Category Archives: Constitution
Giffords Raises $11 Million for Gun Control
Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly’s organization Americans for Responsible Solutions (ARS) raised $11 million for gun control efforts over the past four months.
ARS says the money was raised from 53,000 different donors. What hasn’t been explained is whether the bulk of the money came from major donors like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other infamous anti-gun advocates.
To date, ARS has used some of the money to run ads against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), both of whom voted against gun control in the Senate on April 17. ARS also run “thank you ads” for Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Kay Hagan (D-NC), all of whom voted for gun control.
ARS has retained the bulk of the funds it has gathered to help counter the NRA when gun control comes up for another vote.
ARS membership is 336,000. NRA membership is 5,000,000.
–AWR Hawkins, Breitbart.com
Obama Regime Endorses Hateful, Anti-Christian Extremism
“Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”
“We MUST vigorously support the continuing efforts to expose pathologically anti-gay, Islamaphobic, and rabidly intolerant agitators for what they are: die-hard enemies of the United States Constitution. Monsters, one and all. To do anything less would be to roll out a red carpet to those who would usher in a blood-drenched, draconian era of persecutions, nationalistic militarism, and superstitious theocracy.”
– Mikey Weinstein, hateful, anti-Christian extremist, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, supporter of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which inspired Floyd Corkins to try to murder the staff at Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.
Let these words sink in.
These are some of the angriest, most vulgar and vile, and certainly some of the most hateful remarks ever directed at American Christians. American Christians serving in the military, risking their lives for liberty, by the way.
These are among the most hateful, disgusting, incendiary remarks we’ve ever seen. And Barack Obama’s military leaders agree with them. Breitbart.com reported this week that Weinstein will be a consultant to the Pentagon to develop new policies on religious tolerance, including a policy for court-martialing military chaplains who share the Christian Gospel during spiritual counseling of American troops.
That created such an uproar that the government backtracked and toned down its anti-Christian threat.
But do not let down your guard. The times are ominous and the hour is late. The persecution of the Church is in a full sprint. And President Obama — the most radical and antagonistic president ever, against religious freedom — is encouraging it.
This latest outrage is not surfacing in a vacuum. Recently it was learned that a U.S. Army Reserve Equal Opportunity training brief identified “Evangelical Christianity” and “Catholicism” as examples of “religious extremism” like al-Qaida, Hamas, and the Klu Klux Klan.
Col. (Ret.) Ron Crews, executive director of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty, said: “Men and women of faith who have served the Army faithfully for centuries shouldn’t be likened to those who have regularly threatened the peace and security of the United States. It is dishonorable for any U.S. military entity to allow this type of wrongheaded characterization. It also appears that some military entities are using definitions of ‘hate’ and ‘extreme’ from the lists of anti-Christian political organizations. That violates the apolitical stance appropriate for the military.”
These troubling developments are reminders that the so-called “progressive movement” represents anything but progress. Progressivism — as Democrats define it — is taking America backward, coursening the culture, spreading hate and fascism. They have no intention of competing fairly in the marketplace of ideas, preferring instead to lie, demonize, and destroy their opponents as “enemies.” It’s part of the politics of destruction, a hideous practice all too characteristic of the Clinton and Obama administrationws.
SHOCKING MUST READ: Don’t Let Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Advocates Institute Cultural Madness and Turn America on its Head
Sky Fall: Gender Ideology Comes to the Schoolhouse
In our discussions with advocates of redefining marriage, we often hear that defenders of marriage and sexual difference are overreacting to cultural and legal changes. “You run around yelling that the sky is falling,” we’re told. “We’ve had same-sex marriage for a decade now in Massachusetts, and guess what: The sky is not falling.”
This is not an argument, of course, but an attempt to end any discussion of what it would mean to remove sexual distinctions from the law. As it did to James Bond’s psychiatric evaluation in the recent hit movie, the mention of the phrase “sky fall” is supposed to terminate the proceedings.
No serious participants in the current marriage discussion are running around like Chicken Little. Defenders of marriage are concerned primarily about the long-term implications of redefining the institution. We might not expect the redefinition of marriage to alter cultural practices dramatically right away. After all, it took nearly two generations to realize the full effects of the divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. But strange things are nevertheless happening in Massachusetts, where sexual difference was eliminated from marriage laws in 2003.
Two years ago, the Massachusetts legislature enacted a statute prohibiting, among other things, discrimination in public schools on the basis of “gender identity.” The law defines gender identity as “a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behavior,” which is not determined by “the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth.”
On the basis of that statute, the Massachusetts Department of Education (MDOE) has now eradicated sexual distinctions from public schools. MDOE’s new directive requires schools to let children use bathrooms and play on sports teams according to the gender they personally identify as theirs, not their anatomical sex. The directive also admonishes schools to eliminate sex and gender distinctions in graduation garb, physical education, and other practices.
Under Massachusetts law, the connection between gender identity and sexual distinction is now considered a historical accident, the result of arbitrary (at best) or mistaken documentation at birth. MDOE’s directive explains:
One’s gender identity is an innate, largely inflexible characteristic of each individual’s personality that is generally established by age four, although the age at which individuals come to understand and express their gender identity may vary based on each person’s social and familial social development. As a result, the person best situated to determine a student’s gender identity is that student himself or herself.
Because the child is solely responsible for identifying his or her own gender, the regulations require school officials to seek the student’s permission before disclosing the student’s gender identity to his or her parents.
That’s not all. The regulations suggest that students who don’t endorse a fellow student’s gender identity may be subject to punishment. After condemning bullying, the directive endorses a memorandum that a Massachusetts school principal sent to teachers instructing them to discipline students who intentionally refer to a transgender student by his or her given name, or the pronoun corresponding to his or her anatomical sex. Such behavior “should not be tolerated.”
MDOE justifies these regulations on pedagogical grounds: “All students need a safe and supportive school environment to progress academically and developmentally.” By “all students” MDOE must mean all students who share MDOE’s conception of sex and gender as an individual choice.
It is not difficult to imagine who will embrace MDOE’s conception. The regulations state, “A student who says she is a girl and wishes to be regarded that way throughout the school day and throughout every, or almost every, other area of her life, should be respected and treated like a girl” (emphasis ours). The caveat that the student might want to be treated like a boy for some purposes seems an implicit admission that gender identity is not, in fact, an inflexible characteristic, as MDOE insists, but rather can adjust over time. And the directive states that the law “does not require consistent and uniform assertion of gender identity” (emphasis original).
While we doubt that teenage boys will take much interest in the provenance of gender personality, it’s not a stretch to suppose that they will welcome its implications for co-ed activity.
Perhaps this is why many parents in Massachusetts find these regulations shocking. We must confess that we are not so surprised. Massachusetts lawmakers have for many years been eradicating sexual distinctions from the law. This result seems to us the logical consequence of those efforts.
Redefining marriage to eliminate sexual complementarity as an essential characteristic doesn’t automatically commit a state to forcing girls to share locker rooms with boys. But there is a logical connection. One of the premises justifying the redefinition of marriage also grounds these new regulations, that is, the view that sexual difference is irrelevant to the practice of marriage.
But if sexual difference is irrelevant to marriage, then how can it be relevant to any practices? Once the state has determined that sexual difference is no longer a legitimate reason to extend special recognition to man-woman monogamy, there is no reason in principle to maintain sexual distinctions in less intimate practices. If one’s anatomical reality isn’t relevant to one’s marriage, it’s even less obvious why it should be relevant to one’s bathroom choice.
To be sure, there are prudential implications of eradicating sexual distinction from education laws. But if letting people identify their own gender is a matter of justice, then it’s the job of law to solve the practical problems of implementation. (That is a key lesson of civil rights legislation.)
Though future practical problems might seem obvious, the law makes it far from clear that there are any. If a boy who identifies as a girl really is a girl, as the law declaims, then any perceived harms resulting from his presence in a girls’ locker room are illusory. No wonder the Commonwealth exhorts school officials to discipline students who object to the arrangement.
There are other indications that those who perceive inherent differences between men and women will increasingly be marginalized from public life in Massachusetts. A few months ago, a federal court in Massachusetts ruled that the United States Constitution requires the Commonwealth’s Department of Corrections to pay for a sex-change surgery requested by an inmate who is serving time for murder. It is cruel and unusual punishment, the court reasoned, to force the prisoner to keep his anatomy intact while he is incarcerated.
This ruling might seem unrelated to removing sexual distinctions from law, but for the court’s reasoning. The court discredited the Commonwealth’s expert witnesses, who expressed doubt that a sex-change surgery is medically necessary, and who recommended treating the prisoner’s psychological and emotional disorders instead.
The court ruled that these recommendations are “not within the range that would be acceptable by prudent professionals.” In other words, the court decided that no prudent professional would deny sex-change surgery to a male prisoner who identifies himself as a woman.
The lesson is clear. If you think male and female are two distinct sexes determined by your anatomy at birth, then don’t bother serving as an expert witness in the United States District Court in Massachusetts. Nor can you in good conscience send your children to public school in the Commonwealth. A view of human nature that until very recently was understood to be obvious is becoming a source of disqualification from participating in public life.
As lawyers, we perceive the logic of this latest regulatory innovation. But as fathers, we think that those who are dismayed by MDOE’s regulations are the only Massachusetts residents who can plausibly claim to be in their right minds. If the sky is not falling then it is at least showing ominous fissures.
Adam MacLeod is an associate professor at Faulkner University’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law and a 2012-2013 Visiting Fellow of the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Andrew Beckwith is Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the Massachusetts Family Institute.
Stop Phoenix from Passing Radical Law
On Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. the Phoenix City Council is going to show its utter depravity by considering a resolution allowing men who think they are female to use women’s restrooms. This radical far left-wing resolution should never have seen the light of day, but this kind of madness is sweeping the nation from the Left.
This means that a man who needs psychological help would be within his legal rights to use the same restroom as your little girl in public accommodations like restaurants, schools, and churches.
Because of the notoriety of this bill, the council session has been moved to the Orpheum Theater at 203 W. Adams Street in Phoenix.
The most radical Left elements of Arizona are all for this nonsense. Those with common sense are against it. Equality Arizona, the most vocal of the far Left special interests groups in the state, is calling people who oppose this bill “extremists on the fringe.” Their friends on the Council, including Mayor Greg Stanton, rushed this bill forward with little to no transparency. Breaking his campaign promise from last year.
Here’s what this serpent-inspired bill will do, if the council is crazy enough to pass it:
- If a business or church asks the man to leave the ladies’ room it will face civil and criminal prosecution for “discrimination.”
- There are no protections in this law to prohibit a predator from posing as a so-called “transgender” to gain access to a child through a restroom or locker room.
- Every business in or that works with the City of Phoenix would face the threat of frivolous lawsuits regardless of their views on homosexuality and so-called “gender identity” – a left-wing fabrication. The mere implication that a business is ”unwelcoming” or “unaccepting” to a homosexual or transgender can trigger a criminal investigation and costly lawsuit that could bankrupt a business. Guess that’s the kind of business environment Stanton wants to create here.
- Churches are not exempt from being forced to allow transgenders in whatever restroom they choose. Furthermore, the weak exemption in this law could force a church or a parachurch organization, like a Christian school, to hire homosexuals and transgenders regardless of the church’s religious beliefs. An affront to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.
Two adults on the Phoenix City Council, Jim Waring and Sal DiCiccio, are opposed to this threat to children, families, businesses and ministries. Councilman DiCiccio’s news release appears in the message below this one.
Contact these council members and urge them to be reasonable and talk these folks off the ledge before they take the state’s largest city into the moral abyss:
- Thelda Williams: council.district.1@phoenix.gov, 602-262-7444
- Vice Mayor Bill Gates: council.district.3@phoenix.gov, 602-262-7441
- Daniel Valenzuela: council.district.5@phoenix.gov, 602-262-7446
- Michael Nowakowski: council.district.7@phoenix.gov, 602-262-7492
- Michael Johnson: council.district.8@phoenix.gov, 602-262-7493
Phoenix ready to take a radical left turn
If you own a business, please be sitting down when you read the latest proposal. The new ordinance being fast-tracked by Mayor Stanton is a disaster for local small businesses in the City of Phoenix. For the first time, any business with one or more employee will be subject to criminal penalties of up to a Class 1 misdemeanor, the highest misdemeanor one can receive.
The proposal requires all businesses that operate in Phoenix to accommodate any individual that wants to express their personal gender or identity. If for example, a man wanted to use the woman’s bathroom in order to express himself then the business owner will be required to allow him to do that or face a criminal penalty and civil litigation. A criminal penalty that will be enforced by the City of Phoenix.
This is a difficult thing to discuss. It opens the door to individuals claiming you are a bigot, old fashioned and someone who condones discrimination. Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe in full transparency and you, the citizens, have every right to know what your leaders are up to. And, you need to know about it before it passes next week. Click here to read the ordinance (see “2013 Proposed Human Relations Ordinance changes”)
The language of the ordinance is so broad; the floodgates of litigation against businesses will be opened. What’s worse, the business community has not even been made aware of this and almost all of the elected leaders in the City were unaware of these proposed changes until last week. This tactic of ramming through such dramatic changes without input from community that will be impacted the most, our local small businesses, shows a total disregard for our business community. This lack of transparency must stop immediately. I have sent a letter and called on the City Manager to immediately notify all businesses in the City of Phoenix of these changes-before the vote next week. Click here to read the letter.
This proposed ordinance should be continued to allow all affected parties an opportunity to comment and have their voices heard. Discrimination is deplorable and we should not stand for it. However, the proposed changes are poorly crafted and go after a non-existent problem.
If this ordinance passes as it is expected to do, business will be forced to hire more lawyers than employees.
My best to you and your family,
Sal DiCiccio, City Council member, Phoenix
Obama Hides Behind Other People’s Children to Call for Gun Grab
Fox News
The National Rifle Association is pushing its proposal for an armed officer in every school in the country with a new ad that calls President Obama an “elitist hypocrite” for his daughters’ security detail.
The 35-second ad, released Tuesday on the NRA’s Website, criticizes Obama for saying he is “skeptical” that armed security is the solution to school violence.
“Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” the ad asks.
NRA chief Wayne LaPierre introduced the gun rights group’s proposal to add armed officers to schools in his high-profile news conference in the wake of the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 first-graders dead. Stricter gun laws aren’t the answer, LaPierre said.
Lawmakers initially seemed willing to consider new gun control legislation, though the prospect for passing such measures in Congress has since diminished.
Even so, Obama plans to announce a range of options Wednesday, including new gun regulations through legislation and executive actions that the White House says are available without congressional approval.
White House mouthpiece Jay Carney called the NRA ad “cowardly” and criticized mention of the president’s children. Yet it was perfectly okay with the president to USE other people’s children, if not hide behind them, in today’s gun grab press conference.