« Bush Administration
May 1, 2008
Phony 'Official' Group Prays for More Bush Judges
This morning, President Bush celebrated a National Day of Prayer, an annual non-sectarian rite going back decades. A much younger tradition was also observed: a phony “official” Day of Prayer group tried to usurp the national celebration with its own Religious Right-flavored broadcast.
As we explained last year, the National Day of Prayer Task Force—chaired by Shirley Dobson, James Dobson’s wife—is in fact an independent group whose platform runs contrary to the multi-faith spirit of the law. NDPTF specifically excludes participation by “Non-Judeo-Christian” groups, promotes fighting a “cultural war,” and its volunteers must swear their belief in an inerrant Bible.
Despite efforts this year by Jews on First, the Interfaith Alliance, and others to clarify that NDPTF is not a federal agency, confusion remains. The president himself helped to muddy the waters during the official White House ceremony, inviting the Dobsons and others involved with NDPTF and opening his remarks by thanking Shirley Dobson “for being the Chairman of the National Day of Prayer.”
The NDPTF ceremony this afternoon featured segments on the three branches of government, each featuring a prominent Republican speaker. The representative of the judicial branch was Judge Janice Rogers Brown, perhaps the most extreme-right of the controversial appeals-court nominees put forth by Bush. After Brown spoke on the nation’s “spiritual trajectory” (through events such as putting “In God We Trust” on coins), Vonette Bright—widow of Bill Bright and co-founder of Campus Crusade for Christ—led a prayer for more right-wing judges to “uphold God’s plan for marriage” and ban abortion:
Posted by Ezra at 5:40 PM | Permalink
February 20, 2008
Define 'Freedom' ...
In his state of the union address, President Bush called for a permanent extension of “charitable choice”—no doubt including efforts by his administration to allow faith-based groups receiving federal funding to discriminate in hiring. Reporting on the effort in Congress, the Washington Times quotes an organization taking up Bush’s charge:
A coalition of multidenominational religious groups is fighting to save the language, and the scuffle is complicating efforts in the Senate to renew the SAMHSA [Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration] law. SAMHSA funds and administers a slew of outreach and intervention programs, doling out grants to social service groups that help fight mental illness and addiction. …
"Asking faith-based organizations to ignore religion in making staffing decisions is like asking senators to disregard party affiliation and political ideology in choosing their staff, or requiring the Sierra Club or the Human Rights Campaign to ignore the political and philosophical commitments of potential staff," argued the Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom in a letter to Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Enzi.
The “Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom” might sound like an organization that would be outraged when a government-funded program openly refused to hire, say, Catholics or Baptists. After all, the Religious Test clause of the Constitution prohibits the government from requiring officials to be of a certain faith, and civil rights laws protect people from religious employment discrimination at all but private religious institutions. But this group apparently defines “religious freedom” not as an individual liberty but as the right of faith-based groups to discriminate while receiving federal dollars.
In fact, this coalition’s name sounds a lot like that of the Coalition to Preserve Religious Liberty, a group of 50 religious, civil rights, and educational organizations (including PFAW) that formed in the 1990s to oppose efforts to establish state-sponsored prayer and public funding of sectarian schools—quite the opposite of the Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom.
CPRF is hosted by a group called the Center for Public Justice, and its members include (as of this 2004 document) the National Association of Evangelicals and the Christian Legal Society.
Posted by Ezra at 3:22 PM | Permalink
February 7, 2008
The Elusive Reagan Spirit
Ronald Reagan’s disembodied voice opened the Conservative Political Action Conference, and the host, American Conservative Union President David Keene, boasted that Reagan spoke at CPAC seventeen times. Indeed, the very first panel was a discussion of the former president. “What better way to start a Conservative Political Action Conference than with a conversation about Ronald Reagan?” asked right-wing publisher Al Regnery.
But while the activists gathered at CPAC are unanimous in invoking Reagan’s legacy, confusion about what that means was evident from the start.
Starting off the first panel (the one about Reagan), Robert Novak posed the question, “Is George W. Bush really Ronald Reagan’s disciple?” If Reagan were president, he asked, would we still be in Iraq? This panel agreed: Nope.
However, this moment of agreement was interrupted by the early arrival of the next speaker: Vice President Dick Cheney, who received standing ovations for his hard-line statements on the war, domestic surveillance, and the administration’s “tough” interrogation policy. The Bush Administration’s legacy appeared secure with this crowd.
And then the Reagan panel resumed: Would Reagan, Novak asked, “conceivably” have proposed such projects as No Child Left Behind or the Medicare prescription drug plan?
Posted by Ezra at 5:05 PM | Permalink
November 15, 2007
Playing the 'Race Card' Card Against Obama
Edward Blum has long been a vocal opponent of affirmative action, having worked for anti-affirmative action groups such as the Center for Equal Opportunity, the American Civil Rights Institute, and his own Campaign for a Color-Blind America (now vanished). In recent years, however, Blum has expanded his purview to another area involving opportunities for minorities: the basic right to vote.
Blum is now director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Project on Fair Representation, which was started in 2005 to oppose the renewal of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the clause requiring states and localities with a history of disenfranchisement to get federal approval for any new voting regulations. Since then, Blum has come to the defense of the embattled Bush appointees to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who have come under fire for overruling career attorneys for apparently partisan reasons. Blum attacked the career attorneys as having “run amok,” and jumped to the defense of Hans von Spakovsky, the “point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.”
Spakovsky gained his experience in voting law by engineering the purging from voter rolls of supposed felons; indeed, he was a board member of a group involved in the 2000 purge in Florida that disenfranchised thousands of legit voters. As a Justice Department appointee, Spakovsky redirected voting-rights efforts toward combating supposed fraud; his politicized tactics have caused opposition to his subsequent nomination to the Federal Election Commission.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has spoken out against Spakovsky’s appointment to the FEC, emphasizing the importance of protecting the right to vote in light of ongoing attempts at suppression, particularly aimed at minorities. Which leads us back to Edward Blum, Spakovsky’s defender, who paints his man as a hero fighting against “liberal staffers” whose efforts to enforce the Voting Rights Act were supposedly making the voting section “an arm of the ALCU.” Earlier this year, musing at length about Obama’s racial identity, Blum expressed hope that the candidate would come out against affirmative action. But now Blum is attacking Obama for "either a complete ignorance of Voting Rights Act….or a willingness to mislead the public in order to promote his civil rights bona fides."
WHEN YOU'RE TEN points behind in the polls, less than two months away from the first presidential primaries, and African American Democrats are divided between you and the front-runner, what is the easiest way to narrow that gap?
Apparently, if you're Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill), you play the race card.
If any discussion about the documented ways in which voter ID laws unduly affect the elderly, the poor, and minorities is “playing the race card,” what do you call Blum’s career of trying to undermine policies designed to redress racial discrimination?
Posted by Ezra at 6:05 PM | Permalink
September 19, 2007
Staver Wants Religious Right Organized against Mukasey
"Just like" with Harriet Miers, says Liberty Counsel head.
Posted by Ezra at 4:18 PM | Permalink
September 11, 2007
Global AIDS Relief Official Reaches out to Religious Right
Kent Hill, an official with the U.S. Agency for International Development, recently appeared on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” to tout the efforts made by the Bush Administration’s global AIDS initiative (called PEPFAR) to fund faith-based groups and abstinence outreach.
As we’ve noted, PEPFAR provided increased funding for AIDS relief, but also came with controversial restrictions seemingly keyed to ideology, most prominently a requirement that two-thirds of money for prevention of HIV transmission—including preexisting funding channels—go to programs dedicated exclusively to promoting abstinence-until-marriage and fidelity. This anti-condom measure was seen as a sop to the Religious Right, as were grants awarded to politically-connected faith-based groups. The Center for Public Integrity has a long report on the issue.
Although there was support among aid groups for the “ABC” strategy (“Abstinence, Being Faithful, and Condoms”) in principle, the requirements heavily favoring abstinence caused confusion and program cuts for condoms and mother-child transmission prevention. Hill, however, characterizes it as “a debate as to whether behavior change is possible” which has brought “some criticism from all sides.”
Hill, a history professor and former president of Eastern Nazarene College, served from 1986-1992 as head of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a right-wing group founded to support President Reagan’s Cold War efforts in Central America, mainly by insinuating ties between the mainline National Council of Churches and communist groups or the KGB. IRD was known in the 1980s as “the official seminary of the White House” (Nation, 4/17/89, via MT).
(AP photo via Center for Public Integrity.)
Posted by Ezra at 5:13 PM | Permalink
August 15, 2007
Right-Wing Think Tank Claims Credit for Immigration Crackdown
The White House, in an apparent attempt to mollify right-wing critics of comprehensive immigration reform, announced last week that it would sharply step immigration enforcement—and at least one group that attacked reform is taking credit for this latest move. Matthew Spaulding of the Heritage Foundation writes:
The Border Security and Immigration Administrative Reform initiative is smart and sensible and deserves to be commended. Virtually all of the policies within it have been proposed by The Heritage Foundation's policy research and analysis.
Posted by Ezra at 4:48 PM | Permalink
August 14, 2007
Stuck in the Mud, Right Wing Forgets Its Happy Days with Rove
For many frustrated right-wing activists, news of Karl Rove’s departure from the White House may have felt like good riddance to bad rubbish. Richard Viguerie called it “good news for conservatives.” Paul Weyrich, another old hand of the conservative movement, said, “You have to say that if (Rove) can claim credit for what happened in 2004, it is reasonable that he is somewhat responsible for where we are in 2007.”
But if these right-wing activists can pin the blame for the administration’s woes on the president’s erstwhile “architect,” they will have a hard time glossing over Rove’s role in giving them an important berth of political power in the Bush White House.
As Rove helped make the Republican Party dominant in Texas in the 1990s, he increasingly forged an alliance with the Religious Right, one that went so far as to find “Christian nation” pseudo-historian David Barton the state party’s vice chairman. As early as 1997, when he apparently helped departing Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed get a cushy consulting gig at Enron and kept Reed from attaching to another campaign, Rove saw the far Right as a ticket to the White House.
After Bush’s win in 2000, Rove saw locking in Evangelical and fundamentalist voters – by inflaming them over wedge issues – as key to creating a “permanent majority” out of a victory so narrow that his candidate lost the popular vote, and he developed working relationships with religious-right leaders. In 2004, the Arlington Group – a powerful coalition right-wing groups and leaders – put pressure on Rove directly and was able to secure the president’s endorsement of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
Although the Right complained that Bush dropped the amendment after using it for his re-election, Rove retained enough trust on the Right to personally convince James Dobson to support the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court—support which was withdrawn later, to Dobson’s embarrassment, after a right-wing campaign against her coalesced and drove her to step aside. “Dobson didn’t call here asking for any advice,” an official at the Family Research Council told reporter Dan Gilgoff. “He just relied on the word of Karl Rove.”
In spite of a few apparent missteps like that, Rove will be remembered fondly for his efforts to organize Bush’s campaigns around abortion, gays, and judicial nominees, and to give the Religious Right enormous access. For while Rove helped create a politics structured around far-right values, he also helped solidify a Religious Right, addicted to this influence, that remains structured around the Republican Party.
Posted by Ezra at 4:15 PM | Permalink
August 10, 2007
Faith-Based Initiatives Architect Criticizes Bush for Hiding Programs
"I like [social-service] vouchers. I don't like stealth," writes Marvin Olasky.
Posted by Ezra at 11:32 AM | Permalink
July 16, 2007
Focus on the Family Action in Need of a Refresher Course?
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?
Posted by Michael at 5:23 PM | Permalink
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