ACLU

As the questioning in Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing finally gets underway, right-wing groups are busy releasing statements and reports claiming she is everything from a "clear and present danger to the Constitution" to a sign of the end times.

The Judicial Crisis Network's first day write-up is particularly confusing, as they seem convinced that Kagan is trying to "disguise herself as the next John Roberts" 

The Senate Judiciary Committee just concluded the first day of Elena Kagan's hearings to replace Justice Stevens on the Supreme Court. Our summary of Day 1: She may not be a Constitutionalist, but she sure plays one on TV.

As we expected, Kagan followed in Justice Sotomayor's footsteps and disguised herself as the next John Roberts, and Democratic Senators did their best to help her hide from her record of extreme activism on abortion, 2nd Amendment rights, and the scope of government power. According to Kagan, "what the Supreme Court does is to safeguard the rule of law, through a commitment to even-handedness, principle, and restraint." In the immortal words of The Who, "Don't get fooled again."

Seeing as it was John Roberts who "disguised" himself as a umpire who would just call balls and strikes and then, once confirmed, revealed himself to be a blatant judicial activist, that is a pretty ironic criticism for JCN to level.

But at least the JCN's complaints are at least coherent, unlike those of Gordon Klingenschmitt:

Chaplain Klingenschmitt has contracted with a team of investigative journalists including Brian Camenker, Amy Contrada and Peter LaBarbera to investigate and report breaking news about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.

While serving as Dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan's administration demanded and forced Blue-Cross, Blue-Shield to cover sex-change operations as an "equal right" paid benefit, harming gender-confused students, as confirmed in 2006 and 2008 by Harvard Crimson newspaper articles.

Kagan also offered sympathetic ear to lesbian group Lambda's Transgender Task Force demand to force all women to share public bathrooms and locker-rooms with cross-dressing men, which is now part of Harvard's dormitory policy, according to the report.

"This is further proof Elena Kagan cannot be trusted to impartially rule on Obamacare or bathroom bills like ENDA, since she believes sin is a Constitutional right," said Chaplain Klingenschmitt, "but rights come from God, who never grants the right to sin."

Because if anything is going to clarify these confirmation hearings, is a report written by a bunch of militantly anti-gay activists like Klingenschmitt, Camenker, and LaBarbera ... and now that is exactly what we have:

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is committed to the radical campaign pushing acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism as “civil rights." Her unprecedented activism supporting that view as Dean of Harvard Law School (2003-2009) calls into question her ability to judge fairly and impartially on same-sex “marriage” and other homosexuality- or transgender-related issues that may come before the nation’s highest court.

Kagan’s record while Dean of Harvard Law School (HLS) demonstrates her agreement with the goals of the radical GLBT (gay lesbian bisexual transgender) movement and her solidarity with those activists. Working hand in hand with students to expel military recruiters in protest over the Armed Forces’ ban on homosexuals (a “moral injustice of the first order,” she wrote) is only the most obvious example of Kagan’s passionate dedication to this controversial and immoral agenda.

Kagan’s celebration and active promotion of the radical homosexualist and transgender worldview has profound implications. As a Supreme Court Justice, she could be expected to overturn traditional law and understandings of family, marriage, military order, and even our God-given sex (what transgender radicals call “gender identity or expression”). She is a most dangerous nominee who must be opposed by all who care about religious freedom, the preservation of marriage and traditional values.

There should be grave concern over Kagan’s issues advocacy concerning “sexual orientation.” Even before her nomination to the Court, her enthusiastic and committed pro-homosexuality activism at Harvard (including her recruitment to the faculty of radical “gay” activist scholars like former ACLU lawyer William Rubenstein and elevation of radical out lesbian Professor Janet Halley) was highly significant for the nation. Now, it is imperative that Senators and the U.S. public gain an accurate understanding of the radical, pro-homosexual environment that was Kagan’s home at Harvard – and the GLBT legal agenda that Kagan herself helped foster as Dean.

But that is actually quite reasonable compared to this statement from Tim LaHaye and Craig Parshall claiming that Kagan "presents a danger as old as the book of Genesis" and that her confirmation could be a sign of the End Times:

First, if she becomes a Supreme Court justice, she could be the all-important fifth vote in favor of interpreting our Constitution, not according to the vision of our Founding Fathers, but from an international law standpoint, a concept that would have seemed treasonous to our Founders. Three justices on the Court have already relied on foreign law in their opinions: Justices Kennedy, Breyer and Ginsburg. Recently-installed justice Sotomayor has praised Ruth Bader Ginsberg's penchant for international law, so we can assume she will be a legal globalist as well. Five justices create a majority and with Kagan on board they could begin radically steering us away from view of the Constitution that honors our Judeo-Christian heritage and founding.

Second, if this happens, it will usher America into a new age of global law. With Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court, international legal standards could well be imposed on Americans by the High Court's legal globalists, even without the Senate approving a specific international treaty. In our new novel, Edge of Apocalypse, we show how this trend might create a modern-day legal nightmare for conscientious Christians. We need only to turn to Genesis chapter 11 to see how God opposed the ancient attempt at global unification: the Lord declared the tragic result that would follow if a centralized group of fallen men were to consolidate an unlimited, unrestrained power over the planet.

Keep your eyes on the Supreme Court's view of global law. It could be one of the most telling 'signs of the times.'

Cross-posted from RightWingWatch.org

Matt Coles at the ACLU has written an interesting blog post outlining some major reasons why the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is so important. One of his points especially resonated after last week’s firestorm around Republican Senatorial Candidate Rand Paul:

Second, we need to get rid of DADT because it is a blot on the Constitution. DADT enshrines in federal law a principle which had been rejected in most other contexts: that discrimination could be justified by the prejudice of others. In the 60s, businesses in the South said that the prejudice their customers had against black people ought to give them an exemption from discrimination laws. Congress and the courts disagreed. In the 80s, government agencies actually defended discrimination on the basis that neighbors (or others) had strong negative feelings about disabled people, "hippies" and even older people (in Miami of all places). Again, the courts disagreed. But in the Congress that passed it, the single justification for Don't Ask, Don't Tell was not that gay members of the Armed Forces couldn't do their jobs. It was rather that heterosexual service members would be so unnerved by the mere presence of gay people that they would be unable to perform theirs. As long as DADT endures, the idea that your rights can't be taken away just because someone else doesn't like you is hardly secure.

Last week, Rand Paul struggled to defend his view that the government should allow private enterprises to discriminate against people based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. He was forced to backtrack on his position after his statements were shot down by civil rights groups, the media, and members of his own party. His reasoning essentially amounted to the idea that the government has more of a duty to protect the right to discriminate than to protect those who are discriminated against. Sound familiar?

That’s a false and outdated interpretation of the Constitution—one that didn’t hold water in 1964, and doesn’t today.

(And, as a sidenote, check out the American Prospect’s takedown of another one of Paul’s perversions of the Constitution).

McCarthyism is back. Let's call it what it is.
 
We are seeing one witch hunt after another led by right-wing opinion leaders, media outlets, organizations and even members of Congress. They pursue personal smear campaigns, grasping at straws to create "guilt by association" and challenge the legitimacy, allegiances and patriotism of their opponents.
 
Remember the Bush-era attacks on the patriotism of anyone who questioned the administration's policies? Those look tame in comparison. Now, with Democrats in power, the insinuation is that the president, his advisers and his political allies are actively trying to destroy America from within and, despite being elected by the people, are inherently unfit to lead.
 
We stand up to right-wing bullies every day, and we want to help all courageous Americans do the same. People For the American Way is ready to confront this new McCarthyism head-on. In the coming days and weeks we will be exposing the Right's tactics and rhetoric and creating tools to help activists combat them. We will educate Americans about the insidious nature of what we see happening in this country and impress upon Americans the urgency of stopping it.
 
In a 1954 Senate hearing, Army head counsel Joseph Welch famously put Senator Joseph McCarthy in his place, saying, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
 
In that great moment in American history, Welch called McCarthy out for his "cruelty" and "recklessness." The crowd at the hearing erupted in applause and, in that instant, McCarthy's power started its decline.
 
It's time for all of us to ask that same question -- Have you no sense of decency? -- of those on the Right who have resurrected McCarthy's tactics.
 
Radical Right activists ("Birthers," "Tea Baggers"), paranoid anti-government extremists and irresponsible media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh (and media outlets like FOX News) -- in many cases with the backing of entrenched right-wing and corporate interest groups -- have simultaneously raised the ominous, not to mention incompatible, specters of socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism and infiltration by foreign elements. This has created a backdrop of suspicion in which McCarthy-like intimidation, guilt by association and character assassination thrive.
 
In the last two weeks alone, we've seen:

• 53 right-wing members of Congress sign a letter to the President requesting that he fire Kevin Jennings who heads the office at the Department of Education tasked with keeping schools safe, for "promoting homosexuality and pushing a pro-homosexual agenda in America's schools." Jennings, a gay man and founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), has been the target of right-wing groups like Family Research Council for months. He was also the victim of false accusations that he broke the law in counseling an underage student when he was a teacher - and the congressional letter included that allegation even though the office of the letter's primary signer, Rep. Steve King, had been made aware that the story was wrong.

• Glenn Beck, whose "6 degrees of Obama" guilt-by-association attacks have generally lacked any shred of coherence, has been going after White House Communications Director Anita Dunn for once offhandedly referring to Mao Tse-tung (along with Mother Teresa) as one of her favorite political philosophers. He has repeatedly implied that this means she must endorse his heinous deeds and personal ideology while remaining conspicuously silent about the fact that many icons of the conservative movement have approvingly cited the political writings and tactics of communists like Mao, Lenin and the Viet Cong.

• Just this past Sunday, the notoriously right-wing editorial page of the Washington Times savaged Judge Edward Chen, who is nominated to the Northern District Court of California, opening the piece with the sentence, "Another day, another Obama nominee who doesn't appear to love America." For its 'evidence,' the editorial cites: Chen's acknowledgement of what we all know -- that a judge's life experiences affect how he or she views a case (shades of the attacks against Sonia Sotomayor); the fact that he expressed concern -- as many thinking Americans did -- about potential recriminations for Muslim Americans following the tragedy of September 11; and his former work with the ACLU.

Of course, the use of race-baiting, red-baiting, gay-baiting and lies to characterize people as enemies of America doesn't stop with attacks on administration officials and nominees. There have been many more examples, and sadly, there will undoubtedly be many more to come.
 
That's why we must all be vigilant. We must call out fear-mongering and intimidation in government, in the media and in our own communities. And when we confront it, we must ask the vital question, "Have you no sense of decency?"
 
People For the American Way is getting out in front of this troubling and pervasive new trend. Through research, educational materials and activism tools, we'll give you what you need to stand up to the Right and McCarthyism.

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Salazar v. Buono, a case involving the display of a cross on top of Sunrise Rock in the Mojave National Preserve, which is federal property. (People For the American Way Foundation joined an amicus brief in this case filed by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and other religious and secular non-profits).

By now, you've probably read about Justice Scalia's angry response when a Jewish lawyer had the audacity to point out that Jews don't use Christian crosses to honor their dead.

Mr. Eliasberg [the ACLU Foundation attorney] said many Jewish war veterans would not wish to be honored by "the predominant symbol of Christianity," one that "signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins."

Justice Scalia disagreed, saying, "The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead."

"What would you have them erect?" Justice Scalia asked. "Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David and, you know, a Muslim half moon and star?"

Mr. Eliasberg said he had visited Jewish cemeteries. "There is never a cross on the tombstone of a Jew," he said, to laughter in the courtroom.

Justice Scalia grew visibly angry. "I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead," he said. "I think that's an outrageous conclusion."

When I read this, my mind immediately went to … crayons. Yes, crayons.

When I was five, I had a somewhat peach-colored crayon that Crayola called "flesh." I'm white, and the crayon was close to my own skin color. It didn't occur to me that Crayola was assuming that all people are white. I didn’t need to think about it – After all, I was part of the majority. Later on, of course, I realized how this nomenclature marked African Americans as other, as outsiders in our society.

But not everyone who is a member of the in group has the capacity to understand what it is to be on the other side. Justice Scalia certainly doesn't.

For Justice Scalia, the cross has never had anything but positive connotations. From the perspective of his life experience, how could a cross grave marker be anything but an honor?

But in the history of America, Jews and other non-Christians have experienced the cross at times as neutral, and at times as a symbol of exclusion and persecution. Yet when someone points out that Jews do not see the cross as a symbol of honor, Justice Scalia gets angry.

In analyzing how the law impacts people, a wise judge considers people who are different from himself. A wise judge has empathy. Justice Scalia has none.

Luckily, the good folks at the ACLU have your back. They've just posted the concluding installment of "Congress-ese," a series of blog entries aimed at teaching you stuff about Congress you didn't learn in social studies class.

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