Appomattox Again April 15, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Right Wing.Tags: Alex Jones, bill o'reilly, conspiracy theories, eric boehlert, fox news, Glenn Beck, gun ban, gun control, hate, ichard poplawski, Jim Adkisson, liberals, media matters, murrah building, Obama, oklahoma city bombing, pittsburgh killing, right wing, roger hollander, ruby ridge, Rush Limbaugh, sean hannity, second amendment, timothy mcveigh, waco, william pitt
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Friday 10 April 2009
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.”
- Timothy McVeigh quoting from “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley
April 9 was a Sunday in 1865, and in the town of Appomattox, Virginia, the sun was shining down on the end of a war. Confederate forces, led by Gen. Robert E. Lee, had finally been brought to bay by Gen. Ulysses Grant after four grueling, blood-sodden years. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox was the conclusion of the largest and deadliest armed insurrection in American history.
April 9 was a Thursday in 2009, and there are some lo these 144 years later who would very much like to see another armed insurrection erupt within these United States. The casus belli for today’s would-be revolutionaries is not states’ rights, slavery or economic independence, but is instead a toxic mix of fundamentalist Christianity, ultra-conservative orthodoxy and, more than anything else, guns.
The existence of armed and angry insurrectionists in America is nothing new. As Robert Kennedy once observed, “One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.” The militia movement, in one form or another, has been a part of our history literally since the founding of the nation itself, and memories of Waco, Ruby Ridge and the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City remain acutely fresh in mind even years later.
Lately, the news has been flooded with reports of citizens arming themselves to the teeth, egged on by right-wing media personalities prophesying doom, the rise of socialism, and that a Marxist dictator now sits in the Oval Office. This frenzy has been spilling from talk radio and television out into the streets for weeks now, and has recently metastasized into acts of outrageous violence. It smells like a new beginning of something this nation has not been forced to endure for nearly a decade.
Last Monday, a man named Richard Poplawski ambushed and murdered three Pittsburgh police officers and tried to kill nine others. Poplawski’s motivations, according to friends and family, centered around his belief in the existence of a vast government conspiracy to destroy American freedoms while establishing a left-wing dictatorship under President Obama. Poplawski came to believe all this after listening to and reading the paranoid rantings of right-wing luminaries like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
Last July, a man named Jim Adkisson walked into a Universalist church in Knoxville and began blazing away with a 12-gauge shotgun, killing two people and wounding several others. He had 70 shotgun shells with him, and fully intended to massacre as many people in the church as possible before police killed him, but he was tackled and disarmed by members of the congregation before he could complete his task.
Eric Boehlert, writing for Media Matters on April 7, said, “When investigators went to Adkisson’s home in search of a motive, as well as evidence for the pending trial, they found copies of Savage’s ‘Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder,’ ‘Let Freedom Ring’ by Sean Hannity, and ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ by Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly. They also came across what was supposed to have been Adkisson’s suicide note: a handwritten, four-page manifesto explaining his murderous actions. The one-word answer for his deed? Hate. The three-word answer? He hated liberals.”
”The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil,” wrote Adkisson, “is kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just Kill yourself. Do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals!”
Describing the Pittsburgh incident, Boehlert wrote, “In the wake of the bloodbath, we learned that Poplawski was something of a conspiracy nut who embraced dark, radical rhetoric about America. He was convinced the government wanted to take away his guns, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Specifically, Poplawski, as one friend described it, feared ‘the Obama gun ban that’s on the way’ and ‘didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.’ (FYI, there is no Obama gun ban in the works.) The same friend said the shooter feared America was ‘going to see the end of our times.’”
”Hysterical warnings of government gun grabs and a socialist takeover of the US are no longer the sole proprietary interest of fringe players like Jones,” wrote Max Blumenthal on Wednesday. “In the Obama era, Jones’s conspiracy theories have graduated to primetime on Fox News. And radicals like Poplawski are tuning in. Indeed, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the alleged killer posted a YouTube clip to (neo-Nazi web site) Stormfront of top-rated Fox News host Glenn Beck contemplating the existence of FEMA-managed concentration camps. (‘He backed out,’ Poplawski wrote cryptically beside the video.) Three weeks later, Poplawski posted another YouTube clip to Stormfront, this time of a video blogger advocating ‘Tea Parties,’ or grassroots conservative protests organized by Beck and Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich against President Barack Obama’s bailout plan.”
There have been more stories like this in recent months, and if history is any guide, there will be more to come. The timing of all this is deeply troubling, and the media players involved are all too familiar. There is something sinister at work here, something malevolent, something sly.
Consider the curious historical synchronicity of all this: after the inauguration of a new Democratic president, there has been a sudden upsurge of right-wing polemicists agitating right-wing citizens into right-wing-motivated acts of violence. The last time things came together like this was back in 1993, after the Waco and Ruby Ridge debacles, combined with the passage of NAFTA and the Brady Bill, detonated into a militia movement that was wildly active, and exceedingly violent, throughout the entirety of President Bill Clinton’s two terms.
Dozens of militia-related incidents, including the Oklahoma City bombing, took place during those years. In 2001, however, these incidents stopped almost completely, and for the entirety of George W. Bush’s two terms as president, hardly a peep was heard from the militia movement that had been so robustly vigorous during the administration of Bush’s predecessor.
A Democratic president takes office in 1993 and the militia movement explodes, egged on by a whole host of right-wing media voices.
A Republican president takes office in 2001 and the militia movement, along with those media voices who sponsored it, all but disappear from the American political landscape.
A Democratic president takes office in 2009, and once again, right-wing media voices begin their clarion call for armed revolution, and once again, a portion of their listeners erupt into violence.
”In Politics,” President Franklin Roosevelt once said, “nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
Indeed.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: “War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know” and “The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.” His newest book, “House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America’s Ravaged Reputation,” is now available from PoliPointPress.
Max Blumenthal on “Rick Warren’s Double Life” December 24, 2008
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Human Rights.Tags: amy goodman, Barack Obama, beliefnet, dailybeast, Democracy Now, gay marriage, gay rights, inauguration, Iran, james dobson, lesbian rights, max blumenthal, pat robertson, proposition 8, rick warren, roger hollander, saddleback church, same-sex marriage, sean hannity
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23 december 2008
President-elect Barack Obama is drawing criticism from many supporters for his choice to deliver the invocation at next month’s inauguration. Obama has selected the Reverend Rick Warren, a leading evangelical opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. Warren supported California’s recent gay marriage ban and has compared abortion to the Nazi Holocaust. In a recent interview with the website BeliefNet.com, Warren said he thinks gay marriage is comparable to incest, polygamy and child abuse. We speak to investigative journalist Max Blumenthal.
AMY GOODMAN: President-elect Barack Obama is drawing criticism from many supporters for his choice to deliver the invocation at next month’s inauguration. Obama selected the Reverend Rick Warren, a leading evangelical opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. Warren supported California’s recent gay marriage ban and has compared abortion to the Nazi Holocaust. In a recent interview with the website beliefnet.com, Warren said he thinks gay marriage is comparable to incest, polygamy and child abuse.
- REV. RICK WARREN: I’m opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.
STEVEN WALDMAN: Do you think those are equivalent to gays getting married?
REV. RICK WARREN: Oh, I do. I just say, for 5,000 years, marriage has been defined by every single culture and every single religion. This is not a Christian issue. Buddhists, Muslims, Jews—you know, historically, marriage is a man and a woman.
AMY GOODMAN: The Reverend Rick Warren, speaking to beliefnet.com. After Warren’s inauguration appearance was announced, Obama was forced to defend his choice.
- PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA: It is no secret that I am a fierce advocate for equality for gay and lesbian Americans. It is something that I have been consistent on and something that I intend to continue to be consistent on during my presidency.
What I’ve also said is that it is important for America to come together, even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues. And I would note that a couple of years ago, I was invited to Rick Warren’s church to speak, despite his awareness that I held views that were entirely contrary to his when it came to gay and lesbian rights, when it came to issues like abortion. Nevertheless, I had an opportunity to speak. And that dialogue, I think, is part of what my campaign’s been all about.
AMY GOODMAN: President-elect Barack Obama, speaking in Chicago last week.
I’m joined now by Max Blumenthal, Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute. His work has appeared in The Nation, Salon and many other publications, currently writing a book on the US evangelical movement. His latest article, “Rick Warren’s Hypocritical Double Life,” is online at dailybeast.com. Max Blumenthal joins us by DN! video stream.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Max.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the history of Rick Warren.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, the history of Rick Warren is pretty interesting. And you heard some of his views right there. These are views that people have only recently started paying attention to. Prior to this controversy, Rick Warren was, you know, proffered by the media as the voice of the new evangelical movement, which embraces environmentalism and fights poverty and is going to move beyond the old hobgoblins of the Christian right and the old, you know, draconian figures of the Christian right, like James Dobson and Pat Robertson. Rick Warren was supposed to be the pioneer of this new movement. He is the founding pastor of Saddleback Church, a megachurch in Orange County. And he’s the author of The Purpose Driven Life, which is, you know, a sort of subtly Christian, self-help manual that sold 25 million copies. So he has a really broad appeal, and he’s planted churches across the world, especially in Africa.
And because, you know, the media has expected evangelicals, especially conservative evangelicals, to be draconian and retrograde, you know, they’ve made a hero out of Rick Warren without looking at who he really is and what he really believes. Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times, for example, has called Rick Warren an evangelical liberals can love. You know, Newsweek named Rick Warren one of the fifteen people who make America great. And even The Nation, which I’ve written for, you know, the venerable left-wing magazine, in 2005 published a piece calling Rick Warren America’s pastor.
You know, he wears a Hawaiian shirt. He looks like a big teddy bear. He doesn’t holler or hector. He speaks in a ponderous tone. And he does seem to genuinely care about the environment and care about poverty. It’s not clear what he’s actually done.
And he’s been pumped up by a small group of Democratic consultants, who urged Barack Obama first to go to his church and speak with him and then to participate in a debate this August that was broadcast by CNN, the Saddleback Forum, where Rick Warren essentially got to interview both candidates sequentially, John McCain and Barack Obama, on the issues and serve as the national minister. The debate went really badly for Obama, because Rick Warren asked him a trick question about abortion: When does a baby get human rights? Barack Obama couldn’t answer it. Soon after, he was attacked by right-wing radio hosts for his answer, because he said, you know, “This question is above my pay grade.” And Rick Warren even went on a conservative radio show and, you know, chuckled about Obama’s response and kind of lightly mocked him.
So, the real Rick Warren is someone who fights the culture war with a velvet glove. He’s a religious right figure who’s figured out a new strategy to move into a Democratic post-Bush era and still hold influence. He even—he freely admitted to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal that the principal difference, the only difference, between him and James Dobson is a matter of tone. And when I called Rick Warren’s PR handlers, you know, the people that are responsible for making him into this major national figure, from Larry A. Ross Communications, they kind of laughed at the idea that he was America’s pastor. They said he’s consistent with what the Bible teaches. He’s not trying to be America’s pastor or whatever.
So, Rick Warren openly backed Proposition 8 in California last November—this November, and he did so in the terms that you heard him speaking to Steven Waldman, essentially saying that two percent of our population, the homosexual population, was trying to dictate to the rest us, which is a really demagogic thing to say. He told that to his congregation. And he’s backed every anti-gay proposition that’s come down the pike in California in the last ten years, including Proposition 22, which laid the groundwork for Proposition 8. He joined up with James Dobson and Charles Colson and Tony Perkins and these people to do this.
Beyond that, he compares pro-choice advocates to Holocaust deniers. He recently was interviewed by Sean Hannity, and Sean Hannity asked him, “Should we attack Iran?” And Rick Warren said, “Well, it’s our God-given obligation to take out evildoers.” He has recently scrubbed material from his website claiming that man walked the earth with dinosaurs, basically that, you know, history is one big Flintstones episode. He will not allow homosexuals to be members of his church, and he recently scrubbed that from his website.
So it’s just interesting to me that people are finally paying attention to this, after Rick Warren has never tried to hide his views. He’s never really gamed the media. It’s just that progressives have finally drawn the line, where Barack Obama has not.
AMY GOODMAN: You write about, one, Rick Warren saying he doesn’t feel that politics and religion should be mixed. But you also talk about how in the last days of the presidential race of Bush’s 2004 re-election bid, Warren sent an urgent blast email to hundreds of thousands of evangelicals, insisting they base their votes on five non-negotiable issues: abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, human cloning and euthanasia.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. And this is before Rick Warren became a member of the ONE Campaign, before, you know, the media had began puffing him, and before people—Democratic consultants like Mara Vanderslice, who ran a sort of Christian front group for Obama called Matthew 25, and self-proclaimed progressive evangelicals in the media, like Amy Sullivan, began presenting him as one of the new evangelicals who was going to take us beyond the Christian right. But the evidence was there that Rick Warren had sort of insidiously backed George W. Bush by saying that pastors had to vote and urge their congregations to vote on issues like abortion and homosexuality. If you vote on those issues and you say that those issues are non-negotiable, then of course you’re going to vote for George W. Bush, and of course you’re going to back the Republicans for Congress.
Beyond that, you know, Rick Warren says he’s for the environment. Rick Warren says that he’s for fighting poverty, which is great. But what has he actually done? You know, I’ve spent hours scouring the internet, calling around, trying to find some results that Rick Warren has produced in Africa against AIDS, results he’s produced against poverty. And all I can find is that his peace programs, which he calls them, are sort of recruitment vehicles for the churches that he’s planning in Africa and that he is using these programs actually to evangelize, and there’s no real way of measuring his results. And there are Christian groups that are doing good work, you know, in the third world, that are fighting poverty, and they measure results, groups like Medical Teams International. Even World Vision measures results. But we have no way of knowing what Rick Warren is doing. It looks to me like he’s going around to the Aspen Institute and to these big elite festivals and telling people who expect evangelicals to be retrograde and who expect evangelicals to be draconian, that he’s doing something different. And he speaks the language that people want to hear in the media-manufactured age of post-partisanship. But it’s unclear what he’s actually doing, beyond fighting the culture war with a velvet glove.
AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, let’s turn to another clip highlighting some of Rick Warren’s views. Earlier this month, he was interviewed by Ann Curry of MSNBC.
- ANN CURRY: If science finds that this is biological—
REV. RICK WARREN: Yeah?
ANN CURRY: —that people are born to be gay, would you change your position?
REV. RICK WARREN: No. And the reason why is because we all have biological predispositions. I’m naturally inclined to have sex with every beautiful woman I see. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Rick Warren. Max Blumenthal, final thoughts?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, that’s a bizarre remark I haven’t heard. And, you know, I like to get to know women first, and I think, you know, most people do. Rick Warren has a doctrine of women’s submission, which he preaches to his church, and he tells the female members of his church that they have to support their husbands’ decisions, even if they make bad financial decisions, because women have to submit in a biblical manner to their husbands. So this goes way beyond being anti-gay. He’s, you know, patriarchal. He’s supported assassinating Iran’s president. And he’s just—
You know, I have no problem, and I don’t think anyone should have any problem with Barack Obama going to Rick Warren’s church and meeting with him or working with him on good initiatives. But the question is, where does Barack Obama draw the line when someone demonizes a segment of Americans? Is this person really fit to address the nation and confer God’s blessing on the entire United States of America, when Rick Warren freely admits that he only believes that a small segment of Americans are going to heaven and that the rest of us are going to burn in an everlasting lake of fire? That’s the question. And I think that Barack Obama has answered it. But at the very least, progressives have drawn the line here, and I think they should hold the line.
AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, I want to thank you for being with us, Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute, writing a book on the evangelical movement. His latest article is called “Rick Warren’s Hypocritical Double Life.” It’s online at dailybeast.com.
My Very Last Post on Palin: I Promise November 29, 2008
Posted by rogerhollander in Humor, Sarah Palin.Tags: ann coulter, chambliss, fox news, georgia, hasselbeck, margaret and helen, max cleland, political humor, roger hollander, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, sean hannity, war hero
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I urge you to go to Margaret and Helen’s Website (Best Friends for Sixty Years and Counting):
http://margaretandhelen.wordpress.com
The photo alone is worth the price of admission. These two bitter sweet old gals really know how to tell it like it is. This is by far one of the very best Websites on the entire Internet for politically relevant and profoundly acicid humor. I swear to God that if I believed in incarnation I would think that Mark Twain has come back as Siamese twins attached at the truly hip. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed. Here is their latest offering, written by Helen because Margaret is “visiting family and probably hasn’t turned on the boob tube even once.”
Sarah Palin, sit down and shut the hell up
I thought I was done. Really I did. Obama won. Bush is almost gone. I was ready to sit back and enjoy the ride. Damn it to hell. She’s back. One day she’s standing in front of a dying turkey talking about how she needs to get back to the business of running Alaska and the next day she’s making plans to head on down to Georgia to campaign for that devil, Chambliss.
You see Chambliss is the guy who won the Georgia Senate seat from Max Cleland a few years back. Now pay attention folks because this is important. Chambliss suggested that Cleland was soft on homeland security. Cleland, of course, is a war hero – one who came home from war with three less limbs than when he began. Yep. Cleland lost an arm and both legs in defense of his country, but Chambliss defeated him with ads suggesting he didn’t have the courage to protect us from terrorists.
So Chambliss is an ass. That’s a given. His opponent in this run-off election is Mr. Martin. Now Martin has all of his limbs so Chambliss is not sure how to attack him. So he called in the Republican attack dog… a certain pitt bull in lipstick who apparently has more political lives than a pitt cat. Heads up folks. Sarah Palin is back and my heart goes out to all our dear friends over there in Georgia. She’s sort of like headlice. You can’t just shampoo your hair. You have to boil everything afterwards.
But let me tell you why I am up on my soap box again so quickly, because I really did plan to relax at least until after the turkey had digested. The other night we were visiting with neighbors at a kind of pre-holiday block party. By the way, if you don’t know your neighbors, you should. People live right next door to complete strangers these days and that just isn’t right. Neighbors should be part of your extended family. Life was better when we all knew our neighbors. But I digress.
At this little gathering I met a couple of idiots who live around the corner from us - couple of morons who still have the McCain/Palin sticker on the back of their car. Here is just a few of the quotes from the evening:
“We are just so worried about what is going to happen to the country now that a Muslim is President.”
“William Ayers raised a lot of money for Obama’s campaign and now Obama owes him a lot of favors.”
“Did you know that no one has been able to prove that he actually graduated from Harvard?”
Trust me, that was just a sampling. I asked them where they had heard this load of crap and I got various references to Limbaugh and Fox News. Complete and utter idiots. I wanted to tell them to sit down and shut the hell up, but they are neighbors. So before I left I told them if they wanted to live in fear that was their choice, but when they were ready to rejoin society do drop by for a piece of pie.
When I got back home, I made the mistake of watching the news. Now I don’t know what Margaret thinks about this because she is visiting family and probably hasn’t turned on the boob tube even once. But when I heard that Sarah Palin will be heading to Georgia to campaign for Chambliss… Well Sarah Palin is not my neighbor. And the last time I checked Alaska was a long way from Georgia. So I hope my friends in Georgia will join me in saying, “Governor Palin, sit down and shut the hell up.”
And while I am on the soap box:
Rush Limbaugh has had the mic entirely too long. For years he has kept this country divided with hate speech and lies. Quite frankly he probably has done more to harm this country than even George Bush. He is neither funny nor relevant anymore. And have you listened to the morons who call into his show? Poor man has to pander to idiots day in and day out. His open mic Friday must be pure torture. OxyContin is a powerful pain pill. Is there any doubt why he would need it so desperately? Together we should all tell him and his callers to sit down and shut the hell up.
Same goes for Ann Coulter. Have you read any of her books. I read a few pages of her last one and it made me wonder if she ever actually went to school. My daughter is a teacher and the kids in her second grade class can write better than that. Ann’s an idiot who also needs to sit down and shut the hell up. And while you’re at it, Ann, cross your legs. Nobody needs to see that.
Sean Hannity is a waste of the time it took me to type this sentence. Sit down and shut the hell up, Sean. Winning in a debate against Alan Colmes is like Michael Phelps lapping me in the pool. This is the best Fox News can give us each evening? Shameful. Just shameful.
Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Well, actually I have nothing to say because I am pretty sure no one is listening to her anymore. I wonder what rat tastes like when it comes back up?
Take a hint from your leader. Bush has pretty much checked out. Of course that assumes he had ever really checked in. But my point is that Obama isn’t President yet and he already seems to be running the show. Thank God.
So Sean, Ann, Rush, Sarah et al. I am not asking for you to give up even a single limb for your country… just your tongue. We’ve heard enough of your crap. We’re ready to move on to better days and smarter people.
I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving, and I am sorry if this rant ruined your holiday. I mean it. Really.
10 years after Matthew Shepard and media still can’t get it right May 10, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in LGBT, Media.Tags: 20/20, aaron mckinney, abc news, anti-gay, bigotry, Bill Hemmer, bill o'reilly, conservative bigotry, Fox Nation, fox news, gay rights, glaad, hate crimes, homophobia, Jim Nussle, karl frisch, lgbt, Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, matthew shepard, media matters, Media Matters For America, Media News, Molly Henneberg, religious bigotry, roger hollander, russell henderson, sean hannity, Virginia Foxx
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Karl Frisch
Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America
Ten years ago, a gay University of Wyoming student was picked up at a bar by two young men, driven out to the middle of nowhere, pistol-whipped, tortured, robbed, tied to a fence and left for dead. Eighteen hours later he was found — still alive but comatose — by a bicyclist, who at first thought the seemingly lifeless body, its face completely covered in blood except for the skin-colored trails left by tears, was a “scarecrow.”
At the time of the brutal attack that resulted in Matthew Shepard‘s death six days later, I was working as finance director for then-Rep. Jim Nussle, an Iowa Republican with a staunchly anti-gay voting record.
Back then I’d never told a soul that I was gay. The attack did more than frighten me; it knocked the wind out of me. Raised in Los Angeles but now living in rural Iowa, I was concerned that should my secret ever be found out, I would face a fate similar to that of Shepard. The response from those around me within the conservative movement — that Shepard was a “fag,” that he shouldn’t have flirted with the defendants, that he would burn in hell for his sexual orientation — only sent me deeper into the closet.
During the ensuing trial of Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, the prosecutor argued that the defendants had played gay in order to gain Shepard’s trust. Their girlfriends even testified under oath that Henderson and McKinney had planned in advance to rob a gay man. Ultimately, for kidnapping, robbing and murdering Shepard, Henderson and McKinney were each given two consecutive life sentences. Henderson avoided the death penalty in exchange for his guilty plea, and McKinney at the behest of Shepard’s parents upon his conviction.
In the years that followed, I would slowly come to grips with my sexuality. I came out to friends and family. I abandoned the conservative movement in search of greener, less hateful pastures. I embraced hope and rejected fear. The country was changing right alongside me as public attitudes toward gay and lesbian Americans steadily improved throughout the decade.
For all the progress, though, debate over enhancing the current federal hate crimes law by including gay, lesbian, and transgender people among its protected classes rages on — race, color, religion and national origin have been protected for years.
How can it be that 10 years after Shepard’s brutal, bias-motivated murder we still find ourselves caught up in the same tired debate?
Witness Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina. During a debate over hate crimes legislation that recently passed the U.S. House of Representatives, she said : “The hate crimes bill was named for [Shepard], but it’s really a hoax that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills.” Foxx’s “hoax” comment was made in an effort to bolster her apparent belief that Shepard’s murder was the result of a robbery gone wrong. Where on Earth could she have come up with such an idea?
Enter ABC’s 20/20. In 2004 the long-running network newsmagazine aired a special on the Wyoming hate crime that, as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) put it at the time, attempted to “undermine the notion that anti-gay bias contributed to” the murder.
Most damning of all, GLAAD noted that “20/20′s piece relies heavily on the perceived credibility of Aaron McKinney, who is now claiming to have lied about the role anti-gay bias played in his decision to target and kill Shepard,” and that McKinney’s girlfriend “now claims she made up the story about McKinney’s homophobic rage against Shepard,” which she testified to at McKinney’s trial.
Among other things, GLAAD also found that 20/20 had ignored “several important sources and pieces of information.” There was “no discussion of the details of Aaron McKinney’s confession to the police, where anti-gay bias [was] central to his characterization,” “[n]o mention of the plea bargain that spared McKinney’s life,” and no mention of the provision of that plea bargain barring McKinney and his attorneys from discussing the case with the media.
Long before finding its way into Foxx’s “hoax” remarks on the House floor, 20/20′s report provided fodder for those opposed to an expanded federal hate crimes law.
Perhaps fearing a hate crimes bill that protects gay, lesbian, and transgender people will soon be enacted — thanks to a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers and the president — many media conservatives have seen fit to maliciously attack the legislation, just as 20/20 twisted and misreported the events surrounding Shepard’s death.
During a recent broadcast of his top-rated cable program, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly said of the hate crimes bill, which not only adds gay, lesbian, and transgender people to the list of protected classes but the disabled as well, “[Y]ou could make an argument that a pedophile has a disease, and because the disease is there, he’s a target or she’s a target.” O’Reilly later added that pedophiles could be included because “[d]isability is included. They have a mental disability.” He’s wrong. Pedophilia is not considered a “disability” under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; in fact, the ADA specifically excludes pedophilia. Bringing up “pedophilia” during discussion of gay and lesbian issues is old hat for those opposed to full equality for the LGBT community.
O’Reilly wasn’t alone pushing this line of attack at Fox News. Sean Hannity, Bill Hemmer, and The Fox Nation website all advanced the false claim that House Democrats voted to “protect” or “defend” pedophiles. On-screen text along the bottom of the screen on Fox quite literally read, “HOUSE DEMS VOTE TO PROTECT PEDOPHILES, BUT NOT VETERANS.”
When they weren’t spouting off nonsense about pedophiles being protected in the legislation, they were busy pushing the false notion that passage of the bill would somehow suppress religious thought or speech. During a segment on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, correspondent Molly Henneberg reported without question that religious groups are concerned that “they may be prosecuted for their religious beliefs if they believe that homosexuality is a sin, that it could gag ministers who preach that, or even if a church may not want to marry a gay couple. There is concern that they could face lawsuits as well.”
Let us be clear: The assertion that this legislation would allow individuals or groups to “be prosecuted for their religious beliefs” is patently false. Section 8 of the bill unambiguously states that “[n]othing in this Act, or the amendments made by this Act, shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by the Constitution” — which, of course, includes the First Amendment’s right to free speech and exercise of religion.
Reporters, hosts, anchors, and pundits — indeed, all Americans — are free to feel and speak as they wish about the gay, lesbian, and transgender community. It’s their right, even if they aren’t being honest. Unfortunately, too many have chosen to use this freedom with complete disregard for the facts.
Fox News and those who parrot its brand of deceptive reporting on this issue have been left behind by an America that continues its centuries-long march toward increased equality.
How frightened they must be.
Karl Frisch is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, research, and information center based in Washington, D.C. Frisch also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web as well as original commentary.