Brian Tashman's blog

The American Family Association is up in arms over a decision by Indiana’s bureau of motor vehicles to offer license plates that benefit the Indiana Youth Group, an organization which provides safe spaces for LGBT youth and straight allies. The license plate would cost an additional $40, $25 of which would go to IYG, and feature a rainbow with a handprint.

Naturally, the AFA’s Indiana chapter is displeased with the move, warning that the license plate which will help “a group which recruits teens into the homosexual lifestyle”:

Micah Clark, Executive Director of the American Family Association of Indiana noted that other plate interests rejected by the BMV have often taken their case to the legislature. Such was the case with Indiana's National Motto "In God We Trust Plate" license plate which now appears on more then 2 million Hoosier automobiles. For some reason the homosexual group went back to the agency again and received approval from the BMV. It is doubtful that the legislature would have approved a plate for a controversial group like the Indy Youth Group.

"You have to question what the BMV was thinking when they approved a license plate for a group which recruits teens into the homosexual lifestyle. Since health risks do not seem to matter, what is to prevent a cigar club from now getting a license plate from the BMV?"

"State agencies should be neutral in the politically charged culture war especially the promotion of homosexuality among minors. It is very disappointing that Indiana is the first state in the nation to have a license plate celebrating youth involved in homosexual behaviors," said Clark.

On Monday, Janet Parshall hosted David Barton to use Martin Luther King Jr. Day as an opportunity for Barton to spew his right-wing reading of U.S. history and the Constitution. While Barton does not have degrees in history or law, he claimed that the theory of evolution was responsible for the Supreme Court’s ruling in Everson v. Board of Education, which found that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause applies to the states because it was incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment — because it led to legal positivism.

As Barton explains, law students who learned about the theory of evolution, which he objects to since he believes the Founders settled “the entire debate on creation and evolution” and opposed the theory, consequently believed that the Constitution should evolve, and in turn made the Establishment Clause apply to the states. Barton has consistently opposed the Supreme Court’s definition of the Establishment Clause and its application to states and localities, even going as so far to tell Jon Stewart that he believes cities can even implement Sharia law, although he later denied saying it.

Barton: This may sound weird but it was the theory of evolution, we think it’s a science debate it is not, if you apply the theory of evolution to law you say, ‘wait a minute we can’t be bound by a two hundred year old document, we’ve evolved past that, what we need to have is an evolving document that meets the needs of society today and who best to evolve the document but judges, they’re the ones who deal with the law,’ so we got into this thing of what’s called legal positivism or evolutionary law, living constitution, and we started teaching that in the law schools in the 1920s. Take kids in the law schools in the 20s and, get this, they’re now in legal practice in the ’30s and now in the ’40s they’re adults with twenty years under their belt and they get appointed to the US Supreme Court and so in ’47 they simply implemented what they’ve been taught in law school twenty-five years earlier.

The Radiance Foundation, the group which consistently propagates the widely discredited smear that Planned Parenthood is using legal abortion to exterminate African Americans, is using Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to make it appear that King would oppose abortion rights:

What the group fails to mention, besides the actual reasons abortion rate is higher in the African American community, is that King received the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood in 1966 and the civil rights leader, who called the award “among my most cherished possessions,” praised the organization and its founder:

There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.

…

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning. Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her. Negroes have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern.

Recently the subject of Negro family life has received extensive attention. Unfortunately, studies have overemphasized the problem of the Negro male ego and almost entirely ignored the most serious element — Negro migration. During the past half century Negroes have migrated on a massive scale, transplanting millions from rural communities to crammed urban ghettoes. In their migration, as with all migrants, they carried with them the folkways of the countryside into an inhospitable city slum. The size of family that may have been appropriate and tolerable on a manually cultivated farm was carried over to the jammed streets of the ghetto. In all respects Negroes were atomized, neglected and discriminated against. Yet, the worst omission was the absence of institutions to acclimate them to their new environment. Margaret Sanger, who offered an important institutional remedy, was unfortunately ignored by social and political leaders in this period. In consequence, Negro folkways in family size persisted. The problem was compounded when unrestrained exploitation and discrimination accented the bewilderment of the newcomer, and high rates of illegitimacy and fragile family relationships resulted.

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.

For these constructive movements we are prepared to give our energies and consistent support; because in the need for family planning, Negro and white have a common bond; and together we can and should unite our strength for the wise preservation, not of races in general, but of the one race we all constitute — the human race.

Have even conservatives finally grown tired of Ann Coulter? Conservative talk show host Steve Deace lit into Coulter, calling the right-wing pundit a “hack of the highest order,” on Michael Brown’s Line of Fire and again on his own talk show last night. Coulter’s relationship with the conservative movement soured after she joined the board of the gay conservative group GOProud, even though she regularly attacks gays and lesbians, and Deace told Brown that Christians who purchase Coulter’s book will are “probably going to have to give an account one day on why they wasted the revenue God gave them:

The commentator that probably has the least amount of credibility in America is Ann Coulter. I think a Christian that buys another one of her books or anything else that’s attached to her is probably going to have to give an account one day on why they wasted the revenue God gave them. She has undermined almost everything Christians say they believe for the last few years, including her recent joining of the board of GOProud, which is a pro-gay Republican group. I don’t know how else to put that, I don’t say this with joy and glee, I’m not playing roll out the barrel in the back as I’m telling your audience this Michael, but you asked me a blunt question and I’ll give you a blunt answer, and that is that the list of people I know in American politics who I’ve studied or interviewed or gotten to know who I think have less credibility and less integrity than Ann Coulter, regardless of their belief system, is a real short one. 

Last night on his own talk show, Deace said Coulter was “the least sincere, most dishonest person in American politics I know and have ever interviewed regardless of which side of the aisle they’re on,” hitting her for her endorsement of Mitt Romney:

I was on an interview, I was on Dr. Michael Brown’s show today, Line of Fire, and he was asking me about our book, We Won’t Get Fooled Again, and he brought up some of the people we’ve interviewed, just wanted to get my quick take on them after we did the interviews and he brought up Ann Coulter, and I said, bottom line, Ann Coulter is the least sincere, most dishonest person in American politics I know and have ever interviewed regardless of which side of the aisle they’re on. I just think she’s an absolute hack of the highest order, and just totally insincere. So [she and Romney] belong together.

Did social conservative leaders come together and jointly endorse Rick Santorum at the Texas retreat over the weekend? That is the way Family Research Council president Tony Perkins and many in the media interpreted the meeting of leading Religious Right luminaries, where on the second ballot Santorum led Gingrich 70 to 49, and on the third ballot 85 to 29. Perkins claimed there was a “strong consensus” behind Santorum, who has won the backing of Concerned Women for America CEO Penny Young Nance, former National Organization for Marriage president Maggie Gallagher, American Values president Gary Bauer and the expected endorsement of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson.

But have Religious Right leaders really coalesced around Santorum?

Gingrich has locked in the support of prominent social conservative leaders: Concerned Women for America founder and chairman Beverly LaHaye; Council for National Policy founder and author Tim LaHaye; American Family Association founder and chairman Don Wildmon; Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver; California pastor and Proposition 8 organizer Jim Garlow; evangelical pollster George Barna; Restoration Project organizer David Lane and pastor and former congressman J.C. Watts.

Gingrich supporters have even claimed that the third ballot, which showed Santorum winning handling, occurred after many leaders left the meeting and that some Santorum boosters were involved with “ballot-box stuffing.” Bob Vander Plaats, an early Santorum endorser, told Bryan Fischer on Focal Point that the Texas gathering only showed “divided support” between Santorum and Gingrich, and Red State’s Erick Erickson, who attended the meeting, said that “it was divided with many thinking Gingrich is the only one who can win.”

The real loser of the meeting was Texas Governor Rick Perry, who won just three votes in the first ballot. Major Religious Right leaders gathered in Texas last summer where they urged Perry to run for president. Dobson, Perkins, Garlow, Nance and other Religious Right figures all appeared with Perry at his The Response prayer rally and after Perry announced his candidacy, he courted a group of social conservative activists including Perkins, Dobson, Garlow at the Texas ranch of mega-donor James Leininger. John Stemberger, the head of the Florida Family Policy Council who was a Perry campaign chairman, has now even switched his support from Perry to Santorum.

While it remains to be seen if social conservatives will really “coalesce” behind Santorum, it is clear that the Religious Right leadership that begged Perry to enter the race has now utterly abandoned him.

Religious Right leader and Left Behind author Tim LaHaye has always reserved strong criticism for President Obama, even going so far as to say that he is pushing the world “closer to the Apocalypse,” continued to lash out at the Obama administration in his letter to South Carolina pastors asking them to support Newt Gingrich. LaHaye and his wife Beverly, the founder and chairman of Concerned Women for America, endorsed Gingrich yesterday and, like Gingrich’s other supporters from the Religious Right, is warning that America may collapse if Obama wins reelection.

“Liberal secularists had brought our nation to the verge of maylieze [sic] and stagnation because over half the Christians in America didn’t even bother to vote,” LaHaye writes, “Please payerfully [sic] onsider going to the polls and help elect Newt Gingrich, a proven conservative who has the best chance of replacing the present occupant of the White House with a man with a proven record of appointing conservatives to office that can return this country to the constitutional principles that God has chosen to bless for over two hundred years”:

The reason I am writing you is because as a South Carolinian, you are in a strategic position to help America at this historic time in our nation’s history. During the last three years our nation has been led by liberal secularists who have tried their best to remove God from our public square and the elimination of the Biblical principles our founding fathers built this nation on. Their financial policies have already brought us to the brink of bankruptcy and their government policies of over regulation has prolonged our recession and will, if continued for four more years, destroy this country as we know it. Some in this government want to tell churches who they can hire or fire to run their church, which is the very thing our forefathers wanted to keep the King and his government from doing. If we do not change our leaders in the next election we will end up being like the godless socialist countries of Europe. That will so destroy our country in four years that many experts believe we will never be able to reclaim it for moral and physical sanity.

That is where you come in! As a voter you can go to the polls and elect the one man in the up coming primary with the intelligence, conservative philosophy and hands on experience in government that is so needed today to return our country to the God honoring principles that made our nation the greatest country in world history. That man is our personal friend, Speaker Newt Gingrich. My wife Beverly, the Founder and Chairman of Concerned Women For America based in Washington D.C., and I believe he is the only man running for the office of President of America who shares our conservative principles who can beat the present leader in open debate and win! As my friend, the late Dr. Jerry Falwell told me personally, Speaker Newt Gingrich is the most qualified man in America to run as president of the United States. We agree!

In 1980, America was on a decline not unlike our country is today. Liberal secularists had brought our nation to the verge of maylieze [sic] and stagnation because over half the Christians in America didn’t even bother to vote. That’s why we started the Moral Majority that helped elect conservative Ronald Regan and with God’s help he changed the direction of our country. I am one of the two minister board members still living who helped Jerry get that majority started. Today we have no regrets!

Now it is your turn. It seems apparent the Republican candidates have come down to two possible winners. Please payerfully [sic] consider going to the polls and help elect Newt Gingrich, a proven conservative who has the best chance of replacing the present occupant of the White House with a man with a proven record of appointing conservatives to office that can return this country to the constitutional principles that God has chosen to bless for over two hundred years. Not just for ourselves, but for our children and to maintain the religious [sic] freedom thais [sic] so important today in preserving our nation’s future.

Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver announced yesterday that he will be hosting a presidential candidate forum at Florida Awake in Orlando on January 28, three days before the Florida primary, at the Aloma Baptist Church in Orlando.

Staver also participated in the 2008 Values Voter Presidential Debate in Florida, which featured candidates like Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Alan Keyes and Duncan Hunter, however, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson refused to appear. At that debate, Staver excoriated Thompson in absentia for supporting the right of state legislatures to legalize same-sex marriage, likening it to slavery, and McCain, Romney and Giuliani received similarly harsh treatment from the debate moderators over their stances on gay rights, abortion rights and campaign finance reform.

While Staver hasn’t said which candidates will appear at Florida Awake, all of the candidates save one may have a reason to avoid Staver’s forum: the very same day he announced his presidential candidate forum, he was named National Co-Chair of the Gingrich Faith Leaders Coalition. Staver said that Gingrich is the “clear choice” to lead “a new conservative resurgence” against Obama, and joined fellow Religious Right leaders like Don Wildmon, Jim Garlow, George Barna and Tim LaHaye in backing the former Speaker.

While GOP candidates besides Gingrich have actively worked to capture the vote of social conservatives, it is odd that Staver would expect candidates to attend his debate when he is the co-chair of one of their opponent’s campaign coalitions.

UPDATE: The Orlando Sentinel reports that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have both committed to participating in Staver’s forum.

Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver announced yesterday that he will be hosting a presidential candidate forum at Florida Awake in Orlando on January 28, three days before the Florida primary, at the Aloma Baptist Church in Orlando.

Staver also participated in the 2008 Values Voter Presidential Debate in Florida, which featured candidates like Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Alan Keyes and Duncan Hunter, however, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson refused to appear. At that debate, Staver excoriated Thompson in absentia for supporting the right of state legislatures to legalize same-sex marriage, likening it to slavery, and McCain, Romney and Giuliani received similarly harsh treatment from the debate moderators over their stances on gay rights, abortion rights and campaign finance reform.

While Staver hasn’t said which candidates will appear at Florida Awake, all of the candidates save one may have a reason to avoid Staver’s forum: the very same day he announced his presidential candidate forum, he was named National Co-Chair of the Gingrich Faith Leaders Coalition. Staver said that Gingrich is the “clear choice” to lead “a new conservative resurgence” against Obama, and joined fellow Religious Right leaders like Don Wildmon, Jim Garlow, George Barna and Tim LaHaye in backing the former Speaker.

While GOP candidates besides Gingrich have actively worked to capture the vote of social conservatives, it is odd that Staver would expect candidates to attend his debate when he is the co-chair of one of their opponent’s campaign coalitions.

Rick Perry today appeared on WallBuilders Live with right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton and his cohost Rick Green, where he spent most of the time railing against President Obama’s spending policies while also criticizing his proposed cuts to the Defense Department budget. According to Perry, “America is paying a huge price” for electing someone who “is a socialist or was trained by socialists”:

Perry: Here’s what I tell people, I said, listen, if you’re looking for the best debater, we got a great debater in the White House right now, America is paying a huge price because they were enamored with hope and change and this president, who I truly believe is a socialist or was trained by socialists, put America in peril. Put America in peril from an economic standpoint, put America in peril from a military-preparedness standpoint, put America in peril from the standpoint of foreign policy.

Barton and Green went on to say that not only have they worked with Governor Perry but also with Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who recently appeared on WallBuilders Live, surely to inform them that Jesus opposed the minimum wage and the capital gains tax while pastors are under the threat of arrest because of hate crimes laws:

Green: Look, I know we’re talking about all the positives on Perry, I know a lot of our listeners, we got folks who support Newt and support Bachmann, and we support those guys too, they’re good folks.

Barton: I’ve already helped a whole bunch of these guys in the campaign, I have worked directly with several of them at their request and I’m happy to do that.

Green: Yeah sure, and they stand for all the right things. But we just got to be honest about Governor Perry’s record and what he did. When we went up there to Iowa and we both went and spoke at some caucuses there, it forced me to really sit down and think, why, if I got to pick somebody to vote for, how do I measure these guys? I started thinking for me it’s got to be that they both believe what I do, they got my values, but they can also be effective. So I think some people do discount him a little be when they shouldn’t and they’re going to be surprised, if he gets the momentum back—there’s some good candidates in the race, we’ll see what South Carolinians think.

Barton: We’ve always taken the position we’ll help people who have the right values, so even when I went to Iowa and spoke for Governor Perry at one of the caucuses, I was right beside Michele Bachmann’s husband Marcus and we had a great time because I had just done some media interviews on behalf of Michele.

Green: That’s right, and I went out to Iowa in August for Michele for the straw poll, and we’ve both helped Newt and Santorum, so yeah there are good people running.

Barton: There are good people running and this is fine and we’re not taking positions, but we are pointing out positive things.

While Religious Right leaders themselves might be fractured on who to support in the race, Republican candidates for president all seem to agree on who to pander to: David Barton.

Today on Grounded, Ryan Dobson was joined by Jeff Myers of Summit Ministries. Wright succeeded David Noebel, who has recently claimed that Obama is trying to “sodomize the world” and that gay-rights is responsible for the Penn State child abuse scandal, to lead Summit.

While the two spent the beginning of their program talking about Right Wing Watch which reported that Dobson, whose father is Focus on the Family James Dobson, compared homosexuality to alcoholism, they quickly moved on to using the Penn State case to argue that while gays and lesbians are really victims of abuse, they refuse to condemn sexual abuse against children. Dobson and Myers insist that by reporting on anti-gay activists, Right Wing Watch is trying to quash any debate over homosexuality, and then went into push the myth that gays molest children in order to recruit them.

Myers said that “60 percent of the males who end up proclaiming a homosexual lifestyle were abused as children,” even though according to the American Psychiatric Association, “no specific psychosocial or family dynamic cause for homosexuality has been identified, including histories of childhood sexual abuse. Sexual abuse does not appear to be more prevalent in children who grow up to identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, than in children who identify as heterosexual.” MaleSurvivor also called such a claim a “myth,” noting that “experts in the human sexuality field do not believe that premature sexual experiences play a significant role in late adolescent or adult sexual orientation.”

Wright also argued that gay-rights groups must go on record to condemn child abuse, as if their position on the subject is ambiguous and unknown, saying that “it is especially important for those groups to do it because they have aligned themselves so closely in the past with groups that do on purpose promote adult-child sex.”

Myers: This is something that Right Wing Watch has a real problem with, there are some issues they don’t want to have discussed, there are some topics they don’t want to have brought up, because to bring them up is to point out the fundamental hypocrisy and deceptions behind so many of these worldviews. The topic that shall not be named, if you were just to talk about any issue relating to homosexuality or anything of that nature, you are going to be in the hot spot because that’s not an issue that you’re supposed to be talking about, that’s not supposed to be discussed.

Dobson: Correct, I’m not allowed to talk about it.

…

Myers: We know about Jerry Sandusky and the whole child abuse scandal he’s involved in so I went to the website for GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and they said on their website there is no link between pedophilia and homosexuality. I will agree—I don’t think—there is nothing about homosexuality that causes people to prey on children. There are homosexual predators and there are heterosexual predators who prey on children. But 60 percent of the males who end up proclaiming a homosexual lifestyle were abused as children.

Dobson: Oh! OK, OK.

Myers: There is a link, but it’s not what a lot of people expect. So here’s what we did, we sent out information to 600 different gay groups and said, ‘we encourage you to condmen the sexual abuse of children, you need to do this, everybody needs to be thinking about protecting children, that children should not be abused is an absolute truth, so we need for everybody who agrees with that to say so.’

Dobson: You’re not saying join us, and make a statement on your website saying ‘we’re going to join with Summit and Jeff Myers.’

Myers: No, they don’t have to kowtow to anybody. We just want them to say, ‘we oppose the abuse of children.’ And it’s especially important for those groups to do it because they have aligned themselves so closely in the past with groups that do on purpose promote adult-child sex.