Last week on Truth in Action Ministries’ flagship radio program Truth that Transforms, hosts Carmen Pate and John Rabe hosted David Kupelian, the managing editor of WorldNetDaily and author of The Marketing of Evil to discuss how “worldly distractions destroy the heart and mind.” Pate, a former president of Concerned Women for America, asked Kupelian how “the homosexual rights agenda” try to use people’s emotions to win support for legalizing same-sex marriage, and Kupelian called it part of their strategy of “seduction and intimidation.” Kupelian falsely maintained that “everybody who looks at this legally will admit” that marriage equality for gays and lesbians will lead to polygamy and even allow “five men and a wastebasket” to be married. He added that legalizing same-sex marriage “will literally define marriage out of existence so marriage will not exist anymore.”

Pate: Look at the homosexual rights agenda when they are really pointing to the emotional heartbeat of individual lives. I think of the Rosie O’Donnell tours that they do with the homosexual families where they go on these tours and they point out how normal these families are and you can end up just crying at the end of the story because they’ve really touched your heart, that these are just people like you and I, there’s no difference and we need to make sure that their rights are really celebrated.

Kupelian: The gay rights issue is a perfect forum for explaining two of the biggest ways we are manipulated, and they are seduction and intimidation. The seduction is what you just described, ‘oh these two people just want to be married, how does their love and their being married hurt you’? Your darn right it hurts, if you go and redefine out of existence the prime institution of civilization since the beginning of man—marriage—and everybody who looks at this legally will admit that once you say that two men can be married and two women can be married you have to say that three men can be married or three women can be married or five men and a wastebasket can be married. Once marriage has changed from a man and a woman and it just becomes consenting adults who want to call themselves married, you will literally define marriage out of existence so marriage will not exist anymore.

Chuck Colson appeared on James Dobson’s show Family Talk last week to discuss how President Obama is trying to replace the freedom of religion with the more narrow “freedom of worship,” telling Dobson, “I have not seen ‘freedom of religion’ mentioned by an official in the Obama administration.” Colson also claimed that President Obama “used ‘freedom of religion’ only once, and that was when he was talking about the mosque in Ground Zero.”

As we have pointed out many times before, this right-wing conspiracy that Obama is avoiding the term “freedom of religion” by not using it in his speeches is patently false, as a search of the White House website return 123 uses of “freedom of religion” and just 4 uses of “freedom of worship.” A similar search for the Bush White House returned 33 uses of “freedom of worship,” but that was never seen as a ploy to eliminate freedom of religion.

In fact, you know who else used the term “freedom of worship”? James Dobson!

While appearing on a conference call with Champion The Vote, Dobson named the “freedom to worship as we choose” as a central tenet of American government.

Surely, no one will accuse Dobson of trying to erode the freedom of religion just for using that phrase.

Later in the program Dobson railed against the administration’s “arrogant” mandate that insurance plans include coverage of contraceptive, which Colson dubbed “the greatest threat to America” and “the greatest threat to us as Chrstians.”

Dobson: How dare! How dare the White House do this! This is arrogant beyond belief.

Colson: I tell you, listening to your voice and listening to the Jim Dobson I’ve known over the years and I’m listening to the rage build and I’m glad because we have to stay firm, there is no way we can equivocate on this issue.

…

Colson: This is the most important issue—I really think the most important I’ve faced in my ministry, and the greatest threat to America, the greatest threat to us as Christians.

Among the guests on the Family Research Council's anti-contraception coverage webcast held last week was Walker Nickless, the Bishop of the Diocese of Sioux City, who warned that the contraception mandate was literally a plot by the Devil to undermine morality and that Christians "have to stand up and violently oppose this" in order to avoid being overtaken by Darkness:

As we noted yesterday, the Family Research Council hastily organized a webcast last week to voice the Religious Right's opposition to the Obama administration's rule requiring health insurance plans to cover contraception. 

Among the guests who participated was Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission who declared that "government-run clinics" will give away birth control pills for free, so the only reason that the government would require employers to offer such coverage is because to government wants to "set the precedent of ramming this down our throats" and destroy their freedom of religion. 

But, Land declared, his Baptist fore-bearers "went to prison and died" to defend these rights so, make no mistake, "we are not going to comply":

• Sahil Kapur @ TPM: McConnell: GOP Will Fight To Let ANY Employer Deny Birth Control Coverage.
• Huffington Post: Cal Thomas Apologizes To Rachel Maddow For Contraception Comment.
• Nick Sementelli @ Faith in Public Life Action: Rick Santorum Dissents from Catholic Teaching on Health Care.
• Ben Armbruster @ Think Progress Security: Fox Pundit Says Women In The Military Should ‘Expect’ To Be Raped.
• Towleroad: Washington Governor Chris Gregoire Signs Marriage Equality Bill Into Law.
• Trudy Ring @ The Advocate: Progressive Clergy: Get Perkins Off MSNBC.

• Mitt Romney won the CPAC Straw Poll but Rick Santorum is accusing his campaign of rigging the vote.
• While in town for CPAC, Santorum had a private lunch with some 90 conservative leaders and vowed that if he wins the GOP nomination, he will not move toward the center.
• The idea that Santorum is some sort of secret liberal is laughable, but that is the case that Newt Gingrich supporter Chuck Norris is trying to make.
• Speaking of Gingrich, the National Review is calling on him to withdraw.
• Finally, Joseph Farah wants Ruth Bader Ginsburg impeached.

The main themes from this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference were not terribly surprising to anyone paying attention to the GOP presidential primary.  According to CPAC speakers, President Obama is a “socialist, Marxist president” bent on destroying the country and the Constitution, and the nation will not survive if he is re-elected.  “Compromise” is a four-letter word. Health care reform is tyranny. Contraception is tyranny. TSA searches are tyranny.  You get the idea.

But there were also moments of insight into aspects of the conservative movement, often coming from smaller rooms and panels, like actor Stephen Baldwin’s declaration that “separation of church and state can kiss my ass” and the anti-multicultural, anti-diversity discussion which featured the founder of a white-nationalist website. Here are a few additions to the excellent RWW coverage of CPAC by Kyle and Brian.

Screw the Vote

As we have reported, Republicans are waging aggressive voter suppression campaigns across the country, including voter ID laws and voter registration restrictions supposedly needed to prevent “voting fraud.”  At CPAC, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton hosted a press conference to talk about the group’s  “Election Integrity Project,” which is suing states that Judicial Watch says have not done enough to clean up their voter registration lists.  Panelists claimed that “rampant election fraud” took place in the last two election cycles – there’s no real evidence to back up that claim – and complained that the Obama administration’s Justice Department is selectively enforcing the Voting Rights Act.  Fitton said that having the DOJ meet with representatives from Project Vote and ACORN is “like having the mafia running the FBI.” Another speaker represented True the Vote, an outgrowth of Houston Tea Party group King Street Patriots, which hosted a fundraising event last year with a speaker who believes:

Registering [poor people] to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.  It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

True the Vote is backing states whose voter ID laws have been challenged by the Justice Department and recruiting volunteers to challenge signatures gathered by those seeking to recall Wisconsin’s anti-labor governor Scott Walker.

The Federal Government’s War on Clean Underwear

It is an article of faith among many right-wing activists and candidates that health, safety, and environmental regulations are oten unconstitutional and are destroying the American economy.  Americans for Tax Reform and its affiliate Cost of Government Center sponsored a panel dubbed “The Red Tape War: How the Regulatory Burden and Growing Nanny State Threaten Prosperity.” The group’s Mattie Duppler described regulation as an ongoing “war on consumers and taxpayers.”  Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute said that energy efficiency regulations had caused a steep decline in the quality of top-loading washing machines, and talked about a campaign his group had run to have people send virtual underwear to the undersecretary of the Department of Energy. (Turns out that campaign was in 2007 during the George W. Bush administration)

Beyond Obstructionism to Nullification

One Newt Gingrich campaign theme has been pledging that as president he would ignore Supreme Court decisions he disagrees with and abolish the jobs of federal judges who don’t share his view of the Constitution.  A couple of groups at CPAC – the Tenth Amendment Center and the Foundation for a Free Society – held a series of events to promote nullification, the idea that the states should similarly ignore federal laws that they believe are unconstitutional.  In fact, they want to go far beyond ignoring such laws.  Speakers introducing a documentary on nullification praised an Arizona bill that would not only declare the federal health care law null and void in the state, but would also make any agent of the government who tries to enforce the law guilty of a felony.  The documentary featured state legislators as well as speakers from the Oath Keepers and the John Birch Society.

Here Sharia Comes!

Pamela Geller hosted a panel on Sharia, at which speakers complained about the room they were given and about their supposed mistreatment at the hands of CPAC – though other panels met in the same room and the “Islamic Law” panel was listed in the conference program.   Geller and fellow panelist Robert Spencer attacked panelists from a previous, more thoughtful, panel on religious liberty which defended the religious rights of American Muslims.  Also speaking was North Carolina congressional candidate Ilario Pantano, who said he was once charged with murder for killing terrorists in Iraq [charges were dropped] and who denounced “political correctness run amok.” Pantano praised discredited “historian” David Barton for telling the “truth” about America’s founding and called the misnamed “Ground Zero Mosque” a “desecration of an American holy site and an American national battlefield.”

Civics Education = David Barton, the Bible, and American Exceptionalism

In a panel on civics education, Matthew Spalding, VP for American Studies at Heritage Foundation praised the battle over textbook standards in Texas, in which David Barton and other Religious Right activists pushed to infuse far-right ideology into social science books.  

Those are the battles that matter, especially big states because they control the textbooks. Texas had a great battle, and the media hated it, the left went crazy, but it’s an extremely reasonable curriculum improvement, and they focus on very good things. It’s a solid, good model….Civic education is not just in the classroom. You must understand the effect that public discussion about these questions, about history and about the meaning of our country affect politics, politics affects elections, elections affects state boards and things that make the curriculum.

Another panelist, Larry Schweikart, author of Patriot’s History of the United States, argued that civics education must be grounded in “American exceptionalism.”

All of the founders understood that the bible and biblical virtues were necessary to a good education, and a civic order. So once again it comes down to those four pillars of American exceptionism: common law, a predominantly Christian religion, property rights, and free markets.

 Limit Government, Not Campaign Speeches

One of the final sessions before Sarah Palin’s closing remarks was intended to give a number of congressional candidates challenging Republican incumbents the chance to make 5-minute speeches.  A couple candidates were shortchanged by the fact that Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock, running to unseat Sen. Richard Lugar, took about twice as much as his allotted time and Ted Cruz, running against Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in the GOP Senate primary, ran even longer. 

Mourdock devoted his speech to the need for conservatives to “conquer”  - conquer the media, educators, advocates of reproductive choice, big-spenders, anyone who thinks America is just an “average” nation, and all who “wish to crush our traditional American values,” presumably including 35-year Senate incumbent Lugar.  Repeated Mourdock again and again, “Conquer we must!”

Cruz, who was also given time at last year’s Awakening Conference at Liberty University, argued that liberty is under assault like never before, that President Barack Obama is the “most radical president this country has ever seen,” and that the U.S. Senate is the key battleground.  Cruz, who hopes to follow in the electoral footsteps of Florida’s Marco Rubio, is like Rubio the child of Cubans who came to the U.S. in the 1950s.  Cruz brags that he is the only candidate this year supported by all four of his favorite senators: Jim DeMint, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Pat Toomey, and called his primary “ground zero” in the battle between the Tea Party and the GOP’s “moderate establishment.”

On last week’s edition of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality Radio Hour, a self-described “former homosexual” called for the arrest of author Dan Savage for his campaign to end suicide among LGBT youth, and today host Peter LaBarbera and guest Patrick Wooden reminisced about when violence against gay and transgender people was considered “normal.”

Wooden, a North Carolina pastor and anti-gay activist with who has claimed that older gay men have to wear diapers after a lifetime of shoving a variety of objects and animals up their anuses, started the program by criticizing NAACP president Ben Jealous for addressing the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Creating Change conference. In his speech, Jealous described how his childhood best friend whom he considered a brother was bullied not only because he is black but also because of his “preference for wigs, dresses and make-up.” Pastor Wooden said that the family should have “whooped” him and “taught the child how to dress,” saying that his “heart breaks” for the NAACP’s stance on LGBT rights.

Later in the interview, Wooden and LaBarbera both claimed that it was “normal” for men to violently react to a gay man they perceived to be flirting with them and LaBarbera even said he fears that it would be considered a “hate crime” for a man to punch a transgender woman using the woman’s restroom.

Listen:

Wooden: My heart breaks and I literally mourn over what has happened to the NAACP. Ben Jealous says he has a brother who is transgendered in his family, the little boy grew up dressing like Diana Ross or somebody when he was a child, well I say his parents should’ve took the child and whooped the child’s behind and taught the child how to dress.

…

Wooden: If you want to get knocked out just go into a male bathroom in the African American community or any community I would think and you’re standing there in a dress and many times the people are trying to hit on people, trying to make sexual responses, one man there, you know, you don’t want to be in there feeling like another man is trying to look at your penis. We’ve always had a hostile response, or a disrespect if you will, for that kind of behavior.

LaBarbera: It used to be common of course, I’ve heard many stories. I remember a story from a military guy, saying a guy came and he was a sailor and they had some temporary little day off at port and some guy hit on him and he decked him.

Wooden: That’s normal.

LaBarbera: When you make a sexual advance against a man on man, that is a normal response, and yet I fear in the rise of political correctness what’s going to happen is, somebody is going to find out that there was a man in his wife’s—his wife was in the restroom when a transgendered man, a biological male, was in the female restroom and he’s gonna punch him, but then the man who punches him is gonna be charged with a hate crime, that’s what I’m afraid of.

Wooden: We’re not promoting, advocating violence here.

LaBarbera: Of course not!