Jindal’s Brain Trust

Last updated on: January 9, 2009 at 9:23 am By Ed Brayton

In the next Pappy O’Daniel administration, these boys is gonna be my brain trust

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou

Bilerico reports on Bobby Jindal’s new brain trust:

In December, Jindal announced the formation of the Louisiana Commission on Marriage and Family, billed as “an entity within the executive department that serves to propose programs, policies, incentives and curriculum regarding marriage and family by collecting and analyzing data on the social and personal effects of marriage and child-bearing within the state of Louisiana.”

In other words, Jindal’s Commission is going to be looking at – and making recommendations regarding – marriage and family issues within the state.

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California Supreme Court Overturns Ban on Gay Marriage

Last updated on: May 16, 2008 at 9:02 am By Ed Brayton

And in the process reveals the utter hypocrisy of the religious right when it comes to the role of the courts, the nature of democracy and “judicial activism.” The Family Research Council immediately put out a press release condemning the court ruling which said:

It’s outrageous that the court has overturned not only the historic definition of marriage, but the clear will of the people of California, as expressed in Proposition 22. said FRC President Tony Perkins. The California Supreme Court assumed the powers of a legislative body by imposing same-sex marriage. However, in 2000, the people of California spoke loudly and clearly on the value of marriage when 61 percent of voters approved Proposition 22.

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No Abortion! No Exceptions!

Last updated on: May 15, 2008 at 9:16 am By Ed Brayton

To show you just how extreme the Republican platform is on abortion, McCain wants to change the plank on abortion to include an exception for rape, incest and the life of the mother and all hell is breaking loose. ABC News reports:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., faces enormous pressure from social conservatives to ignore his repeated commitment to change the GOP’s platform on abortion.

“If he were to change the party platform,” to account for exceptions such as rape, incest or risk to the mother’s life, “I think that would be political suicide,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, to ABC News. “I think he would be aborting his own campaign because that is such a critical issue to so many Republican voters and the Republican brand is already in trouble.”

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Low Turnout at Religious Right Gathering

Last updated on: October 3, 2007 at 9:09 am By Ed Brayton

Last week’s Family Impact Summit in Florida turned out to be quite a bust:

A conservative Christian summit at a Florida church last weekend attracted only about half as many people as organizers had hoped.

By Friday evening, just over 100 people had registered to hear speakers that included Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Southern Baptist leader Richard Land, former presidential candidate Gary Bauer and the American Family Association’s Don Wildmon.

A workshop on grass roots activism drew a handful of people — and one was a spy, an activist for Americans United for Separation of Church and State researching the opposition.

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More on the Louisiana Family Forum

Last updated on: September 26, 2007 at 9:30 am By Ed Brayton

The group that Vitter wants to give $100,000 of our tax money to has quite an interesting history. It was founded by Tony Perkins, how the head of the Family Research Council, the political wing of Focus on the Family, in 1998. Guess how he may have built up the membership for this group? By purchasing the mailing list from a KKK group:

In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. At the time, Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the US Senate in Louisiana. The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to Duke.

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Vitter Gives Federal Money to Creationist Group

Last updated on: September 24, 2007 at 9:30 am By Ed Brayton

When he’s not busy having trysts with prostitutes, David Vitter apparently spends his time making sure creationist groups get Federal tax dollars. The New Orleans Times Picayune reports that he recently placed an earmark in a spending bill that gave $100,000 to a creationist group in Louisiana to push creationism in public schools:

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., earmarked $100,000 in a spending bill for a Louisiana Christian group that has challenged the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public school system and to which he has political ties.

The money is included in the labor, health and education financing bill for fiscal 2008 and specifies payment to the Louisiana Family Forum “to develop a plan to promote better science education.”

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Greenwald on Craig and Vitter

Last updated on: September 4, 2007 at 9:02 am By Ed Brayton

One of the most obvious things about the various scandals involving politicians favored by the religious right over the last few months is the clearly hypocritical manner with which the family values crowd treats those who cheat on their wives with men and who cheats with other women. The entire religious right is demanding that Larry Craig step down, but few demanded that of David Vitter, who admitted to cheating on his wife with prostitutes.

There are two obvious reasons for this. First, because they really do think that being gay is the very definition of horrible, while adultery is seen as a minor sin. So much for “family values.” I dare say that far more families are destroyed by heterosexual adultery. Second, because if Craig resigns his replacement will be chosen by a Republican governor; if Vitter resigns, his replacement will be chosen by a Democratic governor. Glenn Greenwald sums it up nicely:
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Porn and the DOJ

Last updated on: March 28, 2007 at 9:13 am By Ed Brayton

Max Blumenthal has an article in The Nation that ties the firing of the 8 US attorneys to the DOJ’s obsession with prosecuting obscenity cases for porn starring consenting adults. It revolves primarily around Brent Ward, head of the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force that John Ashcroft created at the DOJ. It was Ward who urged that Paul Charlton, the US Attorney for Arizona fired by Gonzales, be let go because he wasn’t sufficiently enthusiastic about prosecuting adult porn cases.

The other e-mail contained a weirder charge: that Charlton refused to prosecute obscenity cases. Written by Ward to Sampson on September 20, 2006, the e-mail leveled the same allegation against Dan Bogden, the US Attorney for Nevada, who was also dismissed in the prosecutor purge, despite positive performance reviews. “We have two US Attorneys who are unwilling to take good cases we have presented to them. They are Paul Charlton in Phoenix (this is urgent) and Dan Bogden in Las Vegas,” wrote Ward. “In light of the AG’s [Attorney General’s] comments…to ‘kick butt and take names,’ what do you suggest I do?”

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Justice Kennedy and Judicial Independence

Last updated on: February 16, 2007 at 9:36 am By Ed Brayton

In one of Washington’s rarest events, Justice Anthony Kennedy appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday to discuss many issues involving the judiciary. Indeed, according to Sen. Leahy, it was the “first time in modern history” that a sitting justice had appeared before that committee. The subject was judicial security and independence. And I’m surprised to note that Jan Crawford Greenburg, normally a reliable voice of reason where the courts are concerned, seems to have ignored a great deal of reality in her evaluation of the event:

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Liberty Sunday Reports

Last updated on: October 17, 2006 at 9:54 am By Ed Brayton

Yesterday was yet another of those frequent religious right “conferences” – really just a series of ridiculous speeches to fire up the base with rhetorical red meat to get them out to vote in November. This one was disingenuously called Liberty Sunday, following on the heels of the equally misnamed Justice Sunday earlier this year. There are several reports on what was said, all of which was predictable and much of it patently absurd. In keeping with their theme, they used a picture of Boston’s famous Old North Church, indicating their metaphor that, like Paul Revere, they were bravely riding to warn our citizens of an impending attack from “sodomites” (none of whom would be caught dead in a red coat, mind you). And as Right Wing Watch reports, the pastor of that church is none too happy about their appropriation of his church as a symbol for intolerance. Rev. Stephen Ayres writes:

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Carpenter on Foley and Homophobia

Last updated on: October 17, 2006 at 9:38 am By Ed Brayton

Dale Carpenter has an excellent essay on the response to the Foley scandal from the anti-gay right. I think he correctly highlights what this episode tells us about the response of the religious right. I’ll post a long excerpt below the fold.

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Republicans to Purge Gay Staffers?

Last updated on: October 14, 2006 at 10:40 am By Ed Brayton

Max Blumenthal has a post at Talk2Action about the possibility that Republicans in Congress will begin to purge their staffs of all gays and lesbians because religious right leaders are now viewing them as a “homosexual clique” put in place to undermine the party:

Immediately after the scandal broke about former Representative Mark Foley, Republican of Florida, some anti-Republican gay rights activists composed a memo containing the names of closeted gay Republican congressional staffers and sent it to leading Christian right advocacy groups. The founder and CEO of one of those groups, the American Family Association’s Rev. Don Wildmon, told me he has received that memo, which he simply referred to as “The List.” Based on The List’s contents, Wildmon is convinced that a secretive gay “clique” boring within the Republican-controlled Congress is responsible for covering up Foley’s sexual predation toward teenage male House pages. Moreover, Wildmon calls on the Republican Party leadership to promptly purge the “subversive” gay staffers.

“They oughta fire every one of `em,” Wildmon told me in his trademark Mississippi drawl. “I don’t care if they’re heterosexual or homosexual or whatever they are. If you’ve got that going on, that subverts the will of the people; that subverts the voters. That is subversive activity. There should be no organization among staffers in Washington of that nature and if they find out that they’re there and they’re a member, they oughta be dismissed el pronto.”

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