“From Backyard Barbeque To Food Fight”: CPAC, The Right-Wing Woodstock Or A Bad Family Reunion?
Like at a family reunion, the infighting at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) started long before anybody arrived.
First, the group American Atheists announced that it would be sponsoring a booth at the conference, with the goal of bringing conservative nonbelievers “out of the closet.” The religious right was not pleased.
“CPAC’s mission is to be an umbrella for conservative organizations that advance liberty, traditional values and our national defense,” said the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. But he made clear that atheists would certainly not fit under his umbrella: “Does the American Conservative Union really think the liberties and values they seek to preserve can be maintained when they partner with individuals and organizations that are undermining the understanding that our liberties come from God?” he asked. Good question.
So, the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, gave the atheist group the boot. In response, the atheists showed up anyway to debate attendees in the hallway.
Then there was the perennial problem of the gays. In 2011, religious right groups including the FRC boycotted CPAC after the ACU allowed the conservative LGBT group GOProud to cosponsor the event. Once again, the establishment sided with the religious right and for the next two years banned GOProud from participating. This year, ACU offered a “compromise” in which GOProud was allowed to attend the event but not to so much as sponsor a booth in the exhibition hall. The “compromise” was so insulting that one of GOProud’s founders quit the organization’s board in protest.
But what about the people who were too embarrassingly far-right for CPAC? Not to worry, there’s no such thing.
Although the atheist and LGBT groups were too far off-message for the ACU, it did allow the anti-immigrant group ProEnglish to sponsor a booth at CPAC. Just a quick Google would have told the conference organizers that ProEnglish is run by a zealous white nationalist, Bob Vandervoort. In fact, CPAC’s organizers might have recognized Vandervoort’s name from the uproar his inclusion in the event caused in 2012 and 2013.
Now, just because the ACU was ready to welcome anti-immigrant extremists doesn’t mean that that was enough for immigrant bashers. A group of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim activists who were worried that CPAC was going too soft on their issues organized an alternative conference across the street. One of their concerns was the perennial conspiracy theory that ACU member Grover Norquist is a secret Muslim Brotherhood agent. Another is that CPAC dared to hold a panel featuring immigration reform proponents.
They shouldn’t have worried. Three days of speeches on the CPAC main stage made clear that many prominent conservative activists have no intention of moderating their stance on immigration reform. Donald Trump told the audience that immigrants are “taking your jobs,” Rep. Michele Bachmann said she wouldn’t even consider immigration reform until they “build the danged fence,” and Ann Coulter, never one to disappoint, suggested that if immigration reform passes “we organize the death squads for the people who wrecked America.” Then, there was One America News anchor Graham Ledger, who used the CPAC podium to claim that because of immigration, schools no longer teach “the American culture.”
To be fair, CPAC did make some efforts at opening the Republican umbrella, hosting a panel on minority outreach off the main stage. But the gesture would have been slightly more meaningful if anybody had bothered to show up.
Any family has its squabbles. But this awkward backyard barbeque has turned into a full-fledged food fight.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For The American Way; The Huffington Post Blog, March 11, 2014
“Counting Dollars And Cents”: For Whatever Reason, Jan Brewer Does The Right Thing
The writing was on the wall all week. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer had no choice but to veto SB 1062, which would have let businesses discriminate against gay patrons (and presumably others) on religious grounds. The veto was demanded by businesses: from the NFL, sponsors of the Arizona-bound 2015 Super Bowl, to Apple to American Airlines to JPMorgan Chase. Even GOP lawmakers who voted for the bill began quailing and taking back their votes shortly after casting them.
Brewer, who has shown independence from her Tea Party base before, particularly on accepting Medicaid expansion, proved to be up to this challenge, too.
The Arizona Tea Party governor vetoed the bill, she said, because of its “unexpected and unintended consequences. The legislation seeks to protect businesses,” she wrote, “yet the business community overwhelmingly opposes the proposed law.” The bill, she said, “could create more problems than it purports to solve.”
Indeed. The proposed Arizona law shows how quickly America’s corporate leaders, and even some Republicans, have counted dollars and counted votes and realized that power lies with gay people and their straight allies who can’t stand anti-gay bigotry – and won’t patronize those who are selling it.
Even as Arizona Republican politicians like Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake declared their enduring fealty to the sanctity of man-woman marriage, they could oppose SB 1062 because of the business backlash. This is a stunning turnaround from 10 years ago, when Karl Rove encouraged Republicans to put anti-gay-marriage measures on state ballots to turn out the right and buoy George W. Bush’s reelection against John Kerry in 2004. There was no downside for Rove 10 years ago.
That was the same year that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom became persona non grata even to some Democrats for legalizing gay marriage in San Francisco. From Dianne Feinstein to Barney Frank, Newsom got pummeled for promoting too much gay freedom too soon. But just 10 years later, a far-right governor of a changing but still conservative state thinks she has to veto this gay Jim Crow law that businesses are smart enough to oppose.
Let’s celebrate. But let’s also look plainly at how Democrats have won the culture war but are still fighting a grim conflict over economic populism – including, sometimes, against other Democrats. I look forward to the day when businesses lobby for a hike in the minimum wage and universal preschool and higher tax rates for those at the very top, and Republicans like Jan Brewer face the fact that they have to relent. It may be a long time coming. But let this victory remind us what a difference even 10 years can make, on an issue that was once a loser for Democrats. May we catch up on issues of poverty, income inequality and economic opportunity just as quickly.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, February 27, 2014
“Morally And Legally, The Right Call In Arizona”: Citizens Cannot Opt Out Of Civil Rights Laws
There’s no question that Jan Brewer did the right thing yesterday. No moral question. And no legal question either. Well, let me slightly amend that: With this Supreme Court, you never know about the future. But we know about the past, and decades of civil-rights case law are squarely on Brewer’s side, and supporters of SB 1062 just have to see this clearly and squarely and accept it.
It’s not like we’ve never fought over these questions. We have, of course, and a result, there’s a history here. And that history, that body of court decisions, says clearly, like it or not, that generally speaking, citizens cannot opt out of civil rights laws.
As Harvard law professor Noah Feldman pointed out yesterday in a Bloomberg view column, segregationist business owners in the South argued after the civil rights act of 1964 that their “constitutional right to associate” as they chose should permit them not to serve black customers. (The religious-liberty right, Feldman notes, has the same “constitutional status” as the right to associate.) But courts never said that this was permissible.
We may laugh today at the idea that the racist owner of a hardware store in Natchez in 1965 could have refused to sell a black carpenter a bag of masonry nails. But it was no laughing matter then. This was real. Congress, and then the courts, put a stop to it. As Feldman told me yesterday in a follow-up exchange: “Freedom to associate and exercise religion are basic rights. Excluding customers isn’t.”
The freedom to associate that Feldman mentions is one carve-out that courts have recognized. But that’s a narrow exemption, intended in real life mostly for private or fraternal organizations that are built around some idea of ethnic cohesion—New York’s Ancient Order of Hibernians, for example, which quite famously has been allowed for years to ban gay people and groups from marching in the city’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
By the way, doesn’t it seem weirdly anachronistic and reactionary that the Hibernians still enforce this ban? The gay-rights position was controversial back in the early ’90s, when I was covering these things. Now, the Hibernians’ position seems like something better suited to Alabama than New York City. In any case, after Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg marched in the discriminatory parade every years, new Mayor Bill De Blasio announced that he’s boycotting it.
But, the Hibernians are allowed to do this under their right to associate. There also exists a so-called “Mrs. Murphy” exemption to the Fair Housing Act for owner-occupied rental housing of four or fewer units—that is, if little old Mrs. Murphy subdivided her big house and wants to keep out certain people, she’s probably allowed to do that. And finally, in certain narrow cases, religious institutions that serve mostly religious purposes are allowed to hire only their coreligionists.
But a business vending to the general public? No way. If these “Christians” in Arizona are permitted to deny their services to same-sex couples, then atheist small-businesses owners in Berkeley are perfectly within their rights to hang a sign: “No Christian evangelicals served.” It would be crazy for courts to open that door.
Brewer seemed to understand all this properly with the money passage of her statement yesterday: “Senate Bill 1062 does not address a specific or present concern related to religious liberty in Arizona. I have not heard one example in Arizona where a business owner’s religious liberty has been violated.” She deserves credit for saying this, dismissing this specious religious liberty talk.
The legal history is clear. The legal future, though, is still a bit up in the air. Feldman acknowledges that SB 1062 “may well be constitutional” because the law’s supporters might be able to argue successfully that their tradition of religious liberty is “in jeopardy.” Samuel Bagenstos, a former assistant attorney general for civil rights under Barack Obama who now teaches law at the University of Michigan, explains that the Arizona law and others like it around the country constitute a new and not-yet-settled legal battle front. “These laws, by singling out gays and lesbians for less protection of antidiscrimination laws, are vulnerable to a challenge under the Equal Protection Clause,” Bagenstos says. “But the law’s very much developing in this area, so we really can’t say anything with confidence.”
It’s developing, but it’s mostly developing on the side of shutting down legal discrimination. Ask the Texas judge who yesterday struck down that state’s same-sex marriage ban, writing “that state-imposed inequality can find no refuge in our United States Constitution.” Increasingly, the law is coming to understand what more and more Americans understand. Gay people are equal. Period. There is no real religious basis for thinking otherwise. Ian Millhiser of Think Progress reminded us yesterday of people who used to think the same way:
In 1901, Georgia Gov. Allen Candler defended unequal public schooling for African Americans on the grounds that “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.” After the Supreme Court ordered public schools integrated in Brown v. Board of Education, many segregationists cited their own faith as justification for official racism. Ross Barnett won Mississippi’s governorship in a landslide in 1960 after claiming that “the good Lord was the original segregationist.” Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia relied on passages from Genesis, Leviticus and Matthew when he spoke out against the civil rights law banning employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters on the Senate floor.
It’s painfully obvious that in a mere 10 or 15 years, that’s how these Arizona Christians will be widely seen. They really ought to ask themselves if that’s the historic company they want to keep.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 27, 2014
“Discrimination Lapel Pins”: These “Religious Freedom” Bills Are The New Stand-Your-Ground Laws
Awaiting signature on the desk of Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is a bill that might be the most insidious attack on LGBT rights to ever pass both houses of a state legislature. SB1062 would allow anyone—be it an individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, religious assembly, foundation, or other legal entity—to deny services to others simply by asserting their religious beliefs. Interpreted broadly, the bill could override many equal protection clauses in Arizona law, including civil rights: A restaurateur could deny service to an out-of-wedlock mother, a cop could refuse to intervene in a domestic dispute if his religion allows for husbands beating their wives, and a hotel chain could refuse to rent rooms to Jews, Hindus, or Muslims.
Republican legislators have made the intended target of the bill clear in their statements, repeatedly citing a New Mexican photographer who was sued when he refused to shoot a lesbian couple’s commitment ceremony. They claim the bill’s detractors are exaggerating its possible effects and are demonstrating hostility towards people of faith. But there is ample reason to believe that a law like this would open the door to discrimination. Once laws are passed, people who may otherwise be afraid of engaging in questionable behaviors may feel emboldened to do so. Moreover, these laws will likely be used by juries as legitimate reasons to dismiss cases against future defendants—after all, the law is the law.
The perfect case in point for all of this? The stand-your-ground laws which have been enacted in several states across America.
These laws were ostensibly passed to protect citizens from criminals by removing the need to retreat or escape when attacked, the rationale being that criminals would think twice knowing that their victims could legally defend themselves with proportionate force. And yet SYG defenses have been used with alarming frequency, and in scenarios unimaginable when these laws were passed, including by drug dealers and gang members. States which have enacted SYG laws have seen an 8 percent rise in “justifiable homicides,” possibly indicating that those with knowledge of the law are willing to take chances in situations where the law might apply.
Furthermore, SYG defenses are shockingly successful. Seventy percent of people who have invoked the defense have avoided prosecution. In fact, SYG laws seem to have tilted the odds in favor of the shooter: In states that have it, 13.6 percent of homicides have been ruled justifiable, while in those that don’t, only 7.2 percent have been deemed such. Unsurprisingly, the success of a SYG defense has a decidedly racial bias—white-on-black killings are far more likely to be deemed “justified” than any other kind.
What does this all mean for bills like SB1062? Granting people the legal right to invoke religious beliefs to justify their right to refuse service will embolden many people who might have otherwise been afraid to do so. Moreover, the defense could end up being a largely successful one. Certainly jurors who might already be biased will be unafraid to side with the defendants, but even those who might not agree with the law will be hard pressed not to accept its validity; should a defendant make a somewhat rational case for why their religious beliefs would be violated by providing these services, the jurors would be forced by the law to acquit. The law would not only provide cover to judges and juries who might otherwise harbor sentiments against the defendants for whatever reason, but would even compel those who aren’t biased to rule in favor of the accused parties.
Many have compared these laws to the gay propaganda bill that passed in Russia last June, some expressing dismay that such laws could be enacted here in America. In the sense that the Russian law seems to have emboldened many Russians to hunt down LGBT people (a law recently passed in Nigeria seems to doing the same thing), it’s not hard to draw the same conclusions here. These Republican legislators claim to want to protect people of faith, yet they did not invoke a single legitimate instance where a person’s freedom of religion is compromised by having to serve others. Purporting to be against discrimination, these lawmakers are trying to use the victim card against the very people they want to discriminate against. Yet there is a tacit social contract we all sign in pluralistic societies: Even when we do not agree with everyone’s beliefs or lifestyles, we still agree to treat each other fairly.
There’s something vaguely desperate about these laws, the last gasp of a cause aware that it’s dying. They are unlikely to pass constitutional muster; they hardly seem to be trying to do so. In all likelihood, Brewer will veto SB1062. As law, it would not only cause a ridiculous pileup in the courts but could tear at the social fabric of the state, exposing certain prejudices that best remain hidden—the landmines are too numerous for the governor to risk so late into her term. Still, this will hardly be the last we hear of these dubious “religious freedom” arguments. Every step in the civil rights movement was met with resistance. Now that the push for LGBT rights has gained such momentum, the backlash will only get stronger.
By: Eric Sasson, The New Republic, February 24, 2014
“Platinum-Level Citizenship”: Highly-Religious Christians’ Battle To Change The Very Nature Of The First Amendment
Ask a conservative Christian about the President of the United States, and you’re likely to hear that Barack Obama has been waging a “war on religion” since pretty much the moment he took office in 2009. As laughable as the assertion may be, there’s little doubt that many have come to believe it, spurred on of course by opportunistic politicians and right-wing talk show hosts whose stock in trade is the creation of fear and resentment. In response, those conservative Christians have mounted a little war of their own, fought in the courts and state legislatures. The enemies include not just the Obama administration but gay people, women who want control of their own bodies, and an evolving modern morality that has left them behind.
In the process, they have made a rather spectacular claim, though not explicitly. What they seek is nothing short of a different definition of American citizenship granted only to highly religious people, and highly religious Christians in particular. They are demanding that our laws stake out for them a kind of Citizenship Platinum, allowing them an exemption from any law or obligation they’d prefer to disregard. They would refashion the First Amendment in their image.
Last week saw a number of new developments in the effort to create this elevated status for religious people, as bills seeking to enshrine discrimination against gay couples moved forward in two states. A bill in Kansas would explicitly allow both businesses and government to discriminate against gay couples in pretty much any way they wanted. A movie theater could turn gay couples away at the door, or a paramedic could refuse to treat a gay person having a heart attack, and they’d be immune from prosecution or lawsuits. After passing the Kansas state house overwhelmingly, the bill died in the state senate, in a brief (though likely temporary) moment of sanity.
A bill in Arizona did better, passing both houses, and it now awaits Governor Jan Brewer’s signature. This one was written more broadly, without the direct focus on gay couples, but its effects would be the same. It grants to any person, organization or corporation a nearly unlimited right to assert their “sincerely held” religious beliefs as a shield against lawsuits for discrimination.
Similar bills are pending in a number of conservative states; this won’t be the last we hear of them. And the Supreme Court will soon hear the case of Hobby Lobby, the retail chain that would like to be exempt from some of the requirements of the Affordable Care Act because its owners are Christians, and therefore they should be able to select the provisions they’ll abide by and not bother with those they find religiously objectionable.
The implications couldn’t be clearer. Let’s consider the put-upon Christian florists of Arizona, who might be subjected to the unspeakable horror of taking a gay couple’s money. What if one of those florists decided that since being born again through Christ is the one and only path to heaven, selling flowers to Jews or Muslims or Catholics would violate his deeply felt religious beliefs? Would he then be free to put up a sign in his window saying, “We only serve Protestants here”? According to the Arizona law, he would, regardless of what that pesky Civil Rights Act says. Or what if the owner of an accounting firm decided that since his religion places men above women, all his female employees will be paid half of what he pays male employees for doing the same job? It’s his religious belief, after all.
Anyone could say that almost any belief they have springs directly from their faith and their reading of scripture, and the state would be required to abide by it. Your faith tells you not to obey laws against discrimination? Well, maybe mine tells me that paying taxes is an offense to God. And my neighbor is a biblical literalist, so when his teenage son mouthed off to him, he arranged for the boy to be stoned to death, just like the Lord instructs quite clearly in Deuteronomy 18 and Leviticus 20. Surely we can’t convict him of murder, since he was only following his sincere religious beliefs.
You might say, well, those beliefs are ridiculous. Maybe they are. And maybe I find your opinions about gay people ridiculous. But up until now, neither one of us has had to have our own liberty compromised because of what the other believed, because we defined the First Amendment’s free exercise clause through religious practice. The government can’t tell you how to worship your god, and it can’t do things that make it difficult for you to worship as you’d like.
But now, conservatives are pushing a much broader conception of religious freedom, one that extends beyond religious practice to virtually anything a religious person does. But it’s when you take your religious practices outside of your own faith, your own beliefs, and your own practice and start applying them to other people that you lose the special privileges that religion is accorded. As an old saying has it, my right to swing my fist ends precisely where your nose begins.
Any Christians who want to can believe that gay people are sinful and wicked, or that gay marriage is a terrible thing. What they can’t do is use those beliefs as a get-out-of-jail-free card that gives them permission to break the law or escape civil liability when they harm other people.
Up until now, the distinction between religious practice and the things religious people do when they enter the secular world has worked pretty well. Anti-discrimination laws don’t mean that a rabbi has to conduct a wedding for two Baptists. Religious organizations can hire only people of their own faith. But once you enter into other realms, like commerce, you have to obey the laws that govern those realms.
If we grant religious people the kind of elevated citizenship conservatives are now demanding, where the special consideration given to religious practice is extended to anything a religious person does, the results could be truly staggering. Why stop at commerce? If things like employment law and anti-discrimination laws don’t apply to religious people, what about zoning laws, or laws on domestic abuse, or laws in any other realm?
The supporters of these laws, and of Hobby Lobby, argue that religious people shouldn’t have to put aside their beliefs when they act in the secular world. “It’s alien to me that a business owner can’t reflect his faith in his business,” said one Republican Arizona legislator. But when your business puts you in contact with people who don’t share your faith, putting aside your religion is precisely what you have to do, if “reflecting” that religion means violating the law.
For many years, conservatives would argue that they didn’t really object to equal rights for gay people, they were just against “special rights.” In practice, what they meant by “special rights” were things like the right not to be fired from your job or evicted from your home because of your sexuality, rights that weren’t special at all. But today, religious conservatives are demanding truly special rights for themselves. They want one set of laws that applies to everyone else, and another set that applies only to the religious. Or more precisely, they want religious people—but no one else—to be able to pick and choose which laws apply to them, and which they’d prefer to ignore. That’s a twisted version of the liberty the First Amendment was supposed to guarantee.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prsopect, February 24, 2014
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