« Race/Civil Rights
April 29, 2008
Right Steps Up Attacks on 'Racist' Planned Parenthood
For several years, a handful of far-right activists have promoted the idea that the occurrence of African American women choosing abortion amounts to a so-called “black genocide” perpetrated consciously by clinics. But it’s only seeming to catch on now, as more and more right-wing media outlets have picked up on the claim in the last few months. Televangelist Rod Parsley recently embraced the notion as a personal cause, and a UCLA student group deployed actors to call Planned Parenthood offices and pose as racist donors (under the assumption that if the operator accepts the money, the organization must be racist).
Activists promoting the “black genocide” idea converged on Thursday at a Washington, DC clinic protest. From a CBN report:
Kristan Hawkins, Students for Life: Planned Parenthood, guess what? Your secret is out!
John Jessup, CBN: That secret? That Planned Parenthood is deeply rooted in targeting African Americans for Abortions.
Day Gardner, National Black Pro-Life Union: Black America must wake up, and stand up, to this racist organization that purposefully plants abortion facilities firmly in black and minority neighborhoods. […]
Rev. Clenard Childress, Black Genocide: I believe, as always, that if abortion was not lucrative, it would not be legal and they are benefiting off of the blood of innocent babies.
Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) attended, promising to offer legislation to make it illegal “to abort a baby based solely on their sex or their race,” while others pushed Congress to prevent Planned Parenthood from receiving any federal funding for its non-abortion health programs. (Federal funding of abortion is already prohibited by law.)
Protesters also linked their cause to the presidential campaign. Gardner’s National Black Pro-Life Union sent a letter to presidential candidates, calling on them to condemn Planned Parenthood’s supposed “racist business practices.” In particular, Barack Obama seemed to be the target. "If (Obama) supports abortion, which is a scourge of our community, which is devastating our community, then we cannot, we must not, support him," said Dallas pastor Stephen Broden at the protest.
The National Black Pro-Life Union has dogged Barack Obama for some time, as have others at Thursday’s protest. Clenard Childress of BlackGenocide.org, for example, recently accused Obama of being a black “front” man for Planned Parenthood.
Posted by Ezra at 9:59 AM | Permalink
March 21, 2008
Right Wing Joins Conversation About Race
A few voices on the Right have expressed partial praise for Barack Obama’s speech on race, but by and large, right-wing commentators have stuck to the script, picking over the parts where Obama mentioned the country’s racial wounds, excoriating him for failing to disavow affirmative action or liberal economic policies, and generally promoting the idea that Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate who secretly hates both America and white people.
But if Obama hoped to start a national conversation about race, he succeeded, in a way. Many right-wing commentators have proved willing to redirect their attacks on Obama to a discussion of their views on African Americans in general. Cal Thomas opined that “black people should be listening to” Bill Cosby, not Rev. Wright. Ann Coulter announced that she had had enough of blacks talking about racism:
But the "post-racial candidate" thinks we need to talk yet more about race. How much more? I had had my fill by around 1974. How long must we all marinate in the angry resentment of black people? …
We treat blacks like children, constantly talking about their temper tantrums right in front of them with airy phrases about black anger. I will not pat blacks on the head and say, "Isn't that cute?" As a post-racial American, I do not believe "the legacy of slavery" gives black people the right to be permanently ill-mannered.
Unfortunately, the online videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church appear to be the first exposure some on the Right have had to blacks or the African American church. Human Events reporter Ericka Anderson admitted as much: “Those of us outside the black community lack any deep knowledge of black churches. The only black minister we are very familiar with was Martin Luther King, Jr.” Anderson added, “He never damned America.”
George Neumayr, editor of the Catholic World Report, was apparently scandalized by what he described as the “feverish” church-goers in the videos “hopping up and down like hyperactive children” as they follow their “buffoonish[],” “sashaying” pastor.
Perhaps we should leave the final word to Pat Buchanan, who has made a career out of claiming that “white America” is under constant threat from other ethnicities. Before Obama’s speech, Buchanan pined for the “Negroes” of the 1950s:
That Wright is a revered preacher in black America also tells us that, far from coming together, we Americans are further apart than we were in the 1950s, when Negroes could be described as Christian, conservative and patriotic. Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad did not speak for black America then. Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young and Dr. Martin Luther King did. But Jeremiah Wright makes Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown sound like the Mills Brothers.
After the speech, Buchanan was more blunt, writing that “Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.”
What is wrong with Barack's prognosis and Barack's cure?
Only this. It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, "everybody but the rioters themselves."
Was "white racism" really responsible for those black men looting auto dealerships and liquor stories, and burning down their own communities, as Otto Kerner said -- that liberal icon until the feds put him away for bribery.
Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.
Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.
This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard.
Posted by Ezra at 5:43 PM | Permalink
Double Standards
Although it wasn’t surprising to see John McCain spend much of the past few years courting the Religious Right in advance of securing the Republican presidential nomination, he continued to pander even after his primary victory was all but finalized. Beginning with his speech to the right-wing activists at CPAC—which followed shortly after his main rival, Mitt Romney, dropped out—McCain seemed to step up his embrace of the fringe, picking up more and more endorsements, campaigning with apocalyptic televangelist John Hagee and “Patriot Pastor” Rod Parsley, and reaching out to the Council for National Policy.
McCain’s search for religious-right support might have raised a few flags. Hagee, for example, frames his support for Israel in terms of the end times, going as far as warning that any U.S. foreign policy decision that isn’t “pro-Israel” enough will result in God bringing a “blood bath” of terrorist attacks to America. Hagee also identifies the Catholic Church as the “great whore” of Revelation (a characterization he now denies) and said Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on a sinful city.
When confronted with some of Hagee’s extreme views, McCain simply responded “all I can tell you is that I am very proud to have Pastor John Hagee’s support.'’ After a lot of pressure from the Catholic League, McCain finally issued a bland statement: “I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee’s, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics.”
Indeed, McCain would have had difficulty criticizing Hagee any further—much less call the pastor out on his “profoundly distorted view of this country,” to quote Barack Obama’s critique of Rev. Jeremiah Wright—because McCain had sought out Hagee precisely for his extreme stance and the religious-right constituency he can reach.
Just as McCain sought out Hagee for his political clout, it was politics that brought McCain and Ohio televangelist Rod Parsley together on the campaign. When McCain brought Parsley on stage and called him a “spiritual guide,” that didn’t mean the senator had sent the Word of Faith preacher a financial “seed” in hopes that God would bolster his campaign contributions. Instead, McCain was embracing Parsley’s far-right political views and the political machine of “Patriot Pastors” he leads.
David Limbaugh, one of the many right-wing commentators who dismissed Obama’s speech on his pastor, claimed there was a “double standard” when it came to conservatives: “When the remotest connection can be inferred between a conservative and a bigoted supporter, there is always hell to pay.”
But in fact the opposite double standard seems to be in play: While Obama continues to be attacked for his personal relationship with a pastor whose controversial political ideology he’s rejected, McCain’s ongoing ideological relationship with the far Right—consisting, in essence, of him telling them he embraces their political views—remains unconnected to McCain’s political reputation.
Posted by Ezra at 12:45 PM | Permalink
March 6, 2008
Obama: Fronting for Racists
Clenard Childress Jr., founder of Black Genocide.Org, says Barack Obama is serving as a front-man for a racist Planned Parenthood strategy to destroy African Americans: "No other ethnic group in the United States has been decimated more by abortion than the Afro-American community. The war being waged upon innocent captives in the womb is led by Planned Parenthood. The strategy?Convince the targeted community to accept their eugenic racist plan by selecting one from their ethnicity to promote it."
Posted by Kyle at 2:17 PM | Permalink
February 15, 2008
Hate in the Name of Jesus: From Anti-Gay to Anti-Semitic
Believe it or not, somebody is taking credit for the above flier, which urges “Memphis Christians” to “unite and support ONE Black Christian” against Rep. Steve Cohen because “Steve Cohen and the Jews HATE Jesus.” Rev. George Brooks of Murfreesboro, Tennessee put his name and phone number at the bottom, and told the Commercial Appeal newspaper that he did it because the 9th congressional district “about 90-something percent black” (actually more like 60 percent, but that’s really beside the point) and therefore ought to have a black representative. Cohen was elected in 2006 when Rep. Harold Ford Jr. left his seat to run for the U.S. Senate.
Brooks’s message painting Cohen as an “opponent of Christ and Christianity” because of his religion is stunningly and appallingly over-the-top bigotry. But it’s not the first time that Cohen has been the target of religion-tinged attacks.
Last August, at a meeting of the Memphis Baptist Ministerial Association, members of the clergy attacked Rep. Cohen for his support of federal legislation to extend protections against violent hate crimes—already in place for crimes motivated by racial hatred—to sexual orientation. These ministers borrowed a page from the Religious Right, falsely claiming that the hate crimes bill would affect religious speech. “If this becomes law, then the gay advocates will start suing preachers for preaching what they (gays) see as hate,” said Apostle Alton R. Williams—in spite of the fact that the law includes explicit protections for the First Amendment. For some of the ministers, the bogus religious liberty charge may just have been a cover for the same complaint motivating Rev. Brooks. "He's not black and he can't represent me, that's just the bottom line," said Rev. Robert Poindexter of Mt. Moriah Baptist Church at the August meeting.
The Religious Right has long used anti-gay sentiment as the centerpiece of its outreach to the black church – Bishop Harry Jackson led an anti-hate crimes press conference at the most recent “Values Voter Summit” – and right-wing leaders viewed the Memphis ministers’ embrace of anti-gay politics last summer as a victory. The ministers received praise from the Traditional Values Coalition, and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council—who is writing a book with Jackson on right-wing outreach to black churches—claimed the bill was “uniting Christian pastors across racial and denominational lines all across America.” Gary Bauer cited the ministers’ meeting as an inspiring moment, building on the federal anti-gay marriage amendment, “when conservative pro-family leaders stood shoulder-to-shoulder with black pastors in defense of faith and family.”
While Harry Jackson and the Memphis ministers have apparently signed on to such an alliance, national leaders have rejected the claim that civil rights protections for gays and lesbians must come at the expense of African Americans. The NAACP, African American Ministers in Action, and the Congressional Black Caucus all support expanding hate crimes protections.
Posted by Ezra at 6:09 PM | Permalink
January 31, 2008
Parsley and Hunter: Planned Parenthood = Hitler
As the nation celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. last week, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council wrote of what he called the “irony” of the fact that anti-abortion activists choose the same day to rally in Washington: Hoping to piggyback on the civil rights movement, historically never allied with the Religious Right, Perkins implied that reproductive health-care providers are really motivated by a desire to “exterminate” black people.
Tandem with efforts by the Religious Right to recruit African American churches, the idea that abortion providers are trying to wipe out blacks is being heavily promoted on the far right, thanks to the efforts of the Life Education and Resource Network (LEARN) and BlackGenocide.org. (The group was featured on this “700 Club” report in 2006.)
Johnny Hunter of LEARN was a guest on televangelist Rod Parsley’s show this week:
“Roe v. Wade doesn’t have to be overturned. The hearts and minds of this nation must be overturned,” said Hunter.
Posted by Ezra at 5:45 PM | Permalink
January 18, 2008
Neo-Confederate Behind Pro-Huckabee Flag Ads in South Carolina
As in 2000, a belated Civil War battle is being fought in this year’s Republican primary in South Carolina. But if advocates of flying the Confederate battle flag over the state capitol hope to convince people it’s unrelated to racism, they could hardly have a worse spokesman than Ron Wilson.
Wilson is the man behind the eloquently-named Americans for the Preservation of American Culture, which is running radio ads lambasting John McCain and Mitt Romney for their stances on the flag issue while praising Mike Huckabee. Huckabee—who recently expressed his enthusiasm for amending the U.S. Constitution to align with “God’s standards”—said this week that it was a states’ rights matter:
"In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do," Huckabee said.
According to Wilson, “This is close enough now that this issue is probably going to determine whether McCain wins or Huckabee." Huckabee may appreciate the attack ads on his behalf, but he might want to reconsider.
From the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Wilson is a former member of the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens, both hate groups. His education expertise is limited to the business he ran out of his home selling textbooks to home-schoolers. One of these, Barbarians Inside the Gates, theorized that Jews are working towards world domination — and was specially touted by Wilson's Web site, which insisted, "You MUST READ THIS BOOK."
In his role heading the 32,000-member SCV [Sons of Confederate Veterans], Wilson was part of a takeover attempt by extremists, and led efforts to purge more than 300 members for publicly condemning racism in the SCV.
The SPLC reported in 2002 on the extremist takeover of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, as members hoping “to take the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists, and the skinheads and show them to the door” managed to defeat one white supremacist candidate for leadership in a raucous vote, only to have his close ally, Wilson, elected as a “stealth candidate.”
Posted by Ezra at 6:34 PM | Permalink
January 16, 2008
Fringe Activist Hopes Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Will Carry Him to Congress
With his career as an anti-immigrant activist stalled and his unemployment running out, Ted Hayes has announced that he is running for Congress against Los Angeles Rep. Maxine Waters (D).
Hayes first came to our attention in 2006 as a spokesman for Choose Black America, a front group assembled by the Federation for American Immigrant Reform, a mainly-white anti-immigrant organization that has, as the Southern Poverty Law Center noted, taken “more than $1 million from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation that funds writers seeking to prove that black people aren’t as smart as whites.”
“This illegal invasion, in my opinion, is the greatest threat to American black citizens since chattel slavery itself,” said Hayes, who also headed his own anti-immigrant “Crispus Attucks Brigade.” According to Hayes, the idea behind these groups is to put a stop to solidarity between blacks and Latinos struggling for civil rights: “They got some brothers running around here like Jesse Jackson and them talking about brown and black unity and ignoring the real issue,” he said. That issue, apparently, is immigrants supposedly taking away the civil rights of blacks: “Don't come here telling us about our civil rights. These aren't yours; these are ours. And you can maybe holler human rights here, and we'll give you some wiggle room on that. But you can't have them civil rights, brother.”
(Hayes embracing Minuteman co-founder Jim Gilchrist. AP photo via SPLC.)
Before converting to the Republican Party a few years ago and joining the anti-immigrant movement, Hayes was famous as a homeless activist who started the Dome Village shelter in L.A. But his divisive immigration rhetoric—along with his Minuteman connections and confrontational protest style—failed to catch on. A Los Angeles Times article from just two weeks ago noted his events haven’t drawn crowds and his groups haven’t gotten many members or donations. Meanwhile, Dome Village shut down, and Hayes is almost broke, with his unemployment benefits set to run out this month.
But in announcing his congressional campaign, Hayes was hardly looking to move on from the anti-immigrant rhetoric that’s defined him for the past two years. Instead, immigration is the focus of his run:
Hayes says it is unfortunate that many of the new residents have become very belligerent to the blacks. "As the numbers increase, they begin to take on a whole other mindset," says Hayes, "[that implies] 'get out Negro, this is now Mexico' -- and they're threatening people and forcing them out of the community with violence, in fact. In the high schools, they begin to have an intimidating presence and they begin to attack the black children."
The congressional hopeful says he is challenging Waters this fall because blacks are feeling the ill effects of illegal immigration more than any other group. According to Hayes, illegal aliens are taking jobs that used to go to black citizens. "They'll take less than half the amount of money that we normally should be paid. They're forcing us out of our homes. They're forcing us out of our hospitals. They're claiming that what they're doing is their civil right to do so," he offers.
Posted by Ezra at 5:26 PM | Permalink
December 10, 2007
Get Together with Dog and BOND
Jesse Lee Peterson, Founder and President of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, declares that Dog the Bounty Hunter is not racist and announces a book signing: "The Los Angeles based nonprofit organization BOND, the Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, will host a Book Signing for Duane "Dog" Chapman's book 'You Can Run But You Can't Hide', as well as a Christmas toy giveaway for kids on Saturday, December 15, at 11:30a.m.PST."
Posted by Kyle at 3:08 PM | Permalink
October 29, 2007
Novak: Katrina Will Avenge Southwick?
Last week, the Senate voted to confirm controversial appeals-court nominee Leslie Southwick, whose disturbing record led civil rights groups such as PFAW and the NAACP to oppose him. Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu was among the majority of Democratic senators to vote against Southwick, and conservative columnist Robert Novak claims that this proves her “reliance” on black voters—“even though” many black voters have not returned since Hurricane Katrina and the stalled rebuilding of New Orleans.
Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, the only incumbent Democrat considered vulnerable in 2008, showed this week she continues to rely on African-American voters even though well over 100,000 of them left her state in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Landrieu not only voted Wednesday against confirming former Mississippi Court of Appeals Judge Leslie Southwick as a U.S. Appeals Court judge but also opposed bringing his nomination to a floor vote. Civil rights groups lobbied against Southwick's confirmation. He was confirmed, 59 to 38.
Landrieu and other Louisiana Democrats long have counted on a 100,000-vote margin or more out of Orleans Parish (New Orleans). But because of the heavy black emigration, its total vote was around 75,000 last Saturday and was carried by Republican U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal in his election as governor.
Posted by Ezra at 6:27 PM | Permalink
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