Justin's Political Corner

A firestorm appears to be brewing in North Carolina this week after state Senator Tommy Tucker (R-Union County) uttered thirteen now-infamous words to a North Carolina newspaper publisher: 

“I am the senator. You are the citizen. You need to be quiet.”

The story of what lead up to these fateful remarks begins in the North Carolina legislature. Tucker (and several other conservatives) just pushed an egregious piece of legislation through the State and Local Government committee that would place severe limits on government transparency. According to the Charlotte Observer, “The legislation, Senate Bill 287, would allow certain local governments to stop notifying the public about crucial government activities in the local newspaper. The governments could instead just post legal notices in the bowels of their websites, where few people are likely to see them.”

Throughout most of our national history, requiring the government to notify citizens of major changes to zoning, projects, etc. has been a common sense measure to add checks and balances to government. The mere notion that a government official would attempt to halt this measure - to reduce the methods and ease in which it’s citizens can obtain vital information - is shameful.

The Observer continued, “A check of 20 N.C. cities in 2011 found that the local newspaper’s website attracted audiences 65 times larger than the local municipal website. In Charlotte, the Observer’s website attracted an audience 16 times bigger than the Charlotte-Mecklenburg government site. That’s not an insult to the government websites. But it is a reminder that newspapers and their websites are in the mass communication business; municipal governments are not.”

After the hearing, those potentially affected by the legislation decried the bill sponsors’ efforts to “break the back” of local newspapers. According to the the Raleigh News and Observer, this happened next:

The committee passed the measure by voice vote. Bussian, the press association lobbyist, said the committee voted 6-5 to reject the measure. Tucker, the chair, rejected a subsequent appeal for a show of hands and declared the meeting adjourned. 

At that point, Hal Tanner, publisher of the Goldsboro News-Argus, approached Tucker. He told him he thought the vote was handled in a manner inconsistent with Republican stands for open government. 

“I said, ‘We just got through dealing with Jim Black,’ ” Tanner later recalled, referring to the former Democratic House speaker jailed on corruption charges. 

“I’m not Jim Black, I’m not Jim Black,” an angry Tucker replied. Senate rules prohibit roll call votes in committee.

Later, in an email to members, the press association quoted Tucker telling Tanner: “I am the senator. You are the citizen. You need to be quiet.” [emphasis mine]

It seems that Tucker - besides having a temper and a problem with government transparency - also has an issue following simple rules of order in conducting congressional business. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that he had to repeatedly verbally disassociate himself from another legislator convicted on corruption charges. That’s just speculation though. It does make you wonder why a politician would go to such great lengths to keep his constituents in the dark though, doesn’t it?

If you’d like to let Tucker know transparency is vital to effective government, you can contact  him through his Facebook page, via his office phone at (919) 733-7659, or via email at Tommy.Tucker@ncleg.net.

The Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber has penned a letter to gay teens — which he condescendingly qualifies as “gay” teens — that confirms the clear animus he and his fellow conservatives have for LGBT people. His outright condemnation that homosexuals are sinner going directly to Hell is offensive enough, but worse yet, he suggests that gay teens are not depressed because of the homophobia they experience, but merely because they’re sinners:

God’s word also says that when we sin sexually, it’s particularly egregious because our bodies are the temple of Christ. This separation from God – a natural result of sexual sin – can lead to depression and even despair.

If you feel such despair, know this: it is not “homophobia” causing it, as adult enablers might tell you, but, rather, it is the sin itself that causes it (or struggling alone, absent Christ, with the temptation to sin). […]

If you continue down this wide, empty path, make no mistake: it will not “get better.”

It gets much, much worse. […]

Kids, take your sexual confusion – your struggle with sin – to Christ.

No one else can give you rest.

Matt Barber = a donkey-raping shit eater.

h/t: Zack Ford at Liberty Counsel

In her blogpost on her show’s website, far-right anti-LGBTQ homophobic KFTK radio host Dana Loesch makes baseless cheap shots against people who support allowing gays into the Boy Scouts of America and also mocks the “It Gets Better” campaign founded by Dan Savage.

She even mocked the ACLU, protesters against Chick-Fil-A, and even against Attorney General Eric Holder in her farce of a PSA.

Her blogpost that’s full of lies on DanaLoeschRadio.com:

It gets better, unless you’re the Boy Scouts, then culture puts a ‘kick me’ sign on your back.The PSAs that tell kids “It gets better?” Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t. It never gets better. It stays the same. Bullies grow up to be bigger bullies, bullies who join the ACLU, MMfA, OFA, or some hokey acronym’d org and then get paid to bully others for a living. I had a bully once. 

Apparently it never dawned on any of these activists that here in America you can start your own group and create your own rules. If you dislike how the Boy Scouts operate, then don’t join. Churches sponsor around 70% of the Scout troops anyway, so it’s not like their beliefs are a secret. Create your own group and run it your own way.This insistence that everyone be of hive mind and accept the same things and establish a boring homogenous culture where if everyone is special no one is betrays the “individualism” that the left preaches. If you’re so “pro-choice,” then leave the choice of which group to join or support to the people. Offer them competition. Create other choices, alternatives.

But stop the bullying and the lawfare. That doesn’t make it better.

And to make things worse for Loesch and other homophobic loons on the right, the majority of Americans surveyed in a Quinnipiac poll released today (02.06.2013) supports allowing gays into the BSA 55%-33%, or a +22% differential in favor of allowing them in.


Total:

Continue ban         33%  
End ban 55 
DK/NA                12     

Dem/GOP/IND:

Dem: 

Continue ban 19% End ban  71%  DK/NA 10% 

GOP: 

Continue ban 51% End ban 33% DK/NA  16% 

IND: 

Continue ban  31% End ban  57%  DK/NA  12% 

Quinnipiac:

The Boy Scouts of America should drop its ban on openly gay members, American voters say 55 - 33 percent in a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. 

There is a large gender gap as women support gay scouts 61 - 27 percent, compared to 49 - 39 percent among men, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds. White Catholics support gay scouts 63 - 25 percent. Among white Protestants, 44 percent say open up scouting and 41 percent say no. White evangelical Protestants oppose gay scouts 56 - 33 percent. 

One troubling finding for Scouting in America is that 54 percent of voters say they were Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, while only 36 percent of voters, including 55 percent of former scouts, say they have children in Scouting. 

“Now that the Armed Forces ban on openly gay service members has been lifted, and polls show increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage, most American voters think it’s time to open up the Boy Scouts too,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. 

(cross-posted from DanaBusted.blogspot.com)

Mix It Up at Lunch Day is one of those programs that just seems like a nice thing to do.

The idea is that on one day of the school year, kids are invited to have lunch with the kind of kids they don’t usually hang out with: the jocks mix with the nerds, lunch tables are racially integrated, et cetera. Sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center as part of their Teaching Tolerance division, it arose out of a broad effort to tackle the problems of bullying in the schools and bigotry in society – and it appears to have been effective in breaking down stereotypes and reducing prejudice. Over 2,000 schools nationwide now participate in the program, which is set to take place this year on 30 October.

You can argue about how permanent its effects are, or whether other approaches might be better, but the idea of making new friends in the lunchroom seems utterly benign. Right?

Wrong, as it turns out – at least, according to the American Family Association, a radical right-wing evangelical policy group. Mix It Up at Lunch Day is, in fact, part of “a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools,”according to the AFA literature. The program “is an entry-level ‘diversity’ program designed specifically by SPLC (sic) to establish the acceptance of homosexuality into public schools, including elementary and junior high schools,” warns the AFA website. “See if your child’s school is on the list.”

The AFA has urged parents to keep their kids home on 30 October, and claims that at least 200 schools have responded to its charge by canceling the program.

There’s a backstory here. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has fought for civil rights causes since its founding in 1971, conceived and promoted Mix It Up at Lunch as part of their Teaching Tolerance program. The SPLC also, as it happens, named the AFA, along with a dozen other “pro-family” groups, as a “hate group” in 2010, citing, among other factors, AFA’s expressed views on same-sex relationships. The “homosexual agenda” is not the only factor in the SPLC’s decision to include AFA on the list. AFA’s director of issues analysis, Bryan Fischer, has appeared to suggest that what is biblically deemed “sexual immorality” merits punishment by death. He evidently hates Muslims, too, having recently opined that “allowing a mosque to be built in town is fundamentally no different than granting a building permit to a KKK cultural center.”

So, now it’s payback time. The AFA’s jihad against Mix It Up at Lunch Day is its way of saying “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” It has come up with its own list of boycotts and hate groups, and sure enough the SPLC, on account of its “incendiary language,” is on that list.

Funny word games aside, the SPLC is right. It is, by now, well known that the AFA and the kind of interests they represent spread conspiratorial falsehoods about the LGBT community, placing blame for a wide variety of social ills on a “gay agenda.” They also seem to support a certain type of bullying and bigotry in public schools – the faith-based kind – and believe there should be more of it.

One example comes from an AFA cultural ally: Gateways to Better Education, formed in 1991 by Focus on the Family in tandem with a rightwing Christian legal advocacy group that calls itself the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Gateways publishes a “Guide for Commemorating Religious Freedom at School.” But the freedom Gateways and the ADF have in mind applies only to those who share their religion.

This type of rhetoric is also championed by a segment of Jewish conservatives. Alarmed that Obama won 78% of the Jewish vote in 2008, they accused Democratic Jews of being “Jinos” – Jews In Name Only. “They eat bagels and lox; they watch ‘Schindler’s List,’” writes Town Hall columnist Ben Shapiro, “but they do not care about Israel” – at least, not in the way that Shapiro thinks we should.

When religion is thus reduced to a single policy decision and support for a political party, it becomes shrill and bigoted. This abuse of religion for political purposes has been tremendously damaging for American politics. But it is worth pointing out that it has been destructive of religion, too. According to another poll this month, this one by the Pew Research Center, record numbers of Americans are now reporting that they have no particular religious affiliation. Perhaps that is because, right now, the God of hate seems to be shouting louder than the God of love.

h/t: AlterNet

Mission: America founder and rabid homophobe Linda Harvey has done it again. She has outdone herself on the crazy meter… this time by suggesting to her listeners that they pull their children from schools that included anti-bullying programs to protect LGBTQ students, teachers, and other staff members.

Brian Tashman at RWW:

Mission America’s Linda Harvey notoriously urged parents last year to refuse care for their children from openly gay doctors and nurses, and today on her radio show told parents that they should consider removing their children from schools which have anti-bullying programs that affirm and protect LGBT students. A consistent and rancorous opponent of such bullying-prevention efforts who wishes that school counselors can practice ex-gay therapy, Harvey repeated her claims that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice and not a sexual orientation and warned that schools are teaching “false and immoral” beliefs about homosexuality through anti-bullying programs. She insisted that if parents cannot have their children removed from classes that discuss the issue of anti-gay bullying then they might want to consider withdrawing their children from the school altogether.

I think she’s the biggest homophobic bigot on the Christian Right clown car, worse than even Bryan Fischer (and that’s saying a lot).

(cross-posted from Daily Kos)

On Mix It Up at Lunch Day, schoolchildren around the country are encouraged to hang out with someone they normally might not speak to.

The program, started 11 years ago by the Southern Poverty Law Center and now in more than 2,500 schools, was intended as a way to break up cliques and prevent bullying.

But this year, the American Family Association, a conservative evangelical group, has called the project “a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools” and is urging parents to keep their children home from school on Oct. 30, the day most of the schools plan to participate this year.

The charges, raised in an e-mail to supporters earlier this month, have caused a handful of schools to cancel this year’s event and has caught organizers off guard.

“I was surprised that they completely lied about what Mix It Up Day is,” said Maureen Costello, the director of the center’s Teaching Tolerance project, which organizes the program. “It was a cynical, fear-mongering tactic.”

The swirl around Mix It Up at Lunch Day reflects a deeper battle between the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group founded 41 years ago in Montgomery, Ala., and the American Family Association, a Bible-based cultural watchdog organization in Tupelo, Miss. The association says its mission is to fight what it calls the “increasing ungodliness” in America.

The law center recently added the group to its national list of active hate groups, which also includes neo-Nazis, black separatists and Holocaust deniers.

Association leaders, in return, have gone on the offensive, calling the law center a hate group for oppressing Christian students and claiming its aim is to shut down groups that oppose homosexuality.

“The reality is we are not a hate group. We are a truth group,” said Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for the association. “We tell the truth about homosexual behavior.”

Although the suggested activities for Mix It Up at Lunch Day do not expressly address gay and lesbian students, the law center itself promotes equal treatment for gays and lesbians and that philosophy then informs the school program, he said.

“Anti-bullying legislation is exactly the same,” Mr. Fischer said. “It’s just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda. No one is in favor of anyone getting bullied for any reason, but these anti-bullying policies become a mechanism for punishing Christian students who believe that homosexual behavior is not something that should be normalized.”

The program is not about sexual orientation but rather about breaking up social cliques, which are especially evident in a school cafeteria, Ms. Costello said.

h/t: NYTimes.com