ThinkProgress Logo

LGBT

Pro-Bullying Lobby: Perkins Says School Teaching Gender Acceptance Is ‘Indoctrinating Children’ Into Homosexuality

By Igor Volsky on May 26, 2011 at 5:00 pm

Students at Oakland, California’s Redwood Heights Elementary School recently participated in a two-day lesson plan about accepting gender differences. Educators relied on toys and animals to teach kids that “not all children will conform to gender norms around areas such as clothing or hair, or the colors they prefer.” “What it does emphasize is that there are differences,” the school’s principle Troy Flint told FoxNews.com. “We should be accepting of these differences in the interest of creating an environment where all children are welcome.”

This afternoon, Fox News invited the Family Research Council’s (FRC) Tony Perkins to opine about the school’s efforts and he quickly shifted the discussion to “same-sex marriage,” accusing the school of participating in a “bigger agenda” to indoctrinate children into homosexuality:

PERKINS: Our children should be able to go into a safe environment. They should be safe from bullying and they should also be safe from indoctrination into homosexuality.… I mean, how far are we willing to go with this? When you consider that only seven percent of the animal kingdom is monogamous in their sexual relationships, is that what we’re saying our kids should aspire to? [...]

Schools should be teaching reading, writing and asthmatic, not comparing their sexuality to fishes…This is part of a bigger agenda and this is the problem that Americans are waking up to as this idea about same-sex marriage and all this is working its way through. This is a part of a process of indoctrinating children at very young ages at the expense of actually teaching them what they need to be successful at.

Watch it:

Perkins’ comments are part of a pro-bullying campaign orchestrated by a nexus of so-called “family values” organizations that malign educational programs and policies that seek to teach children about tolerance for others and help LGBT students feel safe in schools as tools of the “homosexual agenda.” For instance, the right-wing Christian media ministry Focus on the Family has been attacking anti-bullying standards on the federal level, insisting that bullying prevention is being “hijacked by activists” who are “politicizing or sexualizing the issue.” Focus on the Family’s Candi Cushman claims that the anti-bullying bill currently before Congress “cater[s] to a narrow political agenda” that “becomes a gateway for homosexuality promotion in school.”

Perkins’s FRC is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The group “bills itself as ‘the leading voice for the family in our nation’s halls of power,’ but its real specialty is defaming gays and lesbians,” SPLC has concluded.

Yglesias

The Growth And Success Of Post-Jewish Zionism

By Matthew Yglesias on May 26, 2011 at 4:46 pm

Tanya Somanader has a post about a curious op-ed from Joe Walsh (R-IL) in which he castigates “most American Jews” for our insufficiently hawkish views on Israel. And over the weekend Dan Webster (R-FL) offered a plausible rebuttal to my contention that the US-Israel relationship has no concrete benefits for the United States by telling a televangelist that if “we stop helping Israel, we lose God’s hand and we’re in big time trouble.”

See for yourself:

The existence of Christian Zionists is, of course, not new. But what is new is that Israeli politics has drifted toward the hawkish right over the past ten years even as Jewish Americans remain on the progressive left. That change in Israeli politics, meanwhile, has been in part driven by a demographic shift away from the kind of secular ashkenazi Jews who predominate in the American population. At the same time, Christian Zionist sentiment has boomed in America and the Palestinian cause has never been less popular among America’s overwhelmingly non-Jewish population.

This is all part of what I’ve called the trend toward post-Jewish Zionism. That’s not to say that there are no Jewish Zionists in the United States (or Canada, etc.) but merely to observe that Jews as such are decreasingly relevant to the politics of Israel. In Europe, too, we’re seeing a boom of far-right parties (True Finns, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, the Danish People’s Party) with strong pro-Israel stands. And why shouldn’t there be? An Israeli government whose policies are based on putting zero moral weight on the welfare of Arabs is a natural partner for xenophobic anti-Muslim parties who appeal more to Europe’s local sociocultural majorities than to its small Jewish communities.

Update

Daniel Levy’s article on Israeli demographics is also relevant to this. If you’re a typical Jewish American, this is quite literally not your father’s Israel. The Palestinian, Haredi, “national Orthodox,” and Russian immigrant shares of the population have all grown substantially.

Security

House Gives President Nearly Endless Power To Wage War, But Also Only Barely Votes Down Withdrawal

By Zaid Jilani on May 26, 2011 at 4:30 pm

This afternoon, the House of Representatives has been debating — and voting on — a set of amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA). One particularly important bipartisan amendment offered by Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Justin Amash (R-MI) would have struck Section 1034 from the language of the bill.

What is Section 1034? It’s a section that was inserted by Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) and others that would update the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was passed after the 9/11 attacks. It would vastly expand the power of the President to engage in war. As the ACLU explains, the provision would go much further than the AUMF, “allowing war wherever there are terrorism suspects in any country around the world without an expiration date, geographical boundaries or connection to the 9/11 attacks or any other specific harm or threat to the United States. There have been no hearings on the provision, nor has its necessity been explained by Rep. McKeon or anyone else in Congress.” The section also strikes a blow against civil liberties by expanding detainment powers.

This provision is so expansive that even the Obama administration — the very executive branch whose power would be greatly enhanced — has issued a veto threat should it survive Congress. This afternoon, the Lee-Amash amendment was defeated. As The Nation’s George Zornick notes, the amendment was defeated along a 234-187 vote, with 20 Democrats voting against and 21 Republicans voting for it:

On a near-party line vote of 234-187, the House has voted down an amendment by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) that would have stripped the so-called “endless war” provision from the defense authorization bill. [...] Twenty-one Republicans broke with their party to support the Amash-Lee amendment; unfortunately, 20 Democrats also crossed over and opposed it.

Yet there was a silver lining to today’s NDAA votes. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) introduced an amendment to require the President to submit a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. While it failed, it only lost by 11 votes and netted the votes of even 26 Republicans. Recall, last year, when Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) introduced legislation to require an exit from Afghanistan, it failed 18-80, with most Democrats voting against it.

Climate Progress

West Texas sees worst drought since Dust Bowl

By Joe Romm on May 26, 2011 at 4:30 pm

Climatologist: “Along with the U.S., France, and China all are experiencing some pretty nasty drought that is going to have a major global impact on commodities, wheat in particular.”

Parts of West Texas, Oklahoma and adjoining states are suffering from a drought that rivals the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.  Some scientists say this is a kind of “global weirding” heralding climate change.

Were it not for the Biblical flooding of the Mississippi River and, well, Biblical whirlwinds slamming the Midwest, the “hellish” side of Hell and High Water would be the big news.  Last month a “record breaking 1.79 million acres burned across the country” and most of that was in Texas, NOAA reported.

The Houston Chronicle reported this week, “Texas’ farmers and ranchers are coping with their eighth drought in the last 13 years, and this one, while still young, has a chance of slamming producers with their biggest losses ever, officials said.

Nearly four fifths of Texas is under extreme or exceptional drought.  Reuters reports, the “dire drought” has “expanded across the key farming state of Kansas … the top U.S. wheat-growing state” over the last two weeks, “adding to struggles of wheat farmers already dealing with weather-ravaged fields.”

“It is pretty bad,” said Kansas state climatologist Mary Knapp. “For a lot of these areas… the last significant rainfall was in July of last year.”

It’s not just the United States that is being slammed.  As AFP reports, “Central China’s worst drought in more than 50 years is drying reservoirs, stalling rice planting, and threatens crippling power shortages as hydroelectric plants lie idle, state media said Wednesday.”

The UK’s Guardian explains the “drastic” measures the Chinese are taking :

Read more

Security

What The Supreme Court Ruling In Favor Of Arizona’s E-Verify Law Means For SB-1070

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on May 26, 2011 at 4:15 pm

Today, in a 5-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Legal Arizona Workers Act, a law passed by Arizona in 2007 that requires employers to use a controversial electronic employment verification program, E-verify, and establishes a regime of state-level sanctions for employing undocumented workers.

The case, Chamber of Commerce of the United States v. Whiting, has often been pointed to as a predictor of how the Supreme Court might rule on a challenge to the draconian immigration law Arizona infamously passed last year, SB-1070. While many critics of SB-1070 hoped that the Supreme Court would set an important legal precedent in Whiting that would boost the case against state and local immigration laws, the decision itself doesn’t expressly appear to either advance nor significantly hinder the case against Arizona’s latest sweeping immigration law.

The main issue in Whiting was whether Arizona can enact a law that allows the state to either suspend or revoke the business licenses of state employers who knowingly or intentionally employ undocumented immigrants. Under federal immigration law, states are preempted from “imposing civil or criminal sanctions (other than through licensing and similar laws) upon those who employ…unauthorized aliens [emphasis added].”

In the majority opinion issued today, Chief Justice John Roberts upheld the Arizona law, arguing that “Arizona’s licensing law falls well within the confines of the authority Congress chose to leave to the States and therefore is not expressly preempted.” “The Chamber’s reliance on IRCA’s legislative history to bolster its textual and structural arguments is unavailing given the Court’s conclusion that Arizona’s law falls within the plain text of the savings clause,” reasoned Roberts. (In simpler terms, it falls within the parameter of the bracketed exception italicized above).

Today’s opinion affirms the decision delivered by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Whiting — the same court which upheld an injunction against SB-1070 on the basis that several of its provisions are unconstitutional. Why did the 9th Circuit rule against federal preemption in Whiting and in favor of it in U.S. v. Arizona last month?

First of all, SB-1070 is a much broader law that contains several provisions that raise far more legal issues than the one the Supreme Court addressed today. Had the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Chamber of Commerce’s arguments in Whiting, it almost certainly would have doomed Arizona’s new sweeping immigration law. But it doesn’t work the other way around. SB-1070 is significantly more aggressive in its scope and substance, touching on the role of state and local law enforcement, Fourth Amendment rights, and federal supremacy in foreign relations.
Read more

Politics

House GOP Staffers Floated Using Taxpayer Money To Promote Paul Ryan’s Budget

By Lee Fang on May 26, 2011 at 4:00 pm

Republicans are regrouping after the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, rejected the regressive budget crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). The budget, which cuts taxes on corporations and privatizes Medicare, was a focal point during recent special election in New York, where Democrat Kathy Hochul won a surprising upset victory. A source on Capitol Hill sent TPM reporter Brian Beutler a recently circulated e-mail from House Republican staffers hoping to salvage public opinion over the budget. Catherine Mortensen, a press person for Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), solicited ideas for using franking privileges (ie, taxpayer-funded mass mailings commissioned by members of Congress) to defend the Ryan plan. The e-mail from Mortensen is below (emphasis added):

Hello Respected Hill Communicator!

I am going to talk to my boss about a franked mail piece that will hit people’s mailboxes in our district in late July -

I am thinking of focusing on one of two issues:

1 – need to reform Medicare ( a defense of the Ryan plan )

2 – debt ceiling – why we must make structural changes to spending before we agree to pass a debt ceiling limit increase.

Do you have any thoughts on which one of these messages is better?

THANKS,

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has called for investigations into the use of taxpayer money to promote political goals. Will he look into this apparent effort to use public funds to promote the Republican budget?

Yglesias

Budgeting For The Viltrumite Invasion of 2032

By Matthew Yglesias on May 26, 2011 at 3:59 pm

Something easily ignored in discussions of competing think tank visions of balancing the long-term budget is that most of the offerings don’t actually balance the budget. The exceptions are CAP and the Heritage Foundation:

(click for larger view)

In terms of Heritage, I think a non-technical explanation of how they achieve a balanced budget is through laughable ideas about what a sustainable level of spending is. Check out AEI for a conservative presentation that makes some kind of sense, albeit representing an ethical worldview I can’t endorse.

Among the progressive think tanks, the basic difference is that we spend less in order to achieve balance. I’m not sure what the official CAP position on this is, but I think there are two good reasons to map out a balanced budget strategy even though it’s true that you don’t need to do this in order to achieve economically necessary debt stabilization. One is that these are all obviously aspirational policy statements, not things that are going to happen in the real world. And what a balanced budget statement says is “these are public functions we think are worth spending money on, this is what they cost, and here’s an economically smart way to pay for them.” The message gets fuzzier if revenue – spending is a negative number.

The other thing, of course, is that “stuff happens.” Nobody sitting down in 1925 to write a 25-year budget forecast would have made the funds available to win World War II. It’s nice to think that you have a plan that leaves headroom to engage in some deficit spending if it turns out a meteor is going to strike the earth, or Jack Layton is the leading edge of a Viltrumite invasion.

Health

Republicans Will Still Attack Dems For Cutting Medicare And They Will Still Be Wrong

By Igor Volsky on May 26, 2011 at 3:30 pm

Jonathan Chait and Greg Sargent are predicting that having all but officially lost their battle to privatize Medicare, Republicans will now continue to attack Democrats from the left for cutting the program through the Affordable Care Act. They will argue (as Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) does here) that the GOP budget preserves benefits for everybody over 54 while the Democrats cut benefits to today’s seniors and will continue to ration their care and allow the program to go bankrupt. As Chait points out, there is very little truth to any of that:

Of course, there are different ways to cut benefits. The liberal method is to try to get Medicare to stop paying for ineffective procedures, and to encourage measures of results rather than simply incentivize more spending. Conservatives have decided that any measure seeking to root out waste in Medicare amounts to “rationing” and is unacceptable. They prefer to put beneficiaries into private insurance, and then slowly reduce the subsidy for that insurance, so that customers can shop for cheaper plans.

What the Democrats actually did is cut the rate of growth in Medicare, reduced annual increases in payments to hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies and other institutions to spur productivity and cut overpayments to private insurers that are not delivering value for Medicare dollars. They used that money to expand coverage to 32 million Americans — many of whom were receiving uncompensated care at these institutions — extend the life of the Medicare program and invest in new demonstration projects that aim to deliver quality care more efficiently.

Those are just the facts, and the problem for the GOP is that they actually voted for many of these reductions as part of the Ryan budget without investing the savings in coverage expansion or changing the way the government finances health care. Jonathan Cohn gets at the difference in his Kaiser Health News column:

Republicans claim, as Democrats do, that their plan will nudge the whole health care system in the direction of more efficiency — not by changing the behavior of providers, as Democrats prefer, but by changing the behavior of consumers, in ways that will create a more vibrant and competitive market. It’s a highly dubious argument, given that private insurance has higher overhead and less bargaining power than government insurance. (Remember, the Democratic plans would take money back from private insurers serving the Medicare population, for precisely the same reason.) But even if it were true, there’s no credible expert who thinks the savings from competition would be large enough to offset the massive reduction in funding Republicans have in mind.

There is also no credible research showing that forcing individuals to be more cost conscious will significantly lower national health care spending, so the GOP is voting for these cuts without increasing coverage or lowering costs.

Alyssa

Sarah Palin’s Excellent Adventure

By Alyssa Rosenberg on May 26, 2011 at 3:14 pm

Reintroducing herself to the American people as a viable political candidate via a documentary by a guy who executive-produced Julie Taymor’s Titus before going on to make conservative movies is a bold move for Sarah Palin. If it works, it’s a smart way to turn the Palin family’s reality show efforts, which at best are tacky and at worst are attack-ad ready fodder, from a major deficit to an asset, recasting Dancing with the Stars and Sarah Palin’s Alaska as media training rather than cash grabs. That said, I don’t really think it’s going to work. A movie isn’t the ritual act of deference that early primary voters are accustomed to.

But there’s a more interesting litmus test for the movie than whether it bolsters Palin’s political prospects. On the heels of Atlas Shrugged‘s inability to earn back its budget, Undefeated a test case for whether there’s a viable Tea Party market that Hollywood can target. Nikki Finke says the movie will end up in between 50 and 100 markets, so it’s not just going to be screened for carefully-selected audiences: they’re going to try to make some money on this thing. At one point, Palin was a reliable draw—her memoir, Going Rogue, sold at least 2.7 million copies. But Sarah Palin’s Alaska didn’t get renewed, and her ratings on Fox haven’t been particularly impressive, enough so that the network’s declined to pursue future editions of specials she was supposed to host.

In other words, the movie is a real gamble for Palin: it may not resurrect her political career, and if it fails, it could end up puncturing her entertainment brand too.

Politics

After Promising To End Earmarks, Tea Party Freshmen Hog Defense Pork

By Marie Diamond on May 26, 2011 at 3:05 pm

Tea Party freshmen who were swept into office largely based on their pledge to end congressional pork are apparently hogging the trough. Capitol Hill Blue reports that members of the Tea Party Caucus filled the latest defense appropriations bill with millions of dollars of earmarks for projects in their home districts:

While talking the big plan to be fiscally responsible the Republican freshmen have packed a huge $553 billion spending bill with millions of pet defense projects for their home districts.[...]

For example, freshman GOP Rep. Bobby Shilling put in $2.5 million for weapons and munitions advanced technology for the Quad City Manufacturing Lab at Rock Island Arsenal, which just happens to be in his district. During his campaign against Democrat Phil Hare last year, Schilling criticized Hare for adding money to defense budgets for the same facility.

GOP frosh Vicky Hartzler of Missouri packed the bill with $20 million for “mixed conventional load capability for Air Force bombers,” for Whiteman Air Force Base in her district. Hartlzler backed the GOP moratorium on earmarks during her campaign. Now she says she didn’t think the moratorium applied to defense spending.

The list goes on. In Mississippi, Steven Palazzo (R) used anti-pork rhetoric to beat out longtime Democrat Gene Taylor. Palazzo added nearly $30 million to the defense bill for projects in his district. Disdain for “pork barrel spending” was, of course, a central feature of all of these representatives’ campaigns.

This betrayal of Tea Party principles isn’t new for the freshmen members, who seemed to have discovered the benefits of cozying up to lobbyists the second they set foot in Washington. According to The Washington Post, GOP freshman Kristi Noem (SD) is just one of at least 13 new Republican lawmakers who hired lobbyists to run their offices. During her campaign, Noem railed against special interest groups for “throwing money at the feet of a member of Congress,” and made a big issue of her opponent’s marriage to a lobbyist. In their first few weeks in office, dozens of freshman lawmakers “had fundraisers to collect millions of dollars from lobbyists and other deep-pocketed interests.”

Dana Milbank noted that it was probably inevitable the Tea Party base would be betrayed, “but the speed with which congressional Republicans have reverted to business-as-usual has been impressive.” Hartzler’s novel justification — that the earmark moratorium doesn’t apply to defense spending — is revealing. Apparently pork isn’t pork if it’s for big hairy weapons systems. The unspoken reasoning is that the freshmen are confident they won’t get tagged for violating their pledge if they can spin it as being “tough on defense.”

They shouldn’t bet on it. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 51 percent of Americans support cutting defense spending to reduce the deficit. Nevertheless, the Tea Party freshmen’s rapid turnaround illustrates an unfortunate political truth: it’s only pork when your opponent does it.

Older

Newer

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up