The Arizona governor’s decision Wednesday to veto a bill widely seen as pitting religious protections against gay rights puts an end to two controversial amendments proposed by lawmakers.RELATED: Tea Party Leader: Arizona Veto Enslaves Christians into Baking Giant Penis Cakes
But it leaves standing the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which continues to empower individuals to sue when they believe state or local laws – including antidiscrimination laws – are violating their religious rights.
In announcing her decision to veto the amendments, known as SB 1062, Gov. Jan Brewer (R) said that religious liberty is valued in Arizona. She added that the state also values the principle of nondiscrimination.
How those two goals coexist in Arizona in the future remains unclear. But it is clear from the governor’s veto that the potential downside of following through with the amendments outweighed the advantages.
“I sincerely believe that SB 1062 has the potential to create more problems than it purports to solve,” she said in a brief statement.
While the Brewer veto ends the current dispute in a way that appears to deliver a clear victory to gay rights advocates and their supporters, the underlying causes of the conflict remain unresolved.
On one side are Arizona residents seeking to live their lives in accord with traditional moral positions embraced in the Bible’s Old Testament – positions that condemn homosexuality. On the other side are gay men, lesbians, bisexual, and transsexual individuals fighting for equal rights and equal dignity in communities they also call home.
The Arizona Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) seeks to protect religious faith from coercive laws. That protection continues to exist throughout Arizona.
What is changing is a growing recognition of civil rights for gay Americans that is clashing with traditional religious teachings. For example, Arizona law offers no protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation, but three Arizona cities – Phoenix, Tucson, and Flagstaff – have passed ordinances banning sexual orientation discrimination in their jurisdictions.
The two proposed amendments to the Arizona RFRA were an attempt to address the issue in a way that favored religious adherents. Brewer’s veto eliminates the attempt, but it does nothing to address the underlying clash.
The veto was issued amid a growing controversy in Arizona over what had been a little-noticed state law patterned on a 21-year-old federal statute designed to shield religious adherents from government measures that violate their beliefs.
The original Religious Freedom Restoration Act, far from a hate-inspired antigay measure, sailed through the US House of Representatives on a voice vote and passed the US Senate 97 to 3 before being signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton in 1993.
The law was written to fill a vacuum left after the US Supreme Court embraced a significantly narrower reading of the protections of religious liberty under the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion clause. Congress responded with RFRA.
When asked by a Fox news reporter for examples of Tea Party racism liberal protesters get uneasy. According to one woman, "they're racist against Blacks, Hispanics...I think their racist against...women."RELATED: Don’t blame the Tea Party for America’s inward tilt
The Democratic pollster Democracy Corps, commissioning research from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, recently dug into that foreign species commonly referred to as “the conservative voter.” In a dispatch that reads like the curious field notes Charles Darwin scribbled while observing the natural wonders of the Galapagos, the Democratic pollsters have found that the family Republican is made up of a variety of genera, including moderates, tea partiers and socially conservative evangelicals.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pollsters discovered that these factions are distinct and not especially friendly towards one another; but the report is not without surprising findings.
The top of that list is the discovery that the majority of Republican voters are fed up with litigating social issues via the electoral process. A wave of pragmatism is overtaking the GOP’s subgroups, setting up a collision with the last remaining holdouts within the GOP who view politics as the last weapon in a dwindling arsenal aimed at halting what they view as a debasing of the culture.
“We know that Evangelicals are the largest bloc in the base, with the Tea Party very strong as
Well,” the memo reads. They feign shock at the notion that Republicans view President Barack Obama as a “liar” and a “manipulator,” two designations that the majority of American voters would agree with but to which the Democratic base’s Pavlovian response is to point and shriek “racism.”
Indeed, the pollsters even confess that they “expected” to find more racism among Republican voters. “We expected that in this comfortable setting or in their private written notes, some would make a racial reference or racist slur when talking about the African American President,” they confess. “None did.”
But this response by the voters they surveyed is viewed by Democracy Corps pollsters more as a clever evolutionary response to a history of predation. The Republican voter, the pollsters declare, harbors racial consciousness that is only masked by an effective camouflage:
They know that is deeply non-PC and are conscious about how they are perceived. But focusing on that misses how central is race to the worldview of Republican voters. They have an acute sense that they are white in a country that is becoming increasingly “minority,” and their party is getting whooped by a Democratic Party that uses big government programs that benefit mostly minorities, create dependency and a new electoral majority. Barack Obama and Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many Evangelical and Tea Party voters.The capable naturalists at Democracy Corps are trained to recognize even the latent, recessive racism lingering deep within the Republican genome. Like the human coccyx, the vestigial prejudice in the GOP voter is betrayed when the subject is scrutinized by those with trained eyes.
Looking past the obligatory nods to partisan shibboleths contained within this memo, however, are a series of interesting nuggets that contribute to the political debate. “Evangelicals who feel most threatened by trends embrace the Tea Party because they are the ones who are fighting back,” the memo reads. “They are very in tune politically, but the Tea Party base is very libertarian and not very interested in fighting gay marriage.”
This spells trouble on the horizon. The tense truce between socially conservative evangelicals and tea partiers, two groups which largely agree on philosophy but greatly differ over tactics, will certainly find themselves again at odds when the Republican Party’s presidential primary process heats up after the midterm elections. The clash may, however, come sooner.
As National Journal‘s Charlie Cook observes, Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) best shot at maintaining his majority in the upper chamber of Congress by scuttling a small budget deal and forcing House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to take an unpalatable measure back to his members in order to force another shutdown. This cynical tactic is among the last tools in the toolshed for Democrats, and it just might work.
In the same way, Democrats can shatter this fragile truce between purist evangelicals and pragmatic tea partiers by forcing the issue of national gay marriage legislation. It would tear the country apart, but with the country will go the GOP.
Desperate times…RELATED: Tea party brews up a 2016 presidential straw poll - and Cruz is in the lead
This might come as a surprised to anyone familiar with Martin Bashir‘s usual rhetoric. On Friday afternoon, the MSNBC host tore into Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) for his “inflammatory” fundraising email that compared the Ku Klux Klan to the tea party movement. The congressman continued his defense of the email in spite of outspoken liberal Bashir’s protests.
Bashir began by noting that he has “some sympathy” for Grayson’s analysis, citing how “over the last five years, we have witnessed plenty of instances of racial hatred toward the president — whether it’s the revoting Rush Limbaugh, the imbecile Sarah Palin, or tea party supporters spewing their hate at various rallies.” However, he asked, “How can you possibly compare racist epithets with racist actions of the KKK, which actually led to racist murders?”
Grayson responded that “the home of discrimination and bigotry in our country” is the tea party, similar to how, at one point, the KKK was the wellspring of racial hatred years ago. “I’m pleased that we haven’t gone so far as to see those murders,” he said, “but the analogy holds to that degree,” citing the protestor who waved a Confederate flag in front of the White House recently.
“But how many young black and white civil rights workers has the tea party lynched?” Bashir asked, prompting the congressman to respond: “Sometimes analogies are imperfect.”
“Do you accept that that may have been an inappropriate analogy?” the MSNBC host pressed.
“No,” the congressman replied. He suggested that because the NAACP once asked the tea party to remove racists from their midst, and have thus far failed to do so, the analogy holds.
Bashir attempted to corner Grayson by likening him to some of the more extreme elements of the Republican Party who’ve failed to curtail their own “incendiary” comments. “Don’t you yourself thereby debase your own party by arguing on their level?” the host asked.
“Do you think that racism is the same as calling out racism?” a baffled Grayson fired back. “Do you think that my effort to end racism in America is somehow analogous to racism itself? That’s ridiculous.”
Towards the end of the interview, Grayson even suggested that Bashir was in cahoots with the racist elements of the tea party by calling him out in the first place: “The point I’m making is that if you don’t speak out against it, then in effect, you’re collaborating with it,” he said. “And, in fact, if you give someone like me a hard time for speaking out against it, then maybe you’re collaborating with it.”RELATED: Roland Martin Gets Into Fiery Shouting Matches with Callers Over Grayson’s KKK-Tea Party Email
Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson’s campaign sent out a fundraising email likening the tea party to the Ku Klux Klan, complete with an image of a burning cross.
The email, which went out to supporters yesterday, shows a burning cross — complete with images of two KKK-like figures in the background — used as the “T” in “tea party.” When users click on the image, they’re taken to a fundraising landing page for Grayson’s campaign.
RELATED: Paging Alan Grayson: The truth about civil rights & the Democrat Party
The text of the email is an excerpt from an interview Grayson did with the Rev. Al Sharpton, in which he draws the tea party-KKK comparison.“At this point, the tea party is no more popular than the Klan,” Grayson says in the interview.
The email praises Grayson’s bluntness and urges supporters to donate to his campaign.
“Congressman Alan Grayson deserves your support, like no one else,” the email says. “He, and only he, is saying the things that you are thinking, and so much need to be said.”
Matt Gorman, rapid response director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, denounced Grayson’s fundraising tactics.
“There’s no excuse for the hateful words and imagery used by Congressman Grayson,” he said in a statement. “House Democrats should swiftly and strongly condemn him and return the money he has raised for them. This hate-filled rhetoric has Americans fed up with Washington.”
Newly uncovered IRS documents show the agency flagged political groups based on the content of their literature, raising concerns specifically about "anti-Obama rhetoric," inflammatory language and "emotional" statements made by non-profits seeking tax-exempt status.RELATED: IRS Scandal: Lois Lerner called ‘Tea Party very dangerous,’ advises staff on targeting and ‘FEC will save the day’
The internal 2011 documents, obtained by USA TODAY, list 162 groups by name, with comments by Internal Revenue Service lawyers in Washington raising issues about their political, lobbying and advocacy activities. In 21 cases, those activities were characterized as "propaganda."
The list provides the most specific public accounting to date of which groups were targeted for extra scrutiny and why. The IRS has not publicly identified the groups, repeatedly citing a provision of the tax code prohibiting it from releasing tax return information.
More than 80% of the organizations on the 2011 "political advocacy case" list were conservative, but the effort to police political activity also ensnared at least 11 liberal groups as of November 2011, including Progressives United, Progress Texas and Delawareans for Social and Economic Justice.
The IRS controversy first exploded in May, when Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner admitted that the IRS had targeted Tea Party groups for additional scrutiny beginning in early 2010. The IRS placed a hold on those applications for more than 20 months, an inspector general's investigation found.
The IRS acknowledging that it targeted conservative political groups during the 2012 election season has sparked bipartisan calls for investigation -- with House Republicans already saying they will hold a hearing on the issue.RELATED: Sarah Palin: ‘Same Corrupt IRS’ That Targeted Conservatives ‘Will Be In Charge Of Enforcing Obamacare’
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Friday the Republican-led chamber would investigate the tax-collecting agency for flagging the groups for additional review to see whether they were violating their tax-exempt status.
“The IRS cannot target or intimidate any individual or organization based on their political beliefs,” the Virginia Republican said.
Cantor’s comments were followed within minutes by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp saying he would hold a hearing.
The IRS on Friday apologized for targeting groups, but Camp, R-Mich., argued the agency had “repeatedly denied” such activity.
“The admission by the agency that it targeted American taxpayers based on politics is both shocking and disappointing,” he said.
The committee has jurisdiction over the IRS, but it remains unclear whether other House committees also will investigate the issue, in which roughly 300 groups were flagged.
Republicans were joined by a leading Senate Democrat in the call for congressional investigations.
Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said members have already been looking into the IRS's failure to make sure tax-exempt groups engage only in social welfare activities -- not partisan politics.
Alleged Los Angeles shooter Christopher Jordan Dorner, influenced by left-leaning media coverage of gun crime in the wake of the Newtown shootings, has virtually paralyzed the City of Angels. Floyd Lee Corkins, a gunman incensed by anti-gay marriage bias after reading articles by the liberal advocacy group Southern Poverty Law Center, took a firearm into the Family Research Council’s headquarters with the intention of killing “as many as possible.” He hoped to smash Chick-fil-A sandwiches in the faces of as many corpses as he could. These shooters were clearly moved by left-wing media, and we should thank every benevolent force in the universe that they were. Had either shooter possessed even a tenuous link to a conservative group, a media-driven hysteria about the malevolent influence of right-wing broadcasters and commentators would be gripping the nation today. Fortunately, when a crazed shooter’s ideology is explicitly and demonstrably left-wing, the media displays admirable restraint about linking a gunman’s politics to their acts of violence.RELATED: Accused cop-killer left manifesto praising Obama, Hillary, Piers Morgan, gun control
The instinct by many high profile voices in the media to link violence to right-wing politics is not a new phenomenon, but it has enjoyed a renaissance since the tea party began to achieve political power. The broadcasters who subtly implicated former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in the 2011 attack on a Democratic congresswoman in Tucson, Arizona, is indicative of this bias. CNN host Piers Morgan exemplifies the lamentable instinct to blame conservatism for senseless violence well.
In a November, 2011, interview with Mark Kelly, Morgan said he was shocked by the “extraordinary” fact that Palin did not reach out to former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) immediately after the shooting. Kelly agreed, saying that the infamous map on Palin’s website which featured targets over a variety of congressional districts that Republicans were “targeting” in that year’s midterm elections – an infraction which sparked a national uproar about the martial imagery employed by politicians since the time of Demosthenes – was “not the right thing to do.”
The implication was clear: Palin had some influence on the crazed gunman who shot up an impromptu meeting of a Congresswoman and her constituents. Palin’s crosshairs map had become a scapegoat for prominent voices from Paul Krugman to Randi Zuckerberg. It did not take much investigation into Loughner’s background to learn that he was not especially political, and was certainly not a fan of Palin’s. Nevertheless, nearly a year after this tragic incident, Morgan clung to that baseless charge.
Since the Newtown shooting, Morgan has been beating the drum about the need for stricter gun laws. His pro-gun control crusade made a deep impression on Dorner, who praised Morgan in his manifesto. So, having been specifically cited as someone who influenced Dorner, Morgan would engage in some introspection. Instead, he dismissed his influence on the L.A. shooter outright.
Morgan tweeted confidently — just hours after the manifesto in which Dorner praised not just Morgan but MSNBC’s programming and a proposed Assault Weapons Ban – that politics has “nothing to do” with Dorner’s rampage.
Unfortunately, the spectacularly wrong-headed approach the media took to assigning nonexistent motives to Loughner did not lead the media to impose some restraint on itself when opining on the politics of crazed shooters.
After Aurora, Colorado, shooter James Holmes attacked moviegoers this summer, ABC News reporter Brian Ross – minutes after the name of the suspect had been leaked to the press – sifted through the white pages to discover that there was one James Holmes in Colorado who happened to be a tea party activist. That incident forced ABC’s President Ben Sherwood to issue an apology.
In February, 2010, when the deranged Joseph Stack flew his Piper Cub into the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service in Austin, Texas, few in the elite media waited for the dust to settle before blaming conservatism. “The First Tea Party Terrorist?” asked New York Times columnist Robert Wright.
Even though Wright had Stack’s online manifesto in hand – one in which he praises Marxist communism and laments the harsh excesses of American capitalism – Wright used a magicians sleight of hand to nevertheless link Stack to the tea party.
Was he a Tea Partier — or at least a Tea Party sympathizer? Conservatives who say no point to leftish themes in his manifesto. And it’s true that — in a line much-quoted by these conservatives — he seems to wish that the government would do something about health care. Then again, who doesn’t?When the facts make it impossible to indulge the instinct to link a violent extremist to the right – in Dorner and Corkins’ cases for example – the media displays appropriate caution about assigning political motives to their actions.
…
In the end, the core unifying theme of the Tea Partiers is populist rage, and this is the core theme in Stack’s ramblings, whether the rage is directed at corporate titans (“plunderers”), the government (“totalitarian”) or individual politicians (“liars”).
That is an laudable impulse. The motives that drive disturbed individuals to commit heinous acts of violence, whatever they are, should not be glorified. Dorner’s manifesto clearly indicates that the media, and its coverage of the gun control debate that has followed the Newtown massacre, influenced him significantly. A responsible media would take that into account and maybe, just maybe, ask what they may be doing to contribute to the increased incidences of mass shootings.
That is a national conversation that Americans deserve. Rest assured, if Dorner or Corkins had been influenced to commit their crimes by right-wing media outlets, we would get it. Sadly, that level of self-awareness is nowhere to be found in today’s media landscape.
RELATED: Stop It! Partisan Speculation About Colorado Shooter: He’s A Tea Partier; No, He’s A DemocratOn Good Morning America, ABC News' Brian Ross and George Stephanopoulos suggested that the Tea Party might be connected to the mass shootings early this morning in an Aurora, CO theater during a screening of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. The mainstream media attempted to blame the Tea Party for the Tuscon shootings in January 2011, shortly after Republicans swept the midterm elections. Now, in the critical 2012 elections, the mainstream media seems poised to do the same--and ABC News has led the way.
Here is the exchange between ABC News chief investigator Brian Ross and host George Stephanopoulos about apparent suspect James Holmes:
Stephanolpoulos: I'm going to go to Brian Ross. You've been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant.
Ross: There's a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.
Stephanolpoulos: Okay, we'll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much.
How interesting that Ross and ABC News should think to look to the Tea Party website first--and to broadcast politically volatile information without verifying if that "Jim Holmes" is the same as the suspect.
The "Jim Holmes" page on the Colorado Tea Party website is advertising an event with Middle East commentator Brigitte Gabriel next Thursday, July 26--hardly the behavior of a man who expected to be committing a deadly crime on July 20 for which he would certainly be apprehended and might not survive.
Look for more scapegoating from the mainstream media and the Democrats in the hours and days to follow.
UPDATE: The James Holmes arrested at the Aurora theater was 24 years old and seems to be from Denver, CO, according to a Facebook profile (a similar Facebook profile linked by a local news reporter has not been confirmed as the suspect's profile, either). There are many people with the name "James Holmes" in the area, and the James Homes on the Tea Party website could match a James Homes from Aurora, CO who is in his fifties and therefore does not fit the description of the suspect. More evidence that Ross, Stephanolpoulos and ABC rushed to blame the Tea Party without confirmation that the suspect is also the Tea Party member.
UPDATE: When ABC News corrected its initial report, it tried to spread the blame around to "social media" and "members of the public":
An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect. Several other local residents with similar names were also contacted via social media by members of the public who mistook them for the suspect.
It has since issued a more straightforward apology:
An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect. ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.
According to the poll, both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are viewed unfavorably by the majority of New Yorkers. The Tea Party’s numbers rose a bit this month with 30 percent of voters viewing the movement favorably compared to 28 percent in November and 58 percent viewing it unfavorably compared to 60 percent in November. Occupy Wall Street favorable rating dropped from 45 percent in November to 38 percent. The unfavorable rating for Occupy Wall Street climbed from 44 percent in November to 52 percent.
Morgan Freeman laid down the chips on the Tea Party in a new interview with Piers Morgan that is due to air Friday night.Yeah, because wanting a guy from an opposing party out of office can't have anything to do with failed economic policies, rising unemployment, inexperience and steady attempts to raise taxes, it has to be because those who oppose Barry are "RACIST!" What a simpleton that Morgan Freeman guy is.
The Oscar-winning actor sat down with the British TV host and, amongst other things, discussed his belief that the right wing Tea Party's anti-Obama stance is rooted in racism.
When asked by Morgan whether Obama's presidency has made racism in the United States better or worse, Freeman, who once played apartheid-defying South African president Nelson Mandela, frankly stated that his time in office has made it worse, as he has become a target of the right's aggression.
"Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term," the actor said. "What’s, what does that, what underlines that? 'Screw the country. We’re going to whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here.'"
Declaring once again that "it's a racist thing," Freeman said the group's rise has shown the hate still lingering in America.
"Well, it just shows the weak, dark, underside of America," he said. "We’re supposed to be better than that. We really are. That’s, that’s why all those people were in tears when Obama was elected president. “Ah, look at what we are. Look at how, this is America.” You know? And then it just sort of started turning because these people surfaced like stirring up muddy water."
Have you ever fantasized about beating Bill O'Reilly to death with a crowbar or shooting up the offices of Americans for Prosperity with an Uzi? Well, the folks at StarvingEyes Advergaming apparently have and they'd like to share their latest creation with the world. The game is called "Tea Party Zombies Must Die" and, apart from abysmal game play, features several different levels where your only objective is to mercilessly slaughter everyone around you whether they are a Fox News stars or simply Americans For Prosperity employees.
Among the notable conservatives who you are tasked with brutally killing are Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Brit Hume, Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Glenn Beck, and the Koch Brothers.
Of course there are plenty of lesser targets to mindlessly butcher like the "factory made blonde Fox News barbie who has never had a problem in her life zombie" or the "Koch industries Koch Whore lobbyist pig zombie". The names are as creative as they are classy. Kind of like the game itself.
While it is disturbing to see that some people believe it would be fun to mow down your political opponents it's also quite that odd that an advertising company with a diverse portfolio of high profile corporate clients from Meow Mix to Pepsi would create a game to allow those people to do just that. Does StarvingEyes really want to risk their business with TLC or Hotels.com by going out on their own to make a disgusting and offensive game like this? Or were they paid?
Regardless of who was responsible this news comes at just the right time to reinforce the already solid theory that the left doesn't care at all about the New Tone they championed not so long ago. New Tone indeed...
UPDATE: I emailed StarvingEyes for comment on the game and it potentially bothering other clients. Jason Oda, the head of the company, responded with the following: "The game was just a personal project. I am not worried about it effecting business."
A "tea party" group has fired back at Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who during a Saturday forum for unemployed people in Inglewood said "the 'tea party' can go straight to hell."
The event occurred a day after new statistics were released showing that California's jobless rate last month went up to 12%, from 11.8%. California now has the second-highest rate of unemployment in the nation, trailing only Nevada at 12.9%, and its jobless rate is well above the U.S. average of 9.1%.
More than 1,000 people attended "Kitchen Table Summit," which was designed to give the jobless an opportunity to vent to elected officials and share their struggles about finding a job.
Waters criticized Republicans in Congress, saying: "I'm not afraid of anybody. This is a tough game. You can't be intimidated. You can't be frightened. And as far as I'm concerned, the 'tea party' can go straight to hell."
Waters told the crowd about job fairs the Congressional Black Caucus is organizing nationwide, including one such event scheduled for Aug. 31 in Los Angeles. She encouraged residents to continue their push to make government get big businesses' help to fix the problem.
"You got to stand with me to fight this," Waters said.Just when you commend a well-known black liberal like Waters finally speaking out on the fact that Barry ignores his black electorate and his liberal policies have made things worse for blacks in America, she goes back to being the crazy, old witch that conservatives have long known her to be. No doubt Barry will have little to nothing to say about this diabolical rant.
One tea party group took issue with Waters in a statement released Monday.
"We’ve had Democrats calling American citizens ‘terrorists’ and ‘hostage takers,’ and now an elected Democratic representative says that we can ‘go straight to hell,’” the group Tea Party Patriots said, according to the Washington Post. “... Is civility only required from their opponents? Perhaps it’s time for a new-NEW era of civility. ... The president’s silence on these latest violations of civility has been deafening, but not surprising.”
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