Hate Crimes

As we noted the other day, the Family Research Council had run ads against Rep. Joseph Cao in Louisiana because, after having endorsed him in 2008, FRC decided that Cao was insufficiently anti-gay.

Last night, Cao lost his re-election bid.

Contrast that with another Louisiana politician, Sen. David Vitter, who admitted to involvement with prostitutes.  What does FRC have to say about that?

All is forgiven:

“He came forward, took responsibilities for his actions, acknowledged it, asked for forgiveness, has remained consistent in his positions and the voters in Louisiana have responded positively to that,” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, told The Ballot Box.

“He had enough time between when this event became public and when he had to stand for reelection, he was able to convince voters that he had changed,” added Perkins. “People make mistakes, but its whether or not we recognize we made a mistake” that’s the issue.

...

Perkins said he and Vitter spoke after D.C. Madam news broke.

“He left me convinced that I should give him another chance,” he said. “He certainly has not changed his positions. If anything, he’s gotten stronger and more resolute in his firm conservative stance.”

So let that be a lesson to other Republican leaders: if you support things like Hate Crimes legislation or the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, FRC will attack you for helping to "advance the radical social agendas of homosexual activists."

But if you are a "family values" conservative who frequents prostitutes and says you are sorry once you get caught, FRC won't hold it against you.

The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins hosted a conference call for FRC activists to hear from Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas. Perkins, who recently said gay teens commit suicide because they know they’re abnormal, is in Iowa, where he has joined the FRC-National Organization for Marriage bus tour that is targeting state Supreme Court judges who ruled last year favor of marriage equality. While it was a unanimous decision, Religious Right groups are urging voters to reject the three justices who are up for retention this year.  Gohmert spent some time with the Iowa bus earlier this week. Gohmert and Perkins mocked the pro-equality judges, saying they hadn’t studied law or biology if they thought there was no difference between a man and a woman and a man and a man.

Via Al Mohler we get this fascinating study by Mark A. Smith of the University of Washington in "Political Science Quarterly" entitled "Religion, Divorce, and the Missing Culture War in America" [PDF].

In it, Smith examines why Religious Right groups who spend all of their time talking about family values and the sanctity of marriage seem to give only lip-service, at best, to fighting divorce, despite the fact that it is repeatedly mentioned in the Bible. The Right may mentione it, generally when bemoaning the deteriorating culture, but they invest little to no effort in actually trying to change the laws to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce.

Smith notes that neither Jerry Falwell with his Moral Majority nor Pat Robertson with his Christian Coalition paid much attention to the issue; a trend which continues today with the Family Research Council: 

The FRC regularly sends email alerts to its members and supporters in an attempt to inform, persuade, and reinforce their attitudes and beliefs about matters of interest to the group. In 2006 and 2007, the FRC dispatched hundreds of these, most of which contained three paragraph-length items. Surprisingly for an organization that structures its activities around marriage and the family, only 8 of the 1,366 items centered on divorce. In the context of its total volume of communication with members and supporters, the FRC rarely broached the topic of divorce. The organization has stated that “we will not relent in our insistence to reform divorce laws,” but that abstract support has
not been matched by a sustained commitment to spending time or resources on the issue.

Perhaps the FRCʼs emails do not accurately reflect its priorities, meaning that analyzing a different facet of the groupʼs activities would yield a different answer. Accordingly, it will be useful to examine the messages the FRC expresses when it broadcasts its views through the mass media. As part of a larger strategy to influence both the mass public and political leaders, the FRCʼs staff regularly write editorials and attempt to publish them in leading news outlets. During 2006 and 2007, the staff succeeded in placing editorials on topics falling within the organizationʼs mission, including abstinence programs in schools, gay rights and hate crimes, abortion laws in the states, and judicial activism regarding online pornography. Yet FRC staff also published editorials that criticized wasteful government spending, warned against universal health care, and challenged the science behind global warming. Certainly no one could deny that government spending, health care, and global warming are important subjects for American citizens and political leaders to consider. For an organization whose self-definition holds that it “champions marriage and the family,” however,
these issues are considerably removed from its core mission.

The FRC has stated that constraints of budget, time, and staff prevent it from engaging questions surrounding same-sex marriage and heterosexual divorce at the same time, but it managed to allocate its scarce resources to addressing many other issues of current interest. Even if one could justify on practical or biblical grounds prioritizing gay marriage over divorce, such a view could hardly justify pushing divorce all the way to the bottom of the pecking order, below issues with only a tenuous connection to marriage and the family. Of course, a comprehensive search of all of the FRCʼs communications with members, the media, and government officials from 1983 to the present would probably uncover sporadic advocacy for changing public policy regarding divorce. Such a finding would not undermine the conclusion drawn here, namely that the subject occupies a low spot on the groupʼs priority list. Indeed, in the statement from its Web site quoted above, the FRC conceded that it spends little time on divorce.

Smith notes that FRC's lack of focus on divorce is especially odd given that FRC President Tony Perkins authored the nationʼs first covenant marriage bill back when he was a state legislator in Louisiana. 

But Smith also notes that there is very little chance that FRC or any other Religious Right group is going to "move beyond just saying that they endorse divorce reform and actually turn that abstract support into concrete action" because Americans so widely accept divorce to such an extent that even a significant portion of the Religious Right's base would oppose such efforts:

Needless to say, it is not a winning strategy for mobilization to tell your potential constituents that they have committed immoral acts that you are attempting to restrict through governmental regulations. Without an organized and vocal constituency making positions on divorce a litmus test for political support, it is difficult to imagine how the issue could join the ongoing culture war.

For all the flag-waving Tea Party placards accusing the Obama administration of unconstitutional acts and treason, it seems that threats of revolution against the constitutional republic of the United States are coming mostly from the right wing – and not just from fringe militia groups.

We recently noted that Religious Right activist Chuck Colson has launched an effort to bully the Supreme Court into opposing marriage equality by threatening that a pro-equality ruling would result in “cultural Armageddon.” And we have noted the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer’s repeated warnings that the federal government’s “tyranny” will lead to “civil unrest.” Speakers at last year’s How To Take Back America conference suggested “Second Amendment” responses to health care reform and urged participants to buy more guns and ammunition. 

Now we see that the National Organization for Marriage, whose director Brian Brown has been claiming on his anti-equality road trip that it is an organization grounded in love, is picking up on the theme as NOM’s Maggie Gallagher writes in an op ed that "American politics are in a quasi-revolutionary phase": 

The people, symbolized first in the eruptions of Tea Parties, are rebelling against elites who believe they can ignore our voices and our values….

Rush Limbaugh had his finger on the truth. In the nearly half-hour speech he gave after the Proposition 8 ruling ("the American people are boiling over!"), Rush said that Walker "did not just slap down the will of 7 million voters. Those 7 million voters were put on trial -- a kangaroo court where everything was stacked against them. ... Those of you who voted for Prop 8 in California are guilty of hate crimes. You were thinking discrimination. That's what this judge has said! Truly unprecedented."

Yes, it is. We are entering into a new phase in the battle not only for marriage, but for self-government, for the legitimacy of the views and values of the Ameircan people.

This is a fight we cannot dodge, and must and will win.

Buckle down, it's going to be a ride!

Of course, this isn’t the first time a NOM leader has suggested possibly deploying a revolutionary response to judicial rulings recognizing marriage equality. When Mormon author Orson Scott Card joined NOM’s board last year, we and others drew attention to his own threats, which he made in writing in a Mormon newspaper:

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn….

American government cannot fight against marriage and hope to endure. If the Constitution is defined in such a way as to destroy the privileged position of marriage, it is that insane Constitution, not marriage, that will die.

We have our own question: why is it that the standard right-wing response to votes in Congress or court decisions that they don't like is to threaten revolution against the U.S.?

It really is remarkable how the Family Research Council is slowly transitioning from a political group with a religious agenda to a religious group with a political agenda.

Case in point: this weekend's second annual Call2Fall event through which FRC seeks to lead churches across the nation on a "journey back to God, to His forgiveness and favor, [which] begins on our knees in humility and repentant prayer."

As we noted before, FRC is even providing participants and leaders with suggested sermons and prayer targets - targets that just happen to coincide with FRC's right-wing political agenda, warning that the Obama administration's embrace of the LBGT community's "immoral social agenda" is a "threat to us all" because it will cause God to unleash his wrath upon our nation: 

Immoral Social Agenda -- June was declared by our President to be "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Equality Month." At a White House party for homosexual activists, the President recounted his pro-homosexual record and promised a host of new benefits, rights and special protections for the LGBT community. But this privileged new class, whose members are identified by their bizarre sexual practices, presents many threats to society: threats to public health, public morals, the wellbeing of children, threats to religious liberty and, indeed, to themselves. Our Creator condemns their practices as "abominable" and morally reprehensible (see Lev 18:30). Historically, many American states have had laws against homosexual behavior, yet now it is celebrated in the White House. Scripture warns that those who practice and those who approve these things are objects of God's wrath (Rom 1:32). Scripture warns that these practices will cause the very land to "vomit out its inhabitants" (Lev 18:25). Thus, public approval is a threat to us all.

The President's commitment to implement the LGBT agenda (e.g., the so-called "Hate Crimes" law, the proposals to repeal both the military's policy of prohibiting homosexuals from serving and the "Defense of Marriage Act," the pro-homosexual "Employment Non-Discrimination Act," and other measures) has far-reaching implications for America. God reminds us in the New Testament that "by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly" (2 Pet 2:6); and "In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire " (Jude 7).

FRC also warns that Christians need to fall on their knees and repent the nation's slide into "economic tyranny" and for our "corporate guilt" including "America's recent treatment of Israel, widespread abortion, the subjection of our children to immoral 'sex education,' pornography, promiscuity, divorce, same-sex 'marriage,' violent entertainment, and more" ... and has produced a handy "Catalogue of Sins" [PDF] for which individuals, families, churches, and state should repent.

And thus, the need for nationwide prayer and repentence:

Pray that God will use Call2Fall to birth a new spirit of prayer and repentance in churches across America. May He help pastors to lead their churches in repentant prayer! May a new season of prayer and solemn assembly that move God's heart begin across our nation! May God send revival to His Church and another Great Awakening to America! May our children inherit a land where Christ is honored as Savior and Lord. May America yet become a "city on a hill" to the nations.

I'd like to point out that the man running the show over at FRC and leading this Call2Fall effort, Tony Perkins, was a witness for the Republicans in Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing just yesterday.

Last year we noted that a group calling itself Reclaiming Oklahoma for Christ which had more or less proclaimed itself the second incarnation of the late D. James Kennedy's defunct Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, though it was to be focused initially on Oklahoma.

Since then its founder, Paul Blair, has managed to establish himself among the Religious Right's B-list activists, co-organizing last fall's anti-hate crimes legislation rally and playing a key role in Janet Porter's recent May Day 2010 rally .. and so the organzation's mission has been expanded beyond Oklahoma to the entire nation:

We began working to “Reclaim Oklahoma for Christ” and now have an effective working relationship with over 100 pastors from across our state. Our goal is to connect with, encourage, and if needed, assist pastors all over the nation in reclaiming their own states for Christ and the Christian liberty upon which our founding fathers built this great country.

Although we are not affiliated or connected with Coral Ridge Ministries or its former initiative, the Center for Reclaiming America, we have been granted permission by those entities to use the name “Reclaiming America for Christ” as we expand this vision across America. We hope to honor the name and legacy of Dr. Kennedy as we strive for another Great Awakening in this nation.

And next month, the group is hosting two day conference/Tea Party event that is scheduled to feature the likes of David Barton, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, Jim Garlow, and Rick Scarborough:

Last week we noted how the Religious Right, and more specifically Matt Barber, were using the arrest of a Christian street preacher in Britain as a scare-tactic, warning Christians in the US that the same thing was going to happen to them if they don't stand up to things like hate crimes laws and ENDA and defend their religious liberties.  

Well, via Joe.My.God, we see that the charges against the preacher have now been dropped:

Charges have been dropped against a Christian preacher who told a police officer homosexuality was "a sin".

Dale Mcalpine, 42, was accused of a public order offence after speaking to a community support officer (PCSO) in Workington, Cumbria, in April.

...

Mr Mcalpine was charged with breaching section 5 of the Public Order Act by allegedly using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.

He was due to stand trial later this year, but the CPS have now confirmed they will not be prosecuting.

A spokeswoman said: "We keep cases under constant review and following a further review of all the evidence in this case we were no longer satisfied that there was sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction and we have therefore discontinued the proceedings against Mr Mcalpine."

...

Chf Supt Steve Johnson, police commander for West Cumbria, said: "We would like to reassure the public that we respect, and are committed to upholding, the fundamental right to freedom of expression.

"We are just as committed to maintaining the peace and preventing people feeling alarmed or distressed by the actions of others in public places.

"Our officers and staff often have to make difficult decisions whilst balancing the law and people's human rights, this is not easy especially when on occasions opinions and interpretations differ."

This is now the second time in recent months that efforts by the Religious Right to use this sort of foreign case as a scare tactic has been undermined by the fact that the charges have been dropped and free speech rights upheld.

When it was first reported that Dale Mcalpine, a Christian street preacher in Britain, was arrested for saying that homosexuality is a sin, you know it was only a matter of time before the Religious Right in the US started using this incident to work up fears about how this is exactly what gays want to do to Christians here in America.

Case in point:

Liberty Counsel Cultural Affairs Analyst Matt Barber raised the warning that such cases will be seen more and more in America, too.

"We know that what's happening in Europe and what's happening in Canada offers us a window into the future of what will happen here in the United States," he said. "The hate crimes laws and employment sexual orientation laws such as ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act here in the United States, have been the precursor to the more oppressive hate speech laws," Barber explained.

"Make no mistake, those laws we have now for hate crimes and the more present danger with ENDA, these laws are the precursor in the U. S. for the same kind of criminalization of Christianity that's happening in the U. K.," Barber said.

...

"Their goal is to silence any dissent and to silence under any penalty of law the Biblical recognition and expression of a traditional Judeo-Christian world view relative to sexual behavior and sexual morality," Barber said.

He warned if unchecked, the radical homosexual lobby will ensure that the U.S. goes the same direction as Britain.

"We've seen the same kind of vague language and loopholes that are used to prosecute Mr. McAlpine in Great Britain show up in laws employed here in the United States to prosecute individuals for non-violent speech, for simply sharing a Biblical world view relative to sexual morality," Barber said.  

This WND article also contains audio of the entire interview with Barber, during which he also claims that after he first learned of this incident, he "started perusing a number of homosexual news sites and homosexual blogs" and found that "the majority of homosexuals and homosexual activists for this same kind of homophobia/hate speech persecution here in the United States" and goes on to say that this is exactly what the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Kevin Jennings, Chai Feldblum want to see happen in this country. 

• James Dobson's new radio program began today.
• It is pretty ironic to see Mat Staver go after the Freedom From Religion Foundation on the grounds that it is a "paper tiger" propped up by wealthy donors.
• Fresh out of prison, Jim Traficant is running for Congress.
• The US Embassy in Kenya wants it made clear that the US government is not supporting the ACLJ's effort to shape the nation's constitution to their right-wing liking.
• A federal judge will hear arguments on a motion to dismiss the right-wing lawsuit against hate crimes legislation in June.
• Religious Right activists in Virginia are no longer smitten with Gov. Bob McDonnell.
• Finally, why are activists being encouraged to wear red clothing to a "Code Blue Health Care Freedom Act Rally" in Missouri? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to wear blue? Or call it a "Code Red Health Care Freedom Act Rally"?