Drew Courtney's blog

Last week, Lowe's made an enormous blunder when it pulled its advertising from TLC’s reality show “All American Muslim” after a Religious Right group complained that the show portrayed Muslims as ordinary Americans, not radical terrorists.

Yesterday, Kyle pointed out Bryan Fischer’s appearance on Morning Edition, where he was billed simply as a representative of the American Family Association. If a respected media outlet like NPR is going to give a platform to someone like Fischer, it needs to make clear the long record of hate speech he brings with him. PFAW President Michael B. Keegan reached out to Alicia Shepard, the NPR Ombudsman with this note:

Dear Ms. Shepard:

I was surprised yesterday to hear the voice of Bryan Fischer, Director of Issue Analysis at the American Family Association, on Morning Edition. I wonder if the show's producers knew of Mr. Fischer's record of extremism and hate speech against Muslim Americans and gays and lesbians.

People For the American Way's RightWingWatch.org blog tracks Fischer in his roll as a blogger and radio host for the AFA, where he makes no attempt to disguise his extremism. Just in the past year, Fischer has:

• Demanded that no new mosques be built anywhere in America. (8/10/2010)
• Argued that inbreeding has caused Muslims to be stupid and violent. (9/10/2010)
• Says that Muslims should be banned from serving in the U.S. military. (11/9/2009)
• Insisted that all Muslims are traitors, called for the deportation of all Muslims from the U.S. (4/10/2010)
• Claimed that U.S. service members died in vain because the U.S. failed to make Iraq a Christian nation. (8/19/2010)
• Said that "homosexuals should be disqualified from public office." (8/5/2010)
• Insisted that gays are biased, sexually deviant felons, not to mention pedophiles, and should never serve on the Supreme Court. (4/15/2010, 4/16/2010)
• Called gay adoption "a terrible, terrible, inexcusable, inhumane thing to do to children." (8/10/2010)
• Argued that we should "impose the same sanctions on those who engage in homosexual behavior as we do on those who engage in intravenous drug abuse." (2/3/2010)
• Wrote: "The inescapable conclusion is that gay sex is a form of domestic terrorism." (6/10/2010)
• Said: "Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals." (5/25/2010)
• Disparaged family values in the Hispanic community: "Also, the illegitimacy rate among Hispanic women is over 50%. I'm not sure pro-family values are as strong in the Hispanic community as Dr. Land wants to believe." (7/23/2010)

Yesterday, in response to People For's call that GOP leaders distance themselves from Mr. Fischer, he repeated his comparison of gay men to domestic terrorists. On Tuesday, Mr. Fischer defended his call for deporting Muslim Americans, saying "we are doing them a favor by repatriating them to their homeland where an entire nation shares their values."

Of course, Mr. Fischer has the right to air his opinions, no matter how hurtful. However, he should not be given air time by a nonpartisan news organization without some disclosure of his record of hate speech.

I also hope that Mr. Fischer is not, as Morning Edition implied, representative of the Tea Party movement as a whole.

This weekend, he will be appearing this weekend alongside leaders of the Republican Party, including Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, and 2012 presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Pence. We have alerted these public figures to Mr. Fischer's record and urged them to denounce Fischer's remarks lest they lend credibility to his extremism.

Similarly, I urge NPR to resist lending credibility to an extremist like Fischer by providing him with a national platform without alerting audiences to his record of vocal bigotry.

Thank you for your time,

Michael B. Keegan

President, People For the American Way

 We’ll keep you posted on the response.

In a conversation flowing out of Norman Podhoretz’s new book, gadfly blogger Robert Stacy McCain makes a typically ridiculous point:

The demonization of the “Religious Right” was a project developed by Norman Lear and others during the Reagan era, after Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority played such a key role in the 1980 election, and this theme has defined the politics of the Democratic Party ever since.

As a political tactic, it is both amazingly effective and fundamentally false. The Republican Party is chiefly devoted to political policies having nothing specifically to do with evangelical Christianity. Yet there is an entire industry of liberal propagandists who specialize in seeking out various outre pronouncements of “Religious Right” leaders and presenting these views as if they would become firm policy in the next Republican administration. . . .

While we’re always thrilled to hear our founder and board member given credit for “[defining] the politics of the Democratic Party” from 1980 onwards, he might want to check before he claims that the pronouncements of the Religious Right won’t become the firm policy of the next Republican administration. After all, the candidates running for the Republican nomination keep promising exactly that.

Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, and Mitt Romney--all likely candidates for the presidency--are confirmed guests at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC next week, as are Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner. (Sarah Palin is invited but not confirmed, which is surprising as she doesn’t have a full time job at the moment.) If past behavior is any guide, all of these party leaders will take the opportunity to pledge undying fealty to the far right platform espoused by the Family Research Council. And while we were founded on the principle that one could disagree with that right-wing platform without being a “bad Christian,” I’d be surprised any of the attendees of the summit attendees to say it out loud.

If any of those candidates decide to use the opportunity to distance themselves from the “outré pronouncements” of the Religious Right, we’ll be sure to let you know. 

Don’t hold your breath.

The Right has been working overtime to attack President Obama’s nominees to the Department of Justice.  But the grandstanding and name calling that have characterized the Right’s attacks on Elena Kagan, Tom Perrelli, David Ogden, and Eric Holder might only be skirmishes compared to the campaign they’re gearing up to wage against the President’s nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Dawn Johnsen.

Today the National Review weighs in with its typical sobriety.

In Dawn Johnsen's dizzying jurisprudence, government has no business invading individual privacy and regulating abortion but is obliged to coerce taxpayers into underwriting abortions as a first step in what she unapologetically calls "the progressive agenda" of "universal health care, public funding for childcare, paid family leave, and . . . the full range of economic justice issues, from the minimum wage to taxation policy to financial support for struggling families."

If Johnsen is confirmed, OLC will be transformed from a source of non-ideological legal analysis to a culture-war agitator. And its value to the Department of Justice may be lost.

Most of the article is a tirade against Johnsen’s pro-choice credentials, but be sure not to miss the hilarious interlude describing her “smearing of John Yoo, the Cal-Berkeley law professor who, as a Bush OLC staffer, principally authored DOJ's so-called torture memo.”

In contrast to Johnsen's perversion of anti-slavery law to suit her abortion agenda, Yoo was not twisting the law to advocate torture. He was soberly attempting to construe a legal term, "severe . . . pain or suffering," part of the statutory definition of torture that had not yet been interpreted by the courts. This is what OLC does: It struggles to understand the state of the law, irrespective of staffers' predilections, so that policymakers can act in full awareness of their options.

Who says that conservatives don’t have a sense of humor?

Seriously though, as much as we’d love to smear John Yoo’s reputation, he’s already done more to shame himself than we (or Dawn Johnsen) could ever hope to do.

Townhall today features a gloating report on how evangelical and rural voters provided the muscle to push through Arkansas’ anti-gay, anti-family, anti-child constitutional amendment to prevent unmarried couples from becoming foster or adoptive parents.

Rural and evangelical voters propelled Arkansas to adopt one of the nation's few bans against unmarried couples becoming foster or adoptive parents.

Championed by religious conservatives and fueled by a pulpit campaign, the ban passed with the endorsement of 56.9 percent of the voters. Major support came from rural counties in southwest Arkansas, where about two-thirds of voters supported the measure.

. . .

The ban, which takes effect Jan. 1, will reduce the pool of available homes for children who need parents and guardians, the governor said.

They must be so proud.

I used to live in Arkansas, so I was a little confused by the photograph they used to illustrate the article. It didn’t look like any part of the state I remembered, but I guess that’s because it’s actually a Congolese rebel army.

Is this a signal of the next steps for the Religious Right? Preventing children from finding loving homes by any means necessary?
 

In a post on his ghostwritten (but apparently not fact checked) blog, former somebody Tom Delay took aim at People For the American Way Foundation and the ACLU, who along with Voter Action and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are representing Sarasota County voters suing for a revote in Florida's 13th congressional district race in which more than 18,000 voters were disenfranchised in a contest decided by fewer than 400 votes.

[Democratic Congressional Candidate Christine] Jennings, for her part, is filing an official election challenge with the House Administration Committee, and she and leftwing advocacy groups such as People for the American Way and the ACLU have already launched a lawsuit in Florida, asking Leon County (Tallahassee) Circuit Judge William Gary to negate the November 7th results and order a new election. The suit was filed in Tallahasse, hundreds of miles from the 13th district, in hopes of getting a more liberal judge and jury pool instead of Sarasota County where the election actually occurred and the voting machines in question are located.

Of course, had Delay paid attention to the law, he would have known state law requires that an election contest like this, where the election encompassed more than one county, must be filed in state court in Leon County (Tallahassee). Oh, and it’s not a jury trial either.

It’s nice to nice to see Tom Delay is maintaining the high standards of honesty and integrity that gave him the opportunity to be a blogger rather than a member of Congress.

In the recent film “Jesus Camp,” a star preacher opines that when evangelicals vote, they control the outcome of the election -- that’s been the conventional wisdom around Washington since Karl Rove squeaked out President Bush’s successful reelection campaign and conservative evangelical leaders claimed credit.

Mathematically, the preacher’s claim may be correct, but evangelicals are a politically diverse community, and it turns out the most conservative among them may not be going to the polls this year.

The Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association (AFA) is encouraging Christians to register to vote in time for next month's elections. A recent survey of AFA supporters found that about half are not even registered, which is one reason the organization has unveiled a website to help pro-family individuals be well informed voters.

The AFA’s own release goes on to say that their registration rate is significantly less than the nation as a whole. For all their tough talk of electoral might, the AFA should perhaps devote a little more time to basic civics and a little less doing, well, everything else they do.