Miranda Blue's blog

Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt, who earlier this week floated the theory that the Colorado theater shooting was an inside job aimed at promoting gun control, was back on the press circuit today. In an interview with Iowa radio host Steve Deace, Pratt urged listeners to compare the dozen deaths in the Aurora movie theater with the millions of deaths in Nazi concentration camps – deaths which he claims occurred because the Nazi government had taken away the guns of the German populace, preventing them from “shooting back”:

Well, we tragically lost 12 people. How many people a day were lost in concentration camps that were populated by...well, two things had happened: ‘Jews are bad, Jews are bad, Jews are bad, Jews are bad, all the evil in the world is Jews, Jews, Jews,’ and disarmament of the German population. They started coming for the Jews, and they came for other people as well. Nobody shoots back!

When they started to, when George III thought he could muscle us around with his Redcoat troops, we taught him a thing or two that actually, Mr. George, you need to learn a lesson yourself and that is you violated all of the charters that protect the rights of Englishmen.

Pratt drew not-so-subtle parallels between King George and President Obama, warning that the president, if reelected, will act immediately to close down gun shops. “The guy is clearly the imperial president,” Pratt said:

Here’s what I think might happen after the election. If the president, God forbid, is reelected, I can see him telling gun stores through the Justice Department, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, you’re no longer gonna be able to sell caliber handguns above 380, and if you do we’ll pull your license and you’ll be out of business that day. And you’ll no longer be able to sell semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that are capable of firing more than a fixed magazine load of three to five rounds, in other words one that can accept a large magazine. You just won’t be able to be in business if you want to sell those kinds of firearms. That I can see the president doing. Unconstutional, illegal. But then his position on forcing churches to dispense abortifacants, his position on undoing the amnesty laws, his positions on so many things. A court order telling him to allow drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, ‘No way, Jose,’ was basically his response, although I don’t think he speaks that much Spanish.

So the guy is clearly the imperial president. He thinks he, ‘Well, I was elected, I won the election,’ he told the Republicans once in a rare meeting with Republicans. He doesn’t accept criticism kindly, he gets angry quite quickly, he’s very thin-skinned.

Illinois pastor John Kirkwood joined Peter LaBarbara on Americans for Truth About Homosexuality Radio Hour last week to discuss a pending challenge to Illinois’ ban on same-sex marriage. The two were up in arms because the Cook County circuit court judge presiding over the case, Sophia Hall, is openly gay. Not only do they want Judge Hall to recuse herself from the case (the Right made a similar, unsuccessful demand of Judge Vaughn Walker, who presided over the Prop 8 trial in California), but they take issue with the very existence of openly gay judges.

Kirkwood, perusing a newsletter article about a function honoring openly LGBT judges in Cook County compared the event to one honoring “the adulterous judges of Cook County” and mused, “We were better off when the Mafia ran Illinois because they were interested in making a profit, not making some kind of political statement that is totally abhorrent.”

LaBarbara: It’s just amazing, John. I mean, you know, Cook County is corrupt, but it’s hard to appreciate how corrupt it is if you’re outside of Illinois. And this is a county that, and we have a photo here of Judge Hall, she’s one of 14 openly homosexual judges in this county.

Kirkwood: Yeah, you know, it’s affectionately called “Crook County” now. And I can actually make the bold statement, and it might sound absurd as a pastor, but we were better off when the Mafia ran Illinois because they were interested in making a profit, not making some kind of political statement that is totally abhorrent.

….

Kirkwood: It just occurred to me how outrageous it would seem if the headline you read is, “Seek to Honor the Adulterous Judges of Cook County.”

LaBarbara: Right, right, well that goes to, John, that goes to you as a pastor and all of us. We’re believers and we regard homosexuality as a serious sexual sin. And so, yeah, just even the language: “gay judges.” I mean these are judges who are openly practicing immoral conduct, they’re proud of it, and even though they don’t think like that, that’s how many people regard homosexuality and that’s the problem.

In his Washington Update radio address today, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins slams the American Library Association for a curriculum that educates students about their library privacy rights. Perkins quotes the concerns of Parents Against Bad Books in Schools, a group that encourages parents to challenge “sensitive, controversial and inappropriate material” in school libraries, including such books as Beloved, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.

“School libraries,” Perkins says, “are one place where liberalism has a long shelf life”:

In the library, what kids are really checking out is a new ideology. Hello, I'm Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. School libraries are one place where liberalism has a long shelf life. For years, the American Library Association's been funneling inappropriate material to kids. And stopping them just got a whole lot harder. The Left wing's favorite billionaire, George Soros, is giving the ALA a half-million dollars a year to develop a "privacy curriculum" that teaches kids how to "bust through censor walls," "encrypt their communication," and "override filters." Even worse, librarians are told "to inform students that their book circulation data will never be shared with anyone, including their parents." Groups like Parents Against Bad Books in Schools are fighting back, but they need your help. "If enough parents become aware of how many objectionable books there are in [circulation] and work together in constantly challenging them, things can improve considerably," said a spokesman. Otherwise, what libraries will be lending isn't books--but a helping hand to the Left.

For what it’s worth, here are the American Library Association’s guidelines on privacy in school libraries:

Students as Library Users: Students who use school libraries need to learn about the concepts of privacy and confidentiality. They may not know the dangers of sharing personally identifiable information with others. School library media specialists may face the situation of an adult asking for information pertaining to students' library use. These situations must be handled in accordance with all school and library policies. In an ideal situation, that information would not be released. Teachers should not be able to "check" on students to see if they have borrowed assigned readings or used specific resources. School library media specialists are best served when they assist teachers in developing classroom procedures and policies that preserve user privacy and meet educational goals.

The Center for Military Readiness’s Elaine Donnelly has been making the rounds this week to discuss what she alleges is the Pentagon’s attempted cover-up of a marked increase in violent sexual assaults in the Army since 2006. The increase in sexual assaults was reported [pdf] by the Army in January and Defense Secretary Leon Pannetta immediately called the trend “unacceptable” and vowed to take steps to stop it. This week, a federal judge ordered the Army to release more detailed records on the assaults, at the request of the ACLU and the Service Women’s Action Network.

Donnelly, however, asserts that the Pentagon has been trying to cover up the increase in sexual assaults in order to cover for a new policy allowing women to officially serve in combat positions.

Speaking with Frank Gaffney on Secure Freedom Radio yesterday, Donnelly said that adding “social burdens” to the military – like allowing women to serve in combat and gays to serve openly – will eventually topple institution like a tower of Jenga blocks. Donnelly has previously claimed that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military would  "break the all-volunteer force."

Gaffney: Are we at risk, Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, of breaking the all-volunteer force with all of this?

Donnelly: Yes, yes we are. And what we’re heading toward is what I call the Jenga block military. If you’ve ever played that game with wooden blocks, you know you take the blocks out of the bottom, and you load more burdens on the top. Eventually, the tower becomes so unstable it collapses. And it’s a fun game to play on your kitchen table. But if you take things away from our military, and you keep adding social burdens on top, what you do is make a weakened force, you make that tower unstable. You, in essence, weaken the infrastructure of the culture of the military.

And let’s face it, it isn’t just about the weapons and the planes and ships and all of those hardware things, it’s the people who defend the military – the all-volunteer force. If we are doing great harm to both men and women in the military, if sexual assaults become so demoralizing, so conducive to indiscipline, what we’re doing is weakening the finest military in the world, we’re doing it gradually and according to this Army report, the progression is relentless. And it’s going in the wrong direction, it’s getting worse. And we certainly should not make it even worse than that by placing female soldiers into direct ground combat infantry battalions.

Somebody’s got to blow the whistle on this. Social engineers never are held accountable for their handiwork. Instead, the Pentagon invites them in to do more mischief, to create more problems. They don’t know what they’re doing. This report indicates that we need to really analyze this thing, and frankly Congress needs to intervene before it is too late.

Donnelly also dropped by the Janet Mefferd Show yesterday, where she claimed the Pentagon is “pretend[ing] there’s no problem” and mocked the Defense Department’s hiring of Sexual Assault Response Coordinators as a “jobs program” boondoggle:

Donnelly: You can understand why the Army did not want to trumpet these findings: they don’t fit the template. Well, now we’re going to put women into land combat battalions, the ones that are all male, the tip of the spear. They just pretend there’s no problem, and if theirs is a problem, well the problem is a myth. So, we’ll just do more training, we’ll hire more, what do they call it, ‘sexual assault response coordinators.’

Mefferd: Oh, good grief.

Donnelly: Starts to make a pretty good salary. You’re talking about a jobs program here.

HRC got its hands last night on a December 2009 National Organization for Marriage strategy document, which was unsealed in connection to NOM’s court challenge to Maine’s campaign finance disclosure laws.

The most explosive revelation in the document is NOM’s explicit plan to drive a wedge between the gay community and blacks and Latinos. But another part of their effort to recruit “hearts and minds” to the anti-marriage cause is also startling. Not only did NOM propose to document anti-gay “victims” of gay rights with emotional videos– a plan they implemented with a set of glossy films in upstate New York, for instance – they proposed to hire a staff member at $50,000 a year “to identify children of gay parents willing to speak on camera”:

Did NOM end up hiring someone to find children of gay parents who they could portray as “victims”? If so, it seems that a year’s worth of full-time work didn’t turn up a single child of gay parents who was willing to be portrayed as a “victim” of marriage equality.
 

In a sermon uploaded yesterday, Cornerstone Church pastor John Hagee argues that the we are approaching the End Times, as evidenced by recent ecological disasters, including food shortages and the Gulf oil spill. During the End Times, Hagee said, God will take one American life “for every child killed in every abortion clinic in America”:

Read Revelation 9:15. It’s the sixth trumpet. There are four angels released by God himself to destroy one third of mankind in one day. The Bible says there is a year, a month, a day and an hour that God picked out from Genesis 1, that one third of mankind on that day, by the will and hand of God will be destroyed. You say, ‘I have a hard time believing that.’ May I refer you to Noah and the flood? Believe it.

In America, we have something over 300 million people. That means 100 million people in this country in 24 hours, gone. You’ve heard me say that I believe God will require a life for every child killed in every abortion clinic in America. I believe that’s where the tally is going to be set, right there.
 

Conservative activist David Horowitz joined Candace Pate and John Rabe on Truth that Transforms Radio today to discuss the state of liberalism in the United States.

Horowitz said, “I would like to ban the word liberal, because people who are called liberals aren’t liberal about anything except hard drugs, sex and spending other people’s money.” Instead, he argues that the Democratic Party is now controlled by leftist radicals who have learned to lie about their true agenda.

He went on to discuss how  progressives commit great crimes because, “If you thought that you could, you know, return us to Eden or create a world in which there’s no racism, no sexism, no homophobia, no poverty, no war, what lie would you not tell and what crime would you not commit to get there? And that’s why the greatest criminals of the 20th century were communists, were progressives. And they will be in this century as well."

Rabe: Are we as a nation being led in a direction that’s to the left of where maybe the average voter of either party is?

Horowitz: I would like to ban the word liberal, because people who are called liberals aren’t liberal about anything except hard drugs, sex and spending other people’s money.

Rabe: Fair point.

Horowitz: Otherwise, they want to control your life. That should be really, really clear to everybody. These are not liberals, they’re leftists. And Barack Obama is a Marxist radical. That’s his whole training. He came from the same left that I did. He was trained from birth, really, by his mother, Franklin Marshall, the people who tutored him. He was a Marxist in college, and his whole political career was shaped by, funded by Marxist radicals from the 60’s. That’s who he is.

But they learned one thing from the 60’s. I’ve written, actually, a pamphlet about this called “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution,” which traces his upbringing but also his philosophy. What the left learned from their failures in the 60’s is: lie. Don’t tell people what your agendas are. Pretend to be a liberal. Don’t create riots outside Democratic Party conventions, as the left did in 1968, infiltrate the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is now a left-wing party. It’s agendas are socialist.
…

Horowitz: And that is what the left is about. They are a crypto-religion. They too believe that we are in a fallen state and that there will be a redemption. But guess who the redeemers are. It’s them.

Pate: Exactly.

Horowitz: And that’s why they kill so many people.

Pate: Very good.

Horowitz: Because if you thought that you could, you know, return us to Eden or create a world in which there’s no racism, no sexism, no homophobia, no poverty, no war, what lie would you not tell and what crime would you not commit to get there?

Rabe: Right.

Horowitz: And that’s why the greatest criminals of the 20th century were communists, were progressives. And they will be in this century as well.
 

Former Indiana Rep. John Hostettler lamented yesterday that the “church has extracted itself from government,” creating a vacuum filled by “those adversarial to biblical truth.”

Hostettler, talking with Truth in Action Ministries’ Carmen Pate on the organization’s radio program, agreed with Pate that the education system is controlled by “those who really don’t want our kids to understand what the Constitution has to say” – namely, as Hostettler, puts it, that “government is an institution that is not just a God-centered one, but it was ordained by God.”

Hostettler represented southwest Indiana in Congress from 1995 through 2007, and is now president of the Constitution Institute, which dedicates itself to providing state legislators and others with “a greater understanding of the United States Constitution.”

Pate: You know, it seems to me, Congressman, it’s very clear that the founding fathers intended for the government’s role to be limited, and they based this Constitution on biblical principles and truths. Yet we know that those on the left, the secular humanists, see the importance of a big government, not limited, because then they can wield more power over the people.

Not to sound conspiratorial here, but I wonder if there have been attempts perhaps by those secular humanists, those on the left, to really not allow or to take away some of the opportunities for learning more about what the Constitution has to say. Say in our public schools, you mentioned in school you didn’t learn all these things. I didn’t either. It wasn’t until I got out of school and started working with pro-family organizations that I really dug into the Constitution.

Have we allowed the education of our children to be given over to those who really don’t want our kids to understand what the Constitution has to say?

Hostettler: Well, Carmen, you’re exactly right. That is what has happened. Because the church has extracted itself from government and we have fundamentally forgotten, as Dr. Kennedy taught, that government is an institution ordained by God. Just as the family was ordained by God, and just as the church was ordained by God, government is an institution that is not just a God-centered one, but it was ordained by God.

So we have extracted ourselves from it – the church, the body of Christ has – we’ve handed it over to others, and we’ve forgotten that just has nature abhors a vacuum, politics and public policy and government likewise abhor a vacuum. Someone is going to occupy that space, some philosophy is going to occupy that space. And it’s either going to be fundamentally a philosophy that is sympathetic and is agreeable to biblical truths, or it is a philosophy that is adversarial to biblical truth. It’s going to be one of the two. And as you pointed out, it has been a philosophy overall that is adversarial to biblical truth.
 

National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown joined Iowa anti-gay luminary Bob Vander Plaats at a Des Moines rally today to call for a ballot referendum to overturn the state’s marriage equality law. Following Vander Plaats, who compared same-sex marriage to polygamy and incest, Brown argued that making the civil rights of a minority subject to a popular vote is in fact right in line with the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

It’s marriage equality proponents, Brown argued, who are trying to “deprive” their opponents of civil rights– specifically “the right to vote":

Opposition to gay marriage is not rooted in fear and hate as supporters suggest, Vander Plaats said, but rather love and religious truth. He also lashed out at the notion of “marriage equality” as a slippery slope toward no restrictions on relationships whatsoever.

“If we want marriage equality, let’s just stop for a second. Why stop at same-sex marriage? Why not have polygamy? Why not have a dad marry his son or marry his daughter? If we’re going to have marriage equality, let’s open this puppy up and let’s have marriage equality,” he said. “Otherwise, let’s stick to the way God designed it – one man and one woman, period.”

Referring to Senate Democrats’ refusal to advance the amendment and clear the way for a statewide vote, National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown invoked Martin Luther King, Jr., to suggest that it was the opponents of same-sex marriage whose civil rights were threatened.

“We hear that this is about civil rights, and that those of us who oppose the redefinition of marriage are somehow bigots,” Brown said. “And yet, what Dr. Martin Luther King called the most important civil right – the right to vote – these very same folks are trying to deprive us of this right.”
 

Wisconsin state senator Glenn Grothman went on the Alan Colmes show on Friday to discuss a controversial new bill he authored that would require the state’s Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board to officially label single parenthood as “a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.”

The bill was seen as a slap in the face to single parents in Wisconsin, who are raising 31 percent of children in the state.

Grothman told Colmes that the country’s out-of-wedlock birth rate is the “choice of the women,” who should be “educated that this is a mistake.” When Colmes countered with statistics about the high number of pregnancies that are unintended, Grothman said that many women are “trained” to lie and say that their planned pregnancies are actually unintended:

Grothman: There’s been a huge change over the last 30 years and a lot of that change has been the choice of the women. There’s a reason why in the 50s and the 60s you had less than ten percent of the births illegitimate, and now we’re over 40 percent. It’s not that there weren’t abusive men in the 40s or there was a problem with child support. It is the popular culture, led by the social service professions, who are saying…

Colmes: Well tell me what you would change.

Grothman: I think the first thing we do is that we should educate women that this is a mistake.

Colmes: You think women need to be educated, are they not smart enough on their own?

Grothman: They do have to be educated, because right now the culture encourages a single motherhood lifestyle.

Colmes: You think women choose to be single moms…

Grothman: Oh absolutely

Colmes: You think women want to have homes without fathers? You think women look to the opportunity to have to raise kids and not be able to get work because they have to stay home and take care of the kids. Women want to do this?

Grothman: I think a lot of women are adopting the single motherhood lifestyle because the government creates a situation in which it is almost preferred.

….

Colmes: According to data published in USA Today, at least four in ten pregnancies in every state are unwanted or mistimed. According to the analysis that was released last May, more than half of pregnancies in 29 states and the District of Columbia were unintended, 38 to 50 percent were unintended in the remaining states. This mitigates against the argument that women are purposefully wanting to have kids. Their unintended for the most part. They’re unintended pregnancies, which is the argument for health care services and birth control for women.

Grothman: I think you undersell these women.

Colmes: Undersell them?

Grothman: Undersell them. I think when you have an epidemic of this great proportion, people are not so dumb that it’s surprising when they get pregnant. I think people are trained to say that ‘this is a surprise to me,’ because there’s still enough of a stigma that they’re supposed to say this.