Conservative Christians want American sharia

Kim Davis is the new face of the religious right: Angry, marginalized and increasingly desperate

As their numbers dwindle and their cultural influence wanes, Evangelicals are seizing power any way they can

By Amanda MarcotteWhat Davis is asking for is not an accommodation at all, but for the right to declare, by fiat, that Rowan County, Kentucky, is a mini-theocracy not beholden to the laws of the land, but by the whims of Kim Davis. Her legal team wants you to see her as a sweet but faithful woman, but in fact she’s trying to pull a coup here, claiming that “God’s authority”—read Kim Davis’s authority—trumps our entire democratic system.

It’s not just her, either. Rena Lindevaldsen, who works for the Liberty Counsel, which is handling Davis’s case, has taken to boldly arguing that Christians have the right to overthrow the democratically elected government and simply impose their will by fiat. “Whether it’s zoning or taxes or marriage or abortion, in those issues, government doesn’t have authority to say that these things are appropriate because they’re contrary to Scripture,” Lindevaldsen recently argued in front of Liberty University. Which is to say that even though the government has declared abortion legal, if you decide you don’t want your neighbors getting abortions, you should be able to declare yourself a God-appointed authority and simply shut it down. If you don’t want to pay taxes, declare yourself a “sovereign citizen.”

Mike Huckabee has been at the frontlines of pushing the claim that Christian conservatives simply have the right to ignore or overturn democracy to impose their will, and not just because he’s been running around Kentucky, trying to get himself on camera as much as possible in support of Davis’s attempt to ban gay marriage by fiat. He’s also been using the campaign trail to argue that the president should be able to simply end rule of law and start ruling like a dictator.

He doesn’t just the word dictator, of course, but make no mistake, Huckabee has repeatedly and shamelessly promised that if he is elected president, he will start declaring his beliefs to be the law of the land without the cooperation of Congress. In a Google hangout, he laid out the scheme: Declare as president that there are “constitutional rights of the unborn” and simply ban abortion by fiat. He claimed a similar authority during the Republican debate, a moment that got startlingly little play even though it was literally a candidate for president arguing that he would make himself a dictator.Comment:  For more on the subject, see What the Crusades Controversy Is About and Teabaggers Seek White Christian Rule.

Two-spirits celebrate DOMA ruling

Two-Spirit Community Applauds DOMA Strikedown and Dismissal of Prop 8The National Confederacy of Two-Spirit Organizations applauds and celebrates the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) by a vote of 5-4 and the court’s dismissal the Proposition 8, making it possible for same-sex marriages again in California.

"It's a good day to celebrate the decision to overturn DOMA and the dismissal of Prop 8," said Sharon Day of Minneapolis’ Indigenous People’s Task Force. "Perhaps now more of our tribal governments will pass marriage equality laws, after all respect was a value shared by all tribes/Nations observed along with equality between all people including our Two-Spirit people."

"The Supreme Court's decision," said Harlan Pruden, a leader of the NorthEast Two-Spirit Society, "is an equalizer for today’s Two-Spirit married same-sex couples as it was before the colonizers came to this land. It has now come full circle, and once again our relationships are celebrated and supported as they should have been all along."

Reactions to the ruling

Some of the best and worst reactions to this ruling, from me and others:

DOMA, DOMA, DOMA! So we all have to marry gays now?!

Gays marrying gays! Cats marrying dogs! Where will it end?!

Scalia Rages Against Supreme Court’s Gay Rights Ruling

Also, "Overturning laws is okay when I do it, but not when you do it." And, "Gay sex is icky."

Scalia is hypocritical on judicial activism but consistent on "original intent": Only whites should vote and only straights should marry.

Rush is unhappy with the Supreme Court

Limbaugh is mad because he favors traditional marriage, divorce, marriage, divorce, marriage, and divorce.

Antonin Scalia’s self-pitying, angry nostalgia

Scalia's rant is the gay-marriage version of the “calling something racist is worse than racism” argument currently so popular among aggrieved white conservatives.



Get a room, Liberty and Justice!









For more on gay marriage, see Odawa Gay Couple Invited to White House and Wes Studi Supports Gay Marriage

Odawa gay couple invited to White House

Michigan's first gay couple, married by Odawa tribe, invited to White House

By Brandon HubbardIt was a sprint down the aisle for Boyne City's Gene Barfield and Tim LaCroix to become the first same-sex couple to wed when the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians amended their definition of marriage.

Now, it will be a dash Thursday to the White House.

An invitation from the president of the United States arrived last week asking the newlyweds to attend a Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month reception at the White House.And:"The invitation states that the reception is to mark 'LGBT Pride Month,'" Barfield said. "It's from the president of the United States. This is the same United States that spent a small fortune trying to do its best to throw me out of the Navy in 1981 because I'm gay. The same United States in which I stopped counting after the 400th person I knew died from AIDS while nearly everyone but the gay community and our friends stood by and did nothing, or worse. The same United States where George W. Bush bragged about how much of our money he was spending to fight AIDS--in Africa--while cutting funding for AIDS programs here at home. The same United States where too many people still believe that Tim and I getting married is a bad joke."

Both men rushed to the altar in March to be married after more than 30 years together wanting to marry. Because Michigan voters amended the state constitution in 2008 to define marriage as between one man and one woman, it would not have happened until the Odawa Tribal Council and tribal chairman passed an amendment to redefine marriage, following more than a year debating the revision, which made it the first tribe in Michigan to allow such unions and only the third in the nation.Comment:  Again, the Odawa were only the third tribe to legalize gay marriage, not the first. Rest assured that I'm not going to post about every gay marriage among Indians. But this story is significant because of the White House invitation. It shows how mainstream gay marriage is becoming.

For more on gay marriage, see Wes Studi Supports Gay Marriage and Fictional Characters Make Acceptance Easier.

Below:  "Tim LaCroix, left, and Gene Barfield marry in a traditional Odawa wedding ceremony March 15 at the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians Tribal Government Center in Little Traverse Township." (Brandon Hubbard/News-Review)

Wes Studi supports gay marriage

3 Questions With: Wes Studi

By Enrique LimonThis Saturday, Santa Fe Performing Arts presents the American Foundation for Equal Rights and Broadway Impact’s 8, a new stage play by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. Chronicling the federal trial for California’s proposition 8, the reading features the talent of Joyce DeWitt, Ali MacGraw and Wes Studi of Dances with Wolves and Avatar fame.

Why is this play important to you?
I think it’s time that we reassess the institution of marriage and also consider the idea of equality here in the good ol’ USA and extend equal rights to all those who are in pursuit of them.

Does its theme strike a personal chord?
I really do believe that equality is something that we as citizens of the US strive for—should strive for—and I also think it’s something that’s at the heart of what makes up our Constitution. It’s about time that some of us think of a marital union as something other than just the procreation of children.Comment:  Three tribes have now legalized gay marriage. More are sure to follow.

For more on gay marriage, see Fictional Characters Make Acceptance Easier and Suquamish Tribe Legalizes Gay Marriage.

Fictional characters make acceptance easier

Gays may have the fastest of all civil rights movements

Public attitudes have shifted sharply in the last 10 years. Chalk it up to familiarity–among family, friends, co-workers and prime-time TV characters.

By Mark Z. BarabakIn a convergence of causes, the NAACP board voted Saturday to endorse same-sex marriage, saying "marriage equality" was "consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution."

Several reasons account for the success. The gay community tends to be more affluent, and the ability to give generously to candidates has translated into significant political clout, from the local level to the White House. Its leaders are well-versed in the machinations of government and the means of power, knowledge hard-won through years spent dragging politicians into the fight against the AIDS epidemic.

But experts and advocates agree on one explanation above all others: Familiarity.

"People came to understand we existed," Jones said. "They worked with us. They knew us. They had [gay] family members. That demystified it and made it harder for them to hate us in an abstract way."

That was an avenue obviously unavailable to African Americans. "It isn't as if white people suddenly come to discover they have African American children or relatives," said Kenneth Sherrill, a professor at Hunter College in New York and a longtime gay activist.

Gays and lesbians "are born into straight families and live in straight neighborhoods and go to straight schools and work in straight businesses," Sherrill said. "There's a kind of familiarity that's exceedingly difficult to achieve in the case of race."

Popular culture and its shaper, the mass media, have also played a crucial role in changing attitudes, much as news accounts helped advance the cause of the black civil rights movement. Only this time it wasn't images of fire hoses and police dogs turned on innocents but the sympathetic portrayal of gay and lesbian characters in prime time, in what has become a TV staple.

"Will & Grace," the NBC comedy that ran from 1998 to 2006, "probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody's ever done so far," Vice President Joe Biden said in a "Meet the Press" interview that helped prod Obama off the fence into supporting same-sex marriage.

That may be hyperbolic, but many said the vice president hit on something important: that welcoming fictionalized gay characters into the home made it that much easier to welcome gays and lesbians as family, friends, neighbors and co-workers in real life.

"It is certainly the case that gays and lesbians have been widely accepted in popular culture in a way that you could argue blacks in particular and Latinos too have never really been accepted," said Frank Gilliam, an expert on politics and race at UCLA.Comment:  This article suggests why it's important to see real Indians in movies and TV shows. Not historical Indians and not fake "spirit warriors" like Johnny Depp's Tonto, but modern-day Indians who are doctors, lawyers, and teachers.

For more on the subject, see Why Tonto Matters, Truth vs. Twilight, and "Such-and-Such Is Fiction."

Below:  Another entry in the "Indians as Fantasy Figures" sweepstakes.

First Native lesbian state legislator

Kickass Openly Gay Native American Woman Elected to State Legislature

By Erin Gloria RyanNine Native Americans have served in the Minnesota state legislature since the state's founding, and all of them have been men. But on Tuesday, The Land of 10,000 Lakes chose via special election its first ever Native American woman to serve on its state legislature, and the first Native American lesbian to ever serve in any state legislature anywhere.

Susan Allen (not to be confused with the wife of Republican Virginia Senator George Allen) is the polar opposite of her fellow Minnesota countrywoman Michele Bachmann. She's a progressive rather than a Tea Partier, she lives in a mixed income Minneapolis neighborhood rather than a McMansion in the exurbs, and she's a lesbian rather than a lesbian-fixer. Additionally, Allen has vowed to fight for defeat of Minnesota's constitutional marriage amendment, which would effectively make same-sex marriage illegal in the state. Michele Bachmann is one of the leading architects of a previous failed attempt to legally define marriage as between one man and one woman.Comment:  For more on Indians and gays, see Rick Perry Bashes Gays and Two Spirits Is "Thoughtful, Intelligent."

Suquamish tribe legalizes gay marriage

American Indian tribe adopts law recognizing same-sex marriage

By Maureen CosgroveAn American Indian tribe in Washington state on Monday voted to adopt a new law recognizing same-sex marriage. The law, approved by the Suquamish Tribe council, extends marriage rights to same-sex couples on the tribe's Seattle reservation. The tribe will be permitted to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples as long as each partner is at least 18 years old and one of the two is a member of the tribe. Same-sex marriage remains illegal in Washington, so the marriages may not be recognized by the state. The vote comes four years after a lesbian tribe member began her campaign for gay marriage on the reservation. The Coquille Indian Tribe in Oregon is the only other American Indian tribe to recognize same-sex marriage.Comment:  For more on gay marriage, see Gay Indians Doomed Tribe? and Villaraigosa's Pro-California Propaganda.

Gay Indians doomed tribes?

Did Civil Unions Destroy the Illinois Indians?

By Edward McClellandDuring this week’s debate on the civil unions bill, Rep. Ron Stephens (R-Greenville) suggested that allowing gays to marry would cause our society to join classical Greece and imperial Rome in the dustbin of history.

“If you look at the sociological history of societies that have failed, what are the commonalities?” Stephens asked. “One of those is that open homosexuality becomes accepted in the higher society, whether it’s in Greek times, the Romans or others, and here we are at that precipice again.”

Stevens didn’t have to look all the way to Europe to find an example of a society that crumbled as a result of open homosexuality. In fact, he didn’t even have to look outside the state. Here is famed historian Francis Parkman on the Illinois Indians, the tribe on whose ruins we have built our own civilization:

The Illinois were “addicted to practices which are sometimes supposed to be the result of a perverted civilization,” Parkman wrote in his seven-volume France and England in North America. “Young men enacting the part of women were frequently to be seen among them.”

The Sieur de Liette, a French explorer who met the Illinois in the late 17th century, wrote that “they have tapering legs which carry their bodies well, with a very haughty step, and as graceful as the best dancer.”And:Sadly, the Illinois had never heard of the Greeks and the Romans, so there was no one to warn them of the consequences of their behavior.

Not surprisingly, the Illinois were driven out of their native country by the Iroquois, who were less graceful dancers but had more weapons. Today, the tribe is remembered only for inspiring the laughable nickname of the University of Illinois’s sports teams, the “Fighting Illini.”

Are we about to become the second group of Illinoisans to lead ourselves to ruin through our addiction to practices which are the result of a perverted civilization? Rep. Stephens warned us. State Sen. James Meeks warned us. Now, only Gov. Pat Quinn can save us. Before he signs the civil unions bill, he should visit the Cahokia Mounds, to see the magnificent achievements of Illinois’s Indians, before they turned totally gay.

If Quinn signs the bill, we may end up going the way of the Illinois Indians. Not that there will be anything wrong with that.Comment:  Judging by McClelland's other columns, this is supposed to be a satire. If so, it's a poorly conceived one. As I've said before, if you can't tell the difference between a satire and the real thing, there is no difference.

The idea that gays have harmed any civilization is obviously ridiculous. As one counterexample, the Roman civilization lasted from the founding of the Roman kingdom in 753 BC to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD, arguably--about 2,200 years. That's ten times longer than the United States has existed. The US will be lucky to go that long without destroying itself via overpopulation, global warming, or economic collapse.

Incidentally, men who dress as women (transvestites) aren't the same as gays. Before Indians learned about Christian-style guilt, they tended to respect both kinds of people. Their tribes were decimated by disease, warfare, and other forms of conquest, not by having warriors too effeminate to fight.

For more on Indians and LGBT issues, see Girl Attacked for Supporting Gays and Grandmothers Don't Like Radical Advocacy?

Villaraigosa's pro-California propaganda

Antonio Villaraigosa, mayor of Los Angeles, writes about yesterday's decision to overturn Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage.

Prop 8 Wasn't Just Unconstitutional, it was Un-CalifornianOur State has always been mythologized as a place where dreams come true. From the earliest settlers who braved months of travel across mountains and deserts, to the Forty-Niners who came here to make their fortunes, from the Dust Bowl refugees who forged west to rebuild their lives, to those who continue to come here today--from all over the world--in pursuit of a dream.

California has always represented the best of what our country has to offer: opportunity, diversity, tolerance, and above all else, the uniquely American notion that with a little sweat and a little luck, even the most far-fetched dream can become a reality.

I've always said that, here in California, it doesn't matter where your family came from. It doesn't matter who your father was. It doesn't matter if, like me, you never really had a father. And it certainly doesn't matter if you've got two of them!

Because here in California, we value each and every individual for what he or she contributes to our society. Here in California, like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed over half a century ago, we judge a person "by the content of his character," by the courage of his convictions, integrity, truthfulness, and sincerity.Comment:  If you substitute "America" for "California," this is similar to most speeches about our country. No mention of the Indians already living here. Or the oppression they faced from missions, rancheros, '49ers, et al. Or the conflicts between whites and blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other minorities. It's pure propaganda that bears little or not relationship to reality.

Here are a few historical events Villaraigosa may have forgotten:

List of riots1850--Squatters' Riots, California
1871--Anti-Chinese Riot, Los Angeles, California
1943--Zoot Suit Riots, Los Angeles, California
1965--Watts Riot, Los Angeles, California
1966--Hunter's Point Riot San Francisco, California
1966--Compton's Cafeteria Riot, San Francisco, California
1966--Sunset Strip curfew riots, Los Angeles, California
1971--San Quentin Prison riot, San Quentin, California
1979--White Night gay riots, San Francisco, California
1987--Pioneer Days Riot, Chico, California
1992--Rodney King riot, Los Angeles, California
2009--Oscar Grant riot, Oakland, CaliforniaAlso note that Harvey Milk, probably the most famous gay activist, was assassinated in California. That says more about our tolerance for gays than the Prop. 8 ruling does.

Among the more publicized issues in California are limits on affirmative action and social services for immigrants, strikes and boycotts by migrant workers, crackdowns on the homeless, police shootings, and the OJ Simpson trial. Meanwhile, California's Indians battle with non-Indians over gaming, land use, law enforcement, and a host of other issues. These conflicts happen weekly if not daily.

In short, California is no land of milk and honey in terms of race, creed, or sexual orientation. Like most places, it's a muddled multicultural mess.

For similar whitewashing efforts, see:

Religious freedom for everyone, except Indians
National Day of the American Cowboy
The Story of Us whitewashes history
Textbooks still whitewash Columbus
Obama refuses to use g-word
Settling the West in the Inaugural Address

For more on the subject in general, see Ethnic History Corrects American History and Mainstream History = Pro-White Propaganda.

Below:  Police teach Rodney King about tolerance, California-style.