Legislation

Lauding former New York Giant David Tyree’s strong criticism of a pending New York marriage equality bill, Janie Cheaney of the ultraconservative WORLD Magazine dubbed supporters of the legislation “forces of anarchy.” According to Cheaney, passing a bill allowing gay couples to marry will only help a “minuscule number of people” and will lead to the “undefining of the family.” Cheaney writes:

The minuscule number of people who stand to directly benefit from such legislation suggests further that it’s not about marriage at all—it’s about breaking down all barriers to consenting adults living exactly how they please, with dissenting voices confined to the margins.

Last week, former New York Giants wide receiver David Tyree stated his opposition to Cuomo’s bill in a video interview with the National Organization for Marriage. Tyree, best known for his legendary catch against the New England Patriots during Super Bowl XLII, is now catching heck. A Yahoo Sports headline read, “Super Bowl hero’s shocking same-sex marriage comments.” Shocking? Tyree said, “The moment we have [same sex marriage], if you trace back even to other cultures, other countries, that will be the moment where our society . . . loses its grip with what’s right. Marriage is one of those things that is the backbone of society.” He predicted anarchy otherwise, a fighting word if internet reaction to his interview is to be taken seriously.

And it should. We’re in a bare-knuckle fight with forces of anarchy, whether they know it or not. They think they’re about redefining the family, but it actually goes a step further: This is about undefining the family. The family becomes whatever they say it is, on any given day or legislative session. Kudos to the Republicans of the New York Senate (and one lone Democrat), and kudos to David Tyree for resisting the push.

Religious Right activists have been vigorously fighting a California bill that would make sure textbooks address the role of LGBT figures in the state’s history, even going so far as to urge parents to take their kids out of public schools if the bill is signed into law. Save California has warned of “sexual brainwashing” and a “tsunami of perversity” if the legislation passes, and now the virulently anti-gay Traditional Values Coalition is calling for people across the country to protest the bill. Benjamin Lopez of the TVC told Charisma that the bill represents politicians “messing with the minds and the innocence of children for their own twisted benefit”:

The FAIR Act, written by self-admitted homosexual state Sen. Mark Leno of San Francisco, will force all California schools to use textbooks and instructional materials that include homosexual, bisexual and transgender teachings. Despite its name, the Traditional Values Coalition says there is nothing fair, accountable, inclusive or respectful about it.

“The state of California is on the verge of financial collapse,” Benjamin Lopez, legislative advocate for Traditional Values Coalition, told Charisma News. “The last thing we need is to make an unnecessary expenditure to promote the gay lifestyle in California’s schools.”

…

“The victory and the nail in the coffin for the gay agenda” would be if there was a “ a groundswell across the country demanding textbook companies say no to gay teachings in textbooks,” Lopez explains. Lopez and the Traditional Values Coalition urge everyone to help stop the law from passing before it gets voted on at the State Assembly. “If they’re California residents, we want them to absolutely bombard the state assembly with phone calls, letters, emails and faxes, demanding that legislators reject SB 48,” Lopez pleads.

“For people across the country—for everyone outside of California looking in—they’ve got to think, 'As California goes, so goes the nation.' We need people outside of California to write their local legislators saying, 'Don’t even consider doing what they’re doing in California.'

“My very stern plea is for people ... to take action. [Lawmakers are] messing with the minds and the innocence of children for their own twisted benefit. If that doesn’t bug you, I don’t know what will,” Lopez says.

In May Rep. Pete Stark (R-CA) introduced the Every Child Deserves a Family Act, which prohibits “discrimination in adoption or foster care placements based on the sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status of any prospective adoptive or foster parent, or the sexual orientation or gender identity of the child involved.” While it is unlikely that the GOP-controlled House would approve the legislation, it is an important step in the fight to ensure that children awaiting adoption or foster care can find homes.

But the “pro-family” Religious Right wants to stop the bill in its tracks.

Focus on the Family along with the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg attacked the bill, claiming that “children will suffer” if it passes:

“We need to do all we can to encourage successful and innovative partnerships, rather than try to shut agencies out of the process,” said Kelly Rosati, vice president of community outreach at Focus on the Family. “It’s the children who will suffer.”

Sprigg agreed.

“This represents one more case,” he said, “in which we are seeing the rights of adults placed ahead of the best interests of the children.”

Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel even alleged that the legislation is unconstitutional and demonstrates how the “homosexual activist political tsunami destroys everything in its path that is righteous, good and beneficial to society”:

At least one pro-family attorney disagrees with the liberal Democrat from California. "This bill has nothing to do with providing adoptive homes for children in need and has everything to do with shutting down all biblically-sound Christian adoption agencies around the country," contends Matt Barber, vice president of Liberty Counsel Action.

And he argues that the proposal is unconstitutional because it violates the freedom of religion, which is protected by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

"This bill puts the [political] demands of selfish, adult homosexual activists...ahead of the welfare of children and religious liberty, and it must be stopped," Barber adds.

So he decides this is the latest example of how the "homosexual activist political tsunami destroys everything in its path that is righteous, good and beneficial to society." He cites a preponderance of studies that conclusively show children are best served in a home with a mother and a father.

Jason Cherkis of The Huffington Posts reports that, according to tax records, David Barton considers himself an expert on Black history:

David Barton, the Republican establishment’s favorite amateur historian, claims in tax records reviewed by HuffPost to be something of an expert on African-American history.

In filings with the Internal Revenue Service, Barton’s nonprofit, Wallbuilder Presentations, Inc., justified its tax-exempt status by highlighting among its "accomplishments" a video project “of the moral heritage and political history of African Americans."

As luck would have it, we actually wrote an entire report about the very video that Barton produced a few years ago called "Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White" ...  and I am sure you will be surprised to learn that it was utterly and intentionally misleading:

Though the program is billed as an attempt to recognize “the forgotten heroes and untold stories from our rich African American political history,” it is, in reality, a 90-minute effort to portray the Democratic Party as responsible for every problem that has ever plagued the African American community in America and imply that the Republican Party is the antidote. Barton’s website proudly claims that he “is currently breaking ground in the African-American community with his presentations” based on this DVD.

Throughout the program, Barton presents a staggeringly slanted, openly partisan, and tellingly incomplete view of American history. Barton focuses on the Democratic Party’s historical support for slavery and Jim Crow, but completely ignores the transformation of American politics brought about by the civil rights movement. Barton, of course, never mentions that the rise of the modern Republican Party was built on a “southern strategy” of embracing and exploiting the resentments of racist southern Democrats who joined the Republican Party after Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson pushed and signed landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation.

We even took several clips from Barton's program and included them in the report, and so I decided to edit a few of them together just to give you a sense of what sort of propaganda Barton is peddling in the DVD as he tries to link today's Democratic Party to the Ku Klux Klan and asserts that Democrats supported slavery just as they support abortion today:

Last year, Retired General Jerry Boykin recorded a video for Rick Joyner's Oak Initiative in which he claimed that President Obama was using healthcare reform legislation as cover to establish a private Brownshirt army loyal only to him.

At the Oak Initiative Summit last month, Boykin reiterated and expanded upon that claim ... while also explaining that American Jews don't support the Republican Party because they mistakenly believe that Hitler was on the right when he was really "an extraordinarily off-the-scale leftist":

We have incrementally moved towards Marxism and now I think it's at an accelerated pace. There are lots of indicators as to exactly how we're moving along the lines of the Marxist model - if you look back historically at how societies, what they've done as they've moved toward Marxism, we're doing all of those things.

One of which is, you look at Hitler - and one of the most disgusting things I hear is people who call Hitler "the extreme right." The absolute opposite was true - it was the National Socialist Party, he was an extraordinarily off-the-scale leftist. But many Jews in America, for example, can't identify with the Republican Party because they're called the party of the right and they equate that to Hitler when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. So, that's just a data point.

One of the things that Hitler did was he established the Brownshirts. The Brownshirts where his constabulary force to control the population because, as you're making these radical changes, there has to be some entity that stands by you with the strength and the muscle to allow you to make these over the opposition and the protest of the sovereign, the people. So Hitler had the Brownshirts.

Well, in the lead-up to the election, during the campaigns, our current president said very openly, and you can find it on YouTube, if I am elected President , I will have a national civilian security force that is as large as and as powerful as the US military.

For what? Why do you need a national civilian security force?

Now most people say, well we haven't seen any signs of the administration doing that. Until you go back and read what nobody in Washington read, and that's the health care legislation that lays out a provision for the commissioning of officers to work directly for the President in time of a national emergency.

Now what would bring about a national emergency? An economic collapse, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster - we talked about all those things here - which would then allow for martial law. The foundation has been laid.

During a rally in Columbus for Janet Porter’s Heartbeat Bill, which would criminalize abortion in the vast majority of cases, Ohio Republican State Representative Jarrod Martin came up with an economic rationale to pass the legislation: to help the U.S. compete with China.

Martin argued that since there are far more Chinese students taking AP classes than American students, the U.S. needs to ban abortion so women will have more children in order to rival China’s academic dominance.

Martin: When you look at China and you look at their population, the population growth that China has and other Third World countries have compared to the population growth of the United States; China right now how more children in AP and gifted classes than the United States has in school. Think about that, they have more children in their gifted classes than we have in our entire school system. And we are killing thousands and tens of thousands of babies every year. How do we compete? We have to think about our future. That’s a little bit of economics behind this bill.

Martin was introduced by Porter, a radical dominionist and conspiracy theorist who had fetuses testify for the legislation. The Heartbeat bill, which is backed by leading Republicans like Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, passed out of committee but has not yet been scheduled for a vote by the full Ohio State House.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are not doubt familiar with Jerry Boykin, the former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under Donald Rumsfeld who retired after video emerged of him explaining that we were engaged in a spiritual war against Islam that the US would eventually win because our God was bigger than their God.

Since leaving the military, Boykin has joined up with self-proclaimed prophet Rick Joyner and become the Religious Right's resident "expert" on all things Islam and a leading member of the Religious Right's Spartan-like army. He is also the man who exposed the fact that President Obama is a Marxist who intends to use the health care reform legislation to build an army of Brownshirts loyal only to him:

So it only stands to reason that next month, Sarah Palin would share the stage with him at a "Tribute to the Troops" rally in Colorado:

Former Alaska Governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will speak at a May 2 fundraiser for veterans at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood, the school just announced.

Palin will be keynote speaker at "Tribute to the Troops with Sarah Palin" at the university in Lakewood.

Lt. Gen. William Boykin will also speak, and there will be appearances from representatives of all the military branches.

Perhaps the rise of Donald Trump’s poll numbers among Republicans following his escalating “birther” rhetoric has given a boost to the discredited birthers, as the Arizona State Senate just passed a “birther” bill. The legislation requires candidates to prove that they are born on U.S. soil if they want to receive a spot on the ballot, and its chief sponsor in the House even met with Trump to discuss the bill’s prospects:

The measure, House Bill 2177, is aimed at President Barack Obama and those on the political right who want him to produce a birth certificate proving he was born in Hawaii and not Kenya, where his father is from.

The Arizona Legislature passed the bill 20-8 on a party-line vote in the State Senate with Republicans backing and Democrats opposing.

The measure includes some changes that allow for other documents beside birth certificates to be produced by presidential contenders. It now goes back to the Arizona House of Representatives for another vote. The House previously approved the birther bill without new Senate changes.

In addition, Pennsylvania State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe today introduced a similar bill in his state, saying, “It is beyond perplexing and greatly troubling that a political candidate can ascend to the highest levels of government without providing sufficient documentation verifying his or her place of birth or American citizenship.”

Trump, who will be speaking this weekend to the South Florida Tea Party, has won plaudits from leading ‘birthers’ and Republicans like Sarah Palin for promoting the discredited conspiracy theory. At least ten states are considering such “birther bills” this year.

• Rick Santorum has won the all-important Pacific Homeschool Super Conference straw poll.
• On a related note, if all the other possible GOP candidates would drop out, Sarah Palin would be in the lead.
• Rep. Michele Bachmann blasts judges: "They are not put there to make the decisions." Really?
• It is pathetically obvious that Donald Trump as literally zero understanding of the social conservatives or what they want.
• Finally, it looks like Sally Kern's anti-Sharia legislation is dead.