Indiana

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.

A few weeks back, Rick Santorum made news when he declared it "almost remarkable for a black man" like President Obama to be in favor of reproductive choice because, in the Religious Right worldview, abortion is just like slavery.

But in case that tortured analogy was not clear enough, right-wing Indiana talk show host Peter Heck has penned a column that has been posted on the AFA's OneNewsNow claiming that Obama's support for reproductive choice means he is an enemy of the likes of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Abraham Lincoln and is therefore a disgrace to "his ancestors":

Only a man terrifyingly unmoved by the injustices perpetrated against his own ancestors could, just a century and a half later, facilitate even worse atrocities without a hint of remorse.

Intellectual honesty demands that we face a harsh and uncomfortable reality: Barack Obama -- our first black president -- has chosen to take up the whip against his fellow man. By doing so, he carves out an eternal legacy for himself far removed from the dignified halls of honor reserved for those with the moral courage to defend the defenseless. By instead regarding them as subhuman, Obama wars against the life work of [Frederick] Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Abraham Lincoln.

Imagine how history would regard Lincoln had he chosen to respond to the great moral evil of his day as Barack Obama has chosen to respond to the holocaust of child sacrifice that has occurred with impunity since 1973. Imagine Lincoln proclaiming that determining whether blacks were entitled to human rights was "above his pay grade." Imagine Lincoln pledging to "protect this constitutional right" of slavery, while calling the brutality of plantation masters a "legitimate disciplinary procedure."

How would history have judged such a small man if not for the same way it will soon regard Mr. Obama: an utter coward. When given the incredible opportunity to stand on the shoulders of the Great Emancipator -- an opportunity generations of slaves labored to make possible -- Barack Obama chose not to use it to defend the inalienable rights of all, but to undermine them.

In the final analysis, such an incomprehensible betrayal of human rights for the sake of convenience and political expediency far outweighs any contributions his electoral success has brought to "black America." For what Douglass, Tubman, Truth and so many other courageous black abolitionists fought for was not the day when they would see a man with dark skin pigmentation sitting in the White House. They fought for the day when all men -- black and white, large and small -- would see their inalienable rights protected from those who would callously demean them as less than human.

Obama has failed miserably in living up to their vision, and shamefully discredits their efforts. As he commits himself to what Douglass called the denial of justice, the perpetuation of ignorance, and the organized conspiracy to degrade his fellow countrymen, it can rightly be concluded that Barack Obama disgraces his office, his ancestors, and his place in the eternal struggle for the rights of man.

After criticizing Congress for passing a $26 billion aid package to state governments, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has sent a formal request to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for $236 million for Medicaid from the very same funding bill he blasted as a “reckless spending spree.” After pronouncing that “the federal government should not deficit spend to bail out states,” the governor and likely presidential candidate even offered clues that he won’t accept any new money from the federal government (unless that money was for abstinence-only programs).

Pawlenty decided to relent like other “principled” Republican governors before him such as Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford, who proudly disparage government programs and threaten to refuse the federal aid meant to protect the jobs of public employees and salvage state budgets—then agree to accepting stimulus dollars when it’s politically convenient. Similar to the Republican members of Congress who proudly vote against the stimulus and later publicly take credit for providing stimulus dollars in their districts, Pawlenty is attempting to both please the anti-government zealots in the GOP base while also benefiting from Democratic efforts to govern responsibly.

Pawlenty’s backpedaling on the stimulus coincides with the news that Michele Bachmann isn’t the only government spending-critic to receive farm subsidies from the federal government, as Indiana’s favorite Tea Party politician and congressional candidate Marlin Stutzman also obtains federal aid in the form of farm subsidies. Stutzman, who explicitly said that “it’s time to get rid of farm subsidies” in the name of free market orthodoxy, collected $179,370 from the federal government since 1995 for his farm.

For Republicans such as Pawlenty and Stutzman, it’s easy to denounce federal spending to further their political careers and agendas, but they still have no problem with benefiting from the same federal government programs they rail against.

The Weekly Standard has a long profile of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and the question of whether he plans to make a run for the White House in 2012.

If Daniels does plan on running, there are a few issues the might temper support from the Religious Right, like his 1970 arrest for pot possession or his three year divorce and eventual remarriage to his wife Cheri ... but those sorts of things would probably pale in comparison to Daniels' view that a "truce" needs to be called in the culture wars so that our nation can focus on economic issues: 

“There are things that I would advance as a candidate that the playbook says are folly—suicidal,” he said. “We’d have to fundamentally change all the welfare and entitlement programs. What Bush tried to do [in proposing private accounts for Social Security] was mild compared to what needs to be done. You have to have a completely new compact for people under a certain age, for Medicare and Social Security. You’re gonna have to dramatically cut spending across the whole government, including, by the way, national defense. When Bush arrived, we were spending $300 billion on national defense, and he thought that was plenty. Now it’s, what, $800 billion?”

Beyond the debt and the deficit, in Daniels’s telling, all other issues fade to comparative insignificance. He’s an agnostic on the science of global warming but says his views don’t matter. “I don’t know if the CO2 zealots are right,” he said. “But I don’t care, because we can’t afford to do what they want to do. Unless you want to go broke, in which case the world isn’t going to be any greener. Poor nations are never green.”

And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved. Daniels is pro-life himself, and he gets high marks from conservative religious groups in his state.

If there is one thing that drives social conservatives crazy, it is the insistance from Republican and conservative leaders that their agenda has to perpetually take a back seat to the party's economic platform ... so the idea of Religious Right leaders supporting a candidate who is calling for that agenda to be set aside in favor of focusing on economic issues seems rather unlikely: 

This morning, at the Heritage Foundation, I asked Daniels if that meant the next president shouldn't push issues like stopping taxpayer funding of abortion in Obamacare or reinstating the Mexico City Policy banning federal funds to overseas groups that perform abortions. Daniels replied that we face a "genuine national emergency" regarding the budget and that "maybe these things could be set aside for a while. But this doesn't mean anybody abandons their position at all. Everybody just stands down for a little while, while we try to save the republic."

To clarify whether Daniels simply wants to de-emphasize these issues or actually not act on them, I asked if, as president, he would issue an executive order to reinstate Reagan's "Mexico City Policy" his first week in office. (Obama revoked the policy during his first week in office.) Daniels replied, "I don't know."