Stories from Michelle Goldberg

Paul Ryan’s Extreme Abortion Views

2012-08-11T12:35:24+00:00

By now, you surely know, if you didn’t already, that Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential pick, wants to privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher system. You might have read that, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, his economic plan “calls for radical policy changes that would result in a massive transfer of resources from the broad majority of Americans to the nation’s wealthiest individuals.”

Less attention has been paid, though, to Ryan’s hard-right positions on social issues. Indeed, on abortion and women’s health care, there isn’t much daylight between Ryan and, say, Michele Bachmann. Any Republican vice-presidential candidate is going to be broadly anti-abortion, but Ryan goes much further. He believes ending a pregnancy should be illegal even when it results from rape or incest, or endangers a woman’s health. He was a cosponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a federal bill defining fertilized eggs as human beings, which, if passed, would criminalize some forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization. The National Right to Life Committee has scored his voting record 100 percent every year since he entered the House in 1999. “I’m as pro-life as a person gets,” he told The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack in 2010. “You’re not going to have a truce.” More>

Christian Right Historian David Barton in Freefall Over ‘Jefferson Lies’

2012-08-10T12:39:57+00:00

At the Rediscovering God in America conference in 2011, Mike Huckabee gave an impassioned introduction to David Barton, the religious right’s favorite revisionist historian. “I almost wish that there would be something like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced—at gunpoint, no less—to listen to every David Barton message,” he said. “And I think our country would be better for it.”

It’s hard to overstate how important Barton has been in shaping the worldview of the Christian right, and of populist conservatives more generally. A self-taught historian with a degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University, he runs a Texas-based organization called WallBuilders, which specializes in books and videos meant to show that the founding fathers were overwhelmingly “orthodox, evangelical” believers who intended for the United States to be a Christian nation. Newt Gingrich has called his work “wonderful” and “most useful.” George W. Bush’s campaign hired him to do clergy outreach in 2004. In 2010, Glenn Beck called him called him “the most important man in America right now.” At the end of the month, he’s slated to serve on the GOP’s platform committee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. More>

Wisconsin’s Repeal of Equal Pay Rights Adds to Battles for Women

2012-04-07T13:24:37+00:00

On Thursday, with little fanfare, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker signed a bill repealing the state’s 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which allowed victims of workplace discrimination to seek damages in state courts. In doing so, he demonstrated that our political battles over women’s rights aren’t just about sex and reproduction—they extend to every aspect of women’s lives.
Scott Walker

“This whole session has been anti-woman and anti-middle class, and this fits right in with that agenda,” says Wisconsin state representative Christine Sinicki, a Democrat who co-authored the original legislation.

The Equal Pay law wasn’t just about women—it also offered protection from discrimination based on race, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and other factors. But it was enacted largely in response to a large gap between men and women’s compensation, one that was worse than average in Wisconsin—in 2009 the state ranked 36th in the country in terms of workplace gender parity.

Wisconsin’s law was similar to many others—indeed, almost every state in the country has anti-discrimination laws that augment federal legislation. “It’s often easier, faster, and cheaper to pursue a claim of discrimination in state court than in federal court,” says Linda Meric, national director of 9to5, an organization devoted to working-women’s issues. “The law is different in each state, but Wisconsin was certainly in the mainstream in having a law that provided remedies for employees who experienced discrimination on the job.”

To bring a suit under the law, a plaintiff first had to go through a state-level administrative process to prove discrimination. It was rigorous enough that in the two years the law was in effect, not a single equal-pay lawsuit was filed. Still, the law’s supporters believe it has been effective in spurring businesses to pay women more fairly. Thus by 2010, the state had climbed to 24th in the national gender-parity rankings, with women making 78 percent as much as men, compared to 77 percent nationally. “Since the law was put Read More >

Why Conservative GOP Voters Aren’t Giving Up on Rick Santorum

2012-04-04T13:37:44+00:00

In the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s triple-primary victory on Tuesday, most political experts say the race is slouching toward its inevitable conclusion. “After having won almost all delegates in Tuesday’s primaries, Mr. Romney has gone from very likely to win the majority of delegates to nearly certain to do so,” writes statistics guru Nate Silver.
Mitt Romney

Despite the best efforts of the Republican establishment, many on the religious right are not ready to accept Mitt Romney’s inevitability, Steven Senne / AP Photo

Conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace isn’t convinced. “In the minds of social conservatives, it’s not even close to over,” he says. “The real question is how committed someone like Rick Santorum is to fighting this out all the way to the end. If he’s committed to doing this on a personal level, there’s plenty of social conservatives that will ride him to the finish line.”

Indeed, despite the best efforts of the Republican establishment, many on the religious right are far from ready to accept Romney’s inevitability, or to coalesce behind him. They remain distrustful of his record on abortion, and unsure they can believe his campaign promises. And the harder party elites push Romney on them, the more alienated they become. “The biggest story that everyone read more

Michelle Goldberg: The Case Against Liberal Despair

2012-03-25T12:45:41+00:00

Lila Rose- The Woman Who Sparked the Planned Parenthood Flap

2012-02-06T12:29:32+00:00

Last week, when the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation announced it would stop funding Planned Parenthood, it seemed an enormous victory for the 23-year-old Lila Rose, who has been waging a long media war against the country’s largest abortion and family-planning provider. Initially, the Komen foundation said it was ending grants to Planned Parenthood because of a new policy against supporting groups under government investigation. The only grantee affected by the new policy was Planned Parenthood, which is under investigation by Rep. Cliff Stearns, an anti-abortion Florida congressman who says his inquiry was inspired by Rose’s undercover videos.

Ultimately, of course, Komen reversed its decision. Still, the incident highlighted how effective Rose has been in providing pretexts for those who have long sought to take Planned Parenthood down.

An anti-abortion activist from a young age, Rose met the now-notorious conservative propagandist James O’Keefe when she was a freshman at UCLA, and the two began working together. In one of her first stings, she visited two Los Angeles Planned Parenthoods with a hidden camera, posing as a 15-year-old girl who’d been impregnated by a 23-year-old man. Her goal was to show that the clinics weren’t following the law in reporting statutory rape, and she succeeded; in both cases, when she asked for help avoiding police involvement, they complied. “I can say 16?” she asked one clinic worker, who replied, “Well, just figure out a birth date that works.” Planned Parenthood condemned its employees’ actions, but it also threatened to sue Rose, turning her and the organization she founded, Live Action, into conservative causes célèbres.

In 2008 the Gerard Health Foundation awarded Rose $50,000, funding that enabled her to launch a new round of investigations. “I see Lila as the Upton Sinclair of her generation, getting in and doing undercover investigative work that exposes the dark underbelly of the abortion industry,” says Charmaine Yoest, president of ... more

Newt’s Winning Formula: He Does Scorn and Disgust Better Than Anyone

2012-01-22T17:30:12+00:00

Speaking to a packed house at Mutt’s BBQ in South Carolina’s Pickens County on Wednesday, Newt Gingrich encapsulated the conviction underlying his campaign. “[W]e frankly disdain the internationalist, secular socialists who would like to change our country,” he said, to applause and hoots of thrilled agreement.

Last night was a resounding victory for disdain. Gingrich may be a sexual hypocrite, an erratic leader, and a cosseted lobbyist masquerading as a scrappy insurgent, but he is an absolute maestro of contempt, and that is what South Carolina wanted.

Look at what turned his electoral fortunes around. It had little to do with his attack on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital. I didn’t meet anyone in South Carolina, including Gingrich supporters, who had anything negative to say about Romney’s business record. Instead, the race turned in Gingrich’s favor during the debate on Monday, when Juan Williams asked him whether it might be “insulting” to black Americans to say they should demand jobs and not food stamps, and that poor kids should be put to work as janitors. Gingrich, puffed up with righteousness, went on the offensive. To the crowd, he seemed to be putting Williams in his place. No doubt their hearts pulsed as they imagined him doing the same to Obama.

“Only the elites despise earning money,” Gingrich retorted. When Williams pressed him on his references to Obama as the “food-stamp president,” the audience booed. Gingrich’s sneering, forceful response about not bowing to the forces of political correctness earned him a standing ovation. After that, his rallies started getting mobbed and his poll numbers soared. Gingrich trounced Romney on Saturday because of how effectively he channeled the Republican base’s apparent conviction that whining racial minorities are enjoying unearned privileges in the benighted Obama age. more >

Evangelicals Flocking Toward Newt Gingrich

2011-11-29T22:20:12+00:00

Like many evangelicals in Iowa, Steve Deace, an influential conservative radio host, is wrestling with the possibility that Newt Gingrich may be the most viable standard bearer for family-values voters in the next election. It’s a conundrum, he says, that many others are also grappling with. "Maybe the guy in the race that would make the best president is on his third marriage," he says. "How do we reconcile that?"

One senses him trying. "I see a lot of parallels between King David and Newt Gingrich, two extraordinary men gifted by God, whose lives include very high highs and very low lows," Deace says. David, after all, committed adultery with the ravishing Bathsheba, then had her husband killed, among other transgressions. The Bible makes room for complicated, morally compromised heroes. Now Christian conservatives, desperate for an alternative to Mitt Romney, are learning to do so as well.

"Under normal circumstances, Gingrich would have ...more

The Right’s Failed Protest Smear

2011-10-25T18:36:53+00:00

When your cries of anti-Semitism fail to rile the Anti-Defamation League, you might be on the wrong track.

That, however, has not stopped various right-wing figures from pushing the idea that Occupy Wall Street is a hotbed of Jew hatred. A group called the Emergency Committee for Israel, co-founded by Bill Kristol, is running television ads designed to scare Jews about the movement and embarrass politicians who’ve been sympathetic to the protesters. They feature footage of three men saying hateful things about Jews, before a voiceover asks: “Why are our leaders turning a blind eye to anti-Semitic, anti-Israel attacks? Tell President Obama and Leader Pelosi to stand up to the mob.” Since then, other conservatives have ceaselessly amplified the message, while complaining that the rest of the media is ignoring rampant bigotry on the left.

But the Anti-Defamation League, which no one can accuse of ignoring anti-Semitism, has been less than alarmed. In a statement, ADL head Abraham H. Foxman expressed concern about a few anti-Semites who’ve showed up at the protests, but said, “There is no evidence that these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are representative of the larger movement or that they are gaining traction with other participants.” Indeed, when Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen went to the demonstrations searching for bigots, he failed to find any. “This was my second visit to the Occupy Wall Street site and the second time my keen reporter’s eye has failed to detect even a hint of the anti-Semitism that had been trumpeted by certain right-wing websites and bloggers, most prominently Bill Kristol,” he wrote.

This is not to say that there is no one at Occupy Wall Street, or its many national offshoots, expressing despicable views. Protests always attract fringe characters, particularly when they provide free food and warm clothes to all comers. The footage that the Emergency Committee for Israel used is real, though somewhat disingenuous. For example, one of the ad’s anti-Semites, a guy holding a sign saying “Google: Zionists Control Wall Street,” has since been identified as a homeless man known to picket the area with such placards before the protests even began. Occupy Wall Street more>

Cain’s Abortion Blunder

2011-10-20T18:40:29+00:00

We recently learned that Herman Cain, who seemed unfamiliar with the term “neoconservative,” hasn’t been paying much attention to key foreign policy debates in recent years. Now we know that he hasn’t been paying close attention to the abortion debate either.

On Wednesday evening, Cain gave a rather baffling interview about social issues to CNN’s Piers Morgan. “I believe that life begins at conception, and abortion under no circumstances,” he said, echoing previous statements. But moments later, responding to a question about rape and incest, he suggested that he doesn’t intend to impose his personal beliefs on the country. “What I’m saying is, it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make,” he said. “Not me as president. Not some politician. Not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family… I can have an opinion on an issue without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn’t be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to a social decision that they need to make.”

Anti-abortion activists were shocked. Some, bowing to political realism, are willing to back a candidate who would allow abortion when a pregnancy results from a violation. But Cain’s remarks contradicted what he said just a few days ago, when he explicitly told NBC’s David Gregory that he opposed exceptions for rape and incest “[B]ecause if you look at rape and incest, the percentage of those instances is so minuscule that there are other options.” Beyond that, Cain’s rhetoric, with its separation of personal morality from public policy, echoed that of the abortion-rights More>

Rick Perry’s Debate Fumble

2011-09-23T13:32:17+00:00

Well, that was depressing. There were only two surprises amid the festival of clichés and mendacity that was Thursday night’s Republican debate. The first was the crowd’s angry booing of Stephen Hill, a gay soldier serving in Iraq. Supporting the troops, apparently, only goes so far. The second was how poorly Rick Perry performed. Yes, we’ve already learned that he’s not very good at these things. But in Texas, he has a reputation as a ruthless campaigner, which makes his fumbling amateurishness on the national stage seem odd. At one point, he tried a line on Mitt Romney that was obviously rehearsed in advance, and flubbed it so badly that I almost felt bad for him—you could see the panic and frustration on his face.

“I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with,” he said. “Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of against the Second Amendment, was before he was before the social programs from the standpoint of he was for standing up for Roe versus Wade, before he was against verse Roe versus Wade he was for Race to the Top. He’s for Obamacare and now he’s against it.”

Of course, the Republican base doesn’t demand articulateness from its candidates. People like me might have sneered at the garbled syntax of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, but that only boosted their anti-elitist credibility. Still, Perry seemed to lose the crowd’s sympathy when he admitted that building a wall along the United States’ southern border isn’t feasible, and he couldn’t explain away his record on Texas’s Dream Act, which allows children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at the state’s public universities.

It’s telling that Perry, like Romney, is most vulnerable on one of the most decent things he did in office. As the governor of a state with a large Latino population, he’s in a situation in which there’s no way his record could completely jibe with the preferences of a party in the grips of an angry nativism. He needed a bit of eloquence to smooth over the gap. Instead, said, “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they have been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think more

Marry—or Else

2011-09-18T13:31:53+00:00

When Jasvinder Sanghera turned 14, she knew her time had come. As the sixth of seven daughters in a conservative Sikh family, growing up in the English industrial city of Derby, Sanghera had watched her parents pull her older sisters out of school, one by one, and send them to India to marry complete strangers—often men who abused them. The British educational system never questioned the girls’ long absences and ultimate disappearances. Then, one day, when Sanghera came home from school, her mother presented her with a photograph of a man. Sanghera was told that she’d been promised to him when she was just 8 years old. “I was the one who said, ‘No, I want to finish school, Mum. I just want to get an education,’” Sanghera said recently.

Her parents yanked her out of class, she said, and padlocked her in her room for weeks until she promised to submit to the marriage. “In the end, I agreed purely to buy back my freedom,” Sanghera said. When her parents relented and allowed her to visit a friend’s home, she ran away with the friend’s older brother—at first sleeping in his car, and then in a cheap boardinghouse. When she called her family, she says, they told her, “You are dead in our eyes from this day forward. You can come home and marry who we say; otherwise, you are dead.” When Sanghera refused, her family disowned her. “Even today, if I see my sisters, my family, they will cross the road and refuse to acknowledge me,” she said. “All of a sudden, I had become the perpetrator. I was the one who had dishonored and betrayed them, and I had no family.” She has lived as a pariah for the past 29 years.

Despite her ostracism, Sanghera eventually managed to finish her education and build a life for herself. More

Abortion Ruling Won’t Stop Perry

2011-09-01T12:19:51+00:00

When Texas’s 82nd legislature convened in January, the state was facing what the Houston Chronicle called a “sickening shortfall” of between $15 billion and $27 billion. Yet fiscal issues were notably absent from Gov. Rick Perry’s list of “emergency” items that lawmakers had to fast track. Instead, he decreed that the state needed to prioritize legislation mandating sonograms for women seeking abortions. “When you consider the magnitude of that decision, ensuring someone understands what is truly at stake seems to be a small step, in my opinion,” he told the 2011 Texas Rally for Life. “Those of us here know that when someone has all the information, the right choice will be made, the choice of life.”

The resulting legislation, which was supposed to go into effect on Sept. 1, was among the most invasive in the country. Before carrying out an abortion, the law requires a doctor to perform an ultrasound on his or her patient, and to display the resulting images while giving her a detailed description of the embryo or fetus’s development, whether or not she wants to hear it. If a heartbeat can be detected, the doctor has to make it audible, irrespective of the patient’s wishes. First-trimester ultrasounds are typically performed vaginally, with a phallic-shaped wand. Forcing this procedure on an unwilling woman is a particularly intimate type of government intrusion.

On Tuesday, however, U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks, a George H.W. Bush nominee, issued an injunction temporarily blocking the law, pending a court case. “The Act compels physicians to advance an ideological agenda with which they may not agree, regardless of any medical necessity, and irrespective of whether the pregnant women wish to listen,” wrote Sparks. So for now, women seeking abortions and the doctors who provide them will be spared this gratuitous dose of state interference, though Texas has already... more

Christian Group’s New Gay War

2011-08-22T13:26:49+00:00

On Aug. 9, a man describing himself as an “adviser” to the Charity Giveback Group, or CGBG, a Christian fundraising operation that Mike Huckabee is involved with, left an oddly threatening message on the voicemail of a San Francisco blogger named Roy Steele.

The for-profit company, which had been known as the Christian Values Network until a March name change, operates a sort of online mall, donating a portion of each purchase to religious nonprofits. Among them are conservative organizations like Focus on the Family, The Family Research Council, Promise Keepers, and a number of anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. In recent months, thanks to a remarkably successful online boycott campaign, major companies have rushed to disassociate themselves from CGBG. Steele publicized the boycott on his blog, Tie-Dyed Jive in the (415), and sent out a press release promoting it. The voicemail he received in response, if indeed from someone associated with CGBG, would suggest that the company was getting rattled.

“If you are seeking to be added to the coming litigation against Ben Crowther, Joe Mirabella, Change.org, and others who have continued to produce inaccuracies on the dialogue on this matter, we are more than happy to add your name to that list,” said the caller, mentioning two people who’d been involved in petitions against CGBG. He gave Steele 24 hours to demonstrate a “change of heart” by issuing a new, corrective press release. Steele responded by setting the audio to an animation of an angry drag queen and posting it on his blog.

It’s tempting to think that this must be a prank, except CGBG, which agreed to answer some questions via email, refuses to comment on it.

If it’s real, it’s certainly odd to see an outfit with powerful connections, one that continues to partner with major companies like Home Depot, Target, and Circuit City, make such a clumsy attempt to intimate a relatively obscure blogger. Still, it’s easy to see why CGBG is alarmed. It’s not only that major firms like Microsoft, Apple, and Wells Fargo are pulling out at an astonishing rate, threatening the company’s future. CGBG is also coming face to face with something that has long terrified the Christian right: the possibility that the stigma once attached to homosexuality would be transferred to those who oppose it. more

Christian Group’s New Gay War

2011-08-22T13:26:41+00:00

It’s tempting to think that this must be a prank, except CGBG, which agreed to answer some questions via email, refuses to comment on it.

The Liberals’ Tea Party

2011-08-17T13:09:02+00:00

Van Jones is sitting in an office in Washington, D.C., talking about John McCain when, quite unexpectedly, he starts crying.

He’d been discussing the shock of some in the Obama administration at the furious right-wing backlash that greeted their arrival in Washington, a backlash that hit Jones particularly hard. “We thought John McCain was the representative of the Republican Party,” he says. “John McCain, who we didn’t like and didn’t agree with, but who, at the end of the day, put country first.”

Jones recalled an angry McCain town hall in Minneapolis where attendees voiced their mounting contempt for Obama. At one point, an older women had declared that Obama was an untrustworthy “Arab.” Shaking his head, McCain took the microphone from her and replied, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man.” That moment moved Jones. “He stood up, two weeks before the election,” he says. “Down in the polls. Needing his base. That’s a big deal.” His voice cracks as he continues. “And it was the people in the audience that disrespect this country. And they’ve taken over this party. And they’re trying to take over America.” He bangs on the table. “And we can’t let them!”

Tears start running down his face and his voice catches in a sob. It could be an act for dramatic emphasis, but it sure doesn’t seem like it. “I’m telling you, this country is better More

A Christian Plot for Domination?

2011-08-17T13:04:33+00:00

Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry aren't just devout—both have deep ties to a fringe fundamentalist movement known as Dominionism, which says Christians should rule the world.

With Tim Pawlenty out of the presidential race, it is now fairly clear that the GOP candidate will either be Mitt Romney or someone who makes George W. Bush look like Tom Paine. Of the three most plausible candidates for the Republican nomination, two are deeply associated with a theocratic strain of Christian fundamentalism known as Dominionism. If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.

Put simply, Dominionism means that Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions. Originating among some of America’s most radical theocrats, it’s long had an influence on religious-right education and political organizing. But because it seems so outré, getting ordinary people to take it seriously can be difficult. Most writers, myself included, who explore it have been called paranoid. In a contemptuous 2006 First Things review of several books, including Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, and my own Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era.”

Now, however, we have the most theocratic Republican field in American history, and suddenly, the concept of Dominionism is reaching mainstream audiences. Writing about Bachmann in The New Yorker this month, Ryan Lizza spent several paragraphs explaining how the premise fit into the Minnesota congresswoman’s intellectual and theological development. And a recent Texas Observer cover story on Rick Perry examined his relationship with the New Apostolic Reformation, More

Norway Killer’s Hatred of Women

2011-07-25T03:24:56+00:00

Conservatives worried about the Islamization of Europe often blame feminism for weakening Western societies and opening them up to a Muslim demographic invasion. Mark Steyn’s bestselling America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It predicted the demise of “European races too self-absorbed to breed,” leading to the transformation of Europe into Eurabia. “In their bizarre prioritization of ‘a woman’s right to choose,’” he argued, “feminists have helped ensure that European women will end their days in a culture that doesn’t accord women the right to choose anything.”

This neat rhetorical trick—an attack on feminism coupled with purported concern about Muslim fundamentalist misogyny—is repeated again and again in Islamophobic literature. Now it’s reached its apogee in mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto, “2083: A European Declaration of Independence.” Rarely has the connection between sexual anxiety and right-wing nationalism been made quite so clear. Indeed, Breivik’s hatred of women rivals his hatred of Islam, and is intimately linked to it. Some reports have suggested that during his rampage on Utoya, he targeted the most beautiful girl first... Read More >

Marcus Bachmann’s Gay ‘Cure’

2011-07-11T23:54:37+00:00

In 2006, a story about Michele Bachmann in the Minneapolis City Pages delved into husband Marcus’s involvement in the ex-gay movement. The piece quoted Curt Prins, an attendee at a conservative conference where Marcus, a therapist who runs a Christian counseling practice, gave a presentation, “The Truth About the Homosexual Agenda,” arguing that homosexuality is both a choice and a threat. As a finale, he brought up three people, including a prominent ex-gay activist named Janet Boynes, who testified about leaving homosexuality behind. “One of them said, 'If I was born gay, then I'll have to be born again,'" Prins recalled. "The crowd went crazy."

Yet when the City Pages reporter asked Marcus if his clinic performs so-called reparative therapy—a widely discredited technique meant to turn gay people straight—Marcus denied it. And over the years he has kept denying it, despite plenty of evidence that both he and Michele are deeply committed to the idea that homosexuality can be cured.

If there was any doubt that he was lying, it disappeared on Friday, when The Nation broke news of an investigation by Truth Wins Out, a group devoted to combating the ex-gay movement. “Undeniably, 100 percent, the Bachmann clinic practices reparative therapy, which tries to cure gay people of their homosexuality,” says Wayne Besen, Truth Wins more...

Michelle on Democracy Now!

2011-06-30T17:18:26+00:00

Today’s Hidden Slave Trade

2011-06-28T17:05:30+00:00

When Americans think about human trafficking, they tend to think about sexual slavery. The very real stories of girls sold to brothels or tricked into prostitution by gangsters are great fodder for journalists. They attract the kind of celebrity commitment that puts causes on the map—see, for example, last week’s Demi Moore-hosted CNN special about sex slaves in Nepal.

The issue certainly deserves our attention—indeed, its horrors can scarcely be overstated. But as the State Department’s 2011 Trafficking in Persons report makes clear, sexual bondage is only a part of a much larger and more insidious evil. Modern slavery isn’t just about sex. Huge parts of the global economy, from tomatoes to electronics to American military contracting, are tied up with forced labor.

“Many people who work on this, work on this because sex trafficking awoke them to action,” says Luis CdeBaca, director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. But in fighting slavery, he says, “getting to a place where we are looking at domestic servitude, agriculture and factories as well as prostitution is the natural next step.”

Releasing the annual trafficking report on Monday, Hillary Clinton pointed out that as many as 27 million men, women, and children worldwide are victims of modern-day slavery. The report doesn’t contain a breakdown of various types of trafficking, but CdeBaca says labor trafficking is the most prevalent type. “The dusty images of slaves working on plantations line bookshelves and museum walls, but the demand for cheap goods in a globalized economy sustains slavery today in fields and more...

How to Split the GOP

2011-06-27T13:55:56+00:00

In 2004, a nationwide campaign against gay marriage proved crucial to returning George W. Bush to the White House. All over the country that year, Republican mailers and robocalls warned of the dread specter of same-sex families. Eleven states had constitutional amendments on the ballot banning gay marriage and, in some cases, domestic partnerships as well. Besides firing up the base, these initiatives gave evangelical pastors an ostensibly non-partisan issue to mobilize around, allowing them to mount sophisticated get-out-the-vote operations without violating IRS law governing church politicking. “On November 2, I see people marching like a holy army to the voting booth,” pastor and televangelist Rod Parsley intoned from his Columbus, Ohio megachurch. “I see the Holy Spirit anointing you as you vote for life, as you vote for marriage, as you vote for the pulpit!”

Many true believers did just that. In one famous exit poll, 22 percent of voters cited “moral values” as their chief concern. “Senator Kerry probably received about 56 percent of the vote from people most concerned with foreign policy or economic issues, the traditional subjects for presidential campaigns,” Bush adviser Marvin Olasky wrote in the evangelical magazine World. All 11 state amendments passed. Gay marriage proved to be the ultimate wedge issue.

Now, it could be again, but in a way no one imagined seven years ago. Friday’s historic passage of marriage equality in New York instantly increased the prestige of Governor Andrew Cuomo. Surveys showed a decisive majority of New Yorkers in favor. Nationwide, recent polls reveal that, for the first time, a slim majority of Americans back gay marriage. There’s been a dramatic public shift among Republican elites. Among the GOP base, though, opposition to gay rights remains overwhelming. That means that for Democrats, and particularly for President Obama, supporting gay marriage isn’t just the right thing to do–it’s also the clever thing to do.

No other issue so divides the Republican Party’s small-government wing from its Christian right foot soldiers. As The New York Times reported on Sunday, a group of ultra-wealthy Republican donors played a powerful role in getting the New York law passed. Motivated in part by their own gay loved ones, they offered their influence and money “to insulate nervous senators from conservative backlash if they supported the marriage measure.” Ken Mehlman, the former Republican National Committee chairman and Bush’s 2004 campaign manager, lobbied hard for the new law. (After coming out as gay last year, Mehlman expressed his more...

The Christian-Right Whistleblower

2011-06-24T13:50:27+00:00

Frank Schaeffer saw the birth of the religious right from the inside. His father, the brilliant Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer, was the intellectual father of the movement. He channeled the countercultural spiritual yearnings of '60s-era Jesus Freaks into the right-wing movement that now dominates the Republican Party. It was Schaeffer who first led evangelicals to mobilize against abortion, for many years ignored as primarily a Catholic concern. His three-party documentary, How Should We Then Live?. which Frank produced, inspired a whole generation of evangelicals into politics, including Michele Bachmann, who cites it as a formative influence. As his son, Frank was a conservative Christian celebrity in his own right, keynoting the Religious Broadcasters Convention and the Southern Baptist Convention.

Now, though, he has a new message. The Christian right, he says, is fundamentally motivated by an anxious, terrified obsession with sex, an obsession that once drove him as well. “Since the 1970s, the American culture wars have revolved around a fear of sex and women no less insane and destructive than any horror story to come out of Afghanistan,” he writes in his intriguing if hyperbolic new book, Sex, Mom and God.

Of course, to many critics of the religious right, Schaeffer’s argument is a truism. To sympathizers of the movement, it will probably seem, at best, condescending and simplistic. But his privileged view of the Christian right’s sexual weirdness makes his account particularly interesting, and helps explain why the aggressively pious so frequently destroy themselves with sex scandals.

Sex, Mom and God is actually Schaeffer’s second memoir about his odd hothouse coming of age. His first, 2007’s Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back, was built around his larger than life father. This one is centered on his adored, paradoxical mother, Edith Schaeffer, an author who wrote books for Christian women like The Hidden Art of Homemaking. Edith was a fascinating more...

Women Lose in Walmart Suit Ruling

2011-06-20T21:33:25+00:00

You’ve heard about firms that are too big to fail. Now the Supreme Court has declared that some companies are too big to be sued for discrimination. On Monday, the court threw out Dukes v. Walmart, the largest sex-discrimination lawsuit in history, waged against the world’s biggest company, essentially on the grounds that it dealt with too many women. In doing so, the court has made it much harder for employees to challenge bias that results from a broad corporate culture instead of the misdeeds of a few individuals. Ironically, the wide range of Walmart’s alleged discrimination, coming from lots of managers in lots of places, became the reason the company was let off the hook.

Given the current court’s enthusiastic deference to corporations, most observers expected Monday’s ruling. Still, the facts of the case were stark enough to create uncertainty. On Friday, Best Buy settled a class-action lawsuit charging discrimination against women, African Americans, and Latino employees, in part out of concern about the Dukes verdict. “Settlements are often reached when there is uncertainty, and both sides feel that they are at some risk,” the plaintiff’s lawyer, James Finberg, told Reuters. “So depending upon how the Dukes case comes out, we could be either better off or worse off. And I think Best Buy viewed it similarly.”

Best Buy needn’t have worried; the Supreme Court has now shielded companies from class-action lawsuits in significant ways. The decision “encourages employers to simply allow discrimination to take place unchecked throughout their workplace, and the bigger they are, the easier it will be do that,” said Marcia Greenberger, founder of the National Women’s Law Center.

The ruling had two parts. The first, which was unanimous, dealt with the somewhat arcane matter of the rule under which the class—the group of people banding together in the lawsuit—was certified. But the judges broke along familiar ideological lines about whether the suit should have been able to proceed at all. That 5-4 split more...

Bachmann’s Unrivaled Extremism

2011-06-19T12:29:53+00:00

In April 2005, Pamela Arnold wanted to talk to her state senator, Michele Bachmann, who was then running for Congress. A 46-year-old who worked at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Arnold lived with her partner, the famed Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft, on a farm in Scandia, Minnesota. Bachmann was then leading the fight against gay marriage in the state. She'd recently been in the news for hiding in the bushes to observe a gay rights rally at the Capitol. So when members of the Scandia gay community decided to attend one of Bachmann's constituent forums, Arnold, wanting to make herself visible to her representative, joined them.

A few dozen people showed up at the town hall for the April 9 event, and Bachmann greeted them warmly. But when, during the question and answer session, the topic turned to gay marriage, Bachmann ended the meeting 20 minutes early and rushed to the bathroom. Hoping to speak to her, Arnold and another middle-aged woman, a former nun, followed her. As Bachmann washed her hands and Arnold looked on, the ex-nun tried to talk to her about theology. Suddenly, after less than a minute, Bachmann let out a shriek. "Help!" she screamed. "Help! I'm being held against my will!"

Arnold, who is just over 5 feet tall, was stunned, and hurried to open the door. Bachmann bolted out and fled, crying, to an SUV outside. Then she called the police, saying, according to the police report, that she was "absolutely terrified and has never been that terrorized before as she had no idea what those two women were going to do to her." The Washington County attorney, however, declined to press charges, writing in a memo, "It seems clear from the statements given by both women that they simply wanted to discuss certain issues further with Ms. Bachmann."

Lots of politicians talk about a sinister homosexual agenda. Bachmann, who has made opposition to gay rights a cornersto ...more

Lisa Baron’s Salacious Memoir

2011-06-12T14:13:17+00:00

Life of the Party: A Political Press Tart Bares All, the new memoir by former GOP PR aide Lisa Baron, begins on a note both intriguing and revolting. "When people find out that I worked for Ralph Reed during the 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, they always ask the same thing: Was it true Ralph told voters that Senator John McCain fathered a black child?" she writes. "And my answer is always the same, 'How would I know? I was in a Greenville hotel room giving Ari Fleischer a blow job.'"

Given this opening, one might expect that Baron's book, which comes out later this month, will be a gossipy tell-all packed with Republican secrets. It's timing seems perfect, given that the pace of sex scandals has lately picked up faster than that of natural disasters. In fact, though, there's not all that much dirt here. We do learn that Ralph Reed set Baron up with Jack Abramoff crony Adam Kidan—here called Jason, but very thinly disguised—and that, under the pretext of having to make a business call, he lured her to his hotel room on the first date, then stripped naked and lunged at her. More significantly, there are hints that it really was Reed who spread miscegenation rumors about McCain—at one point, he fumes, "If John McCain thinks I did a number of him in South Carolina, he hasn't seen anything yet!"

Overall, though, most of the exposure here is of Baron herself. Yet that exposure is actually quite a bit more damning than she seems to realize, which makes the book strangely fascinating. A pro-choice, pro-gay Jewish woman who revels in her "trash-talking, booze-swilling, foul-mouth, fornicating" ways even as she spins for the family values crowd, Baron seems to see herself as a loveably insouciant lush, a right-wing Chelsea Handler. She doesn't seem to have the slightest idea how ugly her self-portrait really ...more

Policing Pregnancy

2011-04-21T14:19:17+00:00

Utah prosecutors and conservative politicians are determined to lock up the young woman known in court filings as J.M.S. for the crime of trying to end her pregnancy. Her grim journey through the legal system began in 2009, when she was 17 and pregnant by a convicted felon named Brandon Gale, who is currently facing charges of using her and another underage girl to make pornography. J.M.S. lived in a house without electricity or running water in a remote part of Utah. Even if she could have obtained the required parental consent and scraped together money for an abortion and a couple of nights in a hotel to comply with Utah’s twenty-four-hour waiting period, simply getting to the nearest clinic posed an enormous challenge. Salt Lake City is more than a three-hour drive from her town, twice that in bad weather, when snow makes the mountain passes treacherous. There is no public transportation, and she didn’t have a driver’s license.

And so, according to prosecutors, in May 2009, in her third trimester and desperate, J.M.S. paid a stranger $150 to beat her in the hope of inducing a miscarriage. The assault failed to end her pregnancy, but that didn’t stop police from charging her with criminal solicitation of murder. The juvenile court judge who heard her case, however, tossed it out on the grounds that her actions were legal under the state’s definition of abortion.

Local abortion opponents were outraged that J.M.S. had been freed. “It revealed an extreme weakness in the law, that a pregnant woman could do anything she wanted to do—it did not matter how grotesque or brutal—all the way up until the date of birth to kill her unborn child,” said Carl Wimmer, a state representative. He led a successful more...

Made in Heaven

2011-03-17T21:12:43+00:00

Last fall, 27-year-old Ohad Ben-Yaakov was injured in an accident at his part-time job, and he died after two weeks in a coma. Ben-Yaakov wasn’t married, nor was he in a relationship. No woman was pregnant with his child. Nevertheless, his devastated parents believe it’s not too late for them to become the grandparents of his offspring. And because they live in Israel, the world capital of in-vitro fertilization and a country that regularly pushes the envelope on reproductive technologies, they might get their wish.

When Mali and Dudi Ben-Yaakov learned their son was brain dead, they had his sperm extracted. Now they’re awaiting the decision of Israel’s attorney general on whether they’ll be permitted to find a woman to bear their grandchild. “If we were entitled to donate the organs of our son why are we not entitled to make use of his sperm in order to bring offspring to the world?” they asked in Haaretz more...

The Woman Who Beat Craigslist

2010-09-27T21:37:54+00:00

Underage girls who say they were sold for sex on the site were behind the battle to shutter its adult-services section. Michelle Goldberg reports on the inside story of their role—and the remarkable woman who led the fight.

India’s (Jewish) Mother

2010-04-11T17:38:29+00:00

Outside the Manakula Vinayagar temple in Pondicherry, a former French colony in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a temple elephant named Lakshmi collects offerings of rupees with her trunk, blessing devotees and tourists alike with a pat on the head. White curlicues are painted on her face, bells hang around her neck, and silver jewelry adorns her ankles. Behind her, little stalls sell religious knickknacks—faux-sandalwood figurines of Hindu gods and a great profusion of framed pictures. It looks, in other words, like thousands of other temples throughout India, until you examine the pictures more closely. They’re of an old woman with hooded eyes and a cryptic closed-mouth smile who looks a bit like Hannah Arendt. Everyone refers to her as “The Mother,” but she was born Mirra Alfassa. The de facto goddess of this town is a Sephardic Jew from France.

Over the past 150 years, many Westerners have sought spiritual transcendence in India, and quite a few have been accepted and absorbed into Indian culture. The British radical Annie Besant, once one of the world’s most famous atheists, moved to India in the 1890s embracing Theosophy, the grandmother of modern new age movements. She became a major figure in the Indian independence movement and at one point was even elected president of the Indian National Congress. But even by India’s historically flamboyant standards, the spiritual career of the late Mirra Richard—Alfassa’s married name—is astonishing.

By chance, when I showed up in Pondicherry in February, it was the 50th anniversary of Mirra’s founding of the Sri Aurobindo Society, which is devoted to propagating the ideas of her close spiritual collaborator, the Indian freedom fighter-turned-yogi Sri Aurobindo. The society, which is headquartered in Pondicherry, sponsored an exhibition in a pavilion by the beach to commemorate the occasion. The Mother’s empty chair, draped in marigold silk, was part of the display, her old sandals in a glass box at the foot. Visitors, mostly Indian but a few Westerners too, bowed before it.

Though The Mother’s image is everywhere in Pondicherry, it’s not easy for the visitor to learn much that’s concrete about her life; the books for sale all tend toward dreamy, magic-filled hagiography. I got a useful clue, though, when I visited the Aurobindo Ashram in the town’s picturesque French quarter. On a bulletin board, there was a typed declaration from the ashram’s late director of physical education, a position that, I later learned, carried significant influence, because The Mother was serious about exercise. It warned Ashramites about a book called The Lives ...More