Fishermen's Net -- From Gay Bashing to Immigrant Bashing

It seems that anti-gay baiting and bashing are not enough for Fishermen's Net, Venango County's self-proclaimed Christian network.

The group's web site, managed by Jane Richey, the esteemed manager of local "Christian" radio station WAWN, is now trying to mobilize support for Pennsylvania State Representative Daryl Metcalfe's Arizona-modeled legislation aimed at providing "Pennsylvania law enforcement with full authority to apprehend illegal aliens" and several other sweeping reform measures.


We kid you not!


Here's a link to the Fishermen's Net web site to see the ugliness for yourself: http://www.fishermensnet.org/oldnews.html

And a recent article about the legislation from The Interfaith Alliance of PA:

Interfaith Advocates Call for Rejection of Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric and Legislation

HARRISBURG- With renewed fervor in the immigration debate after the passage of extreme legislation in Arizona, The Interfaith Alliance of Pennsylvania today called on state and federal legislators to be part of the solution on immigration and to reject rhetoric and legislation that divides people based on race and ethnicity.

“This is a matter of human dignity,” said Rabbi Carl Choper, the chair of The Interfaith Alliance of Pennsylvania. “We cannot promote laws in this state that demand that certain people be looked upon with suspicion simply because of their race or national origin.”

The organization’s statement came on the heels of a press conference held today by state Representative Daryl Metcalfe and four other state representatives to announce their intention to introduce legislation that mimics Arizona’s new law.

The law in Arizona has drawn criticism from around the country and the announcement of a federal civil rights challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Immigration Law Center, and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Rabbi Choper noted that there already is too much tension in Pennsylvania around immigration issues, as evidenced by the brutal murder of a man of Mexican origin by teen-agers in Shenandoah only two years ago. “This law will not help,” he said.

“The Arizona law will inevitably lead to racial profiling,” Choper said. “And that’s a betrayal of both American values and the values of people of faith. Why would we want to import a flawed law into Pennsylvania?”

Choper noted that The Interfaith Alliance of Pennsylvania stands with marginalized communities in their civil rights struggles. “We stand for inclusivity in American society. That was the point of the Commonwealth Interfaith Service which we held only last night,” he said, referring to the Second Annual Commonwealth Interfaith Service which The Interfaith Alliance of Pennsylvania convened on Monday, May 3 at Pine Street Presbyterian Church in Harrisburg. The service included Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Bahais, Unitarians and others of many ethnic and national origins.

“We believe in an America where everyone gets a fair shake,” Choper said. “We stand with those who face discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity or expression.”

The Interfaith Alliance of Pennsylvania is a statewide, grassroots network of people of faith and good will that advocates for social justice and religious liberty and that protests when religion is manipulated for political purposes or to oppress others.

Death for Gays ?

The following article from the New York Times provides a look at the world as it might be if Venango County extremists Jane Richey (below left) of "Christian" radio station WAWN and Diane Gramley (below right) of the American "Family" Association of Pennsylvania had their way.




Richey's and Gramley's efforts regularly promote one of the anti-gay organizations (Exodus International) and many of the anti-gay tactics mentioned in the article that have led to a call for the death penalty for gays in Uganda!

It's Time To End The Hate!

After Americans Visit, Uganda Weighs Death for Gays

By Jeffrey Gettleman for the New York Times:

KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.


The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.


One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations.

Donor countries, including the United States, are demanding that Uganda’s government drop the proposed law, saying it violates human rights, though Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity (who previously tried to ban miniskirts) recently said, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.”

The Ugandan government, facing the prospect of losing millions in foreign aid, is now indicating that it will back down, slightly, and change the death penalty provision to life in prison for some homosexuals. But the battle is far from over.

Instead, Uganda seems to have become a far-flung front line in the American culture wars, with American groups on both sides, the Christian right and gay activists, pouring in support and money as they get involved in the broader debate over homosexuality in Africa.

“It’s a fight for their lives,” said Mai Kiang, a director at the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a New York-based group that has channeled nearly $75,000 to Ugandan gay rights activists and expects that amount to grow.


The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

“I feel duped,” Mr. Schmierer said, arguing that he had been invited to speak on “parenting skills” for families with gay children. He acknowledged telling audiences how homosexuals could be converted into heterosexuals, but he said he had no idea some Ugandans were contemplating the death penalty for homosexuality.

“That’s horrible, absolutely horrible,” he said. “Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.”

Mr. Lively and Mr. Brundidge have made similar remarks in interviews or statements issued by their organizations. But the Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” Later, when confronted with criticism, Mr. Lively said he was very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh.

Human rights advocates in Uganda say the visit by the three Americans helped set in motion what could be a very dangerous cycle. Gay Ugandans already describe a world of beatings, blackmail, death threats like “Die Sodomite!” scrawled on their homes, constant harassment and even so-called correctional rape.

“Now we really have to go undercover,” said Stosh Mugisha, a gay rights activist who said she was pinned down in a guava orchard and raped by a farmhand who wanted to cure her of her attraction to girls. She said that she was impregnated and infected with H.I.V., but that her grandmother’s reaction was simply, “ ‘You are too stubborn.’ ”

Despite such attacks, many gay men and lesbians here said things had been getting better for them before the bill, at least enough to hold news conferences and publicly advocate for their rights. Now they worry that the bill could encourage lynchings. Already, mobs beat people to death for infractions as minor as stealing shoes.

“What these people have done is set the fire they can’t quench,” said the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian who went undercover for six months to chronicle the relationship between the African anti-homosexual movement and American evangelicals.

Mr. Kaoma was at the conference and said that the three Americans “underestimated the homophobia in Uganda” and “what it means to Africans when you speak about a certain group trying to destroy their children and their families.”

“When you speak like that,” he said, “Africans will fight to the death.”

Uganda is an exceptionally lush, mostly rural country where conservative Christian groups wield enormous influence. This is, after all, the land of proposed virginity scholarships, songs about Jesus playing in the airport, “Uganda is Blessed” bumper stickers on Parliament office doors and a suggestion by the president’s wife that a virginity census could be a way to fight AIDS.

During the Bush administration, American officials praised Uganda’s family-values policies and steered millions of dollars into abstinence programs.

Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. (Mr. Warren recently condemned the anti-homosexuality bill, seeking to correct what he called “lies and errors and false reports” that he played a role in it.)


Many Africans view homosexuality as an immoral Western import, and the continent is full of harsh homophobic laws. In northern Nigeria, gay men can face death by stoning. Beyond Africa, a handful of Muslim countries, like Iran and Yemen, also have the death penalty for homosexuals. But many Ugandans said they thought that was going too far. A few even spoke out in support of gay people.

“I can defend them,” said Haj Medih, a Muslim taxi driver with many homosexual customers. “But I fear the what? The police, the government. They can arrest you and put you in the safe house, and for me, I don’t have any lawyer who can help me.”

Just How Racist Is the Tea Party Movement?

The activists behind the Tea Bag movement in Venango County are the same extremists fighting against the rights and visibility of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people here and everywhere. And they are, you guessed it, the American "Family" Association of Pennsylvania, "Christian" Radio Station WAWN, Fishermen's Net, Lighthouse Ministries of Franklin.

By Bill Berkowitz for IPS:

Are the openly-racist elements within the Tea Party movement an aberration, or are they more firmly entrenched than tea partiers would care to admit?

It began with Apr. 15 Tax Day protests as thousands rallied in a number of cities across the country.


It continued on into the summer with raucous town hall meetings and gun-toting anti-Barack Obama demonstrators, and appeared to reach its apex with a Sep. 12 march on Washington, which drew nearly 100,000 participants.

Now, however, some in the so-called Tea Party movement are turning their attention toward becoming a force during the 2010 congressional elections.

Several reports on the Sep. 12 event noted it was a nearly all-white crowd and some demonstrators carried an assortment of "homemade" anti-Obama posters, declaring that "The Anti-Christ Is Living in the White House", and calling the president an "Oppressive Bloodsucking Arrogant Muslim Alien".

Despite the fact that it doesn't have a clear identity, and serious questions about the movement's character remain to be answered, the Tea Party movement has been one of the most intriguing political developments of the past year.

Is it a grassroots movement, or has it been organised and funded by Washington-based conservative groups? Could it be both? Is it mainly concerned with economic issues (government spending, taxes, deficits) or are the Christian Right's traditional social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) of interest to tea partiers?

Are there several -- possibly competing -- ideological tendencies within the movement?

While tea partiers made a lot of noise this past summer, doing their best to put the kybosh on health care reform, is there a future for the movement?

A recent Rasmussen Poll suggests that there very well might be.

In theoretical three-way congressional races between a Democrat, Republican and Tea Party candidate, the Tea Party candidate outpolled the Republican. Democrats attracted 36 percent of the vote; the Tea Party candidate received 23 percent, and the Republican finished third at 18 percent, with 22 percent undecided.

(According to the Rasmussen Reports website, "survey...respondents were asked to assume that the Tea Party movement organized as a new political party. In practical terms, it is unlikely that a true third-party option would perform as well as the polling data indicates. The rules of the election process - written by Republicans and Democrats - provide substantial advantages for the two established major parties.)

Interestingly enough, in an effort to build the movement, some Tea Party organisers have taken to "studying the grassroots training methods of the late Saul Alinsky, the community organizer known for campus protests in the 1960s and who inspired the structure of Obama's presidential campaign," the San Francisco Chronicle recently reported.

Tea Party groups are also using "Tea Party: The Documentary Film" as an organising tool. In a pre-premiere press release, the filmmakers claimed that the film would deal with the "allegations of racism".

And that indeed appears to be the issue that could stymie the movement's growth.

While Tea Party events have become a safe haven for people carrying racist anti-Obama signs, people of colour have stayed away in droves. Members of white nationalist organisations openly participate in Tea Party events and view the movement as a fertile recruiting ground.

Questions about the overlap between tea partiers and anti-immigration activists might be answered when an immigration reform bill is taken up next year.

Are the openly-racist elements within the Tea Party movement an aberration scorned by most Tea Party participants as John Hawkins, who runs a website called RightWingNews, insists, or are they more firmly entrenched than tea partiers would care to admit?

"The tea parties themselves are made up of a diverse bloc of different political elements, and white nationalists have chosen to make a stand inside the tea parties," one expert, Devin Burghart, told IPS.

For the past 17 years, Burghart has researched and written on virtually all facets of contemporary white nationalism. He is currently vice president of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, which monitors and publishes on the activities of white nationalist groups.

"The exact extent of the racist element inside the Tea Parties is difficult to quantify, because they are not a static phenomena, and it depends on who shows up," he explained. "That said, it's enough of a factor to attract the attention of a significant portion of the white nationalist movement."

"It's not a matter of how many African-American or Latino/a folks show up at these tea parties, it's about the content and character of the arguments made at them," Burghart added.

Not only have "tea partiers have turned up with overtly racist signs and slogans" at rallies from coast to coast, he said, but also many participants "cling to the belief that our first African-American president is not only un-American, he was not even born in the country".

Unfortunately, Burghart noted, "There's little evidence to indicate that tea party leaders are doing anything to address the racism in their ranks."

Burghart said that he was not surprised that "tea party activists would deny their racism". After all, "racists have been denying their racism even before pro-secessionist bigots couched their arguments in bogus claims about states' rights".

However, he added, "To anyone with any degree of sensitivity to the issue, the tea parties have clearly shown themselves to be racist, in the lineage of George Wallace - who when he campaigned up North eschewed talk of racial segregation in favour ranting against 'elites.'"

In an article at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights' website, Leonard Zeskind, the organisation's president and author of the recently published "Blood and Politics: The History of White Nationalism from the Margins to the Mainstream", pointed out that the anti-Obama "opposition" contains "many different political elements".


These include "ultra-conservative Republicans of both the Pat Buchanan and free market variety; anti-tax Tea Party libertarians from the Ron Paul camp; Christian right activists intent on re-molding the country into their kind of Kingdom; birth certificate conspiracy theorists, anti-immigrant nativists of the armed Minuteman and the policy wonk variety; third party 'constitutionalists'; and white nationalists of both the citizens councils and the Stormfront national socialist variety."

If Tea Party activists can ferret out racists and white nationalists from their ranks – and not become a mouthpiece for Christian Right ideologues - it could become a legitimate force on the U.S. political landscape.

Meanwhile, a host of groups, operating under assorted Tea Party banners, are working to influence the 2010 mid-term elections.

Junk-Science Film Being Promoted By Tea Bag Movement

Venango County Extremists Are Participating In Efforts To Attack Climate Change Efforts



By Stephanie Mencimer for Mother Jones:

The Tea Party movement earned its stripes at town hall protests this summer by claiming that Democratic health care reform efforts would result in defenseless grannies being hauled before "death panels." Now the tea partiers have a new target—the cap-and-trade legislation moving through Congress—and new, unlikely victims to protect—the poor.

One of the key recruiting tools in conservative activists' push against the climate bill is a recent documentary called Not Evil, Just Wrong. The film styles itself as the latest conservative answer to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It has no commercial distributor, but instead debuted on an October 18 webcast heavily promoted by social conservative organizations like Focus on the Family and the American Family Association, as well as local Tea Party groups. Organizers claimed the online premiere attracted some 400,000 viewers.


Now the tea partiers are calling for local chapters to host screenings on November 21. An Escondido, California, branch recently invited members to a "record-setting international Cinematic Tea Party," in terms reminiscent of a social justice rally: "Join the Resistance against the extreme environmentalism that threatens the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people in the developed and developing world; this is the new road to poverty in America." (To facilitate these screenings, the filmmakers are selling a "Platinum Party Pack" on their online store, which for $99.95 gets you all the fixings for a rockin' party: invitations, T-shirts, posters, and even a small red carpet.)

Red carpet notwithstanding, Not Evil is unlikely to garner its creators, a pair of Irish former journalists, any Oscar nominations. The film is poorly organized and rehashes the familiar talking points of climate change deniers—global warming as bad science; climate concerns as hysteria akin to that over killer bees, etc. Pushing those views are the usual suspects, including Patrick Moore, the Greenpeace founder turned nuclear power lobbyist, and Thatcher-era British politician Sir Nigel Lawson.

Where Not Evil differs slightly from the standard denialist script is insistence that cutting carbon emissions will hurt the poor. "For too long, with environmentalists, it's not enough about people," says Ann McElhinney, one of the filmmakers, in an interview. "Is it warming? Is it cooling? Who knows? Is it caused by us? There's even more disagreement about that. All of these things should be about people. We should be fighting for the poor."

To that end, the film introduces 30-year-old Tiffany McElhany, a stay-at-home mom portrayed as a potential casualty of any environmental legislation that would shutter coal-fired power plants. The filmmakers met her in a hotel lounge in Vevay, Indiana, population 1,600. After they told her about the movie, she replied, "If Al Gore could walk a day in my shoes for a few days, he wouldn't be doing the things he's doing." McElhinney and her coproducer/director husband, Phelim McAleer, had found their star.

In the film, they send McElhany on a Michael Moore-inspired road trip to try to deliver a handwritten letter to Gore at his Tennessee mansion. Naturally, he's off on a private jet somewhere. The stunt isn't very funny—but McElheny's role isn't to provide satiric commentary. It's to embody the prosperity that coal and other dirty industries have brought to places like Vevay.

And by all appearances, the McElhanys enjoy an idyllic rural life. Thanks to Tiffany's husband's $16-an-hour job making mufflers for Toyota, the family has bought a new house in the country. The film lingers on shots of the family eating pancakes and their daughter playing the saxophone. At one point, McElhany waxes poetically about coal, which fires a power plant just across the river and therefore employs a number of Vevay residents. "Why would anyone want to take that away? It would mean less funding for schools, possibly less schools; it would mean an extreme cost-of-living rise. It would mean kids like my kids wouldn't be able to play in bands, wouldn't be able to do ballet class because there is just not going to be the extra money anymore in an everyday household to pay for these things," she says.

While the filmmakers may be sincere in their concern for low-income people, their film is populated by a cast of discredited characters, some of them familiar from recent corporate astroturf efforts. Case in point: Roy Innis, the head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), whose group participated in a "Stop the War on the Poor" campaign launched by a lobbying firm connected to Alaskan oil interests in order to push for more oil drilling in the US.


Not Evil presents Innis as the leader of a historic civil rights group fighting to reinstate use of the pesticide DDT, whose ban the film blames for the daily malaria deaths of more than 300 African children. But CORE is better known among real civil rights groups for renting out its historic name to any corporation in need of a black front person. The group has taken money from the payday-lending industry, chemical giant (and original DDT manufacturer) Monsanto, and ExxonMobil. Last year, Mother Jones reported that oil and gas interests recruited Innis to serve as the lead plaintiff in a legal challenge to listing the polar bear as a threatened species.

When I asked the filmmakers why they didn't acknowledge Innis' conflicts in the film, they claimed ignorance. "We didn't pay him anything!" McElhinney exclaimed. "Which industry is Al Gore getting money from?" demanded McAleer, who says that whether Innis received payments from Exxon is beside the point.

It turns out that McElhany's story, too, is more complicated than Not Evil would have you believe. She is by far the documentary's most compelling character, and seems poised to become a minor heroine to the Tea Party crowd. Yet for all her talk of the bounty that coal has brought to Vevay, when I contacted her for this story she disclosed that her husband was laid off in March and has been unemployed ever since. It appears that a lot of dirty industry jobs have disappeared with no help at all from environmentalists.