Justin's Political Corner
Yesterday’s TruNews radio broadcast with Rick Wiles was entirely dedicated to an interview with right-wing anti-Islam activist Walid Shoebat and his son Theodore during which the three of them attacked … Glenn Beck!
That’s right, according to the Shoebats, Beck is a practitioner of “Chrislam,” meaning that he is luring his audience away from true Christianity and into a dangerous Islamo-Mormon deistic universalism with the help of Religious Right leaders such as James Robison, Franklin Graham, and David Barton.
As Theodore explained, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, considered himself to be a second Muhammad, which is why, Walid said, LDS members will not proselytize to Muslims since “basically they have the same faith.”
From the 06.18.2013 edition of TruNews:
After watching the Republican presidential candidates lose the last two elections, right-wing activist Ken Blackwell cooked up a scheme whereby states would move away from winner-take-all allocations of electors to a system in which Electoral College votes would be assigned according to congressional districts.
The result would be that a Republican presidential candidate who does not win the overall popular vote in the state could still end up receiving a majority of that state’s electoral votes simply by virtue of winning the popular vote in more individual districts.
Today, Blackwell appeared on “WallBuilders Live” to promote this scheme, where it was met with enthusiastic support from Rick Green and David Barton. As Blackwell explained, if every state had implemented this plan for the 2012 election, Mitt Romney would have won despite the fact that he lost the overall popular vote by nearly 5 million votes.
Blackwell: There’s an old farmer’s tale that if you throw a brick at a pack of pigs, the one that squeals is the one you hit. Well, when we put this out there, the Left started squealing, the New York Times started squealing, so we must be on to something.
Green: You must be on to something. No doubt about that. I haven’t had a chance to look, I don’t if anyone has done a map, I’d be real curious to know if every state did this, how would the last few elections [have gone]? Have you had a chance to look?
Blackwell: I already know. If every state did it, Romney would have won the election. And so that’s another reason that the Left just instinctively dislikes it.
…
Barton: This actually is a way to give the people a greater voice rather than just having the majority slap it to the minority every time you turn around. And I really like what he’s proposed here with reverting back out of the winner-take-all philosophy of the states, going back to congressional district take all, which is a good way to do it.
From the 05.02.2013 edition of Wallbuilders Live:
At least three church-state watchdog groups have asked the Defense Department to intervene in a prayer event Thursday at Fort Leonard Wood.
The groups asked Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to cancel a planned speech by David Barton, an evangelical Christian minister, discredited historian and conservative political operative.
Barton is scheduled to give a speech called, “Our American Heritage: Why History Matters,” to about 400 military members and their families on Thursday morning. Evangelical groups around the country will hold prayer events for the National Day of Prayer, which was originally established by Congress in 1952. In 1988, it set the day officially as the first Thursday in May.
Organizations like the Freedom From Religion Foundation have challenged the constitutionality of having a national prayer day in court.
On Monday, Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, wrote Hagel that Barton “is well known for his open, vocal, and constant use of contemptuous words against the President.”
On the website of his organization, Wallbuilders, Barton calls President Barack Obama “the most biblically hostile U. S. president.”
Weinstein wrote that Barton’s invitation “can be considered nothing less than the condoning and endorsement of statements that if made by the officer(s) who invited him to speak would be punishable by their court-martial.”
Barton is a former official in the Texas Republican party and has advised Republican presidential candidates, according to the New York Times, including Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Rep. Michele Bachmann.
In a statement, Barton told the Post-Dispatch he “regularly speaks to events at all branches of American military installations” and “presents accounts of the long historical record of the involvement of faith and prayer in the lives of the American military and military leaders over the past two centuries.”
He called Weinstein’s group “an intolerant atheist organization” that objects “to the clearly documented and indisputable role of religious faith in American history, particularly American military history.”
Barton has written several books promoting the view that the nation’s founders were Christian and intended the United States to be a Christian nation. But last year, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson stopped distributing Barton’s New York Times bestselling book, “The Jefferson Lies,” after evangelical historians and other scholars began pointing out errors.
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, wrote Hagel that Barton’s speaking engagement at Fort Leonard Wood, is “highly inappropriate and will only end up causing embarrassment for the military.”
Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, wrote the defense secretary that “when government actors like military chaplains organize prayer events, it is imperative that they—and their guest speakers—be inclusive and non-sectarian. David Barton does not meet these criteria.”
An evangelical Christian group in Colorado, long affiliated with Focus on the Family – the National Day of Prayer Task Force – organizes the annual National Day of Prayer events throughout the country.
h/t: STLtoday.com
While the White House, governors, Congress and other public officials grapple with policy responses to last month’s mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, many Americans wonder whether the massacre of young children will provide momentum for more effective laws that previous killing sprees – even one that gravely wounded a member of Congress – have not.
Some assume, wrongly, that nothing can be done. Politicians’ fear of the $200+ million National Rifle Association (NRA) is generally cited as the reason for weak gun laws that undermine law enforcement and put citizens at higher risk from gun crimes. The power of the NRA to determine the outcome of elections may well be more myth than reality, but even the perception of such power can give the group tremendous political muscle, along with its aggressive lobbying and strong-arm political tactics.
The NRA is not alone in attempting to prevent effective regulation of guns and promoting reckless policies that leave Americans vulnerable to crime. Its efforts are supported by the same kind of coalition that undermines the nation’s ability to solve a wide range of problems. Corporations, right-wing ideologues, and Religious Right leaders work together to misinform Americans, generate unfounded fears, and prevent passage of broadly supported solutions.
Understanding the extremism and dishonesty at the heart of right-wing obstructionism is crucial to overcoming it.
Who’s Extreme?
Opponents of stronger gun laws portray any effort to regulate the sale of even military-style weapons as radical assaults on American freedom. For instance, Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel, a Religious Right legal group, called President Obama a “slime ball,” claiming falsely that Obama used his remarks at a memorial service for the Connecticut shooting victims to push “radical” gun control and saying of Obama, “His extremism knows no lows.”
But it is Barber and NRA officials who are staking out an extreme position. They emphatically do not speak for the American people. More strikingly, the NRA leadership and its allies do not speak for the group’s own members. Huge majorities of NRA members support sensible policies that the group opposes. For example, 82 percent of the public, and 74 percent of NRA members, support requiring a criminal background check of anyone purchasing a gun. NRA leaders strongly oppose requiring background checks for gun sales. And a recent poll taken after the Newtown shooting found that a majority of people who live in gun-owning households support a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines.
At the urging of NRA officials, Congress has even passed laws that undermine law enforcement officials’ ability to fight gun crimes, forcing the Justice Department to destroy within 24 hours records about the buyer in approved purchases and making it harder for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to track sales of certain guns used in crimes. How do anti-gun-regulation activists prevent action in the face of broad public support? They deploy a range of strategies and tactics that right-wing activists use on a variety of issues:
Denying and Masking Reality
On issues from gay rights to climate change, right-wing activists stick stubbornly to their ideology even when it is clearly controverted by scientific consensus and other reality. On gun violence, NRA officials and their allies refuse to acknowledge that the availability of assault weapons and high-volume ammunition clips, or the lack of background checks for private sales of guns, are problems that make it easier for a shooter to kill more innocent people quickly. They ignore evidence that stronger gun laws can and do reduce gun crimes. According to an October 2012 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, “When states expand firearm prohibitions to high-risk groups, and adopt comprehensive measures to prevent diversion of guns to prohibited persons, fewer guns are diverted to criminals, and there is less violence. ”
One way to mask reality is through rhetoric that distorts or hides the truth. Tea Party leaders and their allies rallied opposition to federal health care reform by portraying “ObamaCare” in lurid end-of-freedom, America-destroying rhetoric. They were successful in building public opposition to the generic “ObamaCare” – even though there was strong majority support for most of the substantive elements of the plan. By portraying advocates for stronger gun regulation as government thugs who want to take guns from hunters’ hands, NRA leaders and their allies have been able to generate some poll numbers indicating opposition to “gun control,” but the more relevant fact for policymakers is that huge majorities of Americans, and of NRA members themselves, back many of the most commonly discussed approaches to reducing gun violence. Stronger efforts to keep dangerous guns out of the hands of dangerous people are simply not attacks on the right recognized by the Supreme Court under the Second Amendment of law-abiding citizens to have guns for hunting or self-defense.
Shifting Blame
The speech by the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre a week after the Connecticut shootings was a memorable display of blame shifting. He attempted to cast blame for the killings on everyone but his own group’s resistance to stronger controls on assault weapons and the firearms or ammunition themselves.
Religious Right leaders and right-wing pundits played their usual parts in the spin. Religious broadcaster James Dobson said the shooting was God’s judgment for the country turning its back on scripture and on God. Franklin Graham said much the same: “This is what happens when a society turns its back on God.” Radio host Steve Deace blamed public schools for promoting a “culture of death” and teaching students “there is no God and thus no real purpose to their lives.” American Family Association spokesperson Bryan Fischer said God wasn’t there to protect students because schools were not starting the day with prayer. Newt Gingrich blamed “an anti-religious secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary seeking to drive God out of public life,” along with video games. Culture warriors Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder wrote in Movieguide:
By removing God, the Bible, God’s Law, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit from society, including the mass media and the schools, we are raising generations of people with no faith in God or Jesus and, hence, no moral conscience, and no self-control. If so many people have no faith, no moral conscience and no self-control, then it’s no wonder our society is suffering from all these mass murders by evil lone gunmen.
Tea Party Nation blamed teachers’ unions, liberals, and an “over-bureaucratized society.” The Oathkeepers, a Tea Party offshoot for military and law enforcement officials, argued that the federal government was “complicit in the deaths of these children, and in fact an accessory to their mass murder, by forcibly disarming (with the very real threat of prison) all the teachers, all the staff, and any parent who may have been on school property.”
The consequence of such blame-spreading is that it creates distractions from addressing the real problems. One Religious Right leader appearing on American Family Radio called the shooting a “gracious” act of divine punishment designed to “bring us to our senses and bring us back to Him.”
Hostility to Compromise
The absolute refusal to compromise – indeed, the vilification of the very idea of compromise – is at the heart of the right-wing movement and much of the modern Republican Party. That has been the story of GOP obstructionism on tax policy, judicial nominations, and more. Just as the Tea Party and its corporate backers have gone out of their way to punish Republicans they see as insufficiently “conservative” – even when it meant nominating extremists who could not win a general election – leaders of the NRA and other groups like the Gun Owners of America react with fierce hostility to talk of compromise. Their political power comes largely from the fear they have created among elected leaders that the group will spend lavishly to punish even the tiniest dissent from its ideological dogma. The NRA’s leaders loudly pulled out of current conversations convened by the White House, denouncing the effort to find policy solutions to gun violence as “demonizing” the Second Amendment, and they launched a “Stand and Fight” campaign even before the details of the White House proposals had been announced. Rep. Steve Stockman from Texas even threatened to file articles of impeachment.
One way Religious Right leaders justify their opposition to compromise is claiming a biblical mandate for their favored policies, something Religious Right leaders do on issues like taxes as well as issues involving privacy and sexuality. Discredited Religious Right “historian” David Barton calls the Second Amendment “the biblical right of self-defense” and says it requires that individual Americans have access to any weapon the federal government has.
Smearing Opponents
Just as Religious Right groups smear political opponents as hostile to religious liberty, anti-gun-regulation groups smear as enemies of liberty anyone who advocates for stronger oversight on the purchase of weapons capable of mass violence. Even though polls show that NRA members believe support for the Second Amendment goes hand in hand with preventing gun crimes, the group’s leaders falsely equate any effort to strengthen gun laws to advance public safety with a desire to confiscate Americans’ handguns and hunting rifles.
Religious Right leaders are prone to make claims that only fellow believers are capable of moral action and decision making. Snyder and Baehr, in their post-shooting column, wrote, “Without God, without faith and values, we are just soulless meat machines who can kill without mercy.”
Promoting Conspiracy Theories
The right-wing base of the Republican Party is fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories about liberals and other perceived enemies. That’s why so many Republicans believe President Obama is a secret Muslim bent on the destruction of the US, or that he was not born in the United States. During the Obama administration, right-wing websites have circulated conspiracy theories about the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security administration stockpiling ammunition intended to be used against Americans and building concentration camps for conservatives.
National Rifle Association leaders claimed during the 2012 election that President Obama’s lack of action on gun issues during his first term was an elaborate ruse to mask his radical intentions to disarm gun owners. Larry Pratt of the Gun Owners of America insisted that the federal health care reform law was meant to “take away your guns.”
Some went even further: Christian radio host Bradlee Dean, a close ally of Rep. Michele Bachmann, suggested that the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, like earlier murders at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, were actually orchestrated by the government to create a pretext to ban guns.
Extremist Interpretations of the Constitution
A Wyoming legislator has introduced legislation that would make it a felony to enforce a federal ban on assault weapons or high-capacity ammunition. The idea that a state could imprison federal agents for enforcing a federal law may excite right-wing activists, but it doesn’t reflect a reality-based view of our constitutional system of government. And that’s a widespread problem. David Barton insists that the founding fathers’ view of the constitutional right to bear arms means that any weapon the government possesses must also be available to the population at large: “…whatever the government’s got, we’ve gotta have the same thing, because if they’ve got an AK-47 and come through and we’ve only got a BB gun on the inside, this is not a deterrent. So the whole purpose of the Second Amendment is to make sure you have equal power with whatever comes against you illegally.” If Barton is really saying that citizens have a Second Amendment right to anything that is in the U.S. military arsenal – chemical weapons, fully automated machine guns, bombs, and more – that is emphatically not a view endorsed by the Supreme Court.
Ted Cruz, a new U.S. senator from Texas elected with major support from Tea Party activists said recently that efforts to restrict the sales of assault weapons and ammunition are unconstitutional. In fact, even the conservative Supreme Court has said clearly that regulating the sale of dangerous guns is not prohibited by the Second Amendment. According to Justice Antonin Scalia, “the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns.”
Harnessing Corporate Money
Right-wing causes, including the Tea Party, anti-unionism, and anti-environmentalism, have benefitted from a flood of corporate money in the wake of Supreme Court decisions gutting the nation’s campaign finance laws. In addition, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing group that acts as matchmaker between corporate interests and lawmakers eager to do their bidding, has produced literally hundreds of model bills that right-wing legislators have enacted into law – attacking unions and public education and otherwise supporting the predatory privatization of public assets and government services. Among the model bills ALEC has previously promoted is the so-called “stand your ground” law originally adopted in Florida. ALEC deemed it a national “model” law, and it was enacted in more than two dozen states. The Florida law was cited initially to prevent the prosecution of the man who killed Trayvon Martin.
Some analysts believe the NRA has morphed from a grassroots group teaching marksmanship to a trade association for gun manufacturers – a “lobbying, merchandising and marketing machine.” Business Week reported in January 2012 that more than 50 firearms-related companies had given at least $14.8 million to the group. The NRA has boosted gun makers several ways: its rhetoric about gun confiscation has spurred binge buying by gun enthusiasts; it has pushed a federal law that limits liability against gunmakers as well as state laws that bar cities from suing gun manufacturers (in conjunction with ALEC); and the NRA’s legislative arm has also “helped ensure the end of the federal assault weapons ban” in 2004 (which the NRA and ALEC opposed in 1994). Business Week quotes the former NRA President Sandy Froman claiming that it “saved the American gun industry from bankruptcy.”
Anything Goes
A hallmark of right-wing activism over the past four years has been a willingness to say and do anything to try to undermine the effectiveness of the Obama presidency and to try to prevent the president’s re-election (as well as his initial election). Rhetorically, that has meant equating health care reform and other initiatives with tyranny. In response to recent reports that some aspects of gun regulation could be strengthened by executive order, the right-wing Drudge Report posted photos of Hitler and Stalin.
Before the 2012 election, NRA leaders portrayed President Obama as conspiring to abolish Americans’ Second Amendment rights. But NRA efforts to bring down the Obama administration went well beyond political rhetoric and campaign spending. The NRA leadership played a significant role in the failed effort by congressional Republicans to turn the ATF’s botched “Fast and Furious” operation into an administration-destroying scandal. NRA officials even announced that the group would “score” a House vote on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt, getting votes from Republicans and some Democrats eager to preserve a 100-percent NRA rating.
Money, Power, and Perception
Back in August, Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore said, “Democrats have decided, I think wrongly politically and morally, that it’s only an issue they can lose on.” Indeed, even though the group’s recent political spending is heavily weighted toward Republicans, the lack of desire to cross the NRA’s lobbyists and activists is bipartisan. In 2009, a Democratic Congress complied with demands for federal laws allowing people to bring guns onto Amtrak trains and into national parks; in 2010 the group demanded, and got, a special exemption from identifying its donors in the DISCLOSE Act under consideration.
Right-wing politicians like North Carolina’s Jesse Helms used to demonize Martin Luther King as a subversive and communist. Conservative legislators in some states resisted creating an MLK holiday for years. Some on the far right grumbled about the creation of an MLK memorial on the national mall in Washington, D.C. But many of today’s conservatives have adopted an entirely different strategy: claiming Dr. King’s moral authority as their own, positioning themselves as inheritors of his righteous struggle, and claiming against all evidence and history that he would support their war on Planned Parenthood, their opposition to legal protections for LGBT Americans and their families, their crusades against separation of church and state, and their free market fundamentalism.
Glenn Beck
Broadcaster Glenn Beck is among the most blatant appropriators of King’s memory. His 2010 gathering at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom included video about King and the march, but failed to note that one of the major purposes of the rally was to demand that the federal government to help people find jobs. This year Beck compared himself and the conservative movement with MLK and the Obama administration with J. Edgar Hoover.But does anyone doubt that if Beck had been on the air during the 1960s, he would have been a primary outlet for J. Edgar Hoover’s efforts to denigrate King as a communist?
Alveda King
Alveda King, a niece of the civil rights leader, has become a fixture at right-wing events, where she claims her uncle’s legacy for her opposition to legal abortion, LGBT equality, and church-state separation. Notably, for someone who is fond of quoting her uncle’s dream that people be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin – when she’s using it to urge black voters not to back Obama for example – she has an oddly biological view of her own claim to the King legacy. His dream is “in her genes,” she has said repeatedly, insisting that MLK would be supporting her attacks on legal abortion if he were alive. And in dismissing the late Coretta Scott King’s support for marriage equality for same-sex couples, Alveda Kingsaid “I’ve got his DNA. She doesn’t, she didn’t…I know something about him. I’m made out of the same stuff.” At Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, Alveda King said we would know we have arrived when “prayer is once again welcomed in the public squares of America and in our schools.”
Harry Jackson
Harry Jackson, who People For the American Way has described as the “point man” for the Religious Right’s racial wedge strategies, is an all-purpose right-wing activist, though most infamous for his opposition to LGBT equality. In 2010, Jackson was introduced by dominionist “prophet” Cindy Jacobs as “the modern-day Martin Luther King,” a comparison Jackson himself has made.
He has invoked King in opposition to inclusion of sexual orientation in federal hate crimes legislation as well as marriage equality, and in opposition to the “wholesale removal of God from the public square by secularist totalitarians.”rian Brown
Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage is fond of invoking King and the civil rights movement as he clamors for public votes to restrict legal protections for same-sex couples and their families. “We hear that this is about civil rights, and that those of us who oppose the redefinition of marriage are somehow bigots,” Brown saidin Iowa last month. “And yet, what Dr. Martin Luther King called the most important civil right – the right to vote – these very same folks are trying to deprive us of this right.” Of course, this appeal to King’s memory rings especially hollow since NOM’s crass racial and ethnic wedge strategies – and its desire to keep “fanning” hostility between African American and LGBT communities – have been exposed. It’s worth noting that while Brown and his anti-gay allies are quick to trash LGBT people for describing their efforts to win legal equality as a civil rights issue, he sees no problem comparing his efforts to put equality-denying efforts on the ballot with the bloody struggle to overcome legal barriers erected to keep African Americans from participating in democracy. Brown’s concern for DC voters’ rights does not extend to actual self-determination; he called for Congress to overturn DC’s marriage equality law.
King-claimers have lots of company
Fully chronicling right-wing efforts to co-opt King’s legacy could fill a book. Among those who invoke MLK to support their efforts are opponents of affirmative action programs designed to provide equal opportunity to historically marginalized people; the authors and signers of the anti-choice, anti-abortion, anti-church-state-separationManhattan Declaration; anti-abortion activist Lila Rose; right-wing activist and dominionist Lou Engle,Religious Right activists like Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, andRick Scarborough; GOP presidential candidates, and many more. Evangelist James Robison has argued that wealthy capitalists are facing “a type of racism that is not only damaging but actually potentially very dangerous. There is an animosity and a hostility that you have to go all the way back to the horrible racism that you and I stood against along with Martin Luther King, that we detested. You have to look at that and see how dangerous it is.” The South Carolina Republican Party“celebrated” the legacy of Martin Luther King by inviting David Barton, a GOP activist and promoter of a bogus “Christian nation” history of America, to promote his partisan“documentary” that blames the Democratic Party for slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and the KKK, while ignoring the post-Civil Rights Act “southern strategy” in which the GOP fomented white racism and resentment in order to build electoral support. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is cited by Religious Right activists who claim it supports their insistence that “it may be time for Christians to draw a line in the sand” and used to teach Liberty University law students that they should counsel their clients to follow God’s law rather than man’s law.
Where King Really Stood
Abortion, Family Planning, and Planned Parenthood
Refuting the persistent efforts by anti-choice activists to posthumously enlist King in their crusade against Planned Parenthood is the fact that in 1966, King was honored by Planned Parenthood. His statement on receiving the honor is in stark contrast with those who today accuse Planned Parenthood and other supporters of reproductive choice of waging “Black Genocide.” A brief excerpt:
…Negroes have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern….For the Negro, therefore, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life. There are mountainous obstacles still separating Negroes from a normal existence. Yet one element in stabilizing his life would be an understanding of and easy access to the means to develop a family related in size to his community environment and to the income potential he can command.
This is not to suggest that the Negro will solve all his problems through Planned Parenthood. His problems are far more complex, encompassing economic security, education, freedom from discrimination, decent housing and access to culture. Yet if family planning is sensible it can facilitate or at least not be an obstacle to the solution of the many profound problems that plague him.
… For these reasons we are natural allies of those who seek to inject any form of planning in our society that enriches life and guarantees the right to exist in freedom and dignity.
The Rights and Dignity of Gay People
Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, was an openly gay man at a time when being out was costly and dangerous. Rustin’s sexuality, and a 1950s arrest on “morals charges,” were used by enemies of the civil rights movement to try to discredit the movement and its leaders. King did distance himself from Rustin when counseled that Rustin’s presence would be damaging to the movement but turned to him to organize the March on Washington; over time Rustin was one of King’s most trusted advisors on non-violent civil disobedience and organizing strategies. King grounded his appeals to Americans’ conscience on the equality of all people in the eyes of God and in the words of the nation’s founding documents. There is no evidence that he would support those trying to carve out exceptions to legal equality for LGBT Americans. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, became an outspoken ally of LGBT equality and spoke out on behalf of marriage equality.http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-03-24-king-marriage_x.htm
The Government’s Role in Promoting Economic Justice
It’s particularly jarring to hear politicians invoking King in one breath and denouncing government efforts to promote economic justice in the next. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom called for the government to take action to create jobs. And as Mark Engler has noted in The Nation:
In a November 1956 sermon, King presented an imaginary letter from the apostle Paul to American Christians, which stated, “Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes… God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.…King’s focus on economic justice became even sharper in the last years of his life. A noteworthy part of his critique of the Vietnam War was the idea that aggressive foreign interventionism exacted not only a moral cost but also an economic one: spending on the war was undermining President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. In his famous April 1967 speech at Riverside Church in New York City, King made a damning indictment of a budgetary imbalance that continues to this day: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” he said, “is approaching spiritual death.
The Separation of Church and State
King was an ardent supporter of the Supreme Court’s decision deeming organized prayer in public schools unconstitutional. Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and state writes:
King supported the Supreme Court’s decisions striking down government-sponsored prayer in public schools. In a January 1965 interview with Playboy magazine, King was asked about one of those rulings. He not only backed what the court did, he noted that his frequent nemesis, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, stood on the other side.
“I endorse it. I think it was correct,” King said. “Contrary to what many have said, it sought to outlaw neither prayer nor belief in God. In a pluralistic society such as ours, who is to determine what prayer shall be spoken, and by whom? Legally, constitutionally or otherwise, the state certainly has no such right. I am strongly opposed to the efforts that have been made to nullify the decision. They have been motivated, I think, by little more than the wish to embarrass the Supreme Court. When I saw Brother Wallace going up to Washington to testify against the decision at the congressional hearings, it only strengthened my conviction that the decision was right.”
Sanitizing King – and History
One small indication of just how pervasive the right-wing effort to sanitize and appropriate MLK has become can be seen in a video submission by a young conservative for a speech contest held as part of this year’s Conservative Political Action conference:
There is still hope and good in this broken world, and that’s why Conservatives and Tea Partiers are here because we realize there’s still a dream—the dream that spans from the founding fathers, to Martin Luther King, to Ronald Reagan, to us, and that dream is worth fighting for.
Hmm, now which part of Martin Luther King’s progressive dream is being promoted by the Tea Party? (Reagan, for the record, opposed the creation of an MLK holiday but signed the legislation after it passed Congress with a veto-proof margin.)
h/t: Right Wing Watch
David Barton, the right-wing propagandist and phony historian from Texas, is repeating the same lie (told by him and others many times already) about President Obama supposedly ignoring God at Thanksgiving
“4th Straight Year: Obama Thanksgiving Resolution Doesn’t Thank God”
But more to the point, all four of President Obama’s official Thanksgiving proclamations express, in one form or another, thanks to God for our nation’s blessings. From President Obama’s proclamation this year:
“This day is a time to take stock of the fortune we have known and the kindnesses we have shared, grateful for the God-given bounty that enriches our lives.”
…
“Let us spend this day by lifting up those we love, mindful of the grace bestowed upon us by God and by all who have made our lives richer with their presence.”
“As we gather in our communities and in our homes, around the table or near the hearth, we give thanks to each other and to God for the many kindnesses and comforts that grace our lives.”
“As we stand at the close of one year and look to the promise of the next, we lift up our hearts in gratitude to God for our many blessings, for one another, and for our Nation.”
…
“As Americans gather for the time-honored Thanksgiving Day meal, let us rejoice in the abundance that graces our tables, in the simple gifts that mark our days, in the loved ones who enrich our lives, and in the gifts of a gracious God.”
“Today, we recall President George Washington, who proclaimed our first national day of public thanksgiving to be observed “by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God,” and President Abraham Lincoln, who established our annual Thanksgiving Day to help mend a fractured Nation in the midst of civil war. We also recognize the contributions of Native Americans, who helped the early colonists survive their first harsh winter and continue to strengthen our Nation. From our earliest days of independence, and in times of tragedy and triumph, Americans have come together to celebrate Thanksgiving.
As Americans, we hail from every part of the world. While we observe traditions from every culture, Thanksgiving Day is a unique national tradition we all share. Its spirit binds us together as one people, each of us thankful for our common blessings.”
Barton has become the far right’s favorite pseudo-intellectual with nonsense like this. Most people who haven’t been drinking his Kool-Aid know he isn’t telling the truth.
Joni Lamb on Daystar’s Joni: “If you don’t like Christianity in America, you shouldn’t live here”
On the Election Day edition of Daystar’s Joni, while guest Kelly Shackelford of the Liberty Institute was mentioning the story about a high school valedictorian from Texas who wanted to say a prayer during her graduation speech, Joni Lamb (the show’s host and also the co-host of Celebration with her husband Marcus) made a quote attacking anyone who didn’t conform to her very narrow worldview by stating that “if you don’t like that America is a [conservative] ‘Christian Nation’, then you shouldn’t live here.”
Also at the table was notorious history revisionist liar David Barton, Benita Arterberry, and Cindy Murdock.
Dear Joni, I have some news to break to you: America has NOT been a “Christian Nation” (except demographically), despite what many people of your ilk like to wish it as such.
During the discussion, Shackelford mentioned a legal fight that took place in Texas last year over a high-school valedictorian who wanted to say a prayer during her graduation speech. The student ultimately won the right to do so, which prompted host Joni Lamb to declare it a victory for free speech, saying “that if you live in America and you understand that we are a Christian society then you can’t be offended by things like that or you shouldn’t live here.”
Recently, David Barton appeared on a television program entitled “Fixing The Money Thing” with Gary and Drenda Keesee where he explained that America has struggled economically because it has not followed Jesus’ teachings about taxation and government regulation, asserting that it was only the industries that were government-regulated that failed and had to be bailed out through TARP and the Stimulus Package while “the free market did pretty good”
Back in July, Eagle Forum Collegians hosted their 2012 Annual Leadership Summit at the Heritage Foundation where Rep. Michele Bachmann delivered a speech warning of the Muslim Brotherhood’s supposed infiltration of the U.S. government, her baseless pet cause. Bachmann told attendees that the Obama administration’s meeting with an Egyptian lawmaker, who was vetted by the Secret Service and both the State Department and Department of Homeland Security, was part of a string of “outrageous, unbelievable actions on the part of the administration to allow influence by the Muslim Brotherhood at the highest levels of power: the State Department, the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI.”
She then attacked the media for “saying we’re going after individual personalities and that we’re being mean to Muslims.” But Bachmann did in fact specifically name individuals, including Secretary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and other Muslims serving in the administration as part of a witch hunt denounced by Democratic and Republican leaders alike, including the Republican Speaker of the House and the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Bachmann went on to explain that “every day I’m in trouble for something, who cares, who cares?”
Later, the Congresswoman suggested that attendees read “everything Phyllis Schlafly has ever written,” calling her an “absolute genius,” and also recommended books by extremist commentator Ann Coulter and disgraced pseudo-historian David Barton.
h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW
At a 2011 “pastor’s briefing” with disgraced pseudo-historian David Barton, congressman and Senate candidate Todd Akin (R-MO) recounted an experience of going to jail after protesting against abortion rights. Akin told the audience that he had earlier spoken with “a group of people who had been in jail with me” who were all “involved in the pro-life movement.”
“Don’t tell anybody I’m a jail bird,” Akin said, briefly telling a story about when “a bunch of us sat in front of these doors and the police gave us a ride to the free hotel for a while and you know how it goes.”
At the event with Barton, who has strongly backed his candidacy and has been campaigning with the embattled candidate, Akin was discussing biblical views on when to submit to governmental authority. Akin’s extreme views on abortion rights and rape are already well-known, but he only gave few details about his time as a “jail bird” during what may have been an illegal blockade of a clinic.
h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW
While appearing on televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s Believer’s Voice of Victory, disgraced pseudo-historian once again used his platform on Copeland’s show to deliver an attack on gay rights and women’s rights, this time saying that marriage equality and reproductive rights lead to a nation’s destruction. “If a nation says, ‘hey, we want abortion, we want homosexual marriage,’ it is going down,” Barton said, “anytime you move away from what God says, you are going down as a nation.”
Barton: That is why public policies in a nation are so important. If a nation says, ‘hey, we want abortion, we want homosexual marriage,’ it is going down.
While appearing on Kenneth Copeland’s “Believer’s Voice of Victory” television program, David Barton said that any effort to change the definition of marriage to include “a man and a man or a dog and a horse” will harm a nation’s ability to prosper economically “because you’re violating commands of God.”
The official 2012 Republican Party platform is a far-right fever dream, a compilation of pouting, posturing, and policies to meet just about every demand from the overlapping Religious Right, Tea Party, corporate, and neo-conservative wings of the GOP. If moderates have any influence in today’s Republican Party, you wouldn’t know it by reading the platform. Efforts by a few delegates to insert language favoring civil unions, comprehensive sex education, and voting rights for the District of Columbia, for example, were all shot down. Making the rounds of right-wing pre-convention events on Sunday, Rep. Michele Bachmann gushed about the platform’s right-wing tilt, telling fired-up Tea Partiers that “the Tea Party has been all over that platform.”
1. Bob McDonnell. As platform committee chair, McDonnell made it clear he was not in the mood for any amendments to the draft language calling for a “Human Life Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution and legal recognition that the “unborn” are covered by the Fourteenth Amendment – “personhood” by another name. McDonnell is in many ways the ideal right-wing governor: he ran as a fiscal conservative and governs like the Religious Right activist he has been since he laid out his own political platform in the guise of a master’s thesis at Pat Robertson’s Regent University.His thesis argued that feminists and working women were detrimental to the family, and that public policy should favor married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators.”2 Tony Perkins. Perkins heads the Family Research Council, whose Values Voter Summit is the Religious Right’s most important annual conference, at which movement activists rub shoulders with Republican officials and candidates. Perkins bragged in an email to his supporters how much influence he and his friend David Barton (see below) had on the platform. Perkins was an active member of the platform committee, proposing language to oppose school-based health clinics that provide referrals for contraception or abortion, and arguing for the strongest possible anti-marriage equality language. Perkins also introduced an amendment to the platform calling on the District of Columbia government to loosen its gun laws, which Perkins says still do not comply with recent Supreme Court rulings.The media tends to treat Perkins, a telegenic former state legislator, as a reasonable voice of the Religious Right, but his record and his group’s positions prove otherwise. Perkins has been aggressivelyexploiting the recent shooting at FRC headquarters to divert attention from the group’s extremism by claiming that the Southern Poverty Law Center was irresponsible in calling FRC a hate group. Unfortunately for Perkins, the group’s record of promoting hatred toward LGBT people is well documented. Perkins has even complained that the press and President Obama were being too hard on Uganda’s infamous “kill the gays” bill, which he described as an attempt to “uphold moral conduct.” It’s worth remembering that Perkins ran a 1996 campaign for Louisiana Senate candidate Woody Jenkins that paid $82,600 to David Duke for the Klan leader’s mailing list; the campaign was fined by the FEC for trying to cover it up.3. David Barton. Texas Republican activist and disgraced Christian-nation “historian” Barton has had a tough year, but Tampa has been good to him. He was perhaps the most vocal member of the platform committee, and was a featured speaker at Sunday’s pre-convention “prayer rally.” During the platform committee’s final deliberations, Barton couldn’t seem to hear his own voice often enough. He was the know-it-all nitpicker, piping up with various language changes, such as deleting a reference to the family as the “school of democracy” because families are not democracies. He thought it was too passive to call Obamacare an “erosion of” the Constitution and thought it should be changed to an “attack on” the founding document. He called for stronger anti-public education language and asserted that large school districts employ one administrator for every teacher. He backed anti-abortion language, tossing out the claim that 127 medical studies over five decades say that abortion hurts women. Progressives have been documenting Barton’s lies for years, but more recently conservative evangelical scholars have also been hammering his claims about American history.4. Kris Kobach. Kris Kobach wants to be your president one day; until now, he has gotten as far as Kansas Secretary of State. He may be best known as the brains behind Arizona’s “show me your papers” law, and he successfully pushed for anti-immigrant language in the platform, including a call for the federal government to deny funds to universities that allow illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition – a plank that puts Kobach and the platform at odds with Kansas law. Immigration is not Kobach’s only issue. He is an energizing force behind the Republican Party’s massive push for voter suppression laws around the country, and he led the effort to get language inserted into the platform calling on states to pass laws requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration. He also pushed language aimed at the supposed threat to the Constitution and laws of the US from “Sharia law”; getting this language into the platform puts the GOP in position of endorsing a ludicrous far-right conspiracy theory. Kobach hopes that will give activists a tool for pressuring more states to pass their own anti-Sharia laws. In the platform committee, he backed Perkins’ efforts to maintain the strongest language against marriage equality. Even an amendment to the marriage section saying that everyone should be treated “equally under the law” as long as they are not hurting anyone else, was shot down by Kobach. Kobach alsoclaims he won support for a provision to oppose any effort to limit how many bullets can go into a gun’s magazine.5. James Bopp. James Bopp is a Republican lawyer and delegate from Indiana whose client list is a Who’s Who of right-wing organizations, including National Right to Life and the National Organization for Marriage, which he has represented in its efforts to keep political donors secret.Bopp is also an annoyingly petty partisan, having introduced a resolution in the Republican National Committee in 2009 urging the Democratic Party to change its name to the “Democrat Socialist Party.”
6. Dick Armey. Former Republican insider Dick Armey now runs FreedomWorks, the Koch-backed,corporate-funded, Murdoch-promoted Tea Party astroturfing group – or, in their words, a “grassroots service center.” Armey has been a major force behind this year’s victories of Tea Party Senate challengers like Ted Cruz in Texas and Richard Mourdock in Indiana, both of whom knocked off “establishment” candidates – FreedomWorks also backed Rand Paul in Kentucky and Mike Lee in Utah in 2010. As Alternet’s Adele Stan has reported, FreedomWorks’s goal is to build a cadre of far-right senators to create a “power center around Jim DeMint,” the Senate’s reigning Tea Party-Religious Right hero.To put Armey’s stamp on the platform, FreedomWorks created a “Freedom Platform” project, which enlisted Tea Party leaders to come up with proposed platform planks and encouraged activists to vote for them online. Then FreedomWorks pushed the party to include these planks in the official platform:
An Ohio Tea Party Group, The Ohio Liberty Coalition, celebrated that 10 of 12 made it to the draft – everything but the flat tax and eliminating the department of Defense. But FreedomWorks gave itself a more generous score, arguing for an 11.5 out of 12.
We are used to watching David Barton give off an aura of expertise by speaking so quickly that people can’t notice when he is making patently false claims and simply making stuff up about America’sfounders and the Constitution. For example, last night at the Prayer Rally for America’s Future, the event hosted by Focus on the Family and the Florida Family Policy Council in Tampa’s River Church right before the Republican National Convention, Barton made a rather peculiar claim about the Seventh Amendment.
Here’s what the Seventh Amendment of the US Constitution says:
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re–examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.Read that one more time, because according to David Barton, the Seventh Amendment bans abortion, which he offers as evidence to back up his false assertion that the founders criminalized abortion.
h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW
For more a decade, the religious right’s leading authority on America’s founders and their divine inspiration has been David Barton, a fast-talking Texan with a bachelor’s degree in Christian education and a climate-controlled underground vault stocked with tens of thousands of antique documents, including Bibles, diaries, and correspondence. Barton has turned the study of America’s Christian roots into a lucrative business, hawking books and video sermons, speaking at churches and political confabs, and scoring a fawning New York Times profile and interviews on the Daily Show. He’s got friends in high places: “I almost wish that there would be like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced—at gunpoint no less—to listen to every David Barton message,” Mike Huckabee told an Evangelical audience in March of 2011. “I never listen to David Barton without learning a whole lot of new things,” Newt Gingrich told conservatives in Iowa that same month.
That’s probably because much of what David Barton writes seems to have originated in David Barton’s head.
On Thursday, Barton’s publisher announced that it was recalling Barton’s newest book, The Jefferson Lies, from stores and suspending publication because it had “lost confidence” in the book’s accuracy. That came one day after NPR published a scathing fact-check of Barton’s work, specifically his claim that passages of the Constitution were lifted verbatim from the Bible. NPR’s conclusion: ”We looked up every citation Barton said was from the Bible, but not one of them checked out.” Likewise, although Barton frequently regales audiences with a story about how Congress commissioned the printing of Bibles in order to promote Christian values among the populace, NPR found that “Congress never published or paid a dime for the 1782 Bible.” Rather, “It was printed and paid for by Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken.”
