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Cliff Kincaid, of the right-wing media watchdog organization Accuracy in Media, has joined the group of right-wing elites trying to blame the Mark Foley scandal on an imagined gay cabal within the Republican Party. The following is from a column Kincaid published today:

As I contended during an interview on the public television program NOW, the Republicans have only themselves to blame for this scandal. House leaders permitted homosexuals to infiltrate and manipulate the party apparatus while they publicly postured as friends of family values and traditional marriage. The facade is now in ruins. The press can’t be blamed for seizing on a real and legitimate story.

The Foley-Hastert scandal, according to Kincaid, is the result of the House Republican leadership’s subservience to a dedicated and crafty network of gay Republicans “working behind-the-scenes to sabotage a conservative pro-family agenda in the Congress.” Kincaid suggests that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert’s refusal to resign might be evidence that this alleged secret network of closeted Republicans reaches into the highest positions of leadership:

For the sake of honest and open government, not to mention protection of the children, the secret Capitol Hill homosexual network must be exposed and dismantled. But only Republican leaders can do that. Their failure to do so suggests that the network may go higher and deeper—and have more power—than even the New York Times article indicated.

Some right wing leaders are responding to the congressional page scandal by attempting to shift blame onto gay Americans and making the patently false claim that gays are disproportionately likely to commit child sexual abuse.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, no stranger to ethics problems, and certainly not someone who should be speaking on behalf of family values, got the ball rolling on Fox News Sunday when he tried to excuse Republican leaders’ failure to protect minors serving as congressional pages. Gingrich argued that inappropriate e-mails in which Congressman Mark Foley asked a 16-year-old former page for his photo “were relatively innocuous.” Then he tried to turn the tables and blame the Republican leaders’ inaction on gays: “I think had they overly aggressively reacted to the initial round, they would also have been accused of gay bashing,” Gingrich said, “because it was a male-male relationship.”

That’s right. According to Newt Gingrich, the same Republican leaders who want to write anti-gay discrimination into the U.S. Constitution, who have a collective rating of zero on the Human Rights Campaign scorecard, and who count some of the most bigoted anti-gay activists in the country among their core supporters are so scared of being accused of “gay bashing” that they’re rendered impotent when it comes to protecting vulnerable children. This line of reasoning may seem so preposterous that it could be taken as a bad joke, but it’s also apparently rather catchy.

On Monday, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins jumped on the bandwagon, trying to imply that the broader problem is that Congress is cowed by the awesome power of the LGBT lobby. “We need to get to the source of the problem,” he said on CNN. “What prevented the leadership from acting? Were they fearful of acting because they would be seen as homophobic or gay bashing?” Perkins continued, “It shouldn’t be totally surprising, when we hold up tolerance and diversity as the guideposts for public life, this is what you end up getting.“

Perkins upped the ante in today’s San Francisco Chronicle by dismissing Foley’s wrongdoing and the failure of the House Republican leadership to do anything about it, and asserting instead that “the real issue” in the page scandal “is the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse.”

Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial (subscription required) about the scandal echoed Gingrich’s and Perkins’ assertions:

“In today's politically correct culture, it's easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert's head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts' decision to ban gay scoutmasters?”

The implication here—an assertion about which Perkins was more explicit—is that there is a tie between homosexuality and child molestation. To be clear, that assertion is patently false. As Robert Geffner, the editor of The Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, told USA Today, several studies find that homosexuals are no more likely than heterosexuals to molest kids. Indeed, the most prominent “academic” claiming that there is a correlation between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, Paul Cameron, is clearly more interested in demonizing gays than doing legitimate research, as he’s argued in the past that “the extermination of homosexuals” should be considered.

Maybe instead of attacking gay people, far-right leaders should ask a more obvious question: Why did top Republican leaders in the House decide to protect their own political power when they could have protected children?

The National Black Republican Association made headlines a little over a week ago when it began airing radio ads in Maryland and Ohio claiming Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican. The ads included gross distortions of civil rights history intended to make the Republican Party sound palatable to African Americans, who usually vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Now the NBRA’s at it again. Apparently not content to insult listeners with merely 30 seconds of distortions, the NBRA has released a new 60-second version of its ad (audio here). The new ad contains plenty of additional warped history, and also attempts to stir up anti-gay sentiment. Here’s the transcript:

Voice 1: Dr. King was a real man. You know he was a Republican.

Voice 2: Dr. King? A Republican?

Voice 1: Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan.

Voice 2: White hoods and sheets?

Voice 1: Democrats fought all civil rights legislation form the 1860s til the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks.

Voice 2: Seriously?

Voice 1: And the Dixiecrats? Remained Democrats and vowed to vote for a yellow dog before a Republican. Republicans freed us from slavery and put our right to vote in the Constitution.

Voice 2: What?

Voice 1: Republicans started the NAACP, affirmative action, and the HBCUs.

Voice 2: Sounds like Democrats have bamboozled blacks.

Voice 1: Democrats blocked the minimum wage passed by Republicans, and over $200 billion have been spent on education health care and job training since President Bush took office.

Voice 2: So Democrats want to keep us poor while voting only Democrat.

Voice 1: Democrats want us to accept same-sex marriages, teen abortions without a parent’s consent, and suing the boy scouts for saying God in their pledge.

Voice 2: See, we need to think and vote on our own values.

Voice 1: Exactly. Democrats have talked the talk but the Republicans have walked the walk.

Voice 2: It’s time for us to do the walk.

Voice 1: You know it girl.

This misrepresentation of history is shameful, but it’s not isolated. Radical right faux “historian” David Barton has been peddling similar propaganda through a new DVD, and the NBRA has cited Barton's work as a basis for its communications.

Thankfully, Barton, the NBRA, and their allies are not going unchallenged. Respected African American Democrats and Republicans, as well as nonpartisan leaders such as Rev. Timothy McDonald, the national chair of African American Ministers in Action, are standing up against these distortions and for the truth.

At least a few supporters of Intelligent Design Creationism have taken it upon themselves to teach students another kind of lesson: if at first you don’t succeed, threaten violence.

The AP reports that Pennsylvania U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III received, in addition to verbal attacks from far right commentators, at least a few death threats which led to a week of protection by federal marshals after Jones ruled last year against a plan by the Dover School Board to require the teaching of Intelligent Design Creationism in the district’s schools.

“And if you would have told me when I got on the bench four years ago that I would have death threats in a case like this as opposed to, for example, a crack cocaine case where I mete out a heavy sentence, I would have told you that you were crazy,” he said. “But I did. And that's a sad statement.”

Dover is the town whose residents were warned by Pat Robertson not to pray to God if they suffered a catastrophe because voting the pro-creationism members off the school board meant citizens were kicking God out of town.

PFAWF has already documented that the Creationism movement has tried a variety of tactics to force religion into public science classrooms over the years. And attacking judges as dangerous and un-American has become frighteningly commonplace. But death threats over a school science curriculum is a potent reminder that extremism is alive and well in 21st century America.

A new radio ad in Maryland, apparently intended to boost the Senate candidacy of Michael Steele, urges African Americans to stop voting for Democrats, because, among other things, “Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws” and “Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan.”

The ad claims that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican and says that “Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s” and that “Democrats have bamboozled blacks.” But after listening to the ad, it’s hard not to wonder exactly who’s trying to bamboozle who. The ad, being aired by the National Black Republican Association, fails to note Democrats’ role in the modern civil rights movement, and it neglects to mention Democrats’ positions on currently contested issues including affirmative action, public education, and voting rights.

Unfortunately for Republicans, as political scientist Ronald Walters told the Washington Post, “You’re not likely to find African Americans having historical amnesia on this one. … This is clearly a sales pitch, and not a very good one.”

To his credit, Steele has called the ad “insulting” and asked that it be pulled down, but it’s important to note that the misleading narrative promulgated by the ad is not anomalous. This line of rhetoric is outrageous, but it isn’t new. The Republican National Committee has hired Religious Right faux historian David Barton to travel the country and provide African American audiences with a similarly false version of civil rights history. Barton has also released a one-sided DVD that spreads the same untruths (see a video clip from the DVD here).

People For the American Way Foundation just released an online report on David Barton that includes an in-depth look at his attempts to rewrite civil rights history. That report can be accessed at http://www.pfaw.org/go/davidbarton.

Home-school advocate Charles Lowers sees public schools as the latest front in the Right’s imagined War on Christians. In an Agape Press article published Monday, Lowers, who directs the Radical Right organization Considering Homeschooling, says it’s wrong for Christian parents to send their children to public schools, because public schools erase students’ Christianity.

Children are “so much higher at risk,” Lowers told Agape, “whether it be premarital sex, abortion, pornography, [or] homosexuality. You can't turn your children over to the public school establishment and expect that your children are going to come out Christian.” Lowers warns parents about the “anti-Christian” agenda of public schools, which he thinks are focused on “secular humanist indoctrination,” according to Agape.

This isn’t the first time that Lowers has attempted to promote his pet cause of home schooling by attacking public schools. Lowers made waves a week ago, when he told World Net Daily that Christian parents should “yank” their children from public schools because public schools try “to ensure that your daughters get birth control and abortions without you knowing,” “homosexuals are dictating curriculum,” and students’ “minds and hearts will be molested.”

Seems like the War on Christmas might come early this year.