segregation

After blaming daycare and public schools for ruining society, Jeffrey Kuhner of the Edmund Burke Institute now has another figure to blame for America’s ills: Martin Luther King, Jr. Reflecting on the recent dedication of the King memorial in Washington, D.C., Kuhner writes in The Washington Times that King’s support for progressive causes was responsible for keeping African Americans bound to the “shackles of affirmative action and the welfare state.” Such claims may be news to Glenn Beck, who claimed that he was going to “reclaim the civil rights movement” and tried to frame himself as the next King. Kuhner writes:

Yet, there was a dark side to King and it should not be ignored. Its effects continue to plague our society. Contrary to popular myth, the Baptist minister was a hypocrite who consistently failed to uphold his professed Christian standards. His rampant adultery and serial, life-long womanizing revolted even some of his closest associates. Large parts of his doctoral dissertation were plagiarized. He had numerous ties with communists and Soviet sympathizers. Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover knew this, which is why he considered King a “fraud.”

…

King’s leftism ultimately betrayed his original civil rights creed. His call for a color-blind society was contradicted by his multicultural progressivism. Affirmative action, racial quotas, government handouts to minorities - these policies directly violate the basic principle of equality under the law. Contemporary Americans are not judged as individuals, but as members of a racial group, gender or ethnicity. This is a perverse inversion of the very kind of racialism prevalent in the Old South. More than 40 years after his death, we are further away from being a genuine meritocracy. Victimology and racial set-asides dominate large swathes of American life, from university admissions and government bureaucracies to big business and construction. The country has slowly Balkanized, splintering along ethnic lines.

King’s socialism also convinced many blacks to adopt welfare liberalism. It transformed them into a permanent Democratic constituency. The results have been disastrous. The nanny state has crippled the black community, undermining self-reliance, entrepreneurship and personal responsibility. It has fostered family breakdown, soaring rates of illegitimacy and trapped millions in a cycle of poverty and urban squalor. King showed blacks the way out from segregation, but he led them to an economic plantation.

The great irony is that more Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act than Democrats. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation but to overcome the intense hostility of Southern Democrats he needed - and received - strong GOP congressional support. The party of Lincoln not only freed the slaves, it helped to dismantle Jim Crow. Instead of rewarding Republicans, blacks have largely turned their backs on them and with that, have rejected the self-empowerment and prosperity that comes from free-market capitalism.

King’s legacy has been a double-edged sword: He both liberated and imprisoned black America. As we celebrate his achievements with the new memorial in the nation’s capital, for the sake of future generations, let us remember too how King erred. In order to truly create a society where all citizens rise to the height of their potential, we must discard the shackles of affirmative action and the welfare state.

HT: Media Matters

Cross-posted on PFAW blog

Senate Republicans have called Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family, David Nimocks of the Alliance Defense Fund and Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center as witnesses in today’s hearing on the “Defense of Marriage Act.” The groups these witnesses represent have a long record of extreme rhetoric opposing gay rights:

CitizenLink, Focus on the Family’s political arm, is a stalwart opponent of gay rights in every arena:

• Focus on the Family has consistently railed against the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, demanding the discriminatory policy’s reinstatement.

• The group claims anti-bullying programs that protect LGBT and LGBT-perceived youth in schools amount to “homosexual indoctrination” and “promote homosexuality in kids.”

• The group insists that House Republicans investigate the Justice Department over its refusal to defend the unconstitutional Section 3 of DOMA.

The Ethics and Public Policy Center is backed by the far-right Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Koch- backed Castle Rock Foundation, all well-known right-wing funders.

• George Weigel of EPPC wrote in June that “legally enforced segregation involved the same kind of coercive state power that the proponents of gay marriage now wish to deploy on behalf of their cause.”

• Ed Whelan spearheaded the unsuccessful and widely panned effort to throw out Judge Vaughn Walker’s 2010 decision finding California’s Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional on the grounds that Walker was in a committed same-sex relationship at the time of the decision.

The Alliance Defense Fund, which bills itself as a right-wing counter to the American Civil Liberties Union, is dedicated to pushing a far-right legal agenda:

• The ADF has been active on issues including pushing "marriage protection," exposing the "homosexual agenda" and fighting the supposed "war on Christmas."

• The ADF claims 38 “victories” before the Supreme Court, including: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allows corporations to spend unlimited money on elections in the name of “free speech” and Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000), which allowed the Boy Scouts to fire a Scout Leader because he was gay.

A writer for the far-right Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview wonders whether any of the Wisconsin labor protesters are genuine Christians, and also says she is “pretty certain” that Martin Luther King Jr. would have opposed the Wisconsinites protesting Governor Scott Walker’s plans to dismantle the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

Of course, it was King who condemned so-called “right to work” laws because their “purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone,” and also told the AFL-CIO that “our needs are identical with labor’s needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor.”

But according to Singer, who used his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as evidence, King would have disapproved of the demonstrators. Singer even believes that any Christian should disapprove of the protesters who will “lead this nation to anarchy”:

Note that King acknowledged that the Birmingham city government had a legitimate right to require groups to have a permit before leading a peaceful demonstration in their city. However, knowing that his organization had been denied a permit as a way of preventing them from showing their opposition to unjust segregation laws, he willingly broke the permit law, yet he showed his "highest respect for law" by his willingness to pay the penalty.

What, by contrast, have some of the teachers in Wisconsin done? They called in sick (a lie), they accepted fake doctor's excuses in an attempt to cover up their actions (another lie), they forced their schools to close (defrauding their employers, cheating the children they claim to care about, and causing working parents to scramble to find day care), and they now expect to be paid for their deceit (estimates of the cost for paying for their "sick days" range from $6 million to $10 million, which means they are willing to steal from the taxpayers who must foot the bill).

In other words, they want to protest what they consider an unjust law (which is certainly their right and duty as American citizens), they broke the law to do it, but they are not willing to pay the price for their civil disobedience. I seriously doubt King -- who knew something about paying the steep cost of his convictions -- would approve for he knew too well that such cowardly, narcissistic and dishonest actions would only lead to anarchy.

As I watched the demonstrations on television, I had to wonder how many of the people in the crowd consider themselves Christians -- and how many of those Christians were participating in committing this act of fraud against the state of Wisconsin.

I can only hope that those who are guilty will have an attack of conscience: that the Spirit will bring to their mind the list of sins which God hates the most (Proverbs 6:16-18) so they can see their fault, repent, confess, and then make restitution to those they have harmed. If they don't, then they should expect to pay a different price -- one determined by a righteous and just God who never overlooks sin.

…

However, we won't have the wisdom we need from God if we have put ourselves outside His will by committing the sins He most despises, the sins that will only lead this nation to anarchy.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that a group of openly gay soccer fans requested that the European Championships soccer matches set up separate seating for gay and lesbian attendees out of fear of anti-gay violence in Poland. Catholic League president Bill Donohue unsurprisingly took offense to the way the reporter cited “the teachings” of the Catholic Church as a reason for anti-gay views that are commonplace in Poland, and derided the “gay-crazy and anti-Catholic” media for pointing out the church’s attitude towards gays. “If being opposed to homosexuality makes one phobic, then almost the entire world (throughout all of history) suffers the same malady,” Donohue claims, “How about adultery and incest—is opposition to them also phobic?”

Donohue, no stranger to consistently promoting anti-gay bigotry himself, said in a statement:

Some homosexual Polish soccer fans are demanding that a separate seating section be created at the 2012 European Soccer Championship in Poland; they claim that gays and lesbians might otherwise be subjected to harassment and violence. Their plea would be of no interest to the Catholic League save for a comment made by the AP reporter who wrote the story from Warsaw.

The following is a direct quote from the news story: "Homophobia also remains deeply embedded in Poland because of the legacy of communism which treated homosexuality as a taboo and the teachings of the church in the predominantly Roman Catholic country."

Let's follow the logic. Every world religion is either opposed to homosexuality or takes no position on it; not one finds it acceptable. So if being opposed to homosexuality makes one phobic, then almost the entire world (throughout all of history) suffers the same malady. Not only that, we are to believe that the problem in this case is not delirious homosexuals taking up the cause of segregation, it's the Catholic Church's teachings on sexual ethics.

How about adultery and incest—is opposition to them also phobic? That such ideological nonsense can appear in a sports article in a prominent media outlet shows just how far standards have fallen in journalism. It also shows how gay-crazy and anti-Catholic many in the media have become.

The Texas State Board of Education’s right-wing spin on U.S. history has earned the state a “D” from a conservative education think tank. Mary Tuma of the Texas Independent notes that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a “national conservative group calls for a ‘radical’ overhaul of U.S. history standards at K-12 public schools nationwide,” but even the self-declared “right-of-center” group couldn’t deny the drastic manipulation of the education curriculum by the far-right SBOE. The new education standards, outlined in the Right Wing Watch In-Focus: Texas Textbooks, downplay the roles of the civil rights and labor movements, whitewash slavery and Japanese internment, utilize a Religious Right view of the Constitution and the nation’s founding, and embrace a partisan Republican reading of history (among other changes) in an attempt to remove the alleged “liberal bias” of history textbooks.

The Fordham Institute lowered Texas’ rating from a C to a D due to the SBOE’s “blatant politicizing,” saying that “history is distorted throughout the document in the interest of political talking points.” According to the report, the new Texas standards are “inculcated” with “right-wing policy positions” and promote the Religious Right’s interpretation of government as the “Biblical influences on America’s founding are exaggerated, if not invented.” The report states:

Texas’s heavily politicized 2010 revisions to its social studies curriculum have attracted massive national attention. Indeed, both in public hearings and press interviews, the leaders of the State Board of Education made no secret of their evangelical Christian right agenda, promising to inculcate biblical principles, patriotic values, and American exceptionalism. And politics do figure heavily in the resulting TEKS.

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While such social studies doctrine is usually associated with the relativist and diversity-obsessed educational left, the right-dominated Texas Board of Education made no effort to replace traditional social studies dogma with substantive historical content. Instead, it seems to have grafted on its own conservative talking points. The lists of “historically significant” names, for example, incorporate all the familiar politically correct group categories (women and minorities are systematically included in all such lists, regardless of their relative historical significance). At the same time, however, the document distorts or suppresses less triumphal or more nuanced aspects of our past that the Board found politically unacceptable (slavery and segregation are all but ignored, while religious influences are grossly exaggerated). The resulting fusion is a confusing, unteachable hodgepodge, blending the worst of two educational dogmas.


Complex historical issues are obscured with blatant politicizing throughout the document. Biblical influences on America’s founding are exaggerated, if not invented. The complicated but undeniable history of separation between church and state is flatly dismissed. From the earliest grades, students are pressed to uncritically celebrate the “free enterprise system and its benefits.” “Minimal government intrusion” is hailed as key to the early nineteenth-century commercial boom—ignoring the critical role of the state and federal governments in internal improvements and economic expansion. Native peoples are missing until brief references to nineteenth-century events. Slavery, too, is largely missing. Sectionalism and states’ rights are listed before slavery as causes of the Civil War, while the issue of slavery in the territories—the actual trigger for the sectional crisis—is never mentioned at all. During and after Reconstruction, there is no mention of the Black Codes, the Ku Klux Klan, or sharecropping; the term “Jim Crow” never appears. Incredibly, racial segregation is only mentioned in a passing reference to the 1948 integration of the armed forces.


In the modern era, the standards list “the internment of German, Italian and Japanese Americans and Executive Order 9066”—exaggerating the comparatively trivial internment of German and Italian Americans, and thereby obscuring the incontrovertible racial dimension of the larger and more systematic Japanese American internment. It is disingenuously suggested that the House Un-American Activities Committee— and, by extension, McCarthyism—have been vindicated by the Venona decrypts of Soviet espionage activities (which had, in reality, no link to McCarthy’s targets). Opposition to the civil rights movement is falsely identified only with “the congressional bloc of Southern Democrats”—whose later metamorphosis into Southern Republicans is never mentioned. Specific right-wing policy positions are inculcated as well. For example, students are explicitly urged to condemn federal entitlement programs, including Texas-born Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” and to mistrust international treaties (considered threats to American sovereignty).

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Slavery, so central to the history of Texas, is mentioned only in passing. And then, of course, the other seven strands “cover” the same period yet again. In the high school U.S. history course, the pattern is the same. Scattered examples and lists of names quickly move through late nineteenth-century politics, the emergence of the United States as a world power, Progressivism, and the 1920s; on to the civil rights movement, the Reagan era, 9/11 and beyond. Once again, the other strands revisit the same ground from different perspectives, adding more isolated factoids and ill-matched lists of names. Then, the government and economics courses (themselves subdivided into the usual strands) “cover” the subject yet again, each strand and course offering further fragments of material in a historically incomprehensible jumble.

As Religious Right groups accelerate their campaign against anti-bullying policies in schools, Gary Glenn of the American Family Association of Michigan wants to use his experience fighting anti-bullying policies as a model for anti-gay groups in other states. From California to Minnesota, organizations like Focus on the Family have ramped up their efforts to stop schools from implementing anti-bullying policies that protect LGBT students, who studies show face widespread harassment in schools.

Glenn joined Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality to brag about his role in successfully opposing the introduction of anti-bullying programs that protect LGBT students in Michigan schools.

On the bullying issue, the Republicans were floundering in the Michigan legislature as to how to stop this, we just simply framed it a different way.

The homosexual activists are using the bullying issue, as you indicated, as a Trojan Horse. Their real objective is to establish in Michigan state law and in other states sexual orientation — i.e. homosexual behavior — and gender identity — i.e. cross-dressing — as the legal basis of rights and protections. So all we said was why do you insist on segregating students into these special protected class categories like sexual orientation and gender identity and then dole out protection against bullying expressly on the basis on a student’s membership in one of these protected classes, in other words, a segregation strategy.

Glenn’s claim that “homosexual activists” are using anti-bullying laws as “a Trojan Horse” is commonplace in the Religious Right, whose leaders consistently condemn the “homosexual propaganda” and “homosexual message” that is purportedly found in anti-bullying programs.

Last time Glenn appeared on LaBarbera’s program, Glenn suggested that Martin Luther King Jr. would’ve been on the side of anti-gay activists today and LaBarbera said that Oprah Winfrey “will have to answer to her Creator” for “promoting” homosexuality.

The AFA's Bryan Fischer has made no secret of the fact that he does not like Muslims because, as he says, "devout Muslims simply cannot become good Americans."

Interestingly, Fischer's unrelenting hatred of Islam seems to suddenly be making him see the value of separation of church and state. In his latest post, he offers his comments on a WorldNetDaily article about a group of Muslims in Kansas who are requesting that city officials set apart a section of a city-owned cemetery strictly for Muslim use .. and Fischer is outraged by the idea that a religious group wants public officials to sanction their specific religious demands to the exclusion of others (Fischer's comments are in bold): 

A coalition of Muslim leaders in Garden City, Kan., has told city officials they want part of the public municipal cemetery to be set aside – with a fence or other marker – to be reserved for their use exclusively.

The key word here is "exclusively." Non-Muslims not allowed. In other words, they want city officials to participate in a blatant exercise in religious discrimination. You will note that they are aiming for sanctified property in a public cemetery, thus gaining official government recognition of Sharia law. Worrisome? Not unless you realize that Muslims will not be content to stop here. Their goal is to take over every cemetery in America and run them according to the dictates of Islam. Those who think this is hyperbolic exaggeration haven't been paying attention. The Muslim Brotherhood has made it quite plain that the goal is ultimate domination by Islam of every public institution in America. The time to stop the takeover is now.

Jim Hahn, the city's cemetery caretaker, said there used to be a number of divisions – for Catholics, Protestants and others – in the city facility, but those divisions have been removed.

"We try to accommodate everyone as best we can, and we're trying to get away from sectioning off sections of the cemetery to specific people," he told the newspaper. "The way I look at it, being a municipal cemetery, you want to stay as neutral as possible. There are a lot of different religions out there, and we try to accommodate them as best we can while fitting in with our rules and regulations."

Notice here the fundamental incompatibility of Islam with Western values, and with our national slogan, "E Pluribus Unum." While the city is moving in the direction of erasing religious distinctions in the cemetery, Muslims want to reinstitute them. They want to Balkanize American society. They want to go back to the days of segregation, which would represent a huge step backward for American society. If they are successful here, this will be but a beachhead for further and more aggressive attempts to impose Muslim concepts on compliant but misguided public officials.

But Mohamad Abdulkadir, a leader of the Somalians, told the newspaper two members of his ethnic community died in recent months and were taken to a Muslim cemetery in Wichita.

"If they deny our request, maybe we can buy some land, but we're waiting to see what (city officials) say," he told the paper.

This of course is their solution. If they want their own Muslim burial grounds in a Christian nation, then nobody is stopping them from buying a piece of property and turning it into the cemetery of their choice. What they should not expect is official governmental sanction for Sharia law.

This is qute a change from Fischer's speech last year at the Values Voter Summit when he declared that only Congress was restrained by the First Amendment's ban on the establishment of religion and that it was "constitutionally impossible ... for a city council ... to violate the First Amendment."

But that apparently only applies so long as the religion is question if Christianity.  If the religion seeking a form of establishment and sanction from elected officials is Islam, then it is an absolute outrage. 

Whenever the issue of achieving full equality for gays and lesbians in America comes up, especially as it relates to marriage equality, someone from the Right inevitably plays the "Homosexual marriage is not a civil rights issue" card:

Defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman would not deny homosexuals the basic civil rights accorded other citizens. Nowhere in the Bill of Rights or in any legislation proceeding from it are homosexuals excluded from the rights enjoyed by all citizens--including the right to marry. However, no citizen has the unrestricted right to marry whomever they want. A person cannot marry a child, a close blood relative, two or more spouses, or the husband or wife of another person. Such restrictions are based upon the accumulated wisdom not only of Western civilization but also of societies and cultures around the world for millennia.

But you know what is apparently so much like the civil rights movement that is warrants it own reenactment?  Abortion:

The pro-life movement is all about freedom. That’s why Priests for Life, with the leadership of our Pastoral Associate Dr. Alveda King, is launching “Freedom Rides” for the unborn to galvanize pro-life activity across the country.

During the Civil Rights movement, the “Freedom Rides” constituted a distinctive moment of resolve and unity. The Supreme Court, in its 1960 decision Boynton vs. Virginia, had outlawed segregation in bus terminals and restaurants serving interstate travelers. So the following spring, thirteen people – seven African-Americans and six whites – decided to travel by bus from Washington DC to New Orleans to test the enforcement of that Supreme Court decision.

Along the way, particularly in Alabama, they encountered opposition and violence from those who did not want desegregation. But having been brutally attacked, and some lying with wounds in hospital beds, the “Freedom Riders” vowed that the journey would continue. That’s when others joined in, and the initial Freedom Ride became 60 rides across Southern states in the summer of 1961, with some 450 riders participating. And by the fall of that same year, the government issued orders for the enforcement of desegregation at the bus terminals.

The Civil Rights movement and the Pro-Life movement have the same heart and soul: a longing for equal justice for everyone, based on the inherent dignity of every human life. That’s why, when Dr. Alveda King first walked with me at the annual March for Life and I asked her, “Does this remind you of the marches in the civil rights movement?” she declared, “Fr. Frank, this is the civil rights movement!” Both movements are movements of freedom.

It is therefore time for Freedom Rides for the unborn. The pro-life movement is more ready than ever to proclaim freedom…

Freedom from the lies and the deceit that allow abortion to continue…
Freedom from the fear of speaking up and taking action for the unborn…
Freedom from the shame and guilt of past involvement in abortion, so that those called to speak up and share their testimonies may do so as people who are “Silent No More”…
Freedom from the political oppression that tramples on human rights and denies equality before the law…
Freedom from violence and death itself.

People will be invited to participate in the Freedom Rides themselves. The bus rides are a symbol of the journey we are on, of the fellowship we share with each other, and of the fact that we are a movement. Major events in cities along the bus routes will be held, in which all the different facets of the pro-life movement will be invited to participate.

Among the scheduled participants are Alveda King, Frank Pavone, Clennard Childress, and Day Gardner.

On yesterday's "Talk of the Nation," Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry joined the ACLJ's Jay Sekulow and Father Thomas Reese of Georgetown University to discuss the state of the anti-choice movement, during which Terry lamented that they should have outlawed abortion by this point and proclaimed that the movement as a whole is in disarray and thus called on activists to start "ratcheting up our rhetoric":

MR TERRY: The political reality is that at many levels the pro-life movement is imploding. And this recent election shows just how far we have been set back. And what my mission is over the next four or eight or 10 or 12 years is to assess how and why we have failed, because we should've made child-killing illegal by now. Why are we in this mess that we are in? What have we done that is not working? What have we failed to do that we should be doing? And then to implement those strategies at a cultural and political level, so that we can achieve our goal, which is that you cannot kill a human being from the moment of conception until birth in any of the 50 states, period.

CONAN: You just call it imploding. What do see as a signs of that implosion?

Mr. TERRY: The fact that 55 percent of Catholics voted for Obama; 42 percent of those who claim to be born again voted for Obama. That people - whereas child-killing used to be a non-negotiable with many voters - there were people that said, I am pro-life; I believe in a child's right to be alive, but yet I'm going to cast a vote for the most ardent supporter of child-killing that has even won the White House. This shows some kind of a massive disconnect and, in my opinion, a failure in pro-life leaders and in Catholic bishops, the Evangelical superstars, both at the pastoral level, and on the TV, radio and ministry level.

...

Mr. TERRY: [I]f abortion is murder, then what we need to be doing as the pro-life movement - in addition to any incremental steps that we can make such as the ultrasound legislation, requiring women to see an ultrasound of their baby before they have it killed - what we need to do is we need to have an urgency both in our rhetoric and our actions that is equal to the crime. The very fact that we could sit and discuss in calm tones how we could work with the enemy, you know, shows such a callousness of our conscience. We have lived alongside this evil for so long that we have lost our sense of horror.

If someone was going to be killed on the other side of the glass here, we only have two appropriate reactions. One is to scream our lungs out, and the other is physical intervention. So, where the pro-life movement is failing and where the line of answer that father gave and what we do agree is we want to end child-killing. But where the line of reason falls is that the pro-life movement has failed to meet this holocaust with actions and rhetoric that are equal to the crime. So, what we need to be doing over the next four years is ratcheting up our rhetoric, is becoming like the movement to end child labor or the movement for women's voting rights or the movement to end segregation.

 Terry was also asked about his views regarding Rick Warren's invitation deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration and said he could only applaud him if he took the opportunity to plead God's forgiveness "for the blood of nearly 50 million children that is crying from the ground for vengeance":

Mr. TERRY: If I was asked to pray, I would pray. So, the issue is not, should he pray? The issue is, what does he say? Pastor Rick's judgments are pouring in fast and furious against him from both sides. But the reality is, if he stood up there and said, God, I ask you to bless this administration, but I also ask you to forgive us for the blood of nearly 50 million children that is crying from the ground for vengeance, and I ask you to change the heart of this country and help us, God, to work together to end the killing of the innocent, and then, he went on and prayed for other things as well. But if he prayed something of real substance, like John the Baptist talking to Herod or other great saints that spoke to political leaders, then I would applaud him.