Brian Tashman's blog

Yesterday, Eagle Forum’s Roger Schlafly, son of Eagle Forum president Phyllis Schlafly, mourned the dip in the white birth rate because of its impact on “American values.” Today, Schlafly is upset about the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Quoting excerpts from an Associated Press article, Schlafly mocked VAWA proponents who think the law could “protect women from marrying men who like to get drunk and crazy” and for including protections for immigrants who can provide evidence of domestic abuse, writing, “We have an immigration policy that favors liars and whiners.” Schlafly went on to chastise Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), who discussed her ordeal in trying to “press charges against her rapist before the law’s passage,” maintaining that she simply “did not want to answer questions about whether she seduced the man.”

What VAWA is about

AP reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Republicans set up a showdown Wednesday with the Senate and President Barack Obama over legislation to protect women from domestic violence, a fight that's become as much about female voters this election year as cracking down on abuse.

...

"The man I married had a penchant for drinking and was very violent when he drank," the bill's sponsor, freshman Rep. Sandy Adams, R-Fla., said during floor debate.

Really? Is that what the law is about? Is VAWA going to somehow use federal law to protect women from marrying men who like to get drunk and crazy?

Wisconsin Democrat Gwen Moore recalled what it was like to try to press charges against her rapist in the days before the law's passage.

"I took him to court (but) indeed, I was on trial," Moore said. "I had to prove, as a victim, that I was not being fraudulent in my accusations. They brought up how I was an unwed mother with a baby. Maybe I seduced him. They talked about how I was dressed."

So she testified in court that a man raped her, but did not want to answer questions about whether she seduced the man. She wants a federal law to presume that men are guilty so that female accusers do not have to answer embarrassing questions.

Another hot VAWA issue is visas:

Ronan and his allies argue that there's what he calls a "big national fraud" in which immigrant women claim to be abuse victims in order to gain residency or citizenship through the act, which can offer women permanent residency if they testify against abusive husbands.

The Violence Against Women Act actually offers two avenues for victims of abuse to seek immigration relief. Women in the US illegally can currently seek temporary visas if they are victims of domestic violence.

More and more foreign women are getting permanent USA visas by making unverified accusations of abuse. We have an immigration policy that favors liars and whiners.

Liberty Counsel’s fixation on attacking the LGBT community was on full display today.

First, LCAction released a memo claiming that President Obama is giving gays and lesbians preferential treatment in order to bring about the “collapse of American culture,” offering examples of the administration’s support of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act, push for LGBT rights abroad, funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs, and an order prohibiting health insurance plans from discriminating against LGBT customers, which LCAction claimed would mean that “every individual is going to pay higher health care premiums.”

On Freedom’s Call, LC chairman Mat Staver attacked President Obama for backing marriage equality, alleging that the “sexual anarchists” in the White House are pushing “social engineering on steroids,” and the debate over marriage “is not and never has been about equality:

Some speculate that Vice President Joe Biden is to blame, others point to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, still others say to follow the money trail and point to the nearly $15 million he raised within days of the announcement. Despite the reason for his evolution, what the radical sexual anarchist community in their allies in the White House are seeking to accomplish is social engineering on steroids. There is simply no basis in history, science, or higher law, to justify the redefinition of marriage. This debate is not and never has been about equality; instead it is a debate over the laws of nature and whether the government is willing to recognize them.

Staver today also blasted an ordinance in Jacksonville, Florida, that would bar “discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations” based “on a person’s sexual orientation or sexual identity.” “Morality and privacy will be in jeopardy if this ordinance passes,” Staver warned.

The City Council of Jacksonville will vote next week on an ordinance that will add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of other protected classes, such as race, age, and disability.

“This ‘civil rights’ ordinance takes away more rights than it supposedly grants,” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. If passed, Jacksonville will be another city whose restrooms and locker rooms will not be segregated by one’s sexual identity at birth, but rather his perceived gender. Citing a case in Orono, Maine, where a teenage boy, who self-identifies as a girl, is allowed to use the girls’ bathroom at school, he said, “Wherever this is passed, privacy and decency are eroded.”

Jacksonville’s ordinance carries an exemption for churches and religious organizations. However, religious people do not live in churches, but the community. People of faith use community day care centers and YMCA locker rooms. They participate in Boy Scouts and sporting events. “Wherever people gather, morality and privacy will be in jeopardy if this ordinance passes,” Staver said.

“This has never been about discrimination,” Staver said. “These ordinances are meant to legitimize and codify the homosexual and transgender lifestyles.”

Former National Review columnist John Derbyshire returned to the white nationalist website VDARE, headed by his colleague Peter Brimelow, to defend his earlier VDARE column arguing that “White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with.” In a post published yesterday, Derbyshire claimed that “the overwhelming majority of Black Americans agree with me” because only a small fraction of freed slaves left the U.S. to Africa after the abolition of slavery, noting that Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln had at times supported efforts to resettle African Americans in Liberia:

What generated the most shrieking and swooning from the guardians of racial orthodoxy in this cycle was this remark in my VDARE.com column:

"White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with."

On the John Locke principle, though—i.e. "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts"—the overwhelming majority of black Americans agree with me, and always have. From very early in the Republic, free blacks not only had the opportunity to escape from white supremacy, they were encouraged to do so by abolitionists.

…

But with all this opportunity and encouragement, how many freed blacks actually chose to escape from under the iron heel of white supremacy? Most sources give 15,000-20,000—out of a Civil War-era black population of around four million. That’s less than half of one percent. Ninety-nine point five something percent preferred white supremacy. That's an even bigger proportion than voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."

Apply John Locke's apothegm to the sloppy, dishonest, thuggish, anti-intellectual actions of the guardians of racial orthodoxy in today’s America, and you get a pretty good insight into their thoughts.

Media Research Center’s Tim Graham talked to Janet Mefferd yesterday where he claimed that opponents of same-sex marriage can’t get on TV, a point which he then undercut when he admitted that anti-gay activists like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Harry Jackson actually made the rounds on TV to respond to President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality. Graham called Obama’s announcement a “tragic,” “dark” and “depressing moment” for America, and declared that he “would like to see what would happen” if pastors like Jackson could speak about same-sex marriage during interviews just as “he does at his church”:

Graham: I think for a lot of people Obama saying, ‘I think this should be the way it is in America,’ was really a tragic moment for the country, it was a very dark moment, a very depressing moment. Those people, like me, who have that opinion, try getting on television!

Mefferd: That’s what I was going to ask you, as you were surveying the landscape of the media over the weekend and since the President made this stand on his new evolution, which was really an old evolution that he brought out again, did you see many conservatives or many people who were in favor only of traditional marriage getting a say so on TV?

Graham: A little bit, I mean the most prominent one of course has been Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, and he has made the rounds a bit, I think some of the best things he said is again, in a political context they’re not really having a moral discussion, the media wants to discuss this in political terms. I think the hard thing for people to do, I saw Bishop Harry Jackson on News Hour on PBS, he doesn’t really do in the studio what he does at his church. He doesn’t reach for the Bible, he doesn’t make a testimony, I think people get intimidated saying ‘I’m here in this secular place and I’m going to say secular things.’ I just wonder, I would like to see what would happen, if you try to engage these people, because you have to explain this is where the opposition comes, it’s from a religious, traditional point of view.

Graham may be on to something, as TV interviews might be much more candid and exhilarating if Harry Jackson told the hosts at PBS or MSNBC that demonic forces, specifically the Queen of Heaven, are responsible for gay rights, just as he preaches in church:

Or if Perkins went on CNN or Fox News and said gays are “held captive by The Enemy”:

Roger Schlafly, son of Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, today mourned on the Eagle Forum Blog a Census Bureau report showing that non-white births have now exceeded white births in the U.S. “It is not a good thing,” Schlafly said, warning that “immigrants do not share American values” and therefore “will not be voting Republican when they start voting in large numbers.” He went on to claim that “NY Times liberals seek to destroy the American family of the 1950s,” saying that immigrants “do not share” American values like working hard and self-sufficiency, and instead “will vote Democrat when the Democrats promise them more food stamps.”

For decades, the NY Times has been promoting immigration policies that heavily favored a huge influx of non-whites. Today's lead story brags:

WASHINGTON — After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.

The article goes on to quote experts who say that this is a wonderful thing, except for the facts that the Hispanic immigrants are uneducated and do not vote Democrat often enough.

It is not a good thing. The immigrants do not share American values, so it is a good bet that they will not be voting Republican when they start voting in large numbers.

Latinos, on the other hand, are squarely within their peak fertility, with a median age of 27, said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Between 2000 and 2010, there were more Hispanic births in the United States than there were arriving Hispanic immigrants, he said.

The result is striking: Minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010, Mr. Frey calculated, a surge that has created a very different looking America from the one of the 1950s, when the TV characters Ozzie and Harriet were a national archetype.

The NY Times liberals seek to destroy the American family of the 1950s, as symbolized by Ozzie and Harriet. The TV characters were happy, self-sufficient, autonomous, law-abiding, honorable, patriotic, hard-working, and otherwise embodied qualities that made America great. In other words, the show promoted values that NY Times liberals despise.

Instead, the USA is being transformed by immigrants who do not share those values, and who have high rates of illiteracy, illegitimacy, and gang crime, and they will vote Democrat when the Democrats promise them more food stamps.

During an appearance on the American Family Association’s radio program Nothing But Truth, Harry Jackson said that “radical gay activists” have turned America into Nazi Germany. Jackson, who claims demonic forces are behind the gay rights movement, said that since gays and lesbians “cannot reproduce” they “try to recruit” young people and “just like during the times of Hitler,” gay rights advocates are “coming after one group after another group after another group.”

Listen:

Jackson: It’s obviously disingenuous when they say marriage equality for everyone and I was just pointing out the fact that it really isn’t marriage for everyone, it’s a special kind of marriage for radical gay activists. They want to impose their will on the culture and if you cannot reproduce you may try to recruit, and what I mean by that is what is going on is an attempt to reshape, refashion the mind, hearts and desires of the next generation. Many Christians are sitting back and we aren’t speaking out, but the reality is just like during the times of Hitler we have people coming after one group after another group after another group, and folks are saying, well this doesn’t affect me I’ll let this slide, we have a problem that really we have a whole generation of people who want to affect not only their lives and choices but the choices of another generation.

The Religious Right’s favorite anti-environmental activist Cal Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance appeared on Janet Parshall’s radio show In The Market on Monday where he maintained that environmentalists are following the same path as Satan. Ironically, the corporate-allied Beisner lamented the presence of “theft,” “covetousness” and “greed” in society, which he said that along with “sexual perversion” and disobedience were part of “the growing depravity in the United States,” which he of course linked back to the environmental movement. Beisner later used the refrain, used by conservatives from Rick Santorum to David Barton, that efforts toward environmental protection are dislodging God and humanity from their rightful place and is turning the natural order “upside down just as Satan did in the Garden of Eden.”

As I look at the growing depravity in the United States, whether it’s in those things that most of us think about in terms of depravity, sexual perversion and so on, or in those things that people don’t usually think of in those terms but Paul certainly does: theft, disobedience to parents, dishonoring of authorities, covetousness, greed, idolatry. All of these things are signs of the depraved mind to which God gives people over when they choose not to recognize Him. The Cornwall Alliance is trying to call attention to these things to show particularly how they are dominant in the environmentalist movement.

…

It turns upside down the whole understanding that Scriptures gives us of God, man and the earth. In Scripture, in Genesis 1-3, we see that God is supposed to be in supreme authority, He rules over man, man then rules earth as God’s representative, so hierarchically it’s God, then humanity, then the earth. The environmental movement turns that upside down just as Satan did in the Garden of Eden as he tempted Eve, he wanted Eve to submit her will to a serpent, one of the creatures, and put that serpent over her and God under her, so it becomes earth, then humanity, then God. That happens in the secular movement but frankly, Janet, it increasingly begins to happen among some evangelicals.

Operation Rescue founder and faux-presidential candidate Randall Terry today launched a new website, ProLifeWarrior.com, for activists trying to criminalize abortion and contraceptives. Terry mocked more established anti-choice groups and also had some choice words for Right Wing Watch, Jezebel and Wonkette:

"Think of ProLifeWarrior as a 'cyber-pub' where the troops can gather to have a beer and a shot. That means you can talk about anything you want, and we will not edit, remove, or in anyway censor what you have written. If you want to say 'so-and-so is a #@%&' that is your decision.

"The reason for our editorial policy is simple: most Christian and Pro-Life blogs and on-line communities are sterile and lifeless. We prefer the rambunctious, loud, honest chaos of a crowded pub to the porcelain purity of an empty room. (The only exceptions are blasphemy, pornography, and credible threats of violence. See forum rules.) So if the child-killers at RightWingWatch or Jezebel or Wonkette want to come in and throw some punches, they are welcome to do so.

"You could also think of ProLifeWarrior as a voice of resistance and recruitment, calling the Faithful out of the cyber-ghetto into real political and cultural battle. That means we will vilify those who collaborate with the child-killers (such as NRLC or Ohio Right to Life); we will dismiss those who offer trite gimmicks in place of definitive action; we will expose and mock those who present tawdry fundraising schemes as a means to end this holocaust; and we will challenge those who cower in silence before the strong to rise from their knees and fight.

…

"Our mission is to help create the climate in which it becomes a criminal act to murder an unborn human being from conception until birth. This of course means criminalizing the pill, the patch, Plan-B, Depo-Provera, IUDs, and anything else that deliberately causes the death of an innocent human being who happens to reside in his/her mother's womb.

Pat Robertson today on the 700 Club had harsh words for Episcopalians in the U.S., saying that it is “a matter of time” before the Anglican Communion declares the Episcopal Church “an apostate.” Robertson was referring to a case in Falls Church, Virginia, where a judge ruled in favor of the Episcopal Church over a breakaway conservative group that has been holding services in the disputed sanctuary since 2006, and Robertson said that the returning Episcopalian congregation won’t have “the blessing of God.”

Watch:

Update: Later in the show, Robertson told a viewer to “destroy” her friend’s statue of Buddha:

Last month we noted that many Religious Right leaders have tried to rationalize their fundamentalist version of Christianity with voting for a Mormon candidate for president by arguing that it isn’t a problem since Romney supports “biblical values” and Obama, they allege, does not. Others, such as televangelist Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson, and activists like David Barton, have gone so far as to say that Mormons are indeed Christians.

Now, a group of pastors has released a document, For the Sake of the Gospel, saying that if Christian leaders decide to back Mitt Romney, they must clearly distinguish the theological differences between Mormonism and Christianity:

If an evangelical Christian chooses to vote for Mr. Romney (President Obama or any candidate), that is a decision between themselves and God.

The purpose of this call to evangelical Christians and leaders is two-fold:

1. To protect the purity and integrity of the Biblical Gospel.

2. To seize the opportunity to educate the America Public and Christians to the fundamental differences between historic Christian faith and that of the Latter-day Saints (Mormons).

…

It is our contention that the general population should not be left with any uncertainty whether the theological cult1 of which Mitt Romney is a faithful member, namely The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and historic evangelical Christianity are one and the same faith. This we adamantly deny!

Jerry Johnson of the Nicene Council spoke to Janet Mefferd yesterday about the document and like others such as Warren Cole Smith of World Magazine, cautioned that electing a Mormon president would give the church a powerful tool in their mission work and warned against pastors describing Romney as a Christian. He told Mefferd that he would not vote for either Romney or Obama, lamenting that “the two major parties have given us the choice between voting for the Beast or the False Prophet” and calling the two candidates “twin evils.”

Johnson: Why can’t the Christian Church understand that this election cycle goes beyond Mitt Romney, beyond Barack Obama, even beyond the United States of America, it has to be about the Gospel. Too many Christians are just willing to either rationalize like Pat Robertson and Joel Osteen, they’re willing to rationalize and become very pragmatic, and it appears, I don’t know if they realize they’re doing this, but my question to them would be: what’s more important, the United States of America and its Constitution or the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ?

Mefferd: Well that’s a no-brainer right there, yet you have a lot of Christians who say ‘we have to endorse Romney, we have to get behind Romney, or we’ll get Obama for a second term,’ what do you say to those Christians?

Johnson: I say to them that in this election cycle the two major parties have given us the choice between voting for the Beast or the False Prophet. I for one, I’m not going to vote for either. This is not an issue of the lesser of two evils; I actually see two twin evils here.

Johnson also posted a video outlining “why Mormonism is a cult”: