Emails

Today's best reporting on the Right from around the web:

• Box Turtle Bulletin has a complete transcript of Utah Sen. Chris Buttar's interview, which we mentioned here. Relatedly, Andrew Sullivan points out that in addition to being a homophobe, Buttars is also the former Executive Director of the controversial Utah Boys Ranch.
• Steve Benen reports that Republicans in Congress have suddenly discovered the importance of the White House preserving its emails.
• Pharyngula has a post on the University of Vermont's Nicholas Gotelli and his great response to an invitation he received to debate David Klinghoffer from the Discovery Institute.
• The Washington Blade reports that anti-gay forces are hard at work trying to regain their national influence, stemming from their fear that Congress will advance gay rights legislation.
• Finally, Kathryn Joyce, author of "Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement," has a piece on Babble explaining just what the movement is all about:

[T]he most important thing to understand about the Quiverfull movement [is that] in order for a woman to be Quiverfull, she must embrace a life of absolute submission and obedience to God, her husband, and the cause of Christian revival — winning the culture wars — by having more children than the "other side." At the heart of this call is Quiverfull's insistence that women's individual rights and desires are of secondary importance to the larger cause.

Just when you thought Janet "Vote for Obama and Go to Hell" Porter couldn't get any crazier, it turns out that she can and is, by throwing in with right-wing crackpot Philip Berg and his crusade to expose to America that Barack Obama is not eligible to be President of the United States:

There are critical issues that need to be resolved before the Electoral College makes the election official in mid-December. Faith2Action has placed a full page ad in next Monday's issue of The Washington Times National Weekly, a publication that is read by many of our nation's leaders, to address them.

The ad asks these three questions: (1) "Was Barack Obama born in Kenya?"; (2) "Is he really a citizen of Indonesia?"; and (3) "Does the Constitution still matter?" These questions point to various cases that have been filed before the U.S. Supreme Court and other Federal courts. The ad also lays out several alarming facts which question whether the Constitutional requirements for becoming President are satisfied by Senator Barack Obama.

"Attorney Philip Berg, multiple legal cases, and a growing number of American citizens are demanding answers to these critical questions," states Janet (Folger) Porter, the founder and president of Faith2Action. "The Constitution and our nation's future are too important to not fully investigate this."

"It's our hope that the American people will rise up and call for Congressional hearings and immediate court action to avoid a Constitutional crisis," added Porter. "If we are willing to ignore the Constitutional requirements for the highest office of the land, what else are we willing to forgo? That part about free speech? Freedom of the press? Freedom of religion?"

If you check out Berg's webpage Obama Crimes you can read the Writ of Certiorari [PDF] he's filed with the US Supreme Court in which the defendant is listed thusly:

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, a/k/a
BARACK HUSSEIN DUNHAM a/k/a/
BARACK HUSSEIN SOETORO a/k/a
BARRY OBAMA a/k/a
BARRY DUNHAM a/k/a
BARRY SOETORO

Just how professional is Berg's operation, you ask?  Well, they are asking supporters to contact the Supreme Court Justices directly and ask them to hear the case:

As citizens, you can individually write letters to each of the Court Justices addressing your concerns with respect to Mr. Obama's fulfillment of the requirements to serve as the President of the United States laid out in Article II, Section I of The United States Constitution.

United States Supreme Court
1 First Street NE
Washington DC 20543

The Supreme Court Justices are as follows:

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts
Supreme Court Justice John Stevens
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy
Supreme Court Justice David Souter
Supreme Court Justice Thomas Clarence
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer
Supreme Court Justice Samual Alito

I don't know about you, but I suspect that asking supporters to write letters to Justices "Thomas Clarence" and "Samual" Alito is probably going to end up doing more harm than good to their ridiculous little effort.

I am not exactly sure which right-wing groups are behind the new "Values Voters USA" website but I assume that the American Family Association is involved, since I learned about it through one of their emails, perhaps along with Liberty Counsel, Wallbuilders, and the Family Research Council which are all listed on the site's "resources" page.

We'll find out sooner or later who put this all together, but for now I just want to call attention to the video they have produced which is a pretty remarkable piece of right-wing propaganda. 

Basically, everything you need to know about the Religious Right can be found right here in this video: their use of wedge issues; their reliance on fearmongering and victimization; their insistence that America is, has, and always must remain a Judeo-Christian country; their exploitation of religion for political purposes; all summed up in one four-minute video:

It’s bad enough that the employees of ACORN have had to endure days of baseless and outlandish attacks by John McCain and the RNC. But after McCain outrageously claimed before a national audience on Wednesday night that ACORN was “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy,” the group came under attack, literally. In the following days, ACORN’s Boston and Seattle offices were vandalized and at least one employee received a death threat.

And for nearly two weeks, ACORN offices across the nation have been subjected to an onslaught of racist and threatening voicemails and emails. We have secured copies of some of the most disturbing and offensive messages and have reproduced them below in order to show the very real consequences of the Right Wing’s overheated and misplaced “voter fraud” rhetoric.

Warning: the emails and voicemails below are highly explicit and have only been edited to remove personally identifying information. Please also note that, where relevant, the proper authorities have been notified.

Voicemail #1:  

“Hi, I was just calling to let you all know that Barack Obama needs to get hung. He's a fucking nigger, and he's a piece of shit. You guys are fraudulent, and you need to go to hell. All the niggers on oak trees. They're gonna get all hung honeys, they're gonna get assassinated, they're gonna get killed.”

Email #1: This email was received by the Cleveland office. The subject line was the name of a senior staffer who had recently appeared on TV to defend the group.

According to McClatchy, the email was traced back to a Facebook account featuring a McCain-Palin sign.

Email #2:

Voicemail #2:

"You liberal idiots. Dumb shits. Welfare bums. You guys just fucking come to our country, consume every natural resource there is, and make a lot of babies. That's all you guys do. And then suck up the welfare and expect everyone else to pay for your hospital bills for your kids. I just say let your kids die. That's the best move. Just let your children die. Forget about paying for hospital bills for them. I'm not gonna do it. You guys are lowlifes. And I hope you all die."

It seems that while I’ve been busy not paying attention to the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, they’ve released parts 2 and 3 of their “Why Obama Is Not A Christian” video series. I was inclined to ignore these new videos until I saw that the CADC was relying on us to help them get the word out:

The controversy continues to swirl around our campaign. RightWingWatch.com, a radical liberal organization, has taken note of CADC and our campaign. They have even posted our video on their site. Many of their supporters have weighed in with a barrage of heated e-mails. We are rejoicing that so many unbelievers are watching the videos. Pray that the life changing truth of Christ's gospel will touch their hearts.

Unfortunately for them, angry emails generally don’t contain donations, which they obviously need:

In order to keep Barack Obama from defaming and redefining the Christian faith we need to raise $10,000.00 this week. Help us keep this vital campaign alive so that millions of Christians will not be deceived by Obama's phony claim that he is a "devout Christian." Your gift will make it possible to get us these videos out!

I sure hope that they raise the money they need because, if they go out of business, I’ll have one less D-list fringe group to mock.

Back when the issue of judicial confirmations was heating up in the Senate, at the center of the Republican efforts to confirm controversial nominees was Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Justice.   As a member of the “Four Horsemen” along with C. Boyden Gray, Edwin Meese III, and Leonard Leo, Sekulow was a inside player in the battle over the “nuclear option” and the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. 

Along the way, Sekulow created a new group called The Judicial Confirmation Network that was designed to give the appearance of grassroots support for the efforts:

It was a subtle bit of targeting that dovetailed with another project under way in an office just above the radio studio. That's where Gary A. Marx, head of the grass-roots arm of Mr. Sekulow's campaign, was meeting with a Maine activist ginning up telephone calls, letters and editorials aimed at pushing Ms. Collins into the antifilibuster camp.

In the 2004 campaign, Mr. Marx, 29, was the Bush-Cheney national conservative coalition director who helped organize church-sponsored voter drives in Ohio. In January, Mr. Sekulow invited Mr. Marx to set up the Judicial Confirmation Network in his offices so they could combine forces.

Mr. Sekulow uses his Senate contacts to track the status of the debate and identify wavering lawmakers. While he targets them on the radio or through his regular emails, Mr. Marx follows up with state-based groups that can be important to a senator's political career.

The JCN quickly made a name for itself, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the efforts only to become little more than a shell once the battles were over.  Little was heard from its two employees, Gary Marx and Wendy Long, until both showed up on Mitt Romney’s National Faith and Values Steering Committee and, in the meantime, the JCN essentially went dark, having not even issued a press release since July of 2007.   Until today, that is, when Long resurfaced to attack Barack Obama for his answer during a question at Rick Warren’s faith forum about which Supreme Court judges he would not have nominated:

All this speaks volumes about the kind of judges Obama would appoint, and the way he would fill several potential vacancies at the Supreme Court that could arise during the next President's term in office. Obama wants Justices who will do his bidding, who will implement the preferred policies of the liberal establishment - not Justices like Thomas, Scalia, Roberts and Alito, who understand that the role of a judge is not to legislate from the bench.

But that was apparently enough to get her quoted at length in an article on FoxNews.com:

“Apparently, Obama can do no better than to recycle discredited statements of Harry Reid when it comes to Justice Thomas. Like other liberal elites, Obama cannot stand it when a black man strays from the ideological plantation and refuses to implement liberal policies through the courts. But Obama will never point out any intellectual deficiencies in Justice Thomas’s work, because he can’t. Justice Thomas’s opinions consistently reveal faithfulness to the Constitution, judicial modesty and deference to the will of the people in our representative democracy. That is opposed to everything that Obama and the liberals are trying to do in grabbing power from the people and giving it to the courts,” she said.

If an anti-gay campaign falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

For two years, the American Family Association has operated a boycott of Ford Motor Company for its gay-friendly employment practices and its advertising in gay magazines. And AFA has not been shy about taking credit for the automaker’s financial woes.

“For the 13th month out of the last 15, the boycott of Ford Motor Company by AFA and other pro-family groups has helped cause Ford to lose sales,” the group bragged last June. “Ford continues to financially support homosexual groups despite the massive sales drop and a loss of millions for the company’s stockholders,” it warned in July. In January, AFA founder Don Wildmon asserted that a “significant amount” of Ford’s decline in sales was “a direct result of the boycott.”

Nevertheless, industry analysts have seen Ford’s continuing financial woes as the result of factors such as gas prices, market changes, workforce aging, and management—and not as a direct result of “its commitment to the homosexual agenda,” as AFA put it. Instead, reports focused on Ford’s “Way Forward” plan (released before AFA’s boycott), which announced large downsizing and projected profitability in 2009. The right-wing Media Research Center issued a report accusing “the media” of being “strangely silent” about the boycott.

Yesterday, AFA announced that it was declaring victory and ending the boycott, asserting that, based on AFA’s own “monitoring,” Ford had met its conditions on donations to gay and lesbian non-profits and gay-oriented advertising. “Flinch! Ford finally bends,” trumpeted the right-wing World Net Daily. Ford, on the other hand, denied that it had made any changes in policy:

Ford said in a statement that its principles haven't changed, but that it has reduced overall advertising and charitable spending in recent years because of losses in North America. Ford lost $2.7 billion in 2007.

"We are committed to treating everyone fairly and with respect, including our dealers, customers and employees," the company said. "Ford will continue to market its products widely to attract as many customers as possible and make charitable contributions to strengthen communities to the extent business conditions allow."

If AFA is to be believed, we can expect Ford Motor Company to make a dramatic recovery in the coming months. Then again, it could be that AFA simply gave up, as Daniel Blatt predicted just a month ago:

Let the AFA attribute the decline of Ford to its drawing attention to the company’s pro-gay policies. But other corporations have adopted similar policies and not suffered like the American automaker. The AFA may claim that it hasn’t targeted them, but I would wager that if it had, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Americans are more concerned about a product’s quality than they are about the domestic partnership policies of the corporations than produce it.

Realizing this, expect the AFA to drop its boycott against Ford as it did the campaign against Disney. It will probably claim that it made a point, but it really won’t have made much of a difference.

To say that the American Family Association has had something of a tense relationship with retail giant Wal-Mart would be an understatement.  In the past, the AFA has targeted the chain for everything from using the phrase “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” to sponsoring Diversity Week at Boise State University.  

Last year, when Wal-Mart partnered with the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, the AFA went ballistic and vowed that “1,000,000 families … will not shop at Wal-Mart or Sam's Club on the Friday or Saturday following Thanksgiving” because of Wal-Mart’s apparent role in furthering the homosexual agenda:   

A quick search for books sold by Wal-Mart found the following related to the promotion of homosexual marriage:

    * What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage

    * Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gay, Good for Straights, and Good for America

    * Legalizing Gay Marriage

    * Why You Should Give a -amn about Gay Marriage

    * Civil Wars: A Battle for Gay Marriage

    * Gay Marriage and Democracy: Equality for All

    * Defending Same-Sex Marriage

    * Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry

    * Gay Marriage, Real Life: Ten Stories of Love and Family

A quick search of Wal-Mart's website turned up the following number of items for sale:

Gay - 1148

Lesbian - 468

Transgender - 40

Bisexual - 38

Gay Marriage – 26

The AFA eventually backed off its boycott threat once Wal-Mart pledged that it would “not make corporate contributions to support or oppose highly controversial issues unless they directly relate to our ability to serve our customers."

That seemed to placate the AFA, and now that the Human Rights Campaign is urging people not to shop at Wal-Mart because of the store’s refusal to offer domestic partner benefits to its gay and lesbian employees, AFA has come rushing to Wal-Mart’s defense:

Homosexuals have challenged traditional marriage supporters to do battle. We will now see if traditional marriage supporters accept the challenge.

Make every effort to shop at Wal-Mart this Christmas season. The gays want Wal-Mart sales to go down so they can claim victory.

Forward this to your friends and family and urge them to buy at Wal-Mart. Announce this in your Sunday School class, at church, etc. Ask your pastor to announce in church newsletters and bulletins that the homosexuals are challenging those who support traditional marriage. Tell them about the homosexual's efforts to force Wal-Mart to offer "marriage" benefits and Target's support for "marriage" benefits.

The only thing consistent about the AFA’s shift from boycott to “buycott” seems to be their militant opposition to equality for gays and lesbians.  

Several months ago we noted that Richard Land was trying to position himself as a key player within the Religious Right hierarchy and had been publicly challenging James Dobson on a variety of fronts, including immigration, global warming and, most importantly, the candidacy of Fred Thompson.

From the get-go, Land has been a vocal advocate of Thompson, issuing fawning praise of him at every opportunity – so it must have come as a rude surprise when, last week, Dobson weighed in and declared Thompson unacceptable:

In a private e-mail obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, Dobson accuses the former Tennessee senator and actor of being weak on the campaign trail and wrong on issues dear to social conservatives.

"Isn't Thompson the candidate who is opposed to a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage, believes there should be 50 different definitions of marriage in the U.S., favors McCain-Feingold, won't talk at all about what he believes, and can't speak his way out of a paper bag on the campaign trail?" Dobson wrote. "He has no passion, no zeal and no apparent 'want to.' And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!"

Obviously, this didn’t sit well with Land, so it is not surprising that he has decided to strike back, reaching out to CBN’s David Brody to defend Thompson and blast Dobson:

“I’ve received phone calls and emails from Southern Baptists about Senator Thompson. They are all furious at Doctor Dobson. They just feel that first of all there was a mischaracterizing of his positions. Do I wish that he supported the marriage protection amendment? Of course I do.  To say that he is for 50 different views of marriage in 50 different states is a gross mischaracterization of his position. Secondly, do I wish that he attended church every Sunday? As a Baptist pastor, of course I do. But does that make him a person of unbelief? That’s harsh and unwarranted.”

Land defends Thompson’s opposition to a marriage amendment by claiming that Thompson is simply so principled that he will not jettison his staunch “federalist” convictions for political gain, before winding it up by proclaiming that Thompson is “one of us”: 

“Fred Thompson grew up in a very modest means in a small town in America just like Ronald Reagan grew up in very modest means in a small town in Illinois. You acquire not only an understanding of but a respect for everyday folk when you come from the background that you don’t get otherwise and people sense it. That this is a guy who respects me, a guy who understands that we are the backbone of this country, we are the salt of the Earth and he not only understands us, he’s one of us. He’s a successful one of us but he’s one of us and they trust a guy like that. They give a guy like that a larger margin of error. Nobody gets everything right but its core values. My assessment is that this guy is a whole much like Reagan including his Teflon quality. The press has been beating up with him for these types of gaffes and he continues to climb in the polls.”

It is exceedingly rare that anyone on the Right dares to criticize Dobson, much less do so publicly.  In fact, the last people to do so ended up getting booted out of the movement.  

This sort of high-profile fight cannot be helping the Right as it struggles to figure out how to maintain its influence going into the 2008 election.  But at least it ought to make the upcoming Values Voter Summit all the more interesting, since both Land and Dobson are going to be there.