“Willfully Chose To Reject Changes”: Indiana Republicans Were Warned About Their Anti-Gay Bill
Governor Mike Pence promised Tuesday to “fix” a controversial law with anti-gay undertones in an attempt to stop the constant hammering the state has received since he signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law last week.
“I don’t believe for a minute that it was the intention of the general assembly to create a license to discriminate or right to deny services to gays, lesbians or anyone else in the state, and it certainly wasn’t my intent, but I can appreciate that has become the perception,” Pence said.
But advocates for changes to the law said if Pence didn’t know this would turn into a public-relations dumpster fire, he was either willfully ignorant or simply didn’t care.
Gay-rights advocates said they flagged the problem with the lack of protective language early in the process and pushed minor amendments to the bill, they say, would have largely resolved the issue.
It is unclear whether Pence himself knew about the amendments, but two people familiar with the lobbying effort behind the pro-LGBT measures said it was clear very early in the process that the governor did not want any changes to the bill.
“Pence and his party insisted that the bill not be balanced,” said Indiana Representative Ed Delaney, a Democrat and the author of an amendment that would have added the sentence “the protection of civil rights; or the prevention of discrimination; is a compelling government interest” to the bill.
Delaney said Pence’s office either didn’t know or didn’t care about the amendments.
“He’s created this problem,” Delaney said.
Another amendment would have exempted civil rights laws from RFRA—a change modeled after similar laws in Missouri and Texas. (Indiana’s civil rights laws do not protect LGBT individuals—but several local municipalities, like Indianapolis, have laws on the books that extend civil rights protections to the LGBT community).
Both amendments were rejected by the Republican-led Indiana legislature.
Pence’s retreat—just Sunday he said the law would not be changed—signified that Indiana’s culture warrior had, once again, bit off more than he could chew.
As the uproar started, Pence staff thought the issue would fade, according to a source last week familiar with a conversation between Pence and his aides. So while Pence expressed surprise at the vitriol created by the law, LGBT advocates said he should have seen it coming.
“There is no surprise in this,” Dale Carpenter, a constitutional and civil liberties law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.
“They chose to reject those changes in the committee and again on the House floor that suggests to be the legislative intent here is to allow religious freedom to impact anti-discrimination laws,” said Tyler Deaton, senior advisor at American Unity Fund, a pro-gay conservative group.
Pence insisted in an uncharacteristically defensive interview on This Week last Sunday the bill was about religious liberty, not discrimination.
“There’s been shameless rhetoric about my state and about this law and about its intention all over the Internet,” he said. “People are trying to make it about one particular issue.”
“Shameless rhetoric” aside, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Pence’s explanation, starting with the actual signing of the bill.
And it had everything to do with the “particular issue.”
In a photo of the private signing ceremony, Pence is surrounded by a small group of people—including the three wise men of the anti-gay marriage movement of Indiana: Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana; Curt Smith, president of the Indiana Family Institute; and Eric Miller, executive director of Advance America.
Delaney said the presence of those individuals at the signing ceremony spoke volumes about the intent of the law.
“Is Mike Pence the only person who hasn’t read their press releases?” Delaney asked. “He knows what they wanted to do.”
Pence, himself, has a long, proud record of opposing gay rights during his tenure in Congress.
It also isn’t the first time he carried it into the governor’s mansion, where it has had some pretty embarrassing results.
A push for a constitutional ban on gay marriage in Indiana ended in failure but only after the Pence team tried to censor the opposition.
When gay-marriage proponents posted their displeasure with the measure on Facebook, Pence’s staff simply deleted the messages.
Initially, Pence and his staff said they just deleted comments that were obscene— but later fessed up to removing only the comments that disagreed with the governor’s position.
“On careful review, it appears that this was not always the case and some comments were being deleted simply because they expressed disagreement with my position. I regret that this occurred and sincerely apologize to all those who were affected,” Pence wrote in a Facebook post at the time.
Adding insult to injury the measure failed, giving Pence a black eye just a year into his governorship.
This is a slightly different response than Pence was used to during his time in Washington.
As a member of Congress he had no problem opposing rights for the LGBT community.
He voted for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would have added LGBT as a protected group on the federal level from discrimination in the workplace.
When the federal amendment to ban gay marriage failed to pass the House in 2006, Pence proclaimed it a “successful failure.”
“We poured a little more concrete in the footings of a building that will be built,” Pence said at the time, according to the Associated Press.
He was lauded as a hero by the right for his positions on social issues—receiving multiple “True Blue” awards from the Family Research Council for “his commitment to the family and sanctity of human life.”
The Indiana Family Institute, which was instrumental in crafting the RFRA bill, has likewise awarded him the “Friend of the Family Award.”
But being a culture warrior as governor, as he has found out, has higher stakes.
“He could afford to be a culture warrior because it wasn’t impacting an entire state’s economy,” Deaton said, referring to the burgeoning “boycott Indiana” campaign. “And now he has a different burden on his shoulders and this is turning out to cost the state tens of millions of dollars on the bottom line, thousands of jobs. This is really problematic for a governor.”
By: Jackie Kucinich, The Daily Beast, March 31, 2015
“The Devil Came Down To Georgia And Paid Off Judas”: Republicans Want Their Own Tidy Little Jim Crow Zone Of Discrimination
In some startling, if preliminary, good news from Georgia, members of a state House committee, including three Republicans, “gutted” a religious liberty bill by adding language foreswearing any preemption of anti-discrimination laws. Proponents of the bill quickly moved to table it for the session, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Aaron Gould Sheinin:
The stunning move to table Senate Bill 129 came after Rep. Mike Jacobs, R-Brookhaven, succeeded in amending it to make clear that the bill would protect against “discrimination on any ground prohibited by federal, state or local law.”
“I take at face value the statements of proponents that they do not intend discrimination with this bill,” Jacobs said. “I also believe that if this is the case, we as the General Assembly should state that expressly in the bill itself.”
Ha ha! Good one!
But “religious liberty” fans are not amused by having their own words quoted back to them. Erick Erickson, who often treats Georgia politics like his own personal dominion, pitched a hissy fit that’s extreme even by his porous standards, focusing on two Republicans who appeared to switch sides by voting with Jacobs, and a third who didn’t vote on the amendment.
Yesterday, I encouraged everyone to call Beth Beskin, Jay Powell, and Wendell Willard to tell them thank you. They had stood with Chick-Fil-A, Hobby Lobby, and people of faith. They fought off attempts to gut the religious liberty legislation in Georgia.
After you had taken the time to call them, Beth Beskin, Jay Powell, and Wendell Willard stabbed you in the back.
A week before we remember the anniversary of Judas selling out our Lord for 30 pieces of silver, Beth Beskin, Jay Powell, and Wendell Willard have sold out people of faith.
The very amendments they stopped that would have gutted the religious liberty bill, they put back in yesterday. They saved RFRA in a subcommittee only to kill it in full committee. And they did it after you had thanked them for sparing the legislation.
This is a serious betrayal. They stabbed you in the back as you were thanking them for defending your faith.
Whoa, Erick, remember you’re supposed to be the fearful, persecuted victim here, not a raging vengeful homophobe. Start tossing around references to Judas and you might find yourself tempted to lead one of those medieval-style Good Friday pogroms if you are not careful (as the AJC pointed out this morning, the prime mover in “gutting” the bill, Mark Jacobs, is Jewish).
What the incident makes clear, of course, is that the whole point of “religious liberty” legislation is to sanction discrimination. These people fully intend to discriminate, and demand the right to do so, because they’ve convinced themselves (by conflating traditional secular culture with Christianity, and then finding a few lifted-out-of-context references in Scripture that seem to back it up) that God wants them to discriminate against gay people as unclean. They want their own tidy little Jim Crow zone of discrimination where they benefit from the laws and policies they approve of but are allowed to disregard the others.
But as Erickson demonstrates, the really hard thing for them is to reconcile the appropriate appearance of Christ-like suffering at their terrible victimization with the fury they clearly feel at losing control of the political and legal system, if only for a moment.
One other reason the Freedom to Discriminate coalition is angry is that it is being “betrayed” not just by RINO legislators, but by the business community, which in Georgia and elsewhere, doesn’t want to sacrifice convention business in order to let people defy anti-discrimination laws.
These in Erick’s analogy are the equivalents to the Jewish priests who paid off Judas to turn over Christ to Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane. But the conspiracy apparently is even wider: Erickson points to Gov. Nathan Deal–a hard-core Christian Right pol–for allegedly being on the brink of appointing the chief betrayer of the faithful, Mark Jacobs, to a judgeship.
Having repeatedly appropriated to himself the right to determine who is and is not a “Christian,” ol’ Erick clearly needs to do some more purging of the Republican ranks to make the GOP safe for people who want to appropriate the right to determine which laws to obey.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 27, 2015
“Just Differing Species Of The Same Family”: ISIS And American Conservatives; If It Looks Like A Duck And Quacks Like A Duck…
Look who just banned teaching evolution in schools:
The extremist-held Iraqi city of Mosul is set to usher in a new school year. But unlike years past, there will be no art or music. Classes about history, literature and Christianity have been “permanently annulled.”The Islamic State group has declared patriotic songs blasphemous and ordered that certain pictures be torn out of textbooks.
But instead of compliance, Iraq’s second largest city has — at least so far — responded to the Sunni militants’ demands with silence. Although the extremists stipulated that the school year would begin Sept. 9, pupils have uniformly not shown up for class, according to residents who spoke anonymously because of safety concerns. They said families were keeping their children home out of mixed feelings of fear, resistance and uncertainty.
I know we’re not supposed to say this out loud because it’s so outrageous to suggest that ISIS and American conservatives might have anything in common. And obviously the level of outrageous and murderous violence perpetrated by ISIS has no parallel in the American political system–but that’s also because of the secular counterweight of civil society and constitutional democracy. Culturally, there are a lot of striking similarities between the conservative reactionary ethos in both the western and the Islamic worlds.
Hate evolution? check.
Hate sexually liberated and empowered women? Check.
Love guns and hate gays? Check.
Hate big liberal government? Check.
Believe that society should be organized according to religious principles and that secular people should have no right to curtail religious “freedom”? Check.
Want to empower down-home rural principles against those corrupt city bubble dwellers? Check.
Believe in eye-for-an-eye retributive justice? Check.
Love to sport big Duck Dynasty-style beards? Check.
Just how much quacking do we need to see here before we acknowledge they’re just differing species of the same family of ducks?
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 22, 2015
“2013, The Year In Whiteness”: Grievance Mongering Became An Uglier And Even More Lucrative Racket
Maybe it was the very fact of enjoying a wonderful Christmas with my family and friends, against the manufactured backlash to a nonexistent “War on Christmas,” that let me appreciate the perilous mental state of a small but noisy and paranoid swath of white America. Somehow over the holiday it became clear: 2013 was the year white grievance mongering became an uglier and even more lucrative racket.
Fox News has been peddling the phony “War on Christmas” for years, of course, but it took new Fox phenom Megyn Kelly to give it an explicitly racial cast. Not only did Kelly wage war against the menace of a black Santa – declaring nonsensically that the fictional character of Santa Claus “just is white” – but when she was called on it, she made herself out to be the victim of politically correct bullies, race-baiters and Fox haters. Suddenly it was clear: The imagined war on Christmas has become an equally farcical war on whiteness in the minds of those sad right-wing warriors.
The next week, “Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Robertson also became a martyr for the white right, after A&E briefly suspended him for holding forth on the nastiness of gay sex while insisting African Americans were happy in the Jim Crow South.
The new hysteria and hypocrisy was crystallized by one surreal fact: While paranoid white righties were fighting for their allegedly endangered right to celebrate Christmas (with their white Santa), they could watch a “Duck Dynasty” Christmas marathon on A&E, underscoring that there’s neither a war on Christmas nor on bigoted pseudo-Christians like Robertson. But there’s a lot of cash to be made, and fear to be stoked, by claiming both.
Kelly and Robertson and kindred spirits like Sarah Palin charted a bold new civil rights frontier in 2013: fighting for the right of white people to say false, stupid and bigoted things without facing criticism, let alone paying any real penalty. Palin has long made herself out to be a victim of mean liberals, but this year her anger-mongering took on a more explicitly racial tinge. She bashed Jeb Bush for casting aspersions on the fertility of white people — Bush did make an admittedly stupid remark about immigrants being “more fertile,” but if you thought that would get him in trouble with immigrant groups, not whites, you thought wrong – and later in the year declared her inviolable right to equate the federal deficit she wrongly blames on our first black president with “slavery.” She closed the year announcing she stands with Phil Robertson, even though she had to confess to Fox’s Greta Van Susteren that she hadn’t read the GQ interview that got him in minor temporary trouble.
2013 was also the year that George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of an unarmed black 17-year-old, Trayvon Martin, allegedly in self-defense, becoming a cultural hero to some of that same paranoid white right. If you have the misfortune of stumbling into the Twitter sewer that is TheRealGeorgeZ’s timeline, you’ll find an exaggerated sense of white grievance (please spare me the insistence that Zimmerman is Latino; he has seemed uninterested in identifying as such, at least publicly, and in any case his Latino heritage wouldn’t necessarily erase his whiteness).
TheRealGeorgeZ alternates between tweeting Bible verses and attacks on his “haters.” Of course, like Sarah Palin he’s a big Phil Robertson supporter, tweeting Dec. 20:
I guarantee everyone 1 thing, Phil Robertson is not losing sleep over getting to spend more time fishing, loving his family and The Lord.
— George Zimmerman (@TherealGeorgeZ) December 21, 2013
Robertson has come in for more criticism of his anti-gay remarks than his inanity on race, although it’s a little hard to take any of it seriously. Apparently the Robertson boys are yuppies dressing up as rednecks for profit, and A&E is laughing with them all the way to the bank. But the way the right has made Robertson a hero for his crude racial and homophobic remarks shows the way victimhood has become a crucial part of the white grievance industry.
Of course the stoking of white grievance is nothing new. It was at the heart of the GOP’s so-called Southern strategy, which always had a crucial Northern component: deliberately inflaming the anxieties of white working-class Southerners and Northern “ethnics” about racial and economic change. I have been someone who tried to see and point out the elements of those grievances that weren’t racial, but real: the genuine erosion of economic stability and opportunity for the white working and middle classes. (I wrote a book about it.) And early in 2013 I endured my own mini-backlash for suggesting, in “How to talk about white people,” that sometimes Democrats and social-justice advocates talk about race in ways that are unnecessarily divisive and punishing to whites.
I was honestly unprepared for the criticism, but I understand it better now. To suggest that there’s any way that the rhetoric of either “people of color” or racial liberals is to blame for white paranoia and racism seems like the essence of victim blaming. Of course that wasn’t my intent; I would argue that it stemmed from a very human impulse to try to feel you have some kind of control over forces you don’t. Sadly, or not, I realized this year that liberals have very little control over the way white people respond to racial change (though I will always argue that economic populism has more power to build cross-racial coalitions than the pro-Wall Street, multiracial neoliberalism practiced by too many Democrats over the last 20 years.)
I’m optimistic nonetheless. A little under a year ago I wrote an obituary for former New York Mayor Ed Koch, outlining how the formerly liberal Democrat rode a wave of white fear and grievance into Gracie Mansion in 1977. I couldn’t know it at the time, none of us did, but New York was about to elect its first Democratic mayor in 24 years, a staunch progressive on racial issues with an African American wife and two biracial children. An ad that tried to depict Bill de Blasio as an anti-police lefty who’d lead New York back to the crime and chaos of the ’70s and ’80s backfired; so did the ravings of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which did so much to help elect Koch.
De Blasio’s landslide win, among every racial and ethnic group, showed that white New Yorkers are ready to embrace the city’s multiracial future and tackle its lingering racial and class inequities. The mayor-elect’s influential “tale of two cities” is largely, though not exclusively, a tale of white and non-white New York. Red state demagogues can mock New York as a lonely blue island irrelevant to the rest of the country. But the city helped invent both liberalism and the backlash that tore it down. I’m going to bet that the de Blasio coalition has more influence, in the end, than Phil Robertson or George Zimmerman, Megyn Kelly or Sarah Palin. A noisy, paranoid white backlash against racial change may be inevitable, but it will also pass. That’s what scares them.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, December 31, 2013
“Duck Call Is The New Dog Whistle”: What Conservatives Support Is Not “Freedom”, But “Conformity” To A Conservative Culture
Put those dog whistles away. Judging by the hordes of red neck fans who rose up in angry protest after the star of the popular reality show Duck Dynasty was pulled from the airwaves for saying offensive things about blacks and gays, maybe we ought to start referring to these periodic eruptions of right wing agitation as “duck call politics.”
The reactions to duck call politics are as predictable as they are dispiriting. One Facebook friend of mine professed disbelief that her “liberal friends” had not instantaneously rallied around Phil Robertson once the embattled patriarch of Duck Dynasty was temporarily suspended for his tirade against gays which appeared in GQ earlier this month.
“When did America become a Gestapo State?” my friend wanted to know. “Come on people, this has to stop. Regardless of whether you agree with Phil, the America we love has to support his right to his personal convictions and his FREEDOM to say them.”
Sarah Palin has never let the facts stand in the way of an opportunity to stir up the perpetually resentful populist mob. And so, undeterred by the fact she’d never actually read or saw what Robertson had to say about gays and blacks, Palin nevertheless felt competent to weigh in that: “Those offended by what Phil Robertson said are offended by the Gospel.”
Shortly after the Duck Dynasty controversy began on December 18, Palin wrote on her Facebook page that: “Free speech is an endangered species. Those ‘intolerants’ hatin and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us.”
Palin’s comment drew over 428,000 “likes.”
Now, let’s be clear. When former Pope Benedict said that “tradition” based on Sacred Scripture “has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” he was expressing a religious opinion. It may have been hurtful, or wrongheaded, or even un-Christian in my view. But when Benedict said that homosexual acts are “contrary to the natural law” because they “close the sexual act to the gift of life” and do not proceed “from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity” and so “under no circumstances can they be approved” he was still expressing his interpretation of what Catholic doctrine requires.
What Phil Robertson did was altogether different. Robertson was just being crude and hateful when he told a reporter for GQ: “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men. Don’t be deceived (he said paraphrasing Corinthians) neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”
Robertson then went further: “It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”
Not content to confine his tastelessness to gays, Robertson also resurrected the embarrassing minstrel show fixture of the “Happy Negro,” a stock character whose origins go all the way back to Southern slave apologists like George Fitzhugh, who said “the negro slaves of the South are the happiest and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”
Fitzhugh was one of those Southern “fire-eaters” who believed the condition of the Southern slave compared favorably to that of the wage earner in the North since, as he said, slaves were “capital” whose “owners” paid dearly for them. And so “when slaves are worth $1,000 a head they will be cared for and well provided for” – unlike, he inferred, the expendable, exploitable and readily disposable wage slaves of the North.
Brought up-to-date by the likes of Phil Robertson, Fitzhugh’s repulsive idea sounds something like this: “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’-not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
For the relatively minor consequences he faced for these boorish remarks, Phil Robertson has become a celebrated martyr on the right and their latest cause célèbre. Conservatives have hoisted Robertson up on their shoulders as a cultural icon whose “brave” words are what other right wingers wish they could voice but for one reason or another can’t bring themselves to say out loud.
Nevertheless, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck. And what Phil Robertson said to GQ was anti-gay bigotry, plain and simple, whose open hostility towards these minorities is precisely why conservatives are now retroactively trying to dignify Robertson’s ugly hatefulness by wrapping it in the holy vestments of religious expression and free speech.
But the argument is hollow because Robertson’s fans are no more concerned with free speech than was the Tea Party with debts and deficits as they stood immobile and mute for eight long years while Republicans under George W. Bush doubled both until the Tea Party rose up in spontaneous and righteous anger the moment the American people had the effrontery to elect a black man as their President.
Right wing conservatives are not rallying around Robertson because they are the principled advocates of free speech or dedicated students of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and John Milton’s Areopagitica.
There were no angry outcries from conservatives a decade ago when the Dixie Chicks were being banned from one country music station after another, or having their records burned, once the superstar group said some contrarian things about President Bush and his baseless invasion of Iraq way back in 2003 when such anti-war opposition was unpopular but really mattered.
Country stations pulled the Dixie Chicks after lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience she was “ashamed” that Bush hailed from Texas, where the Chicks are also from.
Soon, station managers were flooded with calls from angry listeners who thought the Chick’s criticism of Bush was “unpatriotic.” One station in Kansas City even held a Dixie “chicken toss” party where listeners were encouraged to dump the group’s tapes, CDs and concert tickets into trash cans.
“We’ve got them off the air for right now,” said Jeff Garrison, program director at KILT in Texas. “People are shocked. They cannot believe Texas’ own have attacked the state and the president.”
When the Dixie Chicks were preparing for their nationwide Top of the World Tour, death threats caused promoters to install metal detectors at the shows. In Dallas, fears for the safety of the group led police to provide an escort from the show to the airport.
A Colorado radio station suspended two of its disc jockeys for playing music by the Dixie Chicks. When the group was nominated for Entertainer of the Year at the Academy of Country Music awards in Las Vegas, host Vince Gill had to remind the booing audience that everyone is entitled to freedom of speech.
Even President Bush weighed in, telling Tom Brokow: “the Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They can say what they want to say. They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out. Freedom is a two-way street.”
Yes, freedom is a two-way street. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion just not their own TV show. People are free to speak their mind and other people are free to retaliate by writing letters, organizing boycotts or taking offensive people off the air.
But what the Dixie Chicks did, it’s important to keep in mind, was criticize President Bush for the political acts he took while in office. Phil Robertson, on the other hand, was merely insulting gays and blacks for being who they are. Then he and his supporters used religion to hide their sin.
The idea that conservatives are civil libertarians who support free speech and diversity is a comic farce in any case, for what conservatives support is not “freedom” but “conformity” to a conservative culture where people have sex in the missionary position with members of the opposite sex or not at all, and where country music groups don’t criticize God-fearing Republican presidents, especially if they are from Texas, for waging wars against the non-Christian infidel.
And if accomplishing this agenda means banning celebrities from the airwaves one minute and then attacking TV networks for doing the same thing to other celebrities the next, then so be it.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, December 26, 2013
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