Girl Scouts: “A Radicalized Organization Promoting Homosexual Lifestyles And Funding Planned Parenthood”
Next time you buy a box of Tagalongs, you might be helping to fund an abortion.
Or, at least, that’s what one Republican lawmaker in Indiana might have you believe. State Rep. Bob Morris (R) wants to kill a resolution honoring the Girl Scouts because they are a “radicalized organization” that promotes “homosexual lifestyles” and funds Planned Parenthood.
In a letter to his fellow Republicans on Saturday, Morris said he would refuse to support a resolution celebrating 100 years of the organization because “after talking to some well-informed constituents, I did a small amount of web-based research, and what I found is disturbing.”
The letter, obtained by the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, says that the Girl Scouts of America and the World Association of Girl Guides “have entered into a close strategic affiliation with Planned Parenthood,” though “you will not find evidence of this on the GSA/WAGGGS website—in fact, the websites of these two organizations explicitly deny funding Planned Parenthood.”
“Nonetheless, abundant evidence proves that the agenda of Planned Parenthood includes sexualizing young girls through the Girl Scouts, which is quickly becoming a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood,” Morris wrote. “Planned Parenthood instructional series and pamphlets are part of the core curriculum at GSA training seminars.”
He continues that the Girl Scouts also let in boys “who decide to claim a ‘transgender’ or cross-dressing life-style” and, in general, promote being gay. “Many parents are abandoning the Girl Scouts because they promote homosexual lifestyles,” Morris said. “In fact, the Girl Scouts education seminar girls are directed to study the example of role models. Of the fifty role models listed, only three have a briefly-mentioned religious background – all the rest are feminists, lesbians, or Communists.”
“As members of the Indiana House of Representatives, we must be wise before we use the credibility and respect of the ‘Peoples’ House’ to extend legitimacy to a radicalized organization,” he continued. “The Girl Scouts of America stand in a strong tradition that reflects with fidelity the traditional values of our homes and our families.”
Cathy Ritchie, of the Girl Scouts of Central Indiana, laughed off Morris when she heard about his letter. “I think perhaps he hasn’t done all of his research,” Ritchie told Eagle Country Online. “There is no relationship between Girls Scouts of the U.S.A. or Girl Scouts of Central Indiana to Planned Parenthood.”
Morris was the only one to refuse to sign the resolution, the Associated Press reports.
This is not the first time the Girl Scouts have been accused of a nefarious liberal agenda. In December, Fox News and some right-wing bloggers charged them with being part of a lefty conspiracy because of a section in the Girl Scouts’ media guide that advises readers to use sites like MediaMatters (“clearly a lefty blog,” as Steve Doocy of Fox & Friends put it) to fact-check what they read on the Internet.
By: Jillian Rayfield, Talking Points Memo, February 21, 2012
Congressional Residency Requirements: Home Is “Anywhere I Hang My Hat”
Of all the issues you can raise in a political campaign, the dumbest is whether a member of Congress has moved his/her family to Washington.
O.K., possibly not the absolute dumbest. There was that dust-up over whether now-Senator Rand Paul had, as a college student, kidnapped a female friend and forced her to worship “Aqua Buddha.” Although now that I’m thinking about it, I really did enjoy that one.
Right now in Indiana, Senator Richard Lugar is under fire from a Tea Party opponent who claims that Lugar has not actually lived in the state since he first entered the Senate in 1977.
“This scandal is our chance to replace one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate with a conservative!” said a fund-raising letter for Lugar’s opponent, Richard Mourdock, the state treasurer.
Lugar is actually a pretty conservative guy himself, although he is best known for his work on nuclear disarmament, which does not appear to be a Tea Party priority. The head of the right-wing PAC, Club for Growth, called for Lugar’s defeat the other day in a statement that denounced the senator for, among other things, having supported the bailout of New York City in 1978. I call that nursing a grudge.
Most of the publicity about the race, however, centers on the residency issue. Mourdock recently held a press conference at the house where Lugar has his voting address, and it definitely did seem to be occupied by another family.
“The entire state is his home,” retorted Lugar’s campaign manager. I am taking this to be a version of “So what?”
The senator’s ability to vote from a residence he hasn’t actually lived in for decades was, the campaign said, based on the same principle that allows a member of the military to vote from the last place he or she lived before going off to fight for the country. I’m not sure this is a comparison they’d want to press.
The issue of voting addresses is particularly sensitive in Indiana, where the secretary of state, Charlie White, was recently tossed out of office after being convicted of registering to vote at his former wife’s address while he actually lived with his fiancée. White, who once worked as a family law attorney, said his private life was “complicated,” which I’m sure we’re all prepared to believe.
Indiana is clearly a state with a lot of political excitement. Just recently, its State House voted in favor of drug-testing welfare recipients, which would not be all that remarkable except that the members also voted to drug-test themselves. “We had an amendment I thought was even better requiring drug testing for all corporate welfare recipients,” said Representative Ryan Dvorak, a Democrat from South Bend. That one, unfortunately, failed on a party-line vote.
But about the residency issue. These fights have been going on forever. One of the very first political investigations I ever worked on involved whether or not a veteran congressman maintained a voting address that was actually a Burger King outlet in North Haven, Conn.
Rick Santorum’s political career was built on an upset victory against a Democratic House member who, Santorum claimed, had lost touch with his district and moved his family to the Washington suburbs. When Santorum moved his own family to the Washington suburbs, he claimed that promises he made when he was in the House didn’t count for the Senate.
Then he enrolled the kids, who were being home-schooled, in a cyberschool that billed his old school district in Pennsylvania $38,000 a year.
“My dad’s opponents have criticized him for moving us to Washington so we could be with him more,” complained one of Santorum’s kids in an ad in 2006, shortly before he lost by one of the widest margins in the history of re-election campaigns. This was the same race in which Santorum claimed that his Democratic opponent, Robert Casey, was a “thug” who sent operatives to peep through the windows of the house near Pittsburgh where the senator maintained a voting address.
“Your despicable actions have endangered our children’s safety,” Santorum and his wife wrote to Casey. A Philadelphia Daily News columnist noted that the children in question were probably not in peril since they were, you know, in Virginia the whole time.
While serving in Congress is really, truly, not the same as serving in combat, these residency flaps are generally bogus. If we want a Congress that looks at least minimally like the country at large — including women, men with working wives, and parents of young children — we can’t carp if they want to keep their families within commuting distance.
Unless, of course, you are talking about somebody who got elected in the first place by running on the residency issue. Then carp away. Please.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 17, 2012
Does Right To Work Actually Lead to More Jobs?
A study by two economists sheds doubt on whether right-to-work laws are all they’re cracked up to be.
Most people watching the Super Bowl last night probably had no idea that only a few days before, in the same city of Indianapolis, Governor Mitch Daniels signed a law that will cripple unions. As I’ve written before, Indiana is the first Rust Belt state to pass a right-to-work law, which prohibits both mandatory union membership and collecting fees from non-members. The news, however, has hardly gotten the attention the labor-minded might have expected. Blame it on the big game or the GOP presidential primary. Or blame it on the loss of union power that allowed the law to pass in the first place.
Whatever the reason, this lack of stories has meant little discussion of the actual impact of right-to-work legislation. Daniels, along with many proponents of such measures, argues that companies choose to locate in right-to-work states rather than in states with powerful unions. And the Indiana governor says he’s already seeing the fruits of the newly passed law. Union advocates, meanwhile, say the laws decrease not only union power but also wages and workplace protections. According to conventional wisdom, it seems, the choice is between fewer good jobs and more cruddy jobs.
But according to Gordon Lafer, an economist at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center, that’s a false choice. In fact, he says, there’s no evidence that right-to-work laws have any positive impact on employment or bringing back manufacturing jobs.
While 23 states have right-to-work legislation, Lafer says that to adequately judge the law’s impact in today’s economy, you have to look at states that passed the law after the United States embraced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and free trade in general. “Anything before the impact of NAFTA started to be felt in the late ’90s is meaningless in terms of what it can tell us,” he says.
Because of free-trade agreements, companies can go to other countries and get their goods made for a fraction of the cost. Even in the most anti-union state in the country, there are still basic worker protections and a minimum-wage law to deal with. Such “roadblocks” to corporate profit can disappear if the business relocates overseas. “The wage difference that right to work makes … is meaningless compared to the wage savings you can have leaving the country,” Lafer says.
Only one state has passed right to work since NAFTA: Oklahoma in 2001. (Before that, the most recent was Idaho in 1985.) About a year ago, Lafer and economist Sylvia Allegretto published a report for the Economic Policy Institute* exploring just what had happened in the decade since Oklahomans got their “right to work.” The results weren’t pretty.
Rather than increasing job opportunities, the state saw companies relocate out of Oklahoma. In high-tech industries and those service industries “dependent on consumer spending in the local economy” the laws appear to have actually damaged growth. At the end of the decade, 50,000 fewer Oklahoma residents had jobs in manufacturing. Perhaps most damning, Lafer and Allegretto could find no evidence that the legislation had a positive impact on employment rates.
“It will not bring new jobs in, but it will result in less wages and benefits for everybody including non-union workers,” says Lafer.
*Full disclosure: I was a writing fellow at the Economic Policy Institute in 2008.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, February 6, 2012
Republican Indiana Secretary Of State Convicted Of Voter Fraud
Though President Ronald Reagan called the right to vote the “crown jewel of American liberties,” many Republicans around the country have begun demanding increased voting restrictions in the name of fighting “voter fraud.” Though actual cases of voting fraud are so rare that a voter is much more likely to be struck by lightningthan to commit fraud at the polls, one Republican official in Indiana has proved that lightning can strike himself.
Yesterday, a jury found Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White (R) guilty on six felony counts of voter fraud, theft, and perjury. The conviction cost White his job, though he plans to ask the judge to reduce the charges to misdemeanors and hopes to perhaps regain the position.
In a statement, Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) announced White’s deputy will take over on an interim basis:
I have chosen not to make a permanent appointment today out of respect for the judge’s authority to lessen the verdict to a misdemeanor and reinstate the elected office holder… If the felony convictions are not altered, I anticipate making a permanent appointment quickly.
But a second court case could ultimately give the job to Democrat Vop Osili, who lost to White in November 2010. A judge’s December 2011 ruling — currently on hold, pending appeal — held that due to the voter fraud charges, White’s election was invalid. Should that ruling survive the appeals process, Osili would assume the office.
Ironically, White’s now-removed 2010 campaign website listed election integrity as among his top concerns, and promised he would “protect and defend Indiana’s Voter ID law to ensure our elections are fair and protect the most basic and precious right and responsibility of our democracy-voting.”
By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, February 4, 2012
Super Bowl Players Should Stand Up For Indiana Workers
Last July, Major League Baseball blew an opportunity to make a difference. With 28 players who were either Hispanic or of Hispanic descent participating in the league’s annual All-Star Game in Phoenix, Arizona, and the eyes of the sports world watching, nary a one spoke out against the radical anti-immigration law Arizona had passed a year before, even though it could have directly affected the players and will directly affect many of their fans. “I ain’t Jackie Robinson,” David Ortiz, one of baseball’s biggest characters, said.
Over the next 10 days, the National Football League will have a similar chance to make a difference.
Just two weeks before Super Bowl XLVI kicks off at Lucas Oil Field in Indianapolis, more than 10,000 people marched through the city to protest right-to-work legislation that is being pushed through the state’s legislature. The legislation passed the state Senate this week and the state House today, and is backed by Gov. Mitch Daniels (R). Considering the NFL nearly lost its 2011 season, and Super Bowl XLVI with it, to a labor dispute, Indiana Republicans’ assault on workers is a cause the players should be familiar with.
Fortunately, there are signs that the NFL players aren’t going to repeat Major League Baseball’s mistake. Several players have spoken out against the legislation, and NFL Players Association President DeMaurice Smith said his organization is already taking action. “We’ve been on picket lines in Indianapolis already with hotel workers who were basically pushed to the point of breaking on the hotel rooms that they had to clean because they were not union workers,” Smith told the Nation. “We’ve been on picket lines in Boston and San Antonio. So, the idea of participating in a legal protest is something that we’ve done before.”
That’s a good first step. But it’s not enough. Indiana union officials are contemplating disrupting Super Bowl-related events to draw attention to their cause, clogging city streets and slowing down events around Lucas Oil Stadium (which was built and is maintained by union workers). Labor leaders are hesitant, though, fearing that such actions could give the city and their cause “a black eye” with people who think sports and politics don’t mix. If some of the league’s top players, particularly those participating in the Super Bowl, spoke in support of those efforts, however, that perception could change.
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, one of the NFL’s most recognizable players, felt strongly enough about his own rights that he signed on as a plaintiff in the players’ antitrust lawsuit against the league last year. So did Logan Mankins, Brady’s teammate, and Osi Umenyiora, a prominent defensive end for the New York Giants. Those players were willing to risk backlash from the league, public scrutiny, and their own images to fight league owners for better benefits and wages. In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, they should do the same for workers who don’t have the luxury of multimillion-dollar contracts, rich endorsement deals, and the good fortune of playing a game for a living.
Sure, with Super Bowl week ahead of them, political causes may be the furthest thing from the minds of most players. But with thousands of reporters conducting hundreds of interviews before, during, and after the big game, the players will have the chance to stand up for the rights of people they should be fighting for. Unlike their counterparts in baseball, they shouldn’t blow it.
By: Travis Waldron, Think Progress, January 25, 2012
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