Steve Deace

Along with Steve King, Republican congressman Steve Stockman of Texas also appeared on The Steve Deace Show last night to criticize the push for comprehensive immigration reform and President Obama’s speech in Mexico City.

Stockman claimed Obama “basically told everybody in Mexico our doors are open, come up, come up, please,” and that they’re “all going to have a great time because y’all are going to be legal.” “He’s going to be the President of the United States and Mexico,” Stockman said.

After touting the very, very discredited Heritage Foundation report on the immigration bill, Stockman later insisted that “there will never be another Republican president and the entire agenda of the left will become the law of the land” if Congress passes a reform bill: “This is the rope that they’re hanging us and we’re going to hang ourselves with it and we’re willingly doing it.”

Stockman: It’s a horrible bill. It legalizes—I don’t know if you remember this Steve but you go down and look in Mexico, about two weeks ago the President went down there and basically told everybody in Mexico our doors are open, come up, come up, please! They were cheering him. He’s going to be the President of the United States and Mexico, apparently. And when he gave that speech it was tantamount to saying y’all come up here, we’re all going to have a great time because y’all are going to be legal.

Deace: People are finally doing the math on this. Now you’ve got Byron York at the Washington Examiner doing this math, you have National Review doing this math with Andrew McCarhty—

Stockman: Heritage Foundation.

Deace: Heritage Foundation. What they’re finding is, if this is your panacea to get the Hispanic vote you better try harder because Romney was going to have to win 73 percent of the Hispanic vote to win this last election and obviously this is not going to help that at all. I still don’t see what the benefit is to this for people paying taxes and obeying the law and silly me congressman I think we ought to pursue legislation that benefits the people paying taxes and obeying the law.

Stockman: Let me say this. Reagan passed comprehensive immigration reform, which was supposed to be the last time we ever needed to do it. After he passed it, California went totally Democrat. They have two Democrat senators, a Democrat legislature, a Democrat governor and you’re going to continue to see that if we pass this. There will never be another Republican president and the entire agenda of the left will become the law of the land. This is the rope that they’re hanging us and we’re going to hang ourselves with it and we’re willingly doing it because we’re intimidated by the press and intimidated by political consultants in the Republican Party who say this is what we need to do as to hang ourselves.

Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America celebrated the defeat of the Manchin-Toomey bill to expand background checks on firearms purchases during an appearance on The Steve Deace Show yesterday. Pratt, who previously attacked gun safety laws as “paganism,” told Deace that prayer stifled the new legislation (before making a Bill Clinton joke).

Pratt: The one thing that the other side will never understand about how a small group like ours was able to do what we did is because we pray. That’s so far outside their box that you could tell them that and they would probably think you were kidding or so what, you know what I mean.

Deace: They would probably think you’re referring to p-r-e-y and wondering why you want to pick on endangered species too, Larry.

Pratt: Either that or we had Bill Clinton loose among us.

He also claimed that Sen. Toomey should be “committed” if he honestly believed that his legislation would not create a national gun registry. “You are functionally so stupid that you can’t operate in the modern world if you believe that,” Pratt said.

Deace: I’ve been around a lot of politicians, particularly because I live in the first in the nation caucus state, so I’ve seen them in their staffs lie with impunity, but Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania’s contention that they were going to do these background checks and collect all the data that they would need for a national gun registry that his bill says they are not allowed to do. So government is going to collect all this data and then restrain itself from actually utilizing it? That one ranks right up there with absolutely some of the dumbest and most incredulous lies I’ve ever heard a politician expect voters to actually buy; I mean that’s just crazy.

Pratt: And if he believes that himself then we really need to get him committed. You are functionally so stupid that you can’t operate in the modern world if you believe that. So I think you’re supposition is closer to what actually was likely going on in his mind. This was just a boldfaced effort to get the gun registry.

The House GOP’s resident provocateur Steve Stockman (R-TX) appeared on The Steve Deace Show yesterday to urge his fellow Republicans to oppose immigration reform because Latinos typically vote Democratic. Stockman mocked the claims of pro-reform conservatives who believe that many Latinos would back the GOP if the party backed away from its hard-line stance on immigration reform, while noting that reform efforts would only help Obama in his plan to “destroy America.”

Stockman: Their advice is: allow this to happen and they will somehow overnight turn into Republicans. I can assure you, if these people were voting Republican, the Democrats wouldn’t want a single person to be legalized, not one, and yet we are somehow fooling ourselves believing that they are magically going to go into a corner and turn into Republicans. It’s not going to happen.

Deace: Why would anybody think that Charles Schumer and Bob Menendez and John McCain, that all the sudden these people that you’re going to do this photo-op with that have already shown they have no regard for the rule of law where this issue is concerned, people like me are just looking at it from the outside in and thinking: why would I support anything they support? When David Axelrod goes on national television and says this issue is Obama’s legacy, pardon me if I’m a little skeptical of fueling the legacy of a guy—

Stockman: To destroy America

Deace: Who thinks that the Constitution is—he just puts it through a paper shredder. Exactly, I don’t get this.

He also lashed out at groups such as Focus on the Family and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is led by Richard Land, for supporting the pro-reform Evangelical Immigration Table. Stockman said that such social conservative organizations are unwittingly pushing the Republican Party’s demise, imperiling the Religious Right’s political agenda and creating permanent Democratic majorities.

Stockman also accused NPR of calling undocumented immigrants “unregistered citizens,” a charge we haven’t found any evidence to back up, and said that it is like calling drug dealers “unregistered pharmacists.”

I’m upset with our own guys. I’m shocked that Focus on the Family and Richard Land, I’ve been in their camps and worked with them a long time, are coming out against us and saying they’re for legalizing twelve million unregistered Democrats, or as NPR calls them ‘unregistered citizens,’ that’s the new term they are using now. I was really appalled at NPR, government-controlled radio, says they are ‘unregistered citizens.’ I guess drug dealers now are unregistered pharmacists. It’s bizarre. I’m a little bit upset with our side so I’m taking bullets on both the right and the left for my stance. I have a dear friend, he came from Lebanon, he took fifteen years to follow our laws, he respects our laws, he is abiding by our laws, if we go and say ‘okay you guys that break the law now get to cut in front of everybody else that’s been waiting in line,’ what kind of message are we sending to the rest of the world?

Reagan allowed a million illegal immigrants at that time and after he did that two things happened: 1) they voted primarily and increasingly for the Democrats; 2) ten million more came in. The system is if we pass this it’s going to increase illegal immigration and it’s also going to turn Texas, Florida into Democrat states, we will never keep the White House and the entire agenda of Focus on the Family and Richard Land that is pro-life and all those things that we hold dear are going to be washed away because of the stupidity and the folly of granting citizenship to people who have not a clue about how our system is or the principles. They are saying here this is the rope, please put it around your neck and then jump off the tree and young hang yourself. It’s just bizarre that we’re so willingly doing that and a little bit frustrating.

Ex-gay activist Joe Dallas appeared on The Steve Deace Show this week to discuss the growing acceptance of same-sex relationships and warned that gays and lesbians will “bring the judgment of God” on America. Dallas, who recently wrote a book condemning homosexuality with actress Anne Heche’s mother Nancy Heche, warned that the gay rights movement will bring society “one more step down the ladder towards a much lower standard of human behavior” and leave people in a “dismal” state.

Deace: Where does this end ultimately? What happens to the individuals here that are struggling with their sexuality when we allow public policy to essentially say: ‘do whatever you want.’ What ultimately will be the price they will pay?

Dallas: The individuals will be given a green light to express their desires as they see fit. Some will claim to find deep fulfillment in that, some will form relationships that they report as being very healthy and satisfying, others will find that their lives take directions that they didn’t expect and they’ll be deeply disappointed.

There’s really two ways I look at this: one is theologically and one is socially. Socially I think it will be one more step down the ladder towards a much lower standard of human behavior. Theologically, I think it will be a green light to engage in behaviors that bring the judgment of God. Either one looks pretty dismal to me.

Conservative talk show host Steve Deace is not happy with Bill O’Reilly’s seeming reversal on marriage equality, telling Religious Right activist Bob Vander Plaats that O’Reilly is “betraying” his own viewers and is essentially a “charlatan” and a “fraud.”

While discussing the Supreme Court’s handling of the marriage cases with Vander Plaats, who warned that the court could “set off a constitutional crisis,” Deace said that O’Reilly is a traitor to his conservative base: “you stab them in the back, throw them under the bus and use the enemy’s own language against them. To me that’s a hanging offense; that is a hanging offense.”

Vander Plaats: If you usurp the will of the people—we saw it in Iowa, you usurp the will of the people, three justices get removed, there’s a credibility gap with the three justices that continue to serve— if you usurp the vote of the people of California you will set off a constitutional crisis against these United States and it should be a constitutional crisis. People like you and me and others, we’d help do our part to set off a constitutional crisis if that is in fact what they came back with.

Deace: I’ve got a bee in my bonnet big time and it’s Bill O’Reilly at Fox News. I don’t like charlatans, I don’t like frauds; give me Rachel Maddow, at least she’s honest. But when you are trying to profit off of the very people you are betraying and you have tried to condescend them and patronize them for years and then at the moment they probably need you to return the favor of all the money they made you over the last fifteen years the most, you stab them in the back, throw them under the bus and use the enemy’s own language against them. To me that’s a hanging offense; that is a hanging offense.

Deace said there are no good arguments for same-sex marriage, and gay rights activists are just throwing “a hissy-fit.” He even said it is pointless to note that homosexuality is found in other species besides humans since “there’s also the licking of one’s own genitals, the flinging of one’s own feces and the eating of live prey and then puking it up to feed your offspring in nature too.”   

With this issue there are no good arguments for it because the argument essentially boils down to, ‘because I want it.’ It’s essentially a tantrum; it’s policy by desire. ‘Because I want it.’ It’s a child throwing a hissy-fit, tantrum in Wal-Mart because mom bought me the regular sized M&Ms and not the king-sized that I demanded. As Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation pointed out on CNN this week that just drove the reporter into a meltdown, ‘no one is in jail for having consensual homosexual sex with another adult, what you’re trying to do is impose your narrow definition of what this means and therefore what it means for free speech and religious liberty on everybody else.’ So they throw out all these clichés and they are so easy to debunk. One of my favorites is, ‘well there’s homosexuality in nature.’ There’s also the licking of one’s own genitals, the flinging of one’s own feces and the eating of live prey and then puking it up to feed your offspring in nature too.

During an appearance on The Steve Deace Show, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) maintained that “our democracy and our representative form of government” will be “in dire straits” if the Supreme Court legalizes same-sex marriage. He told Deace that he is not “aware of any” precedent of the court making such a sweeping decision that would represent “a huge invasion into states’ rights.”

Deace: We’re talking about a supermajority of US states have already, all of them within the last ten to fifteen years, have defined what marriage is within their borders and now we have the US Supreme Court determining whether it has the jurisdiction to override a supermajority of US state laws. Mark, do you know of any precedent for that ever in American history? I can’t come up with one, ever.

Meadows: No, I’m not aware of any and obviously if it gets down to nine people deciding the will of the people our democracy and our representative form of government is in dire straits. The people here in North Carolina overwhelmingly came out and voted really en masse and with such energy that I’ve not experienced in over twenty-eight years of following politics here in North Carolina have not seen that kind of energy, and here we got the Supreme Court looking to overturn a California law that really where the voters voted there as well and you know it was obviously overturned in the Ninth Circuit and now we’ve got the Supreme Court saying that they’re going to weigh in on this particular issue. It’s a huge invasion into states’ rights and the state definition of marriage, whether you call it traditional or natural marriage, I call it marriage, you know it’s between one man and one woman, period.

Later, the freshman congressman charged that any such ruling would lead to “a constitutional crisis,” although he didn’t answer Deace’s question about how Congress would respond to the court’s decision.

Deace: What happens, I mean you’re a congressman, if the court does that, you are in a state that has already asserted its will on this issue but you’re in the body that our founders constitutionally gave oversight of the judicial branch, so you’re right in the thick of this debate. What happens if the court decides that they are their own constitutional convention without any recourse at all, what happens?

Meadows: Well I mean obviously we start to have a constitutional crisis. We’ve already seen some of that with the executive branch saying that they’re not going to enforce certain laws. I think it was Justice Scalia that brought this out in the last couple of days is when you get an executive branch that starts to decide what’s constitutional and what’s not and what they’re going to enforce and what they’re not, they’re usurping the authority of Congress and that’s the representative form of government and we can’t stand for that, as a people we can’t stand for that so we need to stand up and make sure that our voice is heard.

Steve Deace once again hosted far-right activist Michael Peroutka on his radio show to discuss the talk show host’s latest column on same-sex marriage and why we should not “validate relationships western civilization, heavily influenced by Biblical moral teaching, has up until now said for over a thousand years were immoral, destructive, and counter-procreative.” Peroutka explained that “the state has perverted” what “God called marriage,” and if we followed God’s laws then there would be “no way we are ever going to validate homo or sodomite-unmarriage.”

This can’t last, we are killing our own children, we are burying our own country; at some point reality has to set in. I like to use the term ‘reality,’ another term you use in your article you talk about if we can ‘wave a magic wand’ and that’s interesting because that’s an allusion to illusion. But what we really need is a dose of reality, what we need to do is wave reality over this situation and go back to what God called marriage, not what the state has perverted the definition to be but what God called marriage. That’s what we need to return to. There is no way we are ever going to validate homo or sodomite-unmarriage because God defined marriage as between a man and a woman once and forever.

Apparently the reason we aren’t following God’s moral code on the issue of marriage or other social issues, according to Peroutka, is because of the Unions victory in the Civil War, or as he called it: “The War Between the States.”

He argued that the South’s defeat opened the door to a “huge black hole of centralized power,” which means that people began looking to the government, rather than God, as the source of their rights.

Peroutka said that “the real effect of the War and the Reconstruction after the war was to take the very foundation of our understanding of our rights away from us, that is to say that they come from God, and put them in the hands of men,” who can then change the meaning of concepts like marriage.

Somehow we don’t think that this neo-Confederate logic is going to do a lot to help marriage equality opponents rescue their plummeting poll numbers.

Deace: What we’re coming down to here is: What is the law? Who determines it? How do we know that’s the right determination? Who gets to essentially apply and impose their interpretation of where the law comes from and what the law is? And we’re seeing that played out and frankly divisively with the marriage issue.

Peroutka: That’s right. When you ask me a question about this issue or other social issues, I always go back to these two standards: What does God say and what does the Constitution say? I don’t go to what many people, political talking heads, go to: What is politically effective? What does conservatism say? What does the Republican Party say? I go where our founders would’ve gone and where they did in fact go to declare their independence from Great Britain, they said: What does God say about this? And then in this case, what does the constitution say? So those are the standards I’m always going to use, it’s a new issue but it’s the same standard.

Deace: It’s the standard that founded this country, all the way from the Puritans to the people that ratified the Constitution.

Peroutka: And ever since, well there have been a number of watershed events in American history that have taken us away from this view that I’m describing, this American view. One of them was ‘The War Between the States.’ Ever since then there’s been this huge black hole of centralized power that’s formed in Washington D.C. People sometimes talk about ‘The War Between the States’ as being about the issue of slavery, I believe that history is written by the winners, it wasn’t about that at all. What it was about was consolidating power into the hands of a few people.

One of the best ways I’ve ever heard this explained to me was I was at a formal dinner party one time and a number of us at the table, a couple of gentlemen were talking about this issue and one lady piped up and she said, “Now don’t you start talking about that my great-great-granddaddy fought for the state of Illinois.” A gentleman at the table looked at her and said, “Mam, your great-great-granddaddy didn’t fight for Illinois, he fought for Washington D.C., maybe New York City, the banking interests, and by so doing he conquered Illinois, along with South Carolina and Tennessee and Alabama.” It was one of the best ways I think I’ve ever heard it explained because the real effect of the War and the Reconstruction after the war was to take the very foundation of our understanding of our rights away from us, that is to say that they come from God, and put them in the hands of men and say that they come from the Supreme Court or they come from the legislature or they come from the executive.

Steve Deace yesterday invited Michael Peroutka, the right-wing activist and 2004 third party candidate for president, onto his radio show for a weekly special with him about the Constitution. Marking the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Peroutka said that the anti-choice movement should begin to use different and more extreme tactics.

After arguing that Roe doesn’t have any impact on the law because it violates the Bible and merely affected “Jane Roe” alone, he said that local officials should begin prosecuting women for murder if they have an abortion.

For forty years now we’ve been wrapped around the axil spinning our wheels and good people, I mean them no disrespect, trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, trying to get a court or get other justices appointed or blah blah blah, that’s not the answer to Roe v. Wade. The answer to Roe v. Wade is for us as a culture and all the state prosecutors and all the local district and state attorneys to recognize that that’s murder and it was not changed in its category from murder by what the Supreme Court said in Roe v. Wade in January 22, 1973, it wasn’t changed a bit. It was murder then, it was murder before then, it is murder now, it always will be murder and it should be prosecuted.

That’s what people like Cal Zastrow and his family, my friend Cal Zatrow, my friend Les Riley and their families in Mississippi are working right now to try to close the last abortion clinic in Mississippi. That’s the approach that I think needs to be taken but in order for that to be taken we as Americans have to know what law is and what law isn’t.

Cal Zastrow is the co-founder of Personhood USA, which seeks to pass blanket bans on abortion and certain forms of birth control in state constitutions, and Les Riley is the head of Personhood Mississippi and the state’s Constitution party. Like Peroutka, Riley has ties to white supremacist and separatist groups. In 2011, Mississippi voters handily defeated the proposed personhood amendment but now the government is trying to close the state’s sole abortion clinic through regulations.

Thanks to RWW reader Matt for the tip.

Right-wing talk show host Steve Deace writes on his Facebook page that the public school system is partly to blame for the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, because public schools, he claims, promote a “culture of death.”