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Last month, Right Wing Watch detailed Focus on the Family’s attempt to blindly attribute the correlation between declining teen sex rates to the promotion of abstinence-only education. As we pointed out, correlation does not necessarily mean causation.

A news release from the abstinence-only education organization Project Reality continues the shoddy statistical analysis, detailing the overlapping decline in the teen pregnancy rate among 10-14 year olds with the increase in abstinence-only education. Project Reality’s director comments:

Religious-right leaders are flocking to defend a mayor whose anti-gay comments have drawn public criticism.

Last month, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida Mayor Jim Naugle proposed replacing the bathrooms at the city’s beaches with $250,000 self-cleaning robo-toilets to combat the purportedly rampant problem of gay men using public restrooms for sexual encounters. In discussing his plan, he commented:

"I don’t use the word ‘gay,’ I use the word ‘homosexual.’ Most of them aren’t gay. They’re unhappy."

After a public uproar, Naugle then scheduled a press conference to offer an“apology” for his comments. But the "apology" he offered was for not being aware sooner that sex in public bathrooms was such a problem. The major flaw with this apology, in addition to the obvious bait-and-switch which infuriated local gay-rights activists, is that a Fort Lauderdale police spokesman has characterized the supposed problem as “non-existent.”

Nevertheless, adulation from the religious right has been forthcoming, with Rick Scarborough calling Mayor Naugle “bold,” and Concerned Women for America labeling him “gutsy.” Faith2Action’s Janet Folger even presented Naugle with her weekly “Protector of the Family” award for his efforts. A collection of extremely anti-gay religious-right groups including Americans for Truth, Concerned Women for America, Coral Ridge Ministries, and Faith2Action have even formed their own website, www.healthypublicplaces.com.  Although to date it's nothing more than a link to a press release, the site is further evidence that religious-right leaders are willing to circle the wagons around any politician who spouts anti-gay rhetoric.  

(Photo: Janet Folger presents Naugle with the "Protector of the Family" award.)

The Minuteman PAC, established to provide financial support to anti-immigrant candidates running for federal office, appears to be establishing a trend of not actually providing support to candidates. As we previously reported, in the first quarter of 2007 the Minuteman PAC raised over $300,000, and of the $270,000 spent, only $10,000 went toward a candidate running for office.

The organization recently released second quarter numbers and they are not much different. Having raised nearly $260,000 and disbursed close to $250,000, not one penny of that money went to any candidate, as the Minuteman PAC failed to make a single political contribution during the quarter. The vast majority of its expenses -- around $215,000 -- went to fundraising and direct mail fees, mainly to American Caging, American Mailing Services, and other firms linked to non-profit groups associated with Alan Keyes.

According to the right-wing news website, WorldNetDaily, Fred Thompson has finally and “candidly” confirmed his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, which WND says is sometimes referred to as the “‘shadow government’ organization of elites with a global agenda.” Earlier this week, Thompson was confronted and questioned by an activist during a campaign stop regarding his association with the Council, long a bete noir of activists who suspect the United Nations and other elites of scheming to destroy U.S. sovereignty.  The activist who confronted Thompson, and was eventually forcibly removed from the event, mentioned the Council’s supposed efforts to bring about the North American Union, the latest nightmare for Phyllis Schlafly and the black-helicopter crowd.

Thompson seemingly tried to defuse the situation with polite mush:

“I didn't know they were up to that… There are several conservatives over the years who have been members of the Council on Foreign Relations. I try to learn as much as I can from all viewpoints. I have been a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the conservative thinks tanks in town, and enjoy having intellectual exercise and discussions whether I agree or not with anyone on any particular issue.”

But his association with the Council may fuel the suspicions of anti-immigrant activists who have also latched onto the North American Union as a plot to dissolve the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada.  Thompson has previously been condemned by VDARE, an anti-immigration group that has been accused of publishing white nationalist authors, but is also associated with notable commentators such as Pat Buchanan and Michelle Malkin. WorldNetDaily columnist Jerome Corsi, of Swift Boat fame and co-author, along with Jim Gilchrist, of Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders, has been perhaps the most outspoken in attacking Thompson. Corsi, calls Thompson a “red herring” being peddled to conservatives even though, asserts Corsi, he is “not a conservative.”

As recently interpreted by Focus on the Family and the Culture and Media Institute, polls judging attitudes toward equal workplace rights demonstrate that the American people are a bunch of suckers:

According to Gallup, 90 percent of Americans believe gay people should have equal workplace rights, but only 47 percent think being gay is “morally acceptable.” To bridge the gap, the gay strategy is to spotlight themselves as credible and professional, and provide business leadership with gay-friendly misinformation.

“The bottom line is they are using the power of money and position to promote an agenda that these people acknowledge that half of Americans still feel is immoral,” Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Media Institute in Alexandria, Va., told Family News in Focus.

Apparently, this “gap” couldn’t have stemmed from the American public’s ability to develop nuanced views with regard to ideas of equality and their own personal moral convictions... No, the gap must have come from a successful disinformation campaign that somehow managed to fool the public into believing that gay people can be capable workplace employees.

This week in Washington, DC, Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI) held its annual convention to promote the religious-right’s support of Israel. Amid an evening featuring Gary Bauer and Rod Parsley and the bashing of the United Nations, European Union, State Department, and Jimmy Carter as enemies of the state of Israel, rumored presidential candidate Newt Gingrich provided a relatively innocuous keynote address. Well, relative in the sense that Gingrich outlined his hawkish post-9/11 worldview as opposed to discussing Israel’s role in the impending rapture.

Most of the CUFI constituents in the audience appeared to agree with Hagee’s views regarding the rapidly approaching judgment day.  As we highlighted earlier this year when John McCain was courting CUFI, Hagee’s apocalyptic foreign policy views aren’t exactly mainstream.  So what explains Gingrich’s presence at an event hosted by Hagee, whose judgments are shaped by a belief in a biblically predestined war between Israel and Iran, and the worldwide rule of the Antichrist in the form of the head of the European Union?

Gingrich, who offered up a slightly modified stump speech, making mention of the need for strength and perseverance in the face of war and references to the importance of America’s Christian heritage, is apparently looking to build right-wing support for a potential presidential bid without publicly embracing the conferees’ most extreme ideas.

Statistical Analysis 101 emphasizes the idea that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. Focus on the Family Action, however, has not let this basic rule of statistics get in the way of implying a relationship between declining teen sex rates and the introduction of abstinence-only education. Focus on the Family Action cites a National Center for Health Statistics study showing that from 1991 to 2005, the percentage of teens engaging in sexual intercourse dropped from 54% to 47%:

Linda Klepacki, analyst for sexual health at Focus on the Family Action, said 1991 is a significant marker for a reason.

"That's when we separated out abstinence education from contraceptive-based education," she said. "We have seen a continual decline since 1991, so we can infer that we've had an effect with abstinence education in our public schools."

Never mind studies that have called into question the effectiveness of abstinence-only education.

A closer look at the study also reveals that the decrease in teenage sex appears to have occurred from 1991 to 2001. Since the Bush administration began heavily pushing abstinence-only education at a national level in 2001, rates appear to have remained unchanged from 2001 to 2005. With this apparent correlation, how come Focus on the Family doesn’t blame the massive infusion of federal funding on abstinence-only programs during the Bush administration for halting the decline in teen sexual activity since 2001?

Yesterday, a collection of extremist right-wing groups, including BOND and Repent America, along with former Navy chaplain and fringe-right folk hero Gordon Klingenschmitt, held a press conference at the U.S. Capitol to protest Senate hate crimes legislation. The event continued the right-wing’s on-going effort to falsely portray an upcoming Senate bill that would add sexual orientation, gender, and disability to the existing federal hate crime law, as an attack on Christianity.

BOND’s Jesse Lee Peterson puts the legislation into perspective:

“If Christians don’t wake up to what is happening, they will look around one day and realize that they cannot even mention the name of God or disagree with homosexuality.”

Klingenschmitt then more specifically describes the threat:

“If this bill passes, they will come into our churches, they will grab your sermon notes, they will go after your congregation if any pastor preaches against the sin of homosexuality and then a nut in the crowd later goes out and commits a crime. They will accuse him as a codefendant and charge him with a hate speech crime.”

Of course there’s no such thing as a “hate speech crime” in this bill or the existing federal hate crimes law, which targets only violent crimes that cause people bodily harm.  In fact, the “Hate Crimes Prevention Act” already passed by the House includes explicit language protecting the First Amendment rights that Klingenschmitt and his colleagues claim are being threatened.

Repent America’s Michael Marcavage says that the bill’s focus on violent acts is somehow part of a secret strategy:

“[Hate-crime legislation proponents are] doing this in a strategic manner because they say it only applies to violence or violent acts.”

Sure, the law may SAY it only applies to violent crimes, and sure, it may include clear protections for religious leaders and anyone else to speak out against homosexuality, but it’s all part of a slippery slope that will lead to preachers being dragged from their pulpits.

Ah, the old slippery slope argument. Remember then-Senator Rick Santorum insisting that overturning laws against sodomy would lead to acceptance of man-dog sex? Coincidently, this contention also happened to be presented during the press conference by Rev. Jonathan Hunter of LEARN:

“Pastors not only have a right, but an obligation to state emphatically that, according to scripture, a man or woman should not perform a sex act with a person of the same sex, nor with a dog, nor with a snake, nor with a hamster or any other creature.”

As we previously noted, even the urban legend website Snopes.com has debunked the Religious Right’s claims about the hate crimes law. And a group of religious leaders held their own press event in support of the law a day earlier.  But when it comes to portraying supporters of legal protection for gay Americans as enemies of religious liberty, right-wing leaders don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Dr. Alveda King Tookes, a niece of Dr. Martin Luther King who has associated herself with a variety of right-wing causes and organizations, recently called on the NAACP to adopt a resolution passed by the Macon, Georgia chapter, requesting that the national civil rights organization work to reduce abortion and infant mortality rates in the black community and reduce the disproportionately high black inmate population.

While civic leaders from across the political spectrum have advanced plans to reduce unplanned pregnancy and the number of abortions, and nobody would question the goals of reducing African American infant mortality and imprisonment, King seems less interested in advancing those goals than in embracing the far-right’s extreme anti-abortion rhetoric:

“Today, there is no greater injustice facing black people than abortion. Over 13 million African Americans are not here because they died by legal abortion. It’s as if a plague swept through our cities and towns and took one of every four blacks.”

King is “Pastoral Associate” and Priests for Life’s Coordinator of African American Outreach. Here’s a sample of that outreach:

“Blacks make up 12% of the population, but 35% of the abortions in America. Are we being targeted? Isn't that genocide? We are the only minority in America that is on the decline in population. If the current trend continues, by 2038 the black vote will be insignificant.”

King isn’t the only right-wing African American to equate legal abortion with genocide in an effort to split African American voters from their traditional support for progressive policies and candidates.  Two weeks before the 2006 elections, Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. of the High Impact Leadership Coalition minimized concerns about the thousands of people being killed in the war in Iraq by contrasting those deaths to the “genocidal murder” of “millions of black babies.”

In anticipation of Al Gore’s July 7th Live Earth concerts, Brent Bozell, president of the right-wing Media Research Center, issued a statement chastising NBC for televising the event: 

“This isn’t just a big wet kiss to Al Gore and his left-wing agenda, it’s a shameless acknowledgement of NBC’s bias… They might as well re-name it 'Gorestock 2007.' It’s tough to deny what comes from the horse’s mouth. NBC is a self-proclaimed liberal cheerleader.”

If one didn’t know better, one might think Bozell was calling for the revival of the Fairness Doctrine, which the FCC has not enforced since the 1980s, requiring equal broadcast time on television and radio for differing sides of political issues to ensure that the issue receives fair and balanced treatment.

But that can’t be the case since many right-wing groups, including Bozell’s Media Research Center see it as a way to silence right-wing radio. In an earlier press release commenting on the Fairness Doctrine, Bozell defends the partisan and ideologically driven nature of right-wing radio by citing the market for right-wing speech and subsequently condemns those that supposedly want to shut it down:

“The liberals cannot sell their product—liberal talk radio—in the marketplace, so they are planning to use the power of government to stop conservatives from selling their product, conservative talk radio. Liberals don’t believe in free exchange, tolerance, or the marketplace of ideas. They believe in the iron boot of liberalism stamping out any view that upsets the liberal apple cart.”

So what’s the problem with NBC serving as a medium for Gore’s concerts? Given the big-name musical acts performing for Live Earth, the audience and market are certainly there. Somehow, the airwaves carrying partisan right-wing radio are contributing to “free exchange” and a more fruitful “marketplace of ideas” while the airwaves carrying Live Earth are shamelessly pushing the “left-wing agenda.”

Opinions regarding global warming and Al Gore aside, to call out and criticize NBC for carrying his message is simply hypocritical, considering that right-wing radio has given out a few big wet kisses in its day.

In a recent anti-immigration e-mail rant to his supporters, Gary Bauer assailed the federal government for failing to protect the border against a supposed “invasion”:

My friends, this is not the hallmark of a serious nation at war, intent on defending its homeland. If these same bureaucrats were running the government during World War II, America would not have developed the atomic bomb until the 1970s.

Bauer’s position on border enforcement notwithstanding, his remark curiously alludes to one of the greatest immigration success stories in American history. Many of the principal scientists involved in the Manhattan Project and the building of the atomic bomb were foreign-born immigrants, including the Italian Enrico Fermi, German-born Hans Bethe, and Hungary-native Edward Teller. The famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr was here under what one could call a “temporary worker program.”   

As Bauer’s own example points out, those born outside of America have made valuable contributions to U.S. society. Who knows, maybe without immigrants, the U.S. might not have developed the atomic bomb until the 1970s.