Think Progress

Pennsylvania State Senator Refuses To Apologize For His Remarks About Gays: ‘We’re Allowing Them To Exist’

During a June 19 radio debate, Pennsylvania State Sen. John Eichelberger (R) repeatedly asserted that same-sex marriage is wrong, “dysfunctional,” and would lead to “polygamy, marrying younger people.” (Eichelberger is “sponsoring a Constitutional amendment to redefine marriage as between a man and a woman.”) But perhaps his most shocking comments came when fellow lawmaker Sen. Daylin Leach (D) asked him how gay men and women should be treated:

Leach: Should our only policy towards [same-sex] couples be one of punishment, to somehow prove that they’ve done something wrong?

Eichelberger: They’re not being punished. We’re allowing them to exist, and do what every American can do. We’re just not rewarding them with any special designation.

Listen to excerpts of the debate here:

LGBT activists were incensed by Eichelberger’s comments, calling on him to apologize for his “insensitive remarks.” Yesterday, gay and straight protesters briefly met with Eichelberger, “after [he tried] ducking them twice.” They presented him with 5,000 signed petitions asking him to apologize. Eichelberger refused to do so:

EICHELBERGER: You know, the public process is very important in this country. That’s what my bill does. It allows the public to make a decision, which I think is a healthy thing. So I appreciate your support of at least that concept.

SPEAKER: So are you going to apologize to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender people in Pennsylvania — and all the people in Pennsylvania for those comments about allowing to exist and calling them dysfunctional.

EICHELBERGER: No, I think you know my answer to that. Thank you very much.

Watch it:

John Morgan of the Pennsylvania Progressive, who was at the Eichelberger confrontation and captured the exchange on video, said, “The fact he knew we would be at his office at noon and chose not to be there showed his cowardice. It was not until we waited an hour and returned that his receptionist allowed us a few minutes with the Senator in an additional hour.”

Eichelberger has said that his June 19 remarks have been taken out of context. ThinkProgress contacted the senator’s office, asking for clarification and whether he would be issuing an apology. Chief of staff Jason High simply said that the Eichelberger “has already clarified his statement in multiple media outlets.” He pointed us to a June 27 Altoona Mirror story. However, while Eichelberger repeatedly says that his comments are being misinterpreted, nowhere in that article does he shed any more light onto what he actually meant:

He [Eichelberger] said members of Keystone Progress have taken what he said out of context. He said Thursday afternoon he has no intention of taking back or apologizing for anything he stated during the discussion with Leach about heterosexual marriage, bigamy, polygamy, other different forms of marriage and procreation. … Eichelberger said Morrill and his group are purposefully misinterpreting his comment.

Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents, an LGBT blog in Pennsylvania, writes, “It is one thing to disapprove of my identity or believe it is a choice, but quite another thing to suggest that I am permitted to exist in spite of my identity. Should I be grateful to Senator Eichelberger for not condoning someone taking away my existence?”

Scarborough Lambastes McCain And Graham On Iran: They’re ‘So Shortsighted I Find It Stunning’

Since the disputed June 12 presidential election in Iran, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been routinely criticizing President Obama’s response to the crisis. Yesterday on CBS’ Face the Nation, McCain echoed the GOP’s party line, saying “the United States hasn’t done anything” and sought fervently to cast Obama’s actions as “tepid.” Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) demanded that Obama “lead the free world and not follow it.”

But this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough broke ranks and called the senators’ criticism “an exercise in doing things that make us feel good about ourselves” while labeling it “outrageous.” Scarborough — called  the “new face” of the GOP by Christopher Buckley — went on to say that those rebelling in Iran would be punished more severely if Obama were to follow McCain’s advice:

SCARBOROUGH: All we would do is undermine those people in the street, who the second that they are attached to the United States of America, the country after all that’s been known in Iran as the great Satan since 1979, we will undermine their cause … It’s so shortsighted I find it stunning. […]

What would John McCain and Lindsey Graham specifically have the president say? All of those people that are emailing in and telling me that I’m being liberal? Oh really? I’m being liberal? No I think it’s called restraint. Showing a little bit of restraint. Looking at the battlefield in front of you and not just running up Pickett’s Charge and getting gunned down. If you want to feel good about yourself — and you can only feel good about yourself by screaming about the evils of Iran — fine do that. But our leaders in Washington don’t need to do that because people will be routed in the street the second they are identified with the United States of America.

Watch it:

Despite McCain and Graham’s claims to the contrary, Obama has expressed U.S. disapproval of the Iranian government’s actions. Obama released a statement on Saturday condemning the violation of human rights while steering clear of the politics. In an interview with CBS’ Early Show this morning, Obama responded similarly to Scarborough, saying the U.S. has to guard against being used as a scapegoat by the Iranian regime:

“The last thing that I want to do,” the president said, “is to have the United States be a foil for — those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States. That’s what they do. That’s what we’ve already seen. We shouldn’t be playing into that. There should be no distractions from the fact that the — Iranian people are seeking to — let their voices be heard.

McCain and Graham are growing increasingly isolated, as Republicans in Congress and conservatives in the media endorse Obama’s measured response.

Von Spakovsky: Still Fabricating Facts, Still Suppressing Votes

Further demonstrating that no conservative can be so disgraced that they cannot later be published in the Wall Street Journal, Bush-era vote suppression guru Hans von Spakovsky has an op-ed in today’s WSJ claiming that the Justice Department has “spent the last several months misinterpreting key voting rights laws for nakedly political reasons”:

Exhibit A: Justice’s inexplicable dismissal of a civil lawsuit for voter intimidation against the New Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers weren’t content to endorse Barack Obama. They sent their members to the polls last November to “patrol election sites.” Fox News aired a video of two Black Panthers in military-style uniforms in a Philadelphia precinct. One of them was carrying a nightstick. . . .  But instead of following through and getting an injunction to prevent this behavior in future elections, the department, now under Mr. Holder, dismissed the lawsuit against all but one of the defendants (the nightstick holder).

Exhibit B: Justice recently stopped Georgia from implementing a key provision of the Help America Vote Act. Passed in 2002, the act requires states to verify the accuracy of information voters provide on their registration forms by comparing it with state driver’s license and Social Security records — a sensible requirement.

Both of Spakovsky’s exhibits have no basis in reality. Although his tale of Black Panthers patrolling polling sites sure sounds intimidating, the real facts are nothing like von Spakovsky claims.

Two African-American men did show up at a polling place dressed as stereotypical Black Panthers, but the Philadelphia District Attorney says that she took no action because there were “no complaints and no evidence” of any wrongdoing. Similarly, Zack Stalberg, Executive Director of the nonpartisan poll monitoring organization the Committee of Seventy, says that the two strangely-dressed men were “off-putting, not quite intimidating.” Indeed, the sole basis for any allegations of voter intimidation are statements by two poll watchers from an organization called “Democrats for McCain.”

In other words, the Justice Department dismissed their claim against the Black Panthers not for some nefarious purpose, but because there wasn’t any reliable evidence showing that the Black Panthers violated the law. Now that Spakovsky no longer works there, the DOJ actually requires evidence before it brings a case.

Spakovsky’s claim that the DOJ “stopped Georgia from implementing a key provision of the Help America Vote Act” is also false. In truth the DOJ halted an illegal voter suppression scheme that systematically screened out “thousands of citizens who are in fact eligible to vote.”

Under the Georgia scheme, new voter registrations were compared to federal and state records to screen for non-matching names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers and to screen for proof of citizenship. Thousands of eligible voters, however, were screened out because a state employee mistakenly entered the wrong information into a database. Once screened out, a voter had to jump through hoops before they could vote:

[E]lection officials can require these individuals also to appear at the county courthouse or office building, not at the voter’s convenience, but rather on a week day, during normal business hours and, pursuant to state law, with only three days notice.

Moreover, African-Americans were sixty percent more likely to be screened than white voters, and Asian and Latino-Americans were twice as likely to be falsely screened as non-citizens, a textbook violation of the Voting Rights Act.

The bottom line is this: during his disgraceful tenure at DOJ, Spakovsky routinely approved state voting practices that were later struck down by federal courts. He manipulated election law to benefit Republican candidates; he retaliated against career attorneys who stood in the way of his illegal efforts; and he even gave cash awards to career attorneys who towed the party line. Now that he is powerless, he is continuing his anti-voter crusade from the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

White Supremacist Group Posts Doctored Photo Of Sotomayor With KKK Hood

John Aravosis at AMERICAblog notes that the Council of Conservative Citizens — a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a “brazenly racist group” — has put up a doctored photo of Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor. In the picture, Sotomayor is wearing a KKK-type hood. On her robe is a raised fist and the words “La Raza”:

The right wing has been outraged over the fact that Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization. Last week, former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo made a similar smear against Sotomayor and the group, calling it a “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses“:

If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino — it’s a counterpart — a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” What does that tell you?

“La Raza,” in fact, translates as “the people,” not “the race.” ThinkProgress also spoke to an NCLR spokesperson who confirmed that the logo in the CCC photo is not affiliated with the organization in any way.

CCC has been courted by prominent conservatives such as former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who has since renounced the organization. As Tom Edsall wrote in the Washington Post on Dec. 16, 1998:

The CCC, which has strong ties to the old white Citizens Councils, is considered racist by conservatives and liberals. Many of the most prominent figures in the organization are proponents of preserving the white race and culture, which they see as under assault by immigration, intermarriage and growing numbers of Hispanic Americans.

In the spring 1992 newsletter, provided by a Dallas man, Ed Sebasta, who has followed the organization’s activities, Lott is pictured speaking to the group with its banner in the background.

In his speech, Lott, according to the newsletter, called the Citizen Informer, warns against the forces supporting government spending: “We need more meetings like this across the nation” to offset these liberal pressures. “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let’s take it in the right direction and our children will be the beneficiaries.”

Last week, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke also embraced the position that Sotomayor is racist, while claiming that he, on the other hand, has “consistently supported true equal rights.”

Tancredo: Sotomayor Is A Member Of The ‘Latino KKK Without The Hoods Or The Nooses’

Seizing the opportunity to vilify a female, Hispanic Supreme Court nominee, noted bigot Tom Tancredo has emerged from obscurity to denounce Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Earlier this week, Tancredo declared her to be a “racist” who should be “disqualified” from serving on the bench.

This afternoon on CNN, he went further, attacking her affiliation with the National Council of La Raza as equivalent to being a member of the Ku Klux Klan:

TANCREDO: If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino — it’s a counterpart — a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” What does that tell you?

SANCHEZ: Alright. We’re not talking about — we’re not talking about La Raza –

TANCREDO: She’s a member! She’s a member of La Raza!

Watch it

The La Raza line is the latest right-wing attack on Sotomayor. Right-wing groups have been waging war against La Raza since the 2006 immigration rallies. Conservatives, including Rep. Charles Norwood (R-GA), claim the group “supports racist groups calling for the secession of the western United States as a Hispanic-only homeland.” The right-wing blog Stop The ACLU calls La Raza “an anti-white extremist group.”

These attacks — promoted by Drudge — are only going to escalate. Of course, the characterizations are wildly false. La Raza is the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization that focuses on such nefarious issues as “civil rights/immigration, education, employment and economic status, and health.” Used to these attacks, La Raza has a long fact-sheet debunking the unhinged claims of the right, including pointing out that “La Raza” translates as “the people,” not “the race,” as the right wing suggests.

Tancredo echoed a popular right-wing myth, claiming the group’s slogan is “All for the race, nothing for the rest.” When ThinkProgress asked a La Raza spokeswoman, she replied, “No. That’s very much incorrect.” In fact, the true slogan is “Strengthening America by promoting the advancement of Latino families.” A far cry from Tancredo’s egregiously false, race-based characterization.