It’s on Private Property Owned by Muslims; They Have Every Right Under the First Amendment’s Guarantee of Freedom of Religion to Build a House of Worship on Their Property — Lawsuit to Stop Proposed Mosque Filed By Conservative Group Founded By Christian Evangelist Pat Robertson Should Be Thrown Out

Controversy continued to build over construction of a proposed mosque on this New York City block near Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Opponents of the mosque have become more vocal — including Republicans who have vowed to make it a campaign issue in the fall. Lawyers with ties to Christian evangelist Pat Robertson have sued to block construction of the mosque, but are unlikely to be successful — and could provoke a First Amendment freedom-of-religion countersuit by the Muslim owners of the property.  (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, August 17, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

It’s a controversy that’s been building for months and now threatens to explode into a major First Amendment battle over Muslims’ constitutional right to freedom of worship.

It also threatens to further roil an already volatile midterm election campaign.

“It” is proposed mosque to be built on private, Muslim-owned property in New York near Ground Zero, the site of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when 19 al-Qaida extremists hijacked four California-bound airliners shortly after takeoff. Two of them, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were slammed into the World Trade Center, destroying the landmark twin towers and killing more than 3,000 people.

Lawyers from a conservative group founded by Christian evangelist Pat Robertson have filed a lawsuit to block the mosque. But the lawsuit by Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice is very likely to fail — and could even provoke a First Amendment freedom-of-religion countersuit by the Muslim owners of the property.

PLANS FOR MOSQUE HAVE BEEN CONTROVERSIAL SINCE MAY

Plans to build the mosque on a private, Muslim-owned property located on Park Place, just two blocks from Ground Zero, had been controversial from the day they were announced in May. The planned 13-story mosque and cultural center would replace a building that formerly housed a clothing store and has stood unused since the 9/11 attacks, its interiors heavily damaged by debris from the fallen twin towers. The project includes a 500-seat theater and athletic center.

Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf, who helped found the Cordoba Initiative following the 9/11 attacks and whose organization is spearheading the project, along with the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said the proposed Islamic center is intended to foster better relations between the West and Muslims and that it would be open to the general public.

Rauf, the imam, or spiritual leader, of the nearby Al-Farah Mosque on West Broadway, purchased the property last December for $4.85 million, according to official city records. The 29-year-old, 175-member Al-Farah congregation is made up primarily of Sufi Muslims who practice a more spiritually-focused, mystical tradition of Islam, according to NY Resident magazine.

Plans call for the mosque to be completed in time for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in 2011. When completed, the mosque could house as many as 2,000 people for Friday prayers.

RAUF A LONGTIME ADVOCATE OF CLOSER TIES BETWEEN THE MUSLIM WORLD AND THE WEST . . .

Rauf is an author and longtime activist who’s made it his personal mission since the 9/11 attacks to improve relations between the Muslim world and the West.  He has been imam of the al-Farah Mosque since 1983. The 62-year-old native of Kuwait, who has lived in the United States since 1965 and has been a naturalized U.S. citizen since 1977, said in an interview with NY Resident magazine, that the American system of government, with its principles of tolerance, is a paragon of Islamic ideals — even if the country sometimes falls short of those values.

He is the author of three books on Islam and its place in contemporary Western society, including What’s Right with Islam. In a September 30, 2001 interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Rauf condemned the 9/11 attacks as un-Islamic. “Fanaticism and terrorism have no place in Islam.” he said. “That’s just as absurd as associating Hitler with Christianity, or David Koresh with Christianity. There are always people who will do peculiar things, and think that they are doing things in the name of their religion. But the Koran is… God says in the Koran that they think that they are doing right, but they are doing wrong.”

. . . WHILE ALSO A CRITIC OF U.S. POLICY IN MIDDLE EAST

But in that same interview, Rauf said that the attacks were, in part, “a reaction against the U.S. government politically, where we espouse principles of democracy and human rights, [but] where we ally ourselves with oppressive regimes in many of these countries.”

And in a 2004 comment made while on a visit to Australia that drew criticism back home, Rauf compared the 9/11 attacks to the Western allies’ firebombing of the German city of Dresden and nuclear bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II. “The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians,” he said. “But it was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.”

Rauf also called on the U.S. government to reduce the threat of terrorism by altering its policies in the Middle East, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ironically, the State Department announced last week that it was sending Rauf on a religious outreach trip to the Persian Gulf states of Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to talk about Muslim life in America and to promote religious tolerance — a move that drew sharp criticism from conservatives.

FAMILIES OF 9/11 VICTIMS FIERCELY OPPOSE MOSQUE . . .

The two Muslim organizations in charge of the project say that the $100 million complex will create a venue for mainstream Islam and a counterbalance to the extremism that motivated the 9/11 hijackers. But from the beginning, the planned mosque has been under fire from relatives of 9/11 victims, who say they are deeply offended by the mosque being built so close to where their loved ones were killed.

That many families of 9/11 victims oppose the mosque being located so close to Ground Zero is understandable, given the tremendous emotional trauma they suffered.

Nancy Nee of Long Island, whose brother, George Cain, a New York City firefighter, was killed when the twin towers collapsed, told AOL News on August 4 that she wanted Muslims to be able to build a community center — but somewhere farther away from Ground Zero.

“We’re upset,” Nee said. “Not at the fact that Muslims have a right to practice their religion here … we’re not like that. But I feel that it’s a slap in the face to put it close to Ground Zero.”

“I think it’s an insult, an in-your-face insult, to the families of the victims of 9/11,” said Leonard Castrianno, Sr. of Amherst, N.Y., who lost his son, Leonard, Jr., in the attack. “What makes it more insulting is that they want to [finish the] building on [the tenth anniversary of the attacks] on 9/11/11,” he told the Buffalo News.

. . . BUT SO ALSO DO ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTS AND CHRISTIAN SUPREMACISTS  

Unfortunately, the opposition also includes a passel of anti-Muslim bigots and Christian supremacists — including a controversial right-wing Christian evangelist, Bill Keller, who announced in July that he would counter the mosque with a nearby Christian center.

“How do you battle the darkness? With the light!” the fundamentalist Keller declared on his 9/11 Christian Center at Ground Zero Web site, which is laced with vicious anti-Muslim invectives. Keller says he wants to take “an ongoing stand” against the mosque and “combat this new evil being constructed near Ground Zero” and “bring people the Truth of God’s Word and the love and hope of Jesus Christ!”

Mark Williams, the former chairman of the Tea Party Express, touched off a firestorm of controversy in June, when, in a blog post on his Web site, MarkTalk.com, he denounced the proposed mosque as “a monument to the 9/11 terrorists” and a place “for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god,” according to the New York Daily News. Williams resigned as chairman of Tea Party Express to devote full-time to fighting against the mosque.

In late June, thousands staged a protest against the proposed mosque, a demonstration that was virtually ignored by the mainstream media — including the conservative-leaning Fox News Channel and the New York Post — but which received heavy coverage on numerous right-wing Web sites, including that of Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

FUROR OVER MOSQUE BECOMES A CAMPAIGN ISSUE

The furor over the proposed mosque became a campaign issue in the upcoming midterm congressional elections Friday when President Obama spoke out in support of the project during a White House dinner marking the eve of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“Let me be clear,” the president said. “As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.

“This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable,” Obama added.

The president’s remarks drew almost immediate criticism from Republicans, with some promising to make the mosque a campaign issue. Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said  on “Fox News Sunday” that the president’s remarks “demonstrate that Washington, the White House, the administration, the president himself seems to be disconnected from the mainstream of America.”

Representative Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, promptly fired back. Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Van Hollen said that the president “stating the principle that under our great constitution, we do not discriminate against people based on their religion.” Van Hollen added that “it would be wrong to politicize the issue” and that New Yorkers should be left to discuss it.

GROUP WITH TIES TO ROBERTSON SUES TO BLOCK MOSQUE

Meanwhile, a conservative group founded by Robertson filed suit in New York state court, seeking to overturn the unanimous vote of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to deny landmark status for the damaged former Burlington Coat Factory building, paving the way for its demolition to make way for the mosque.

The lawsuit charges that the city violated its own policies and procedures in rejecting landmark status and exhibited “an arbitrary and capricious abuse of discretion and contrary to decades of administrative precedent.”

It is highly unlikely that the ACLJ’s lawsuit will succeed — or even if it will be heard. Not only is the suit likely to be dismissed on the grounds that the Muslim owners of the property have every right under the First Amendment to a build a house of worship on their Park Place property, but as lawyers for an organization founded by a Christian evangelist with a long record of making highly controversial statements — including a slam at Islam last November as a “violent political system” — they might not have legal standing to bring suit to stop the mosque in the first place.

In any case, Robertson’s group is skating on dangerously thin legal ice. The Muslim owners of the property could file a countersuit accusing Robertson’s group of seeking to force the city to deny them the right to build their mosque, which would clearly violate their First Amendment right to freedom of worship on their own property.

The fact is, the Muslims who purchased the Park Place property did so in full compliance with the law. They own it. They have every right under the First Amendment to build a house of worship on it, if that is want they want to do.

Neither the 9/11 families, nor all the politicians, Islamophobic bigots and Christian supremacists who oppose the mosque have any constitutional right to stop it. Period. End of story.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

With Two Federal Courts on Opposite Coasts Declaring That the Federal Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 Both Violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Foes of Marriage for Gay and Lesbian Couples Fall Into Siege Mentality as a Final Ruling by the Supreme Court Is Now All But Inevitable

It’s now a virtual certainty that the Supreme Court will have the final say on whether gay and lesbian couples have the same freedom to marry under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that interracial and interfaith couples have. With federal courts in Massachusetts and California having ruled, respectively, that the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 and California’s voter-approved Proposition 8 both violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, some opponents of extending marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples already are reacting with outbursts of paranoid hysteria. (Photo courtesy U.S. Supreme Court Web site)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Wednesday, August 11, 2010)

(Updated 11:00 a.m. EDT Friday, August 13, 2010)

* * *

NOTE TO READERS:This week’s column — my first since returning from a two-week vacation — is being published a day later than usual, due to unexpected travel delays that resulted in my returning home too late for my Monday-night deadline. I apologize for the delay. Next week’s column will appear as usual on Tuesday, August 16.

By SKEETER SANDERS

Time appears to be running out for opponents of marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples.

Within the space of a month, two federal courts — one in Massachusetts, the other in California — have ruled that laws that prohibit same-gender couples from marrying or deny federal recognition to such marriages are unconstitutional under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In San Francisco, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled last Wednesday that Proposition 8, a voter-approved measure that bars gay and lesbian couples from marrying, “fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license” and, in fact, “does nothing more than enshrine in the  California constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.”

Judge Walker’s ruling came just weeks after another U.S. District Court judge in Boston struck down the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act. Judge Joseph Tauro ruled May 8 that DOMA, as the law is commonly known, unconstitutionally denies federal spousal benefits to married gay and lesbian couples in Massachusetts — where same-gender marriage has been legal since 2004 — in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and intrudes upon the state’s exclusive authority over marriage under the Tenth Amendment.

With a final decision by the U.S. Supreme Court now all but inevitable — and which potentially could produce at least a 5-4 majority to uphold the lower court rulings — some foes of same-gender marriage already are reacting with paroxysms of paranoid hysteria, with a niece of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. going so far as calling such marriages “genocide.”

ANTI-GAY PARANOIA ON FULL DISPLAY AT RALLY IN ATLANTA

Speaking at a sparsely-attended rally in Atlanta called by the right-wing National Organization for Marriage, Alveda King denounced same-gender marriage. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to be extinct, and none of us  wants to be,” she said. “So we don’t want genocide! We don’t want to  destroy the sacred institution of marriage!”

King insisted that “It is statistically proven that the strongest institution that  guarantees procreation and continuity of the generations is marriage  between one man and one woman” — ignoring the fact that advances in medical technology have made it possible since the late 1970s for gay and lesbian couples to procreate through in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination.

Alveda King’s opposition stands in stark contrast to that of her late aunt, Coretta Scott King, who spoke out in 2004 in support of same-gender marriage and against a proposed federal constitutional amendment to ban it.

“Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union,” she told USA Today. “A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages.”

The NOM rally drew only about 35 participants, who were outnumbered by more than 300 counter-demonstrators, who voiced their approval of Walker’s decision.

RIGHT-WING PUNDITS GO BERSERK, ATTACK JUDGE WALKER

Predictably, right-wing pundits went berserk, attacking Judge Walker for alleged “judicial activism” and “judicial tyranny,” in the words of the Heritage Foundation’s Chuck Donovan. Donovan called the ruling “an affront to the millions of California voters who approved Proposition 8 in 2008 after months of vigorous public debate.”

Robert Knight, a senior writer and correspondent for the right-wing Coral Ridge Ministries, went farther: He accused Judge Walker of having “embraced the false premise that homosexuality is morally irrelevant or even something to be promoted through public policy” and denounced his ruling on Prop. 8 as a display of “contempt for the rule of law” and even part of “the criminalization of not only Christianity but of the foundational values of civilization itself.”

Meanwhile Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) sought unsuccessfully to push for a resolution in the House during its one-day session on Monday condemning Judge Walker’s ruling. He attacked Walker personally, pointing out the fact that Walker is gay. “For one openly homosexual judge to toss aside seven million voters (and  45 state laws on marriage if this case advances) is the height of  government arrogance.” he said. “And it’s certainly not good public policy. A  society without accountability or moral boundaries is a society that  will not long survive.”

But Judge Walker is no liberal. A conservative jurist who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Walker’s  nomination was stalled for two years by Senate Democrats who objected to his membership in an  all-male private club and to his having been the attorney representing the International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee in  its 1982 copyright-infringement lawsuit against the organizers of the first Gay Games in San  Francisco, originally dubbed the “Gay Olympics.”

Two dozen House Democrats, led by now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), whose district includes San Francisco, opposed Walker’s nomination because of his alleged “insensitivity” to gays while representing the IOC and USOC. Walker was renominated in 1989 by President George H.W. Bush and elevated to Chief Judge of the U.S District Court for Northern California in 2004 by President George W. Bush.

IT’S THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT, STUPID!

Of course, Donovan, Knight, Smith and other right-wingers conveniently ignore the fact that those seven million  Californians who voted for Prop. 8 did so in direct defiance of the  Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which states quite explicitly that “No state shall  make or enforce any law which shall abridge the  privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any  state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due  process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal  protection of the laws.

As former Solicitor General Ted Olson, the conservative half of the legal team that brought suit against Prop. 8, said in an August 8 interview on “Fox News Sunday,” the U.S. Supreme Court has fourteen times since 1888 — most famously with its landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that struck down laws that banned interracial marriages — “articulated that the right to marriage is a fundamental right. We’re not talking about a new right here.”

When reminded by host Chris Wallace that seven million Californians voted in favor of Prop. 8, Olson shot back that six million Californians voted in the 1960s “to change their constitution to say that you could  discriminate on the basis of race in the sale of your home. The United  States Supreme Court struck that down” as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

“We do not put the Bill of Rights to a vote,” he said.

Olson noted that the high court has repeatedly defined marriage “as the most fundamental relationship we  have in this country,” one that cannot be denied to certain individuals because of their race, nationality, religion or creed. Nor, Olson argued, should it be denied to certain individuals because of their gender.

HOW WILL THE SUPREME COURT RULE?

While both sides in the same-gender marriage fight now concede that the issue will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, no one can predict how long it will take before the justices will finally take up the case. Nor can anyone predict which case the justices will take up first: The Prop. 8 case, known officially as Perry v. Schwarzenegger, or the Massachusetts case against the federal Defense of Marriage Act, known officially as Massachusetts v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Although both U.S. District Court judges — Walker in San Francisco and Tauro in Boston — invoked the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, the Massachusetts case differs substantially from the California case in that whereas Prop. 8 barred gay and lesbian couples in California from marrying, DOMA denied federal spousal benefits to already-married gay and lesbian couples in the Bay State, where same-gender marriage has been legal for six years.

Judge Tauro ruled that DOMA also violates the Tenth Amendment, “by forcing the Commonwealth [of Massachusetts] to engage in invidious discrimination against its own citizens in order to receive and retain federal funds in connection with two joint federal-state programs.”

IT’S UP TO JUSTICE KENNEDY WHICH WAY THE HIGH COURT WILL GO

No one expects the Supreme Court’s four conservatives — Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts — to be sympathetic to the notion that gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry. Likewise, no one expects the court’s three liberals — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor — nor its newest justice, Elena Kagan, to favor denying full marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples, either.

That leaves it up the court’s ninth justice, moderate-conservative Anthony Kennedy, to be the pivotal fifth justice. And given the fact that Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in two previous cases that gays won (Romer v. Evans in 1996 and Lawrence v. Texas in 2003) as well as a separate opinion concurring with the majority in a third ruling in June seen as a victory for gays (Christian Legal Society v. Martinez), the odds are very good that if the justices agree to take up the Prop. 8 case, the court will split at least 5-4 in favor of affirming Judge Walker’s ruling.

Is it any wonder, then, that some opponents of same-gender marriage are plunging headlong into paranoia? They know that the votes aren’t there in Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to ban same-gender marriage — that’s already been tried in 2005 when the Republicans controlled Congress and it failed to garner anywhere near the two-thirds majorities in both houses required for passage.  

So as the battle over same-gender marriage heads inexorably toward the final showdown in the Supreme Court, expect even more extreme rhetoric from the far right, as their paranoid homophobia become more and more transparent.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. all rights reserved.

Tea Party Express Founder and Chairman Accuses NAACP of Being Bigots for Denouncing Racist Elements Within the Broader Tea Party Movement, Ignoring His Own Well-Documented Record of Bigoted Rants and Raves; Meanwhile, New Black Panther Party ‘Scandal’ — Hyped for Months by Fox News and Other Right-Wing Media — Is Exposed As a Politically-Motivated Hoax

IN DEEP DENIAL OF HIS OWN BIGOTRY — Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams, seen here during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, has come under increasing fire for making a series of highly inflammatory remarks that have been denounced as bigoted. But Williams is not only unapologetic, he’s actually accusing his critics of being bigots themselves, while ignoring his own well-documented rants. After the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, passed a resolution at its annual convention condemning expressions of racism within the broader Tea Party movement, Williams fired back, accusing the NAACP of being racist. Meanwhile, an alleged scandal surrounding claims that the New Black Panther Party engaged in voter intimidation — hyped by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets for months — has been exposed as a politically-motivated hoax aimed at inflicting racially-charged damage on the Obama administration. (Photo courtesy CNN)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 20, 2010)

NOTE TO READERS: This column is taking a two-week break after this issue, while I go on vacation. It will resume on Tuesday, August 10.

By SKEETER SANDERS

Stubborn. Bullheaded. Tart-tongued. Full of himself. A bigot.

These are some of the things that critics of Mark Williams, the founder and chairman of Tea Party Express, one of several groups in the broader conservative Tea party movement,  have been saying about him in recent months.

To that, you can add one more: A [bleeping] hypocrite.

The acerbic Williams has accused the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, the NAACP, of bigotry — totally ignoring his own well-documented record of making highly inflammatory and bigoted statements.

Meanwhile, an alleged scandal in which the Justice Department was accused by conservatives of downplaying allegations of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party — which the Fox News Channel and other right-wing media outlets had been playing up for months — was exposed as a politically-motivated hoax aimed at inflicting racially-charged damage on the Obama administration.

WILLIAMS RIPS NAACP FOR CONDEMNING ‘EXTREMIST ELEMENTS’ IN TEA PARTY

Williams had the gall to accuse the NAACP of being “professional race-baiters” after delegates to the NAACP’s annual convention in Kansas City passed a resolution last Tuesday condemning “extremist elements” within the Tea Party movement and calling on the movement’s leaders “to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.”

Addressing convention delegates, NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous said that his organization “has no issue” with the Tea Party movement itself. “We believe in freedom of assembly and people raising their voices in a democracy,” he said. “What we take issue with is the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements.”

Taking direct aim at Tea Party movement leaders, Jealous continued, “The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there is no place for racism and anti-Semitism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry in their movement.”

NAACP CITES SLURS AGAINST BLACK AND GAY LAWMAKERS AT TEA PARTY RALLY

In a statement posted on its Web site, the NAACP said the resolution was passed “after a year of high-profile media coverage of attendees of Tea Party marches” across the country “using vile, antagonistic racial slurs and images” against President Obama. Photos of some Tea Party protesters’ racially inflammatory anti-Obama signs were posted with the statement.

The NAACP statement also made reference to a Tea Party protest on Capitol Hill in March against the passage of the health-care reform bill, in which a black member of Congress, John Lewis (D-Georgia), was called the racist N-word and an openly gay member of Congress, Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), was branded the six-letter homophobic F-word.

A second black congressman, Emanuel Cleaver (D-Missouri), was spat upon by a protester as he was walking toward the House wing of the Capitol Building. Fearing an assault, Capitol Police immediately hustled Cleaver into the building and subdued his would-be assailant. The person was later released after Cleaver chose not to press charges.

WILLIAMS CALLS NAACP ‘OLD FOSSILS MAKING A BUCK OFF SKIN COLOR’

In an interview on Wednesday with National Public Radio, Williams branded the NAACP “professional race-baiters . . . who make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history,”

That same day on CNN, Williams went further. Asked if the Tea Party movement should tell bigots that they’re not welcome, Williams replied, “Racists have their own movement — It’s called the NAACP! They’re a bunch of old fossils looking to make a buck off skin color!”

In a highly inflammatory posting on his blog, Williams wrote what he said was a “satirical” letter to the nation’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, from Jealous, in which Williams sought to take issue with the 100-year-old NAACP’s continued use of the now-outmoded term “colored people” in its formal name — the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — even though the organization has been popularly known and referred to by the media simply by its acronym for the last 30 years.

“We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing,” Williams wrote. “Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!”

Williams concluded his “satire” with the following: “Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong!”

WILLIAMS TRIES TO DRAW ATTENTION AWAY FROM HIS OWN RECORD OF BIGOTED REMARKS

If Williams was trying to be cute, he failed miserably. He also failed in his apparent attempt to draw attention away from his own record of making highly inflammatory, bigoted remarks — a record that is well documented, despite his best efforts to sanitize it.

(Williams took his “satirical” NAACP letter off his blog site, MarkTalk.com, after it was reported by the mainstream media — but not before the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters copied the letter in full and posted it on its own Political Correction Web site.)

Indeed, so well-documented is Williams’ record of bigoted comments that his claims that the NAACP is a bunch of “professional race-baiters” is utterly without credibility — and at the same time reveals how deeply in denial he is about his own bigotry.

WILLIAMS SLAMS MUSLIMS, SAYS THEY WORSHIP A ‘MONKEY-GOD’ . . .

He’s certainly an anti-Muslim bigot. Williams made that abundantly clear in May, when he touched off a furor by blasting a proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center to be built in New York near Ground Zero, the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and killed more than 3,000 people.

The New York Daily News, citing a blog posting on his MarkTalk.com Web site, reported that Williams branded the project “a monument to the 9/11 terrorists” and wrote that Muslims “worship the terrorists’ monkey-god.”

The 13-story glass-and-steel building, which includes a 500-seat theater and athletic center, is under construction just two blocks from the where twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed on September 11, 2001, when two hijacked California-bound jetliners crashed into them and exploded in massive fireballs of jet fuel.

. . . ALSO HURLS INVECTIVES AT JEWISH POLITICIAN — AND THE PRESIDENT

Williams was just as incendiary in his condemnation of a New York politician, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who is Jewish and supports the planned mosque. Williams branded Stringer “a Jewish Uncle Tom who would have turned rat on Anne Frank for the price of an approving glance from Hitler.”

Stringer promptly fired back with a blast of his own at Williams, vowing that he’s not going to take “faith-based filth” from anybody.

“To use words around my religious beliefs, to use words calling me out about my faith, is just absolutely despicable,” Stringer told the Daily News. “This [mosque] is about tolerance and respect for diversity. He [Williams] can spew his hatred — and we’re going to hit right back. You don’t let people like this gain any ground.”

Williams has also made inflammatory anti-Muslim remarks about Obama — despite all evidence that the president is a Christian — calling Obama “an Indonesian Muslim-turned-welfare thug” and a “racist-in-chief.”

He’s also referred to the president as an “enemy of America,” lumping him with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — despite the Obama administration’s increasingly get-tough policy toward Iran’s nuclear program — the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and even former President Jimmy Carter, whose recent book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, has come under sharp criticism by supporters of Israel as being biased in favor of the Palestinians.

So deep is Williams’ apparent Islamophobia that he’s even stepping down from his post as chairman of Tea Party Express to devote full-time to his drive to stop the construction of what local media in New York refer to as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

ALLEGED ‘SCANDAL’ OF NEW BLACK PANTHERS EXPOSED AS PARTISAN HOAX

Meanwhile, the conservative Republican vice-chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, in an extraordinary interview published Friday by Politico.com, accused her fellow Republicans who hold a majority on the commission of a clear partisan bias against the Obama administration in their investigation into the Justice Department’s handling of allegations of voter intimidation by members of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP).

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the [New] Black Panthers; this has to do with [the GOP majority’s] fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration,” said Abigail Thernstrom, who was appointed vice-chairwoman of the commission by President George W. Bush.

Thernstrom told Politico that her conservative colleagues on the commission made their political aims crystal clear “in the initial discussions” of the Panther case last year. “My fellow conservatives on the commission had this wild notion they could bring [Attorney General] Eric Holder down and really damage the president,” she said.

Thernstrom has strong conservative credentials. She is a tough critic of affirmative action and of “political correctness” — especially on matters of race. An adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Thernstrom is also member of the board of directors of the conservative Institute for Justice and is a frequent guest on “Fox News Sunday.”

ALLEGED SCANDAL STEMS FROM 2008 ELECTION DAY INCIDENT IN PHILADELPHIA

The alleged scandal stems from an incident on Election Day 2008. Poll watchers found two NBPP members standing outside of a polling station in an African-American neighborhood of Philadelphia. One of the two was a credentialed poll watcher, while the other was brandishing a police-style nightstick baton.

From there, the details get murky. The man with the nightstick was subsequently identified as a member of the NBPP, a militant, Texas-based black-nationalist organization. Founded in 1989, the NBPP, contrary to its name, has no connection with the original, California-based Black Panther Party of the late 1960s and early 1970s co-founded by Bobby Seale and the late Huey Newton.

Chris Hill, a Republican poll watcher, said that voters had been complaining about intimidation by NBPP members, but the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office said it had not received any such complaints, according to WTXF-TV, the local Fox affiliate in Philadelphia. The nightstick-wielding man was escorted away by Philadelphia police, but no charges were filed against him.

Hill then contacted Rick Leventhal, a correspondent for the national Fox News Channel, and repeated his earlier claim that the two NBPP members were intimidating voters. Fox News aired the story — which was quickly picked up by Breitbart.com and other right-wing media — and has been trumpeting it repeatedly ever since.

FEDS SUE NBPP, BUT LATER HALTS CASE — ANGERING CONSERVATIVES

In January of last year, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against the NBPP and three of its members alleging violations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act stemming from the incident at the Philadelphia polling station. The lawsuit named NBPP members King Samir Shabazz, who had brandished the nightstick, and Jerry Jackson as defendants. A default judgement was entered against Shabazz and Jackson after they failed to appear in court.

In May of last year, Justice Department officials, over the vehement objections of prosecutors who were working on the case, ordered the lawsuit dropped — prompting accusations by conservatives that the orders came directly from Attorney General Eric Holder and that they were racially motivated, as Holder is black.

INTIMIDATION OF WHITE VOTERS ALLEGED — IN AN ALL-BLACK VOTING PRECINCT!

As the controversy continued to build — driven by Fox News, The Washington Times, radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing media — J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney, testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and alleged that the case was dropped because the Justice Department “did not want to protect the civil rights of white people.”

There was one major problem with Adams’ testimony: The polling station at the center of the controversy was located in an all-black election precinct — a fact that Thernstrom caught almost immediately.

In a scathing July 6 article published in the online edition of the conservative National Review, Thernstrom blasted what she said was a lack of evidence to substantiate the allegations of voter intimidation.

“After months of hearings, testimony and investigation, no one has produced actual evidence that any voters were too scared to cast their ballots,” she wrote. “Too much overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges has been devoted to this case.”

Thernstrom ripped her conservative colleagues for charging that “the Philadelphia Black Panther decision demonstrates that attorneys in the [Justice Department’s] Civil Rights Division have racial double standards. How many attorneys in what positions? A pervasive culture that affected the handling of this case? No direct quotations or other evidence substantiate the charge.”

NBPP IS DESPISED BY ORIGINAL BLACK PANTHERS

Although the claims of voter intimidation were exposed as false, the NBPP nonetheless remains a highly controversial organization with very few fans — and is deeply despised by the surviving members of the original Black Panther Party, who adamantly insist that the NBPP is illegitimate and have even taken it to court.

The Huey P. Newton Foundation, founded by former original Panthers David Hilliard and Newton’s widow, Fredrika Newton, has vociferously objected that the new party “denigrates the [original] Party’s name by promoting concepts absolutely counter to the revolutionary principles on which the [original] Party was founded.”

The NBPP continues to use the Panther name and logo in spite of a permanent injunction obtained by the original Panthers in 1997 prohibiting the NBPP from using either. NBPP founder Aaron Michaels has been equally contemptuous of the original Panthers, branding them “has-been wannabes” and rejecting the injunction. “I don’t give a damn what judge issued an order,” Michaels said. “Nobody can tell us who we can call ourselves!”

Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have identified the New Black Panthers as a hate group, “based on the anti-white, anti-gay and anti-Semitic views its leaders have repeatedly expressed.”

# # #

Volume V, Number 29

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

As One Federal Court Declares Defense of Marriage Act Unconstitutional and Another Prepares to Rule on California’s Proposition 8, a Final Decision by the Nation’s Highest Court on Whether Gay and Lesbian Couples Have the Same Fourteenth Amendment Constitutional Right to Marry as Interracial Couples Have Is Not Only Inevitable, But Necessary

Confirming what The ‘Skeeter Bites Report has been arguing in a series of editorials since 2007, a federal judge in Boston last week declared unconstitutional the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, on the grounds that its denial of federal spousal benefits to married same-gender couples in Massachusetts violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As another federal judge in San Francisco prepares to rule on the constitutionality — also under the Fourteenth Amendment — of California’s voter-approved Proposition 8, which bars same-gender couples from marrying outright, there can be no doubt that the issue of whether gay and lesbian couples have the same constitutional right to marry as interracial couples have will inevitably be decided by the Supreme Court — and both sides in the battle had better start preparing themselves for it. (Image courtesy GenerationQ.net)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 13, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

For more than three years now, this column has argued repeatedly that laws that bar gay and lesbian couples from marrying were unconstitutional, based in part on a landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling that struck down, under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, similar laws that barred interracial couples from marrying.

This column has also argued that to restrict marriage to opposite-gender couples only was — and is — an equally unconstitutional enshrinement into state and federal law of a religious doctrine that condemns homosexuality, in violation of the First Amendment separation of church and state.

No one else has made the church-state argument. But now, for the first time, a federal judge has come to the same conclusion as this column with regard to the Fourteenth Amendment.

Ruling in a lawsuit brought by several married same-gender Massachusetts couples against the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, Judge Joseph Tauro of the U.S. District Court in Boston declared that DOMA, as the law is commonly known, unconstitutionally deprives married same-gender couples in Massachusetts of federal spousal benefits enjoyed by their opposite-gender counterparts, in violation of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Judge Tauro was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in 1972 by President Richard Nixon. At 79 years of age, he is the last Nixon appointee still active on the federal bench.

CONSTITUTION ‘DOES NOT TOLERATE TREATING CLASSES OF CITIZENS DIFFERENTLY’

“The [U.S.] Constitution neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Judge Tauro wrote. “It is with this fundamental principle in mind that equal protection jurisprudence takes on governmental classifications that affect some groups of citizens differently than others.

“And it is because of this commitment to the law’s neutrality where the rights of persons are at stake that legislative provisions which arbitrarily or irrationally create discrete classes cannot withstand constitutional scrutiny,” the judge continued.

Judge Tauro flatly rejected the contention of same-gender marriage opponents that one of the purposes of DOMA’s denial of federal recognition to same-gender

marriages was to “encourage responsible procreation and child-bearing,” citing the federal government’s own admission that “this objective bears no rational relationship” to the enforcement of the law, “as a consensus has developed among the medical, psychological, and social welfare communities that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are just as likely to be well-adjusted as those raised by heterosexual parents.”

DOMA ‘USURPS AUTHORITY OF STATES TO SET OWN MARRIAGE LAWS’

In a separate lawsuit brought by the Massachusetts state attorney general against the federal government, Judge Tauro ruled that DOMA also unconstitutionally encroaches on the longstanding authority of the states to set their own marriage laws — an authority that, the judge said, dates back to the colonial era.

Same-gender marriage has been legal in Massachusetts since 2004, after the state’s highest court ruled that gay and lesbian couples had a right to marry under the equal-rights amendment of the Bay State’s Constitution.

“This court has determined that it is clearly within the authority of the Commonwealth [of Massachusetts] to recognize same-sex marriages among its residents, and to afford those individuals in same-sex marriages any benefits, rights, and privileges to which they are entitled by virtue of their marital status,” Tauro wrote. “The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state.”

The judge wrote that control by the states over marital status actually pre-dates the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution, which says that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

During the colonial era, “colonial legislatures, rather than [the British] Parliament [in London], established the rules and regulations regarding marriage in the colonies,” Tauro wrote. After independence, “the founding legislation of each state included regulations regarding marital status determinations.”

The issue of marriage, Tauro wrote, “was not raised” when the framers of the Constitution gathered to define the powers of the federal government. “The states had exclusive power over marriage rules as a central part of the individual states’ ‘police power’ — meaning their responsibility (subject to the requirements and protections of the federal Constitution) for the health, safety and welfare of their populations.”

GAY-RIGHTS ADVOCATES ELATED, CONSERVATIVES OUTRAGED

Reaction to Judge Tauro’s ruling was predictable, with gay-rights advocates hailing it and conservatives condemning it.

Mary Bonauto, an attorney for the Boston-based law firm Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) — who represented seven married same-gender couples and three widowers from Massachusetts (including Dean Hara, the widower of the late former U.S. Representative Gerry Studds) — called the ruling a simple affirmation “that our country won’t tolerate second-class marriages.” The decision, said Bonauto, “will make a real difference for countless families in Massachusetts.”

It was GLAD’s second major court victory on the issue. The firm successfully argued before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that gay and lesbian couples had a right to marry under of the equal-rights amendment (Article CVI) to the Massachusetts Constitution, which bars discrimination “because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin.”

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who brought the second suit against DOMA on Tenth Amendment grounds, also hailed Judge Tauro’s ruling. “Today’s [Friday’s] landmark decision is an important step toward achieving equality for all married couples in Massachusetts and assuring that all of our citizens enjoy the same rights and protections under our Constitution,” Coakley said in a statement. “It is unconstitutional for the federal government to discriminate, as it does because of DOMA’s restrictive definition of marriage. It is also unconstitutional for the federal government to decide who is married and to create a system of first- and second-class marriages.”

Not surprisingly, social conservatives reacted with fury. Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the California-based Traditional Values Coalition, called Tauro’s ruling “judicial activism” and said Tauro was a “rogue judge. We can’t allow the lowest common denominator states, like Massachusetts, to set standards for the country.”

The TVC is one of several conservative groups fighting to preserve California’s Proposition 8, a voter-approved amendment to the California Constitution that bars same-gender couples from marrying. A federal judge in San Francisco is preparing to rule on a Fourteenth Amendment challenge to that measure.

Tom McClusky, senior vice president of the right-wing Family Research Council, said the rulings result in part from “the deliberately weak legal defense of DOMA” that the Obama administration mounted on behalf of the government.

“While the American people have made it unmistakably clear that they want to preserve marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman, liberals and activist judges are not content to let the people decide,” McClusky said in a statement.

THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT CANNOT BE IGNORED

This column’s only concern with Judge Tauro’s ruling regarding the Tenth Amendment is that the very argument used by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts against DOMA can be used by other states to preserve their laws banning same-gender marriage. The Obama administration has said only that it was reviewing the decision, but it’s a safe bet that it will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

If the administration was smart, it would leave the judge’s ruling on the state’s lawsuit alone and appeal only the ruling on the GLAD lawsuit, as GLAD, in the opinion of this column, has a much stronger constitutional argument.

A Supreme Court decision against DOMA on Fourteenth Amendment grounds would all but doom Prop. 8 and all other state laws banning same-gender marriage to the same constitutional fate as those old anti-miscegenation laws, mostly in the South, that banned interracial marriages.

Given the court’s ideological makeup — with four hard-line conservatives (Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts), three liberals (Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer), one moderate conservative (Anthony Kennedy) and, pending her confirmation, Elena Kagan (who’s been targeted for defeat by hard-line social conservatives), any ruling on same-gender marriage by the high court is all but certain to be 5-4, either way.

Consider the fact that it was Kennedy who wrote the majority opinion in two high court rulings won by gays (Romer v. Evans in 1996 and Lawrence v. Texas in 2003), as well as a concurring opinion in a third case favorable to gays handed down just last month (Christian Legal Society v. Martinez).

Add to that mix the fact that Kagan, President Obama’s nominee to succeed retired Justice John Paul Stevens, publicly spoke out at her confirmation hearing against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the 1993 law passed by Congress that bars gay and lesbian U.S. military service members from openly acknowledging that they are gay and remain in the military.

While Kagan’s views on same-gender marriage are unknown, this column firmly believes that there is likely to be a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court — assuming Kagan is confirmed — to strike down the ban on same-gender marriage on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, whether it’s DOMA, Prop. 8 or the other 31 similar state laws.

The justices, more than a generation ago in Loving v. Virginia, declared unanimously that the freedom of two mature, unrelated single adults who love one another and seek to form a lasting commitment to one another to marry is a freedom fully protected by the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, regardless of race, religion or nationality.

There is no reason to believe that such freedom to marry shouldn’t also be regardless of the gender of the couple.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Several Top Conservatives Demand GOP Chairman Resign Over Remarks Made at Party Fundraiser That ‘The One Thing You Don’t Do Is Engage in a Land War in Afghanistan’ Even As He Criticizes Obama — Ignoring the Fact That the President Inherited the War From Bush and That Steele’s Own Party Pushed for More Troops to be Sent There in the First Place

WILL HE STAY OR WILL HE GO? — Ever since Michael Steele was elected chairman of the Republican National Committee 18 months ago, party conservatives have sought to undermine his leadership almost from day one. Now they are openly calling for Steele to resign after the chairman made remarks during a GOP fundraiser last week in which he called into question the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, even as he criticized President Obama’s handling of it. “If he’s [the president] such a student of history, has he not understood that . . . the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan,” Steele said, “because everyone who has tried over a thousand years of history has failed.” (Photo: Getty Images)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 6, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Poor Michael Steele. No matter what he says or does, hard-line conservatives — both inside and outside the Republican Party — simply won’t cut the GOP National Committee chairman any slack.

Ever since Steele was elected the party’s first black national chairman 18 months ago, conservatives — who never wanted him to be chairman in the first place — have sought to undermine his authority.

Now, several prominent conservatives have called on Steele to resign after a video surfaced Thursday of remarks the RNC chairman made the day before during a GOP fundraiser in Connecticut, in which Steele called into question the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan — even as he criticized President Obama’s handling of it.

AFGHANISTAN WAR — INHERITED FROM BUSH — ‘A WAR OF OBAMA’S CHOOSING,’ STEELE SAYS

Responding to an attendee’s question about Obama relieving General Stanley McChrystal of his command of NATO forces in Afghanistan after the general made disparaging remarks about administration officials in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Steele called McChrystal’s firing “very comical.”

McChrystal was replaced by General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.

McChrystal’s dismissal is “a reflection of the frustration that a lot of our military leaders have with this administration and their prosecution of the war in Afghanistan,” Steele said. “Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”

Oh, really?

It seems that Steele has forgotten the fact that the war in Afghanistan is one that Obama inherited from his predecessor, George W. Bush, who sent U.S. forces to Afghanistan to root out al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts two months after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, in which al-Qaida operatives hijacked four commercial jetliners and slammed them into New York’s World Trade Canter and the Pentagon across the Potomac from the nation’s capital, destroying the twin towers, damaging the Defense Department’s headquarters — and killing over 3,300 people in the process.

Had passengers aboard the fourth hijacked jet headed to Washington not fought to take back control of the plane — a struggle that ultimately sent it plunging into a field in Pennsylvania — the hijackers would have likely slammed that plane into either the White House or the Capitol Building.

GOP CHAIRMAN: U.S. SHOULD NOT ‘ENGAGE IN A LAND WAR IN AFGHANISTAN’

For Steele to say that the war in Afghanistan — which pre-dates Obama’s presidency by nearly eight years — is “a war of Obama’s choosing” is ludicrous. But that’s not what’s gotten Steele in trouble with conservatives in his party.

“It was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing [the war in] Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan,” Steele said. “Well, if he’s [Obama] such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?”

Steele went on: “All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history [From Ghengis Khan to the Soviet Union], has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan.”

It is those remarks — that the U.S. should not “engage in a land war in Afghanistan” — that has Steele in hot water with conservatives. After all, Republicans had pushed Obama last fall to heed General  McChrystal’s request for a “surge” of 40,000 troops in Afghanistan — double the number of American forces that Bush sent in the controversial Iraq “surge” two years earlier.

By Friday, Steele was in full damage-control mode. In a statement issued through the RNC, the embattled chairman said, “As we have learned throughout history, winning a war in Afghanistan is a difficult task. We must also remember that after the tragedy of September 11, 2001, it is also a necessary one. That is why I supported the decision to increase our troop force and, like the entire United States Senate, I support General Petraeus’ confirmation. The stakes are too high for us to accept anything but success in Afghanistan.”  

GOP SENATORS RIP STEELE ON SUNDAY TV TALK SHOWS

Steele’s clarification on Friday, however, failed to stem the criticism, as top Republicans continued to blast the chairman in appearances on the TV talk-show circuit Sunday.

Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), the 2008 GOP presidential nominee — who is himself locked in a fight for his political survival against J.D. Hayworth, a right-wing radio talk-show host, in the August 24 primary — blasted Steele’s remarks as “wildly inaccurate.”

Appearing via satellite from Afghanistan on ABC’s “This Week,” McCain stopped short of calling for Steele’s resignation, but did say that he thought “Mr. Steele is going to have to assess as to whether he can still lead the Republican Party as chairman of the Republican National Committee.”

Also in Afghanistan over the Independence Day weekend, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) told CBS’ “Face The Nation” that he was “dismayed, angry, upset” at Steele. “It was an uninformed, unnecessary, unwise, untimely comment,” Graham said.

“If you’re a student of history, you would know that America cannot afford to allow Afghanistan to go back into Taliban control,” Graham continued. “We’re not here fighting a ground war to occupy this country. We’re here to help Afghans who can live in peace with us.”

RON PAUL COMES TO STEELE’S DEFENSE; RAND PAUL CONSPICUOUSLY SILENT

Not all Republicans were voicing anger at Steele, however. Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), who ran for president as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988 and unsuccessfully sought the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, issued a statement Sunday in which he voiced his support for the embattled GOP chairman for speaking out against the war.

“I would like to congratulate Michael Steele for his leadership on one of the most important issues of today,” Paul said. “He is absolutely right: Afghanistan is now Obama’s war. During the 2008 campaign, Obama was out in front in insisting that more troops be sent to Afghanistan. Obama called for expanding the war even as he pretended to be a peace candidate.”

Paul called on Steele to stay on as RNC chairman. “Smart policies make smart politics,” Paul said. “He [Steele] is guiding the party in the right direction and we are on the verge of victory this fall. Chairman Steele should not back off. He is giving the country, especially young people, hope as he speaks truth about this war.”

Later on Sunday, the Texas Republican, appearing on CNN, asserted that the war in Afghanistan “truly is Obama’s war,” even as he acknowledged that it began during Bush’s presidency.

“Obama said, ‘This is the good war’ and he’s expanded the war, but the American people aren’t with him,” Paul said. “The majority of the American people are tired of the war and they want to see it ended. They want to see our troops brought home.”  

Significantly, there has so far been no comment from Rand Paul, the Tea Party movement-backed GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky being vacated by the retiring Jim Bunning, and son of the Texas congressman. Steele had sharply criticized the younger Paul in May after the Kentuckian said that he opposed the anti-discrimination provisions of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act being imposed on private businesses.

Steele said Rand Paul’s libertarian views on the role of government and civil rights “got in the way of reality, and the reality of it is that was important legislation at the time, put in place important benchmarks for the progress of free people.” He called the GOP Senate nominee’s remarks “misplaced in these times” and that they were out of step with the rest of the country.

STEELE HAS NEVER BEEN LIKED BY CONSERVATIVES FROM DAY ONE

That conservatives have heaped scorn on Steele in the wake of his remarks on Afghanistan should surprise no one. The episode is only the latest in an ongoing soap opera in which the right wing has  attacked Steele relentlessly ever since he announced his candidacy for the RNC chairmanship after the party suffered a drubbing in the 2008 election.

The race for the GOP’s top post was a bitterly-fought contest that was riven with charges of racism, prompting Bob Bennett, an RNC member and former chairman of the Ohio GOP, to brand it “the dirtiest [campaign for the party leadership] ever.”  Bennett was a staunch supporter of the RNC chairman Steele defeated, Mike Duncan, who sought a second two-year term.

Steele was forced to face down vicious accusations by right-wing party hard-liners — often anonymously — that he did not possess a true conservative philosophy and that he was actually a social liberal.

Only hours before they were to begin voting for the RNC’s next chairman, the Republican National Committee’s 168 members found fliers that had been slipped under their Washington hotel-room doors depicting a partially unfurled roll of bathroom tissue with an accusatory headline: “Soft is fine for toilet paper, but not for a chairman of the Republican National Committee!”

The fliers cited Steele’s past association with the Republican Leadership Council, which he co-founded with former New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman. A moderate who served as the head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency during former President George W. Bush’s first term, Whitman’s outspoken support for abortion rights infuriated many social conservatives.

Shortly after Steele announced his candidacy for the party chairmanship, his photograph and all mention of him as a founder of the Republican Leadership Council disappeared from the RLC’s Web site.

Among the RLC’s members include the Log Cabin Republicans, an association of openly gay Republicans which strongly supports expanding civil rights protections for gays. Steele said he had “joined” the council only to reach out to liberals as a conservative and help “unite the party.”

James Bopp Jr., a conservative RNC member from Indiana, issued an e-mail to other committee members in which he openly accused Steele of lying about his relationship with the RLC.

CONSERVATIVES CLASH WITH STEELE OVER PARTY FUNDRAISING, SPENDING

In the spring of last year, party conservatives forced Steele to agree to accept restraints on his control of millions of dollars in party funds and contracts — an unprecedented curb on the powers of the RNC chairman, who, until then, had enjoyed almost unrestricted authority over how to spend the party’s funds.

In January of this year, Steele was accused by two of his predecessors of attempting to personally profit from his speaking engagements at colleges, trade associations and other groups, raking in as much as $20,000 in honorariums, or speaking fees.

“I’ve never heard of a chairman of either party ever taking money for speeches,” former RNC chairman Frank Fahrenkopf said in an interview with the right-wing daily The Washington Times at the time. “The job of a national chairman is to give speeches. That’s what the national party pays him for.”

Fahrenkopf’s criticism of Steele was echoed by former RNC chairman Jim Nicholson, who told the Times that the job “demands so much of your time that you can work 24/7 and not get everything done, so taking time out to speak for the benefit of one’s own bank account is not appropriate.”

As chairman, Steele earns an annual salary of $223,500.

STEELE NOW FACING OPEN RIGHT-WING CHALLENGE TO HIS LEADERSHIP

As the GOP’s right wing — including a chorus of neoconservatives led by William Kristol, founder and editor of the Weekly Standard who is also a board member of the of the right-wing foreign-policy think tank Keep America Safe, and Liz Cheney, the think tank’s co-founder and chairman  — demand Steele’s immediate resignation, Steele is likely to face an all-out right-wing challenge if he decides to stay on and seek a second two-year term next January.

North Dakota GOP Chairman Gary Emineth, a social conservative, is stepping down to prepare to run against Steele for the RNC chairmanship after the November midterm elections, according to The Washington Times.

Emineth insisted, however, that he intended to challenge Steele for the chairmanship for the RNC’s loss of financial support from major donors during Steele’s tenure. “I was shocked at the last RNC meeting to learn how little money we got from our major donors,” the Times quoted Emineth as saying.

Regardless of Emineth’s motives, there is little doubt now that Steele’s future as the national chairman of the Republican Party is on the line. The question is whether the embattled chairman will step down now or fight to keep his job. Either way, the GOP now faces a major internal mess that — because Steele is the party’s first black chairman — potentially could get very ugly, the last thing the GOP needs just four months before the November election.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

In a Sharply Divided 5-4 Ruling, Justices Say ‘No’ to Christian Student Group’s Demand That It Be Recognized and Funded by Public, Taxpayer-Funded Law School Despite Group’s Refusal to Admit Gays and Non-Christian Believers in Defiance of the School’s Anti-Discrimination Policy

DRAWING THE LINE — A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday refused to breach the constitutional wall of separation between religion and government when the justices, by a 5-4 majority, rejected a private Christian student group’s demand that it be officially recognized and funded by the public, taxpayer-financed Hastings College of the Law of the University of California, in spite of the group’s refusal to admit gays and non-Christian religious believers. The justices sided with the law school’s policy that bars official recognition and funding to student groups that do not comply with the college’s requirement that they be open to all students without discrimination. (Photo courtesy  supremecourtus.gov)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, June 29, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

A day after hundreds of thousands of spectators lined San Francisco’s Market Street to watch the city’s 40th annual Gay Pride Parade, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sided with a San Francisco-based public law school’s refusal to recognize or fund a Christian student group that refused to admit gays and non-Christian religious believers as members.

On the final day of its 2009-10 term, the justices, in a sharply-divided 5-4 decision, ruled that the Christian Legal Society could not expect to receive official recognition or funding from the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law if it refused to comply with the school’s anti-discrimination policy.

The justices declared that the First Amendment did not require the public college to sanction the private group’s membership policies based on its religious beliefs. While the court did not explicitly say so, its ruling strongly implied that granting such sanction would have violated the constitutional wall of separation between church and state.  

CHRISTIAN GROUP’S DISCRIMINATORY CONDUCT — NOT ITS BELIEFS — AT ISSUE, SAYS GINSBURG  

Writing for the court majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg rejected claims by the Christian Legal Society that the law school’s anti-discrimination policy violated its First Amendment right to the free exercise of its religious beliefs and freedom of association.

To the contrary, Hastings’ anti-discrimination policy “ensures that no Hastings student is forced to fund a group that would reject him or her as a member,” Ginsburg wrote. “It is the CLS’s conduct, not its Christian perspective, [that] is, from Hastings’ viewpoint, what stands between the group” and recognition by the law school.

“In requiring the CLS — in common with all other student organizations — to choose between welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress constitutional limitations,” Ginsburg wrote.

Colleges and universities, both public and private, fund student groups through activity fees directly charged to students, in addition to their tuition, room and board, and other expenses. For student groups at Hastings to receive official recognition and funding from the school, they must be open to all students, without regard to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability or sexual orientation.

Ginsburg — who read the majority opinion in the court’s chamber even as she was mourning the death Sunday of her husband, Martin Ginsburg, from complications of metastatic cancer at the age of 78 — was joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and — on his last day before his retirement — John Paul Stevens.

The Hastings College of the Law currently recognizes about 60 student groups, including the Hastings Association of Muslim Law Students, the Hastings Catholic Law Students Association, the Black Law Students Association, the Hastings Jewish Law Students Association and even Hastings OutLaw, a group formed by Hastings students who are openly gay.

All have provisions in their bylaws, as required under the school’s nondiscrimination policy, that membership is open to any full-time student at Hastings, but the Christian Legal Society is the only student group at Hastings that requires its members to strictly adhere to its religious principles.  

GROUP’S ‘STATEMENT OF FAITH’ BARS GAYS, NON-CHRISTIANS

The CLS, a nearly half-century-old, Illinois-based national organization with chapters on 40 college campuses across the country, effectively bars gay men, lesbians and bisexuals from membership by requiring that all its members and officers affirm its “Statement of Faith,” which includes the belief that “Christians should not engage in sexual conduct outside of a marriage between a man and a woman.”

A resolution passed by the CLS board was even more explicit: “Unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle is inconsistent with an affirmation of the Statement of Faith,” the resolution said. “We condemn all acts of sexual conduct outside of God’s design for marriage between one man and one woman, including fornication, adultery and homosexual conduct.”

The group’s “Statement of Faith” also effectively bars non-Christian believers by explicitly stating that “all officers, directors, members, advisory council members, and staff of CLS shall, as a condition of their employment or membership in CLS, acknowledge in writing their acceptance of . . .the Deity of our Lord, Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary; His vicarious death for our sins through which we receive eternal life; His bodily resurrection and personal return.”

JUSTICE KENNEDY: ‘STATEMENT OF FAITH’ AKIN TO COLD WAR-ERA LOYALTY OATHS

In a concurring opinion, Justice Kennedy wrote that the CLS’s Statement of Faith amounted to a “loyalty oath” reminiscent of the kind that was imposed on federal government agencies during the Cold War era by President Harry Truman.

“The era of loyalty oaths is behind us,” Kennedy wrote. “A school quite properly may conclude that allowing an oath or belief-affirming requirement, or an outside conduct requirement, could be divisive for student relations and inconsistent with the basic concept that a view’s validity should be tested through free and open discussion.”

In his final opinion before stepping down, Justice Stevens wrote that while the CLS is free under the First Amendment to determine who can and cannot be members, a public university is not required by the First Amendment “to validate or support” the group’s “discriminatory” practices.

“Other groups may exclude or mistreat Jews, blacks and women — or those who do not share their contempt for Jews, blacks and women,” Stevens wrote. “A free society must tolerate such groups. It need not, however, subsidize them, give them its official imprimatur, or grant them equal access to law school facilities.”

ALITO RIPS DECISION AS ‘SETBACK FOR FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION’ — CLS DEFIANT

In a hard-hitting dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito blasted the court majority, denouncing their ruling as “a serious setback for freedom of expression in this country.”

Writing for the court’s four conservatives, Alito cited the long-held judicial principle that “we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’ Today’s decision rests on a very different principle: No freedom for expression that offends prevailing standards of political correctness in our country’s institutions of higher learning.”

Alito’s opinion was co-signed by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts.

The CLS — backed by the Alliance Defense Fund, one of several conservative groups defending California’s Proposition 8, which bars same-gender marriage — issued a defiant statement in response to the high court’s ruling, insisting that Hastings’ anti-discrimination policy was “unusual,” that the court “confined its opinion to the unique policy” and that the justices “did not address” whether other public colleges and universities with similar nondiscrimination policies are free to enforce them.

“All college students, including religious students, should have the right to form groups around shared beliefs without being banished from campus,” Kim Colby, senior counsel at the CLS’s Center for Law & Religious Freedom, said in the statement. “Today’s ruling, however, will have limited impact. We are not aware of any other public university that has the exact same policy as Hastings.”

LAWYER FOR CONSERVATIVE GROUP SAYS RULING ‘DOESN’T SETTLE CONFLICT’

Gregory Baylor, senior legal counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund, said the ruling “doesn’t settle the core constitutional issue of whether nondiscrimination policies in general can force religious student groups to allow non-believers to lead their groups. The conflict still exists.” In the long run, Baylor said, the decision “puts other student groups across the country at risk.”

Baylor insisted that the Hastings policy “actually requires CLS to allow atheists to lead its Bible studies and the College Democrats to accept the election of Republican officers in order for the groups to be recognized on campus. We agree with Justice Alito in his dissent that the court should have rejected this as absurd.”

Baylor’s argument was flatly rejected by the Reverend Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “Religious discrimination is wrong, and a public school should be able to take steps to eradicate it,” Lynn told The Associated Press. “Today’s court ruling makes it easier for colleges and universities to do that. It’s a huge step forward for fundamental fairness and equal treatment.”

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. all rights reserved.

A Ruling Is Expected by the Fall on Lawsuit Challenging Federal Constitutionality of Voter-Approved Measure Barring Gay and Lesbian Couples From Marrying, But No Matter Which Way Judge Vaughn Walker Decides, a Final Showdown in the U.S. Supreme Court is All But Inevitable

                                                     

HOW WILL HE DECIDE? — Vaughn Walker, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, is expected in the next few weeks to hand down a ruling on a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8, a voter-approved amendment to the California Constitution that bars gay and lesbian couples from marrying. Closing arguments in the closely-watched case were made last week. Some supporters of Prop. 8 are making an issue of the fact — revealed by the San Francisco Chronicle in February — that Judge Walker, a conservative appointed to the court in 1989 by President George H.W. Bush, is himself gay. But no matter which way Walker decides, the losing side is certain to appeal, setting the stage for a final showdown in the U.S. Supreme Court. (Photo: Mike Linksvayer via Flickr)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, June 22, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

As millions of lesbian women, gay men, bisexuals and transgenders prepare to march in celebratory pride parades all across the United States and around the world this weekend, many will be casting an eye on a federal judge in San Francisco as he prepares to issue a long-awaited ruling in a closely-watched constitutional challenge to California’s voter-approved Proposition 8, which bars gay and lesbian couples from marrying.

Vaughn Walker, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, heard closing arguments last week in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which many legal experts predict will be a landmark case going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

During the proceedings, Walker repeatedly pressed attorneys on both sides with pointed questions on what interest is served by the state determining who can and cannot marry and on the motivations of the voters in passing the measure.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is named as the defendant in the lawsuit, refused to defend the measure. State Attorney General Jerry Brown, who is the Democratic candidate to succeed the Republican Schwarzenegger in November’s gubernatorial election, also refused to defend Prop. 8. As a result, several religious and conservative groups intervened in the measure’s defense.

Defenders of Prop. 8 — an amendment to the California Constitution — argued that its purpose was to preserve marriage as “an institution intended to promote childbearing.”

Opponents of Prop. 8 — which passed with 54 percent of the vote in  November 2008 — countered with Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared marriage to be a fundamental constitutional right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and struck down laws in 16 states that barred interracial marriages.

A ruling is expected by the fall. But no matter which way Judge Walker decides, it will almost certainly be appealed, setting the stage for a final showdown in the Supreme Court.

OLSON: FEARS OF DAMAGE TO OPPOSITE-GENDER MARRIAGES UNFOUNDED

Former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, the lead attorney representing two same-gender couples challenging Prop. 8, argued that claims of marriage being a tradition whose primary purpose is to bear children and that allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry damages the marriages of heterosexual couples are not sufficient grounds to bar them from doing so.

“‘We have always done it that way’ is a corollary to ‘Because I say so,'” Olson told Judge Walker. “It’s not a reason. You can’t have constitutional discrimination in public schools because you have always done it that way,” referring to government-imposed racial segregation in public schools that the Supreme Court outlawed in 1954.

COOPER: HETEROSEXUALS-ONLY MARRIAGE ‘FUNDAMENTAL TO SURVIVAL OF HUMAN RACE’  

Former U.S. Justice Department attorney Charles Cooper, the lead attorney  representing religious and conservative groups that sponsored Prop. 8, countered that the primary purpose of marriage is the raising of children and that definition is “fundamental to the very existence and survival of the human race.” He argued that “children do best when they are raised by their own mother and father.”

Cooper denounced as a “slur on the seven million Californians who supported Proposition 8” the plaintiff’s argument that “there is no way to understand why anyone would support Proposition 8, would support the traditional definition of marriage, except through some irrational or dark motivation.”

BOTH SIDES IGNORE CHURCH-STATE IMPLICATIONS OF PROP. 8

Neither side addressed a broader constitutional issue raised by Prop. 8 and other laws that bar gay and lesbian couples from marrying — an issue that The ‘Skeeter Bites Report has raised repeatedly: The separation of church and state.

This column has argued again and again and again that Prop. 8 and all similar laws, including the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, enshrine into state and federal law a religious doctrine that condemns homosexuality as a sin that must be suppressed — a violation of both the Establishment of Religion Clause of the First Amendment and the Religious Test Clause of Article VI of the Constitution.

In the seven years since the Supreme Court fully decriminalized same-gender sexual relations in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision that struck down the nation’s last remaining anti-sodomy laws, there has been — and is — no legal justification whatsoever to continue to bar gay and lesbian couples from marrying, since their relationships are no longer illegal.

That point was made clear by no less an authority than conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who, in his blistering dissenting opinion in the Lawrence case, wrote, “State laws against . . . same-sex marriage . . . [are] called into question by today’s decision. The Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.”

If Scalia is right — and The ‘Skeeter Bites Report strongly believes that he is in this case — then every argument to bar gay and lesbian couples from marrying is inextricably rooted in religious approbations against homosexuality, which cannot constitutionally be used in court. The supporters of Proposition 8 and similar laws know this all too well, yet they plod on anyway, despite the Lawrence decision having effectively pulled the legal rug out from under their arguments.

CIVIL MARRIAGE AND RELIGIOUS MATRIMONY ARE NOT THE SAME THING

Lest anyone forget, the Yes on 8 campaign was heavily bankrolled by several conservative churches, most notably the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — better known as the Mormon Church — and the Reverend Rick Warren’s southern California-based Saddleback Church, which made headlines during the 2008 presidential campaign as the venue for a forum on faith and politics in which then-candidates John McCain and Barack Obama participated.

Contrary to the long-held assertions of religious conservatives, the civil institution of marriage is not “a holy gift from God.” They have confused the state institution of civil marriage with the religious sacrament of holy matrimony.

It is the sacrament of holy matrimony, the exclusive province of religion, that is the “holy gift from God,” completely separate from civil marriage, the exclusive province of the state.

Conservative religious institutions that oppose homosexuality have every right under the First Amendment to deny the sacrament of holy matrimony to gay and lesbian couples in accordance with their religious doctrine. But they have no constitutional right to seek to have the state deny civil marriage to gay and lesbian couples. It is clearly not their place to do so.

Nor do all religious institutions condemn homosexuality. To the contrary, many other religious institutions are openly supportive of gay men and lesbians — with some even according the sacrament of “holy union” to gay and lesbian couples.        

JUDGE WALKER A CONSERVATIVE WITH A STRONG INDEPENDENT STREAK

Judge Walker, appointed to the district court in 1989 by President George H.W. Bush and elevated to chief judge of the court in 2004 by President George W. Bush, is widely seen by court observers as a conservative jurist with a strong independent streak.

Originally nominated for the district court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan, Walker’s nomination was stalled for two years by Senate Democrats who objected to his membership in an all-male private club and to his having been the attorney representing the International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee in its 1982 copyright-infringement lawsuit against the organizers of the first Gay Games in San Francisco, originally dubbed the “Gay Olympics.”

Two dozen House Democrats, led by now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), whose district includes San Francisco, opposed Walker’s nomination because of his alleged “insensitivity” to gays while representing the IOC and USOC.

(The Olympic committees and the Federation of Gay Games (FoGG) have since made peace with one another and have worked cooperatively together, successfully lobbying to have travel restrictions on HIV-positive athletes waived for the 1994 Gay Games in New York, the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The 2010 Gay Games will take place July 31-August 6 in Cologne, Germany; Cleveland will host the 2014 Gay Games).

Judge Walker has demonstrated having a libertarian streak in cases involving individual rights, ruling that the federal government’s controversial post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping program was unconstitutional. He has also issued rulings in two previous cases on the on the civil and constitutional rights of LGBTs that have been interpreted as being pro-gay.

In one case, Judge Walker ruled that the First Amendment free-speech rights of two city employees in Oakland, California were not violated when when managers removed a bulletin board flier for a religious group that promoted “natural family, marriage and family values.”

In another, Walker dismissed a lawsuit brought by the parents of a California boy against a local school district that claimed their First Amendment religious rights were violated by comments their son’s teacher had made in the classroom supporting LGBT civil rights.

CONSERVATIVES ATTACK JUDGE’S IMPARTIALITY AFTER NEWSPAPER ‘OUTS’ HIM AS GAY

Throughout the trial on the constitutionality of Prop. 8, Judge Walker asked a lot of tough questions to the attorneys on both sides of the issue. And given Walker’s past representation as an attorney of the IOC and USOC in the 1982 copyright case against the Gay Games, no one can realistically call Walker a “pushover” on LGBT-related issues.

Yet when the San Francisco Chronicle revealed in February that Judge Walker is himself gay, conservatives were quick to demand that Walker recuse himself from the case.

Ed Whelan, a columnist for the conservative National Review magazine writing on its online edition that “Walker’s entire course of conduct has only one sensible explanation: that Walker is hellbent to use the case to advance the cause of same-sex marriage. Given his manifest inability to be impartial, Walker should have recused himself from the beginning, and he remains obligated to do so now.”

That prompted the Chronicle to fire back with an editorial asserting that “A judge’s sexual orientation does not inherently shade his ability to read and interpret the U.S. Constitution with clear-eyed wisdom. Assuming this case advances on appeal, no matter how [Judge] Walker rules, there almost certainly will be jurists who will need to set aside their religion’s teachings — and, quite likely, the impact of their ruling on close friends or even a family member — as they do their utmost to uphold the meaning of the Constitution.”

In fairness to the Chronicle, Judge Walker never kept his being gay a secret, so the newspaper cannot be accused of “outing” him against his will. But he’s never boasted about it either, thus the Chronicle’s disclosure did come as a surprise to many.

That the Prop. 8 case will ultimately land in the Supreme Court is beyond doubt — indeed, it’s inevitable. So the fact of Judge Walker being gay really is of no consequence to the final outcome of this case.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

As the Environmental and Economic Costs Continue to Mount From Blast That Destroyed BP’s Deepwater Horizon Rig — Now the Worst Man-Made Disaster in U.S. History — Advocates Struggle to Draw Greater Attention to Safety of Workers on Other Offshore Oil Rigs

Response crews pour water on the burning Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico shortly after the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers and ultimately destroyed the rig and triggered a massive undersea gusher of oil, which now threatens the Gulf Coast with the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. But as much attention has been focused on the environmental and economic costs of the disaster, less attention has been paid to the 11 workers killed in the blast — whose bodies have never been recovered — and on the safety of workers on other oil rigs in the gulf. (Photo courtesy U.S. Coast Guard)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, June 15, 2010)

By MIKE LILLIS

The Washington Independent

(Published under a Creative Commons license)

The largest oil spill in U.S. history has received no absence of congressional scrutiny. Yet as lawmakers continue to focus their examinations on the environmental, economic and energy implications of the disaster, a number of labor advocates are beginning to wonder: What about the workers?

Eleven men were killed and dozens more injured, when BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana. The youngest victim, Shane Roshto of Franklin County, Mississippi, was 22; the oldest, Keith Blair Manuel of Eunice, Louisiana, was 56.

To date, none of the bodies have been recovered.

Yet their stories have become mere footnotes beneath the other narratives that quickly monopolized the national headlines – particularly the environmental and economic threats posed by the millions of gallons of crude oil that have gushed into the Gulf of Mexico since the blast.

WORKERS AT HUNDREDS OF GULF OIL RIGS FACE DANGERS

Worker advocates are quick to acknowledge the severity of the ongoing leak. Still, many also warn that ignoring the worker safety issues exposed by the tragedy would be a mistake, especially considering that hundreds of oil and gas rigs – among the most statistically dangerous workplaces in the country – remain active off the nation’s shores.

“The worker-safety issue has been completely lost in this story,” said Tom O’Connor, executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, an advocacy group. “It’s one of the biggest industrial disasters in recent history, and yet Congress [views it] the same as the public: They’re not seeing it as a worker-safety issue.”

Federal statistics support O’Connor’s call for concern. Between 2004 and 2008, the most recent figures available, 563 oil and gas workers were killed on the job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, including 120 in 2008 – easily dwarfing the 93 coal miners killed in mining-related accidents in a comparable period between 2003 and 2007.

In 2008, the oil and gas industry accounted for more than 10 percent of all workplace fatalities resulting from fires and explosions, according to the federal Minerals Management Service (MMS). And offshore rigs are hardly immune. Between 2001 and 2009, 60 offshore workers were killed on the job, while more than 1,600 were injured, according to the agency.

BP OIL RIGS IN GULF DISASTERS WAITING TO HAPPEN, DOCUMENTS SHOW

[The House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the April 20 blast, released dozens of internal BP documents Monday that showed BP made a series of decisions aimed at saving money that heightened the risk of a catastrophic blowout, with a BP engineer calling the Deepwater Horizon platform “a nightmare well” in an e-mail issued less than a week before the explosion.

[The release of the documents came just weeks after the online news service Truthout reported that a former contractor who worked for BP warned in a series of e-mails that the British-owned oil conglomerate violated federal worker-safety laws and its own internal procedures by failing to maintain crucial safety and engineering documents related to one of the company’s other deepwater oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

[The whistleblower, whose identity was not disclosed, raised concerns as far back as November 2008 about safety issues at another BP-owned rig, the BP Atlantis, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans.

[And more than a year ago, an outside consultant who examined procedures at the BP Atlantis rig warned that more than 85 percent of operations were not compliant with either federal workplace safety regulations or with BP’s own safety and environmental management standards and carried a high risk of “catastrophic operator errors.”]  

A MUCH DIFFERENT REACTION FROM THAT TOWARD W. VIRGINIA COAL-MINE DISASTER

The reaction to the Deepwater Horizon incident contrasts sharply with the response to another recent industrial disaster: the April 5 explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in southern West Virginia that killed 29 workers and almost killed a 30th. In the wake of that tragedy, it was concern for the well-being of the miners that captivated lawmakers and spurred their indignation.

“[Miners] deserve nothing less than a safe working environment, and an employer who respects and values their safety,” Senator Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) said in April, echoing the sentiments of many of his colleagues. “We must reexamine the health and safety laws we have put into place and what more may need to be done to avoid future loss of life.”

Since then, three separate labor panels – the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Senate Appropriations Labor Subcommittee, and the House Education and Labor Committee – have examined the Upper Big Branch accident.

Neither of those panels has held hearings on the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Senate Democratic leaders were quick to call Gulf spill hearings in the Energy, Environment and Homeland Security committees.

In the House, both the Energy and Natural Resources panels have examined the disaster, while Representative Edolphus Towns (D-New York),chairman of the Government Oversight Committee, has launched an investigation into the actions of federal regulators prior to the accident.

A QUESTION OF WHO HAS JURISDICTION

But, to date, none of the scrutiny has focused on worker safety.

Part of the reason is likely jurisdictional. Unlike mine safety, which is monitored by a branch of the Labor Department (the Mine Safety and Health Administration) — and therefore overseen by Congress’ labor panels — offshore drill rig safety is a responsibility split between the Minerals Management Service, a part of the Interior Department, and the Coast Guard. Neither agency falls under the watch of Congress’ labor experts.

A provision of a 1970 labor law has allowed both the MMS and the Coast Guard to preempt the oversight authority of the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which focuses exclusively on workplace safety. Critics of that arrangement contend that the other responsibilities of the MMS and the Coast Guard dilute their concentration on occupational safety.

Peg Seminario, safety and health director for the AFL-CIO, suggested that as a result of the 1970 law, the wrong agencies are in charge of overseeing offshore oil rigs. “Those most focused on worker safety and the environment – OSHA and the EPA – don’t have a say in this,” she said. “It’s an area that clearly needs attention.”

Calls by The Washington Independent seeking comment from the MMS and the Coast Guard were not returned.

WHITE HOUSE, CONGRESS NOW ZEROING IN ON WORKPLACE SAFETY

The Obama administration has taken some steps to prevent similar disasters from occurring in the future. On Thursday, the administration acknowledged that the safety rules for offshore rigs have been lacking, with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announcing strict new operating requirements for those projects, as well as a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.

Faced with criticisms that the MMS’ duties – which include oil rig leasing, revenue collection and safety enforcement – are conflicting, the Interior Department recently split the agency into three separate parts, one of which will focus exclusively on the “oversight, safety, and environmental protection in all offshore energy activities,” according to an Interior Department spokesman.

[President Obama is scheduled to deliver a televised address the nation from the Oval Office at 9:00 p.m. EDT tonight (Tuesday) on the gulf oil disaster.]  

Meanwhile, congressional leaders are urging worker safeguards where they do have jurisdiction in the Gulf region — on land.

Representative George Miller (D-California), chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, wrote to OSHA on Thursday seeking assurances that the agency is protecting workers involved in the cleanup efforts, some of whom have been hospitalized with headaches, nausea and vomiting.

“Much is still unknown about the long-term health effects of chemicals utilized in this cleanup,” Miller wrote, “Especially given the health and safety track record of [BP], heightened vigilance is necessary to ensure that every person aiding the cleanup is provided the necessary information, training and equipment to protect themselves.”

BP A POSSIBLE TAKEOVER TARGET BY CHINESE FIRM?

[Meanwhile, BP’s stock value has fallen by a dramatic $67 billion since the disaster began, leading to speculation that the oil giant could become a target for a takeover by a larger company.

[According to Bloomberg News, BP could become an attractive target for a takeover by a Chinese oil company. The business news service on Thursday quoted analysts at the London-based Standard Chartered Bank as saying that PetroChina, in a bid to top Exxon Mobil as the world’s largest oil firm, would have “persuasive” reasons to seek a takeover of BP.

[A takeover of BP by PetroChina would likely run into a brick wall of opposition by both the U.S. and British governments, however. An $18.5 billion bid in 2005 by the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) to purchase Unocal Corporation was scuttled in the face of strong opposition in Congress. Unocal — known for its orange-ball 76 brand — was subsequently acquired by Chevron Corporation (ConocoPhillips now owns the 76 brand).  

[BP’s shares have plunged from a year’s high of $62.38 a share on January 19 to a year’s low of $29 a share last Wednesday. It rose slightly on Monday, closing at $30.67 a share.]  

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Special Report Copyright 2010, American Independent News Network. Published Under a Creative Commons license.

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Dissenting Officials Inside Spy Agency Say That Remote Air Strikes With Predator Drones Against Suspected Al-Qaida Operatives in Pakistan are ‘Doing More Harm Than Good’ by Boosting Recruitment of New Jihadist Militants Into Ranks of Al-Qaida, Taliban

UNDER FIRE — The use by the Central Intelligence Agency of unmanned, remote-controlled Predator attack drones, such as the one photographed above, against suspected al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan is drawing new criticism from an unlikely source: Dissenting CIA officials involved in the strikes, who argue that the attacks are “counterproductive” and resulting in making it easier for al-Qaida and its Taliban allies to recruit new militants into its ranks. (Photo Courtesy U.S. Air Force)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, June 8, 2010)

By GARETH PORTER

Inter-Press Service

(Published under a Creative Commons license)

Some Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in its drone strikes program in Pakistan and elsewhere are privately expressing their opposition to the program within the agency, because it is helping al-Qaida and its Taliban allies recruit new jihadist militants, according to a retired military officer in contact with them.

“Some of the CIA operators are concerned that, because of its blowback effect, it is doing more harm than good,” said Jeffrey Addicott, former legal adviser to U.S. Special Forces and director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, in an interview with Inter-Press Service.

Addicott said the CIA operatives he knows have told him the drone strikes are being used effectively by al-Qaida and Taliban leaders to recruit more militants.

CIA officers “are very upset” with the drone strike policy, Addicott said. “They’ll do what the boss says, but they view it as a harmful exercise. They say we’re largely killing rank and file Pakistani Taliban, and they are the ones who are agitated by the campaign.”

ATTACKS KILLING CIVILIANS,’INFURIATING’ MUSLIM MEN INTO BECOMING JIHADISTS

Because the drone strikes kill innocent civilians and bystanders along with leaders from far away, they “infuriate the Muslim male”, said Addicott, thus making them more willing to join the movement. The men in Pakistan’s tribal region “view Americans as cowards and weasels,” he added.

Addicott retired from the U.S. Army as a lieutenant colonel in 2000 after serving for six years as senior legal adviser to the Special Operations Forces but is still a consultant for the U.S. military on issues of terrorism and law.

Addicot said the CIA officers expressing concern about the blowback effects of the drone policy are “mid-grade and below.”

They learned about the impact of drone strikes on recruiting by extremist leaders in Pakistan from intelligence gathered by CIA and the National Security Agency, which intercepts electronic communications, according to Addicott.

They have informed high-level CIA officials about their concerns that the program is backfiring. “The people at the top are not believers,” said Addicott, referring to the CIA. “They know that the objective is not going to be achieved.”

DISSENTING CIA OFFICERS’ CONCERNS CONFIRM 2009 WARNINGS

The complaints by CIA operatives about the drone strikes’ blowback effect reported by Addicott are identical to warnings by military and intelligence officials reported in April 2009 by the McClatchy News Service.

McClatchy quoted an intelligence official with deep involvement in both Afghanistan and Pakistan as saying al-Qaida and the Taliban had used the strikes in propaganda to “portray Americans as cowards who are afraid to face their enemies and risk death.” The official called the operations “a major catalyst” for the jihadi movement in Pakistan.

A military official involved in counterterrorism operations told McClatchy the drone strikes were a “recruiting windfall for the Pakistani Taliban.”

DRONE ATTACKS IN AFGHANISTAN, YEMEN AND ELSEWHERE ALSO UNDER FIRE

The CIA operatives’ opposition to the drone strikes program extends to Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan, all of which now have confirmed deaths from drone strikes, according to Addicott.

The official goal of the geographical expansion of drone strikes is to destroy or disrupt al-Qaida. But al-Qaida today is less a major organization than “a mentality” in most Middle Eastern countries, Addicott said, and the CIA officers fear that the strikes will only reinforce that way of thinking.

BEGUN UNDER BUSH, DRONE STRIKE EXPANDED UNDER OBAMA

Addicott said the drone program has been driven by President Obama, rather than by the CIA. “Obama’s trying to show people that we’re winning,” he added.

The program was originally authorized by President George W. Bush against a relatively short list of high-level al-Qaida officials, and with highly restrictive conditions on approval of each strike. The strike could not be approved unless the target was identified with high confidence, and a complete assessment of “collateral damage” had to ensure against significant civilian casualties.

In early 2008, however, Bush approved the removal of previous restraints. As recounted by David Sanger in his 2009 book, The Inheritance, Bush authorized strikes against targets merely based on visual evidence of a “typical” al-Qaida motorcade or a group entering a house that had been linked to al-Qaida or its Pakistani Taliban allies.

As a top national security aide to Bush acknowledged to Sanger, the shift was “risky” because, “you can hit the wrong house or mistakenly misidentify the motorcade.”

It also meant that anyone who could be linked in some way to al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces” could now be targeted for drone attacks.

OBAMA STRATEGY TO ‘DEMORALIZE’ AL-QAIDA WITH DRONE STRIKES FAILING

The Obama administration has continued to justify the program as aimed at high-value targets, suggesting that it can degrade al-Qaida as an organization by a “decapitation” strategy, according to Addicott. However administration officials now privately admit that the objective of the program is to “demoralize the rank and file,” he said.

That won’t work, according to Addicott, because, “These are tribal people. They don’t view life and death the way we expect them to.”

In effect, the drone strikes program has become an “attrition” strategy for Pakistan, Addicott said.

Such a strategy in Pakistan’s tribal regions appears to be futile. Madrasas in the region have churned out tens of thousands of young men with militant views, and their activities are spread across hundreds of sites in the region.

ATTACKS SEEN BY ADMINISTRATION AS ‘GETTING RESULTS’

Within the Obama administration, it appears that the logic behind the program is that it has to be seen to be doing something about al-Qaida. “The argument I get from people associated with the program,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow in conflict prevention at the Council on Foreign Relations, “is the same as the one [CIA Director Leon] Panetta gave last year.”

“Very frankly,” Panetta declared on May 18 of last year, “it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaida leadership.”

Zenko, who has studied the bureaucratic in-fighting surrounding such limited uses of military force, told IPS that the drone strikes have appealed to the Obama administration because they offer “clear results that are obtained quickly and are easily measured.”

All the other tools that might be used to try to reduce al-Qaida’s influence in Pakistan and elsewhere take a long time, require cooperation among multiple actors and have no powerful political constituency behind them, Zenko observed.

Dissent from those who are involved in the program itself has little effect when it is up against what is perceived as political pressure to show progress against al-Qaida — no matter how illusory.

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Special Report Copyright 2010, Inter-Press Service. Reposted under a Creative Commons license.

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

The Libertarian GOP Congressman From Texas Cast the Sole ‘No’ Vote on a 2004 Resolution Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Landmark 1964 Anti-Discrimination Law; Meanwhile, in Interview on Russian TV, Rand Paul Calls For Stripping Illegal Immigrants’ American-Born Children of Their Constitutionally-Protected Birthright of U.S. Citizenship

Tea Party-backed Kentucky Republican U.S. Senate nominee Rand Paul (right) isn’t the only libertarian who’s taken a dim view toward Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and other public accommodations. His father, Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) (left), is even more vehement in his opposition to Title II — so much so that he was the only member of Congress who voted against a 2004 resolution celebrating the landmark law on its 40th anniversary. Meanwhile, in an interview on Russian television, Rand Paul called for stripping the American-born children of illegal immigrants of their U.S. citizenship — despite the fact that the Constitution guarantees citizenship for all persons born in this country. (Photos courtesy House.gov and Politico.com)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, June 1, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Like father, like son.

It turns out that Rand Paul, the Tea Party-backed Republican nominee for the Kentucky U.S. Senate seat now held by the retiring Republican Jim Bunning, isn’t the only member of his family who has argued that Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act wrongfully interferes with the internal affairs of private businesses and property owners.

So does his father, Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), who ran unsuccessfully for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination.

In fact, the elder Paul’s opposition to Title II — which outlaws discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce — is so intense that he was the only member of Congress to vote against a 2004 congressional resolution honoring the landmark anti-discrimination law on the 40th anniversary of its passage.

Ron Paul stunned even his Republican colleagues when he delivered a speech on the House floor denouncing the Civil Rights Act, insisting that, contrary to the claims of its supporters, “the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the [law] increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.”

Meanwhile, Rand Paul, who’s maintained a low profile after igniting a firestorm of outrage on May 19 when he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that he, too, opposed the law’s ban on discrimination by private businesses, is in hot water again, this time for telling a Russian TV interviewer that the American-born children of illegal immigrants should be stripped of their U.S. citizenship.

The younger Paul — whose comments on the Civil Rights Act were condemned as “absolutely appalling” on May 20 by House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-South Carolina), a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus and a veteran of the civil rights movement — said that the U.S. is “the only country that I know that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen. I think that should stop.” Rand Paul made his assertions in spite of the fact that citizenship for all persons born in the U.S. is a right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

RON PAUL DENOUNCES CIVIL RIGHTS ACT IN 2004 SPEECH ON HOUSE FLOOR. . .

It was on June 24, 2004 when the House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring the Civil Rights Act on the 40th anniversary of its passage. The vote was a nearly unanimous 414 to 1. Incredibly, Ron Paul was the only member of the House to have voted “no.”

In his floor speech — which is published in full in the June 23, 2004 edition of The Congressional Record — the elder Paul said that the Civil Rights Act “gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society.”

Ron Paul asserted that under the landmark anti-discrimination law “bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife.”

The  Texas congressman went on to say that “the federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form — or not form — contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties.”

He concluded his remarks by saying that, “While I join in sponsors of [this resolution] in promoting racial harmony and individual liberty, the fact is the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not accomplish these goals. Instead, this law unconstitutionally expanded federal power, thus reducing liberty.”

. . . AND AGAIN IN 2007 INTERVIEW ON ‘MEET THE PRESS’

Shortly after declaring his candidacy for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, the elder Paul made an appearance on the December 23, 2007 edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” during which, when pressed by then-host, the late Tim Russert, to clarify his remarks, insisted that Title II of the Civil Rights Act violated property rights.

“You’re not compelled in your house to [invite] strangers you don’t like,” Paul said, referring to Title II’s ban on discrimination in public accommodations. “So it’s a property-rights issue. This idea that all private property is under the domain of the federal government I think is wrong.”

When asked point-blank by Russert if he would vote against the Civil Rights Act today, the elder Paul replied, “Yes — if it were written the same way, where the federal government has taken over property. It has nothing to do with race relations . . . It has to do with the Constitution and private property rights.”

RON PAUL ALSO SAYS LINCOLN WRONG TO GO TO WAR TO END SLAVERY

When Russert confronted him with a 2006 Washington Post article that read, in part, that “According to [Paul], Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery,” the Texas congressman replied, “Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, [Lincoln] shouldn’t have gone to war.”

Russert interrupted Paul to say that “We’d still have slavery,” to which he derisively answered, “Oh, come on, Tim! Slavery was phased out in every other country in the world and the way I’m advising is that it should have been done by doing what the British did — You buy the slaves and then release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans?

“Every other country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war,” the elder Paul continued. “That doesn’t sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.”

In the wake of the elder Paul’s public pronouncements on the Civil Rights Act and even on the Civil War to end slavery — combined with racially inflammatory articles published in a series of early 1990s newsletters that bore his name — is it any wonder that his 2008 presidential campaign drew support from avowed white supremacists, including former Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard Don Black, who now runs Stormfront —  the largest “white-nationalist” site on the Web — as The ‘Skeeter Bites Report and other bloggers revealed in January of that year?

Is it also any wonder that, to this day, the 74-year-old Ron Paul has been steadfast in his refusal to either distance himself from the white supremacists who backed his 2008 campaign or to return their financial contributions? There are even reports that some of those same white supremacists who backed the elder Paul’s run for the White House are now supporting his son’s Senate candidacy.  

RAND PAUL: ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS’ AMERICAN-BORN KIDS SHOULD NOT BE CITIZENS

Meanwhile, the 47-year-old Rand Paul is in trouble yet again — this time over controversial remarks made in a Russian TV interview. Appearing on the state-run, English-language Russia Today (RT) network shortly after winning the May 18 primary, the Kentucky Republican Senate candidate said that the American-born children of illegal immigrants should not automatically become U.S. citizens.

The younger Paul told RT’s Dina Gusovsky that he believes that politics plays a big hand in the current immigration issue. “We shouldn’t provide an easy route to citizenship,” he said. “A lot of this is about demographics. If you look at new [legal] immigrants from Mexico, they register [to vote by a] three to one [margin as] Democrat[s], so the Democrat Party is for easy citizenship and allowing them to vote.

“I think we need to re-address that,” he said. He didn’t specify how, but there is a bill pending in the House with 90 Republican co-sponsors that would deny automatic citizenship to the American-born children of illegal immigrants.

The bill, however, would clearly violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly says that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Not surprisingly, Ron Paul also favors denying citizenship to the American-born children of illegal immigrants. In his 2007 interview on “Meet the Press,” the elder Paul shocked Russert when he called for a constitutional amendment to do so. “The Fourteenth Amendment wasn’t in the original Constitution,” he said, “There’s a confusion on [its] interpretation.

“Individuals are supposed to have birthright citizenship if they’re under the jurisdiction of the government,” he continued. “Someone who illegally comes into this country — say a drug dealer — is he under [U.S.] jurisdiction and their [American-born] children deserves citizenship? I think that’s awfully confusing, and I have a bill pending to change that, as well as a constitutional amendment to clarify that.”

WHY ARE THE PAULS SO INTENT ON ALIENATING BLACKS, LATINOS?

So explicit is the language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause that no attempt to deny citizenship to the American-born children of illegal immigrants has ever succeeded in court. And a constitutional amendment to achieve that purpose would require two-thirds supermajorities in both houses of Congress for passage — supermajorities which do not currently exist and are unlikely to exist even if Republicans took back control of Congress in November’s midterm election.

A constitutional amendment would also have to be ratified by a three-fourths majority — 38 — of the 50 state legislatures before it can become part of “the supreme law of the land.” Currently, the Democrats control a majority of 28 of the 50 statehouses. Chances for passage of such an amendment, therefore, is virtually nil.

Indeed, it would be politically suicidal in the long run for any politician to push for such measures. Already, Latinos are the fastest-growing voting bloc in the nation, especially in California and the Southwest. They’re also the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population overall,  according to the Census Bureau, with the Latino birth rate now outpacing that of whites for the first time in the nation’s history.

Republicans in California already have been paying a severe political price with Latino voters — who now make up 40 percent of the state’s electorate — in the 15 years since they successfully campaigned for Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative designed to prohibit illegal immigrants from using the state’s social services, health care, and public education, only to see it struck down by the federal courts as an illegal state intrusion into federal jurisdiction.

Next door in Arizona, a Latino voter backlash continues to grow against Arizona Republicans over the recent passage by the GOP-controlled legislature and signing into law by the state’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, of a measure to crack down on illegal immigrants in that state. Critics of the new law warn that it would lead to widespread discrimination against Latinos, including  Mexican-Americans, who make up nearly a third of Arizona’s population, according to the Census Bureau.

So why are Ron and Rand Paul — who both swear they aren’t racists — nonetheless seemingly bent on alienating African Americans with their denunciations of the Civil Rights Act and on alienating Hispanic Americans with their calls to deny U.S. citizenship to the American-born children of illegal immigrants from south of the border?

And why has the elder Paul continued to turn a blind eye to the white supremacists who backed his 2008 presidential campaign — some of whom are now reportedly supporting his son’s Senate candidacy? Are the Pauls really that blind to the damage to racial and ethnic harmony that their positions — and their controversial supporters — are inflicting?

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

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