlingly irresponsible” — and likely unconstitutional, as well, since public schools are allowed to teach about religion but can’t promote any particular theology, said Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University who has reviewed the text.

“They don’t seem to realize that their claims about the Bible’s reliability are statements of faith, not statements of fact,” Chancey said.

Eventually, the foundation developing the curriculum hopes to sell it to districts across the nation. Steve Green has said he dreams of it one day becoming a mandatory course for all high school students.

These people and Christofascists like them are an insidious cancer and a clear a present danger to the freedom of others.  The sooner that the larger society recognizes the danger and the theocratic goals of these folks the better.  it goes without saying that I will never be found darkening the threshold of a Hobby Lobby store.