Utah

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

• If you thought Utah Sen. Chris Buttars' statements were outrageous, check out this post from Good as You on the statements made by Paul Mero of the Sutherland Institute during a debate on gay rights at the University of Utah.
• Pam's House Blend reports that an anti-gay member of the Allegheny [PA] County Council has been arrested on more than 20 counts of bilking a 90 year old widow whose $14.5 million trust fund he was paid to administer.
• Steve Benen makes several good points regarding The American Issues Project's new ad saying that if you spent $1 million a day since the day Jesus was born, you would still have spent less money than Congress just did with the stimulus bill.
• RH Reality Check explains that the anti-choice factions who are working against Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius's potential nomination to be HHS Secretary are driven, in part, by her recruitment of a Democratic challenger to knock off rabidly anti-choice Attorney General Phill Kline.

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.

• The scheduled airing of the American Family Association's "Speechless: Silencing Christians" on a television station in Grand Rapids, Michigan has been cancelled.
• Speaking of the AFA, they have rolled-out something called "Project Push Back" but I have no idea what its purpose is supposed to be.
• The President of the Virginia State Bar recently visited Liberty Law School and proclaimed that "the Virginia State Bar is thrilled with Liberty University" and told the students that faith and law are not contradictions.
• The Right is not happy that the Republican Governor of Utah has come out in support of civil unions.
• Sarah Palin is not amused by people making donations to Planned Parenthood in her name. Palin is also poised to name a new justice to the state supreme court and appears to be a bit boxed in, as neither of the candidates chosen by the Alaska Judicial Council meet her conservative standards, so this will definitely be worth keeping an eye on.
• Finally, Frank Schaeffer, whose father Francis was influential in the rise of the Religious Right, has penned an open letter to Barack Obama to tell him that they cannot be worked with:

As someone who appeared numerous times on the 700 Club with Pat Robertson, as someone for whom Jerry Falwell used to send his private jet to bring me to speak at his college, as an author who had James Dobson giveaway 150,000 copies of my one of my fundamentalist "books" allow me to explain something: the Republican Party is controlled by two ideological groups. First, is the Religious Right. Second, are the neoconservatives. Both groups share one thing in common: they are driven by fear and paranoia. Between them there is no Republican "center" for you to appeal to, just two versions of hate-filled extremes.

The Religious Right supply the kind of people who at McCain and Palin rallies were yelling things such as "kill him" about you. That's the constituency to which your hand was extended when looking for compromise on your financial bailout bill.

There's only one thing that makes sense for you now. Mr. President, you need to forget a bipartisan approach and get on with the business of governing by winning each battle. You will never be able to work with the Republicans because they hate you. Believe me, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are the norm not the exception. James Dobson and the rest are praying for you to fail.

• In yesterday's installment of Right Wing Leftovers we mentioned that Utah Eagle Forum President Gayle Ruzicka was opposing Equality Utah's Common Ground Initiative which would extend some legal protections to same-sex couples, saying it was a slippery slope to undoing Utah's anti-marriage amendment. But even authors of the amendment say the right-wingers are over-reacting because the amendment was "drafted very carefully to allow the extension of certain benefits."
• Tony Perkins's latest video update is, not surprisingly, dedicated to bad-mouthing the stimulus bill.
• The Liberty Counsel's Mat Staver blasts the Ninth Circuit's DOMA ruling, calling it "an opinion of an activist judge based on nothing else than his personal bias is no law at all and [that it] commands no respect."
• The Eagle Forum is angry at Sen. Kay Hagen for voting against Sen. DeMint's stimulus amendment, saying she has already turned "into a yes-woman for the intolerant secular-progressive forces in Washington."
• Gary Bauer warns Barack Obama that if his "actions lead to the obliteration of a U.S. city, the words 'I screwed up' won’t be enough."
• Did "angelic beings" save Ronald Reagan on not one, but two occasions? A new book says "yes, they did."
• Finally, Rick Warren was asked if he was surprised when he was asked to deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration. He says it was entirely unexpected and that he "could name several dozen wonderful pastors who would have done a better job." Yeah, so could we.

Ever since the passage of Prop 8 in California during the November election, there has been an effort underway to figure out just how much money the Mormon Church dumped into the effort.  For weeks, the Church denied giving more than a few thousand dollars but last week, facing an investigation by California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, the church reported nearly $190,000 in contributions.

On a related note, just last week AU reported on the influence that the Mormon Church has over the Utah legislature and now it looks like it might be expanding its reach into neighboring Wyoming, as the Casper Star-Tribune reports:

Mormons comprise more than 10 percent of the membership of the Wyoming Legislature, yet Mormon lawmakers are not known for voting as a bloc or working together to promote legislation.

That may be changing.

Mormons are taking a higher profile this session in promoting bills linked to controversial social issues including assisted suicide, gay marriage and abortion.

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are the primary sponsors of bills dealing with all three topics, and a cadre of about eight LDS lawmakers have teamed up as the original co-sponsors of six related bills.

The Mormon legislators insist that their support of this raft of bills is just a coincidence, but the Star-Tribune reports that it may also be the result of targeted lobbying efforts from the WyWatch Family Institute:

Some of the LDS lawmakers said they were approached about getting more involved in social-issue legislation at meetings WyWatch held in months leading up to the session.

WyWatch chairwoman Becky Vandeberghe said her group recruits lawmakers to sponsor and support legislation based on voting records and responses to campaign questionnaires, not on religious affiliation.

"We honestly don’t look at religion," she said.

The evangelical group Focus on the Family Action is also trying to influence some of the bills.

LDS lawmakers say they agreed to sponsor the bills for a variety of reasons, including their religious beliefs.

Mormon lawmaker Rep. Allen Jaggi, R-Lyman, a co-sponsor of several social-issue bills, said he signed on to the measures because of his "Christian values" on issues including gay marriage and abortion, not because he collaborated with other LDS lawmakers.

The WyWatch Institute is the group that is currently pressing for passage of a marriage amendment in the state and is working closely with Focus on the Family and the Alliance Defense Fund to get it passed.

During the Republican primary, many Mitt Romney supporters came to resent Mike Huckabee for promoting “a religious test for office” by highlighting his Christian faith in order to raise questions about Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith and thereby secure the support of anti-Mormon voters.

The effort did not go unnoticed by Mormons in Utah who came to loathe him and now he is trying to make amends, telling Utah radio host David Wright that he has nothing but love for Mormons:

When "11 words were completely misconstrued" when spoken about the LDS religion in a long New York Times profile of him, Huckabee said he "immediately" apologized publicly to Romney and church members in general.

Huckabee said there is no religious test in running for office. "I defend Mormons running for office."

He said when he saw the backlash against the LDS Church following the bitter Proposition 8 race in California last November, he was one of the first to say "I was gratified and proud" to see the church stand up for what it believes in.

…

Saying he may visit Utah soon, he added: "It pains me" that some people think he has said "bad things" about the LDS Church. "It simply is not true."

Utahns' "misinformation (about him) were part of the presidential campaign -- and I wrote my book (to set the record straight) because that is totally not who I am. Utah is one of the most beautiful places on earth, and I want to go there and not have eggs and rotten vegetables thrown at me."

But, of course, he still hates Romney:

Huckabee admitted that he saw a "different Romney" than the man he knew as a fellow GOP governor. (Romney served one term as governor of Massachusetts.)

During the presidential primary campaign Romney "was not the Mitt I knew," Huckabee said. "You could ask all the guys" who ran in the GOP primaries, said Huckabee, and they would agree that backstage, in public debates and campaigning, Romney acted differently than when he was governor or otherwise out of an intra-party race.

Huckabee said that Romney's "attitude and atmosphere" around him was perhaps caused because "he was surrounded by people who gave him very bad advice" during Romney's presidential run.

"Boy, do I ever know" that he is not well-liked in Utah, said Huckabee. But, he added, "I have never said anything unkind about Mormons."

Of course, back when he was running, he and his allies where quick to assert that any attack on him was really an attack on his Christian faith, but apparently Huckabee’s own attacks on Romney and insinuations about Romney’s faith were in no way to be conceived as attacks on Mormonism.

Huckabee’s mantra seems to be “hate the Mormon, love the Mormons.”

The latest "Washington Update" email from the Family Research Council serves as a near-perfect example of how the group operates.  The first section complains about reports that former Senator Tom Daschle has been tapped to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama Administration:

As Majority Leader, Daschle was a notorious opponent of every pro-life measure. He blocked the partial-birth abortion ban, voted for taxpayer-funded military abortions, and supported a measure that would have forced Americans to pay for the distribution of the morning-after pill to young school girls. Apart from his extreme political ideology, the selection of Daschle is even more troubling because the South Dakotan lacks any experience in the public health arena. To most Americans, who thought this election was about "change," these appointments must seem incredibly ironic.

The very next section then praises President Bush and current HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt for implementing last-minute changes that would "deal a crippling blow ... to the pro-abortion movement":

He may technically be a "lame duck," but President Bush is going out with guns blazing. With just two months left in office, the administration dealt a crippling blow to online gambling and is prepared to do the same to the pro-abortion movement on conscience exemptions. Despite an uproar from the usual liberal suspects, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is putting the finishing touches on a rule that would create a hedge of protection around health care providers who object to abortion or other procedures on moral grounds. The regulations, which HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt has promoted for months, would bar anyone who receives federal funds from discriminating against pro-life doctors, nurses, or other medical workers because of their beliefs. Pharmacists would also be exempt from dispensing drugs that could end an innocent life -- like the abortifacient RU-486. If approved before the President leaves office, the rules would be a giant leap forward for the entire medical community, some of whom have been pressured to compromise their convictions on the job. Of course, there is some danger that President-elect Obama would undo HHS's hard work, but it would be a long and arduous task. Like much of the radical abortion camp, he says these rules would create a hurdle in "women's health care." However, his argument is severely flawed, considering that abortion is not -- nor will it ever be -- true health care. While Obama says he wants to "reduce abortions," his promise to sign the Freedom of Choice Act means he's not opposed to forcing people to perform them. Thanks to Secretary Leavitt, more Americans understand that the people who oppose these rules, including President-elect Obama, are the ones imposing their beliefs-not the men and women of faith. As Leavitt said on his blog, "Our nation was built on a foundation of free speech. The first principle of free speech is protected conscience. This proposed rule is a fundamental protection for medical providers to follow theirs." Please let the administration know how much you appreciate their perseverance on conscience protections. Log on to secretarysblog.hhs.gov/my_weblog and leave Secretary Leavitt a comment expressing your gratitude.

To FRC, Daschle is completely unfit for the office not only because he doesn't share their anti-choice views, but also because he "lacks any experience in the public health arena."  But they don't seem to have similar concerns about Leavitt:

Prior to his current service, Leavitt headed the Environmental Protection Agency and was elected three times as the Governor of Utah. During his eleven years as Governor, Utah was recognized six times as one of America’s best managed states. He was chosen by his peers as Chairman of the National Governors Association, Western Governors Association, and Republican Governors Association.

Prior to his public service, Secretary Leavitt was president and chief executive officer of a regional insurance firm.

Hmmm ... I don't see any "experience in the public health arena" among Leavitt's previous jobs as head of the EPA, Governor, or insurance company CEO.  So maybe it is not really the "experience" thing that is bothering FRC, but primarily the abortion thing. 

For the past few weeks, we’ve been reporting on the “Stop the War on the Poor” campaign, an effort to label “extreme environmentalists” who oppose increased domestic oil drilling as enemies of the poor.  The campaign counts among its leaders a group called Americans for American Energy, which describes itself as “a non-profit, grassroots-based organization dedicated to educating the public about the importance of greater energy independence for America and promoting public policies that support that goal.” 

As we wrote last week, Americans for American Energy was created by Pac/West Communications, a firm with considerable Republican ties, and shares a location with the consulting firm of Jim Sims, communications director for Vice President Cheney’s energy task force.  In 2007, fresh off helping to defeat attempts “to ban bear baiting in Alaska and impose new taxes on cruise ships,” Pac/West received a $3 million grant from the state of Alaska to “educate” the American public about ANWR drilling, that was later stopped by Gov. Sarah Palin because the PAC/West-Americans for American Energy efforts were “not part of an open and transparent process.”  But that was not the end for Americans for American Energy. 

Although its profile has risen along with the “Stop the War on the Poor” campaign, Americans for American Energy has been engaging in suspicious activities in western states for the last several years.  In Colorado, it released a report claiming $1.2 billion in first-year profits for natural gas drilling on the Roan Plateau, an estimate that critics, such as the Wilderness Society, claimed were based on “junk science”

Credible economic studies need to stand up to independent review, list data sources and methods, and at the very least include the names of economists who authored the report. Unbelievably, this industry-backed study does none of this.

In Wyoming, its leaders falsely claimed that Gov. Dave Freudenthal was a supporter of their “powerful new oil and gas campaign,” leading the governor to write a letter disavowing the group.  In Utah, they launched an email attack on Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) that compared him to Hugo Chavez and Osama Bin Laden:

Last week, over 160,000 Utah residents received an e-mail letter indirectly comparing a New York congressman to some of the most infamous men in the world.

Along with mug shots of Osama bin Laden, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared a photo of Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.).

Hinchey's crime? Sponsoring the Red Rock Wilderness Act, a bill that would set aside 9.4 million acres of public land in Utah as wilderness.

The letter was attributed to Utah state GOP Reps. Aaron Tilton and Mike Noel, but it was the brainchild of Americans for American Energy, a Colorado-based industry group that has accepted money from, among others, the state of Alaska.

The Red Rock Wilderness Act will "WEAKEN America," the letter states. "How? Because it will hamstring our ability to produce American energy right here in Utah. That leads America to become more dependent on energy from hostile foreign nations -- some of whom fund terrorist organizations that are right now targeting our American men and women in uniform."

An online version of the letter and corresponding Web site go further, for instance with a picture of bin Laden, Chavez and Ahmadinejad. "These terror leaders also want America to continue its foreign oil dependence," reads the caption underneath the graphic.

Now, Americans for American Energy has turned from accusing its opponents of being in league with terrorists to accusing them of fighting a “war on the poor,” and this message seems to have resonated with Republicans on Capitol Hill.  A number of rank and file Congressional Republicans showed up on-message at the kick-off press conference, including Rep. Bill Sali of Idaho, co-sponsor of a bill suspiciously entitled the “Americans for American Energy Act,” which “would open ANWR and the OCS to increase production of American crude oil and give the right incentives to boost conservation, improved efficiency and bring alternative energy online sooner.”

But they’ve gained a much higher-profile ally in Senator Orrin Hatch, who mentioned the campaign, quoted one of its leaders, Bishop Harry Jackson, and plugged its website, all on the Senate floor:

Unfortunately for the Democrat party, the poor are beginning to wake up that the liberals they have always looked to are behind the War on the Poor. By War on the Poor, I refer to the movement by the anti-oil extremists to close off every good domestic oil resource, which is a direct cause of the high energy prices Americans face.

Democrats in Congress have been forced to choose between the very well funded extreme anti-oil interests and the poor, because on energy prices there is no compromise between the two. The Democrats have begun to recognize the position they are in, and are trying to have it both ways with today’s vote.

Earlier this month, a group of protesters came to Capitol Hill calling on Congress to Stop the War on the Poor by groups and congressmen who are closing off America's energy resources.

Included in the group were pastors and civil rights leaders calling on this body to unlock America's oil resources for the benefit of Americans, and especially for the benefit of lower income Americans.

One of the Participants was Bishop Harry Jackson. I would like to quote some of his remarks for the record. These are his words:

"I am a registered Democrat, but this has nothing to do with partisan politics. Unless the public understands that there are specific people and organizations that are fueling this war against the poor, nothing will change and the poor will continue to suffer. We will unmask those behind this war regardless of their political party or ideology. Party labels and partisan ideologies are meaningless when it comes to protecting the lives of America's most vulnerable citizens,"

By the way, Mr. President, you can see more about the stop the war on the poor movement on the web at www.stopwaronpoor.org.

Ironically, Niger Innis, co-chair of the Stop the War on the Poor effort, says that U. S. politicians are "being cowered by a very powerful, well-funded environmental extremist lobby that has a great deal of influence over them, and a great deal of influence over policy” and that their primary mission is "’outing’ the extremist groups and the politicians it says are doing their bidding.”

Bold words for a man heading an effort that is itself a phony Astroturf campaign on behalf of energy interests. 

Remember a few months ago when various Religious Right leaders gathered in Utah and announced that they were prepared to considering abandoning the Republican Party if Rudy Giuliani became the nominee?  

Well, just because Giuliani dropped out doesn’t mean those threats have evaporated – in fact, a new effort appears to be underway now that John McCain has all but locked up the GOP nomination:

The article notes that this new effort might not get as much support as the anti-Rudy threat since, as Huckabee-backer Mat Staver notes, McCain is seen as much better on the social issues the Right cares about than was Giuliani.   And considering that the McCain campaign is currently hard at work reaching out to the very sorts who would likely participate in such a meeting, the impact of any such an effort is likely to be limited.