Republicans Helped Same-Sex Marriage Win At The Polls

AND THE SAME WILL BE TRUE IN THE QUEST FOR DIGNITY, RESPECT, AND EQUALITY FOR LGBT PEOPLE IN VENANGO COUNTY ... EVENTUALLY ...

By Walter Olson for the Washington Post:

After years of defeats, same-sex-marriage advocates scored a remarkable 4-0 sweep of state ballot contests on Nov. 6. One major reason: This year, significant numbers of Republicans voted their way. That should give pause to a GOP establishment that has alienated many younger voters and independents with its stance on the issue and now faces the prospect of dissent among its core constituents as well.

The evidence comes straight from a close study of the election returns in Maryland, Maine and Minnesota. (Washington state, with its unique system of mail voting, has been slower to report its results in detail. I’ve based my analysis on the other three states that had same-sex-marriage contests.)

Let’s break it down.

The Maryland ballot referendum, Question 6, essentially asked voters to confirm or reject a new law allowing same-sex marriage. In 11 of the 18 counties that Mitt Romney carried, Question 6 fared better than President Obama, a sign that GOP voters had crossed over in support. While the phenomenon could be seen everywhere from farm towns to blue-collar inner suburbs, the biggest swings tended to come in affluent bedroom communities. At one precinct in Hunt Valley, north of Baltimore, with 2,116 votes cast, there was a 28 percentage-point swing, leading to a landslide for Romney and the ballot question: Obama drew a paltry 37 percent, but Question 6 carried the precinct with a whopping 65 percent.

The margins weren’t as large in other precincts, but swings of 10, 15 and 20 points were common. (I should mention that I volunteered on my own time for the Question 6 effort, working especially among libertarians and conservatives on its behalf.)

In Minnesota, where voters were asked to ban same-sex marriage through a state constitutional amendment, precinct returns show that suburban Republicans broke from their party in droves to defeat the ban. According to the Pioneer Press of St. Paul, 47 towns around the Twin Cities area voted for Romney while opposing the measure, known as Amendment One. Exurban Scott County, the state’s fastest growing, narrowly turned down Amendment One, even as it gave Romney a comfortable 56.5 percent of its vote.

To be sure, rural parts of Minnesota saw ticket-splitting the other way, with some Democratic-leaning areas backing the marriage ban. But within commuting distance of the Twin Cities, the defections from the Republican line were deep and unmistakable. Romney won easily in such lakeside Hennepin County towns as Orono, Deephaven and Shorewood. Conventional wisdom would have them voting for the marriage ban as well — but they rejected Amendment One by 60 percent or more, an outcome that suggests a significant change in demographics and attitudes from even a decade ago.

In the large and politically competitive middle-class suburb of Eagan, Minn., home to former GOP governor Tim Pawlenty, Romney wound up losing by nine points, about the same as his statewide margin. That was close, though, compared with the results for Amendment One, which Eagan voters buried by a 22-point margin.

One quick way to look for towns where Republicans were especially likely to approve same-sex marriage is to consult the state-by-state Yahoo.com “Best Places to Live” series, which highlights communities with high incomes, high education levels and low rates of property crime. The list of “Best Places to Live in Minnesota” is dominated by outlying Twin Cities suburbs, most of which tilt strongly GOP: Sixteen of the 20 supported Romney — six of them by 60 percent or more. But only one town among the 20 voted to ban same-sex marriage, and by an anemic 50.28 percent (had nine voters there switched sides, the outcome would have been different).

Maine voters were asked to legalize same-sex marriage through a referendum that lost narrowly in 2009. This time it won, with 53 percent of the vote. Again, Republicans helped secure the victory.

Maine, unlike Maryland and Minnesota, has a shortage of classic Republican bedroom suburbs; most of the suburbs of its only sizable city, Portland, lean Democratic. Consider, however, the five towns atop Yahoo’s “Best Places to Live in Maine” list. The Bangor suburb of Hampden voted both for Romney and for freedom to marry. The other four towns, all Portland suburbs — Cumberland, Falmouth, Yarmouth and Cape Elizabeth — went for Obama by votes ranging from 53 to 63 percent, and then in each case registered a further 10- to 13-point swing toward same-sex marriage.

Fox News sponsored exit polls in each of the three states; of self-described Republicans, between 21 percent and 25 percent said they were breaking from the party’s official position in their vote. The pollsters asked voters which was closer to their own view: “Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals” or “Government should do more to solve problems.” Of voters who said government is doing too much — prime prospects for anyone trying to assemble a majority Republican coalition — 34 percent to 38 percent sided with same-sex marriage advocates.

So where next for the Republican Party on this issue? Despite the GOP’s historic identification with individual liberty and with getting the government’s nose out of citizens’ business, no one expects it to endorse same-sex marriage anytime soon. But one plausible path would be a GOP call for leaving the issue to the states, with New York going one way, for instance, and Texas another. That would probably capture a consensus among a broad range of active Republicans, fit reasonably well with the party’s other ideological stands and still distinguish its position from the Democratic Party’s support for same-sex marriage in its 2012 platform.

The GOP has left itself little room to maneuver. When some in the Romney campaign took an interest in the “leave it to the states” position this fall, they discovered that the candidate, like several of his former rivals for the nomination, had already signed a pledge circulated by the National Organization for Marriage committing him to support a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Although many national polls now show support for marriage equality, the national Republican platform continues to endorse the same deeply out-of-touch proposal.

If and when the party’s leadership changes its mind, a whole lot of suburban Republicans will be murmuring under their breath, “About time.”

Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of “Schools for Misrule.”

While Venango County Remains Firmly In The Dark, History Is Made In Maine And Maryland

Victory: Voters Legalize Same-Sex Marriage In Maine And Maryland

by Lila Shapiro, Huffington Post:

For the first time in history, voters have chosen to legalize same-sex marriage on the ballot. Gay rights advocates are already celebrating this development as a critical victory and a turning point in the fight for marriage equality.

Since the late '90s, a total of 32 states have held votes on same-sex marriage, and each time, voters have opposed the measure. For opponents of same-sex marriage, this string of victories has been a crucial talking point. As Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, the nation's leading group opposing gay marriage, said in a press release this summer: "The American people know in their heart what marriage is, and they have expressed that in the form of over 70 million votes cast in 32 consecutive state elections to preserve marriage as the union of one man and one woman."

But on Tuesday night, voters in Maine and Maryland chose to legalize gay marriage, according to exit polls and early returns. In Minnesota and Washington, the results were not yet clear as of this writing.

Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, an organization that has long advocated for same-sex marriage, spent more than $5 million in support of gay marriage in these states.

“This is a landmark election for marriage equality and we will forever look back at this year as a critical turning point in the movement for full citizenship for LGBT people," he said in a press release Tuesday night. "Voters in Maine came to the common-sense conclusion that all people deserve the ability to make loving, lifelong commitments through marriage."

Marc Solomon, national campaign director for Freedom to Marry, another prominent advocacy organization, said in a press release: “Today, a majority in Maine voted in favor of loving and committed same-sex couples seeking the freedom to marry. Now the commitment gay and lesbian couples have made in life will be respected equally under the law, celebrated before their loved ones, and called what it is: marriage.”

For gay-rights advocates, the Maine vote is particularly heartening. Just three years ago, a popular vote overturned legislation that would have legalized same-sex marriage in the state.

"Securing marriage equality at the ballot box in Maine is especially appreciated the second time around," R. Clark Cooper, head of the Log Cabin Republicans, the largest Republican group that supports same-sex marriage, told The Huffington Post in an email.

Although six states and Washington, D.C. legalized gay marriage before Tuesday night, they did so through the votes of state legislators or court decisions. The new victory undermines the conservative premise that those early wins were merely the result of liberal bias in state legislatures and the courts, and it reflects what recent polls have shown to be a shift in Americans' views on the issue.

“It’s hard to overstate the national significance of this vote,” Solomon said. “For years, our opponents have argued that we could not win a majority vote at the ballot. Today, Maine voters proved them wrong, standing up for the Golden Rule and for freedom for all Mainers.”

Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage could not immediately be reached for comment.

While America Moves Into The Light, The American Family Association of Pennsylvania Keeps Venango County In The Dark

Gay Marriage, The Issue That Lost Its Bite

by Ruth Marcus for the Washington Post:

Sometimes in politics, you have to listen for what’s not being said to understand how things really stand. In the 2012 presidential campaign, the telling — and comforting — silence involves same-sex marriage and gay rights.

Think about it: In 1992, Pat Buchanan, speaking at the Republican convention in Houston, warned that Bill Clinton wanted to impose a “homosexual rights” agenda on America.

In 2004, Republicans engineered ballot initiatives against same-sex marriage in 11 states, hoping to bolster George W. Bush’s reelection chances by spurring conservatives to go to the polls.

It may not have worked — former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd has written that the initiatives “had no discernable effect on turnout among conservatives” — but those ballot initiatives didn’t turn up by accident.

Flash-forward to 2012. President Obama pushed to lift the ban on gays serving openly in the military, undoing the “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy put in place by the last Democratic president. He instructed the Justice Department to stop defending the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), also signed into law by President Clinton. Obama completed his slow evolution on same-sex marriage and came out in support.

The platform approved at the Democratic convention in Charlotte included a plank supporting same-sex marriage. Last week, Obama urged voters to back initiatives in Maryland, Maine and Washington state to allow gay couples to marry; he had previously urged Minnesotans to vote against a marriage prohibition.

If this is exacting a political price, it’s hard to discern. Republicans and their nominee, Mitt Romney, have not raised the subject — not at their convention, not on the campaign trail, not during the debates.

“It just shows how different the politics are, and how profoundly the center of gravity on the freedom to marry has shifted,” said Evan Wolfson, president of Freedom to Marry. Gay rights and the right to marry, he noted, “used to be something Republicans campaigned on, and Democrats wanted to be on the right side but didn’t want to talk about it. Now it’s the exact opposite because a majority of the country favors it and a majority of independents favor it.”

The difference is striking. I remember questioning a parade of Democratic presidential contenders about same-sex marriage during the 2004 campaign. They would stammer and talk about hospital visits, maybe civil unions. Their aides would glare at me for broaching this unwelcome topic.

The Republican Party hasn’t transformed itself — far from it. The party platform calls for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Romney has signed a pledge from the National Organization for Marriage to back the amendment and support DOMA.

Still, said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, “this is the first time we have seen a major national election in which one party has not overtly attacked LGBT people and opposed their equal rights in order to gain votes and motivate a base.”

The most interesting test involves the marriage initiatives on the ballot in four states (Maine, Maryland and Washington, where voters are being asked to affirmatively support same-sex marriage, and Minnesota, where opponents of marriage equality have an initiative to prohibit it).

In 32 out of 32 previous ballot initiatives — including an attempt in Maine just three years ago — voters have rejected same-sex marriage. Now, that string of intolerance may be broken; polls are tight in all four states.

But the message of those opposing same-sex marriage has shifted — to emphasize tolerance but draw the line at marriage. One spot against the Washington state measure opens with a rainbow flag, and assures voters, “Gays and lesbians already have the same legal rights as married couples. . . . You can oppose same-sex marriage and not be anti-gay.”

Polling explains this soft sell. A new report from the centrist Democratic group Third Way shows that most of the increase in support for marriage equality comes not from the changing demographics of younger voters, who are more open-minded, but from older voters reconsidering. “Americans in every demographic, political and religious group across the country are changing their minds on this issue,” the report found.

In 2004, 16 percent of Republicans backed same-sex marriage; by 2011, 26 percent did. In 2004, 33 percent of self-described moderates supported marriage equality, by 2011, 54 percent were in favor. And although the Catholic Church is a major financial backer of groups opposing same-sex marriage, support among Catholics has grown from 35 percent to 52 percent.

From ultimate wedge issue to relative nonissue — a stunning transformation.

The Death of the 'Religious' Right

Diane Gramley's Failed Coup Attempt Against the Venango County GOP

Submitted by Dave Martin (3/9/12):


The Venango County Republican Party has been dominated for generations by the Breene family. Martha Breene (right) is presently GOP party chair and her husband, Charlie, is the party committee person. Thus it's been for many, many years. Suddenly this year, it seems that Diane Gramley (below, President of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania) has taken an interest in GOP party politics.

Diane and a few of her followers examined the signatures on the ballot petition forms for GOP committee positions and found minor errors on 10 of them including the petition form of Martha Breene. Diane filed a complaint with the board of elections which ruled in Diane's favor and removed the names of the 10 individuals from the ballot including Martha's name.


Martha and the other GOP committee candidates immediately hired a lawyer, Mike Hadley, and sued to have their names restored to the ballot. The court hearing on Tuesday was noisy and choatic with frequent outbursts not only from those directly involved but from spectators as well.

One interesting bit of testimony was that Diane wished to replace the GOP chair, Martha Breene, and the 9 committee people with members of the local Tea Party headed by Jane Richey, an old ally of Diane's and owner of WAWN which is the local Christian Broadcasting radio affiliate. (The dynamically bumbling duo is pictured here, Richey on left, Gramley on right.)

I just spoke to a friend in the courthouse who tells me that Judge White handed down his decision today in favor of Martha Breene and the other committee people allowing them additional time to correct the errors on their petition forms which will restore their names to the ballot.

Hence, Diane loses not only in her attempted coup but she loses big time in her standing with the "establishment" in Venango County.

I'm no fan of the Breene's or the local GOP party but challenging them on technical errors on a petition form in a courthouse controlled by Republicans before an ardent Republican judge is not the smartest move.

If Diane had any credibility locally previously, she lost it with this whacky move.

I very much doubt that she or her followers will have any credibility in giving testimony before councils in Oil City and Franklin and she has damaged the reputations of the election board that did her bidding as well although the chair, Tim Brooks, is also a Tea Party member.

LGBTI Rights: The Rhetoric and The Reality

In right-wing America, dominated by hate groups that pump out demonizing propaganda, like the Venango County-based American Family Association of Pennsylvania, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are an enemy to be feared, criminalized, exterminated.

The reality, however, is quite different, as summed up in this description of the Open Society Institute's LGBTI Rights Initiative:

Throughout the world lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people are the target of human rights violations. They are killed, tortured, raped, and sexually assaulted simply because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. More than 80 countries consider consensual, adult homosexual relationships criminal behavior. Penalties include lengthy jail sentences, torture, and forced psychiatric treatment. In at least seven countries, individuals can be executed for homosexual conduct.


Even in countries that do not criminalize homosexual conduct, hate violence remains prevalent. Other serious human rights violations against LGBTI people include invasions of privacy; arbitrary detention; and discrimination in employment, family rights, housing, education, and health care. Additionally, when LGBTI people try to organize to assert recognition of their basic human rights, their rights to freedom of expression and assembly are frequently denied, and they often face both government and nonstate violence and harassment.

Despite these challenges and the pervasive discrimination that exists, more and more LGBTI people are engaging in a vibrant and growing global social movement to advance their rights. However, while these rights groups now exist in every region of the world, they continue to face major obstacles including social stigma, lack of recognition by broader civil society communities, and limited resources.

The Open Society Foundations seek to empower LGBTI communities to promote and defend their human rights. The LGBTI Rights Initiative will provide funding to local rights groups and regional networks in the developing world. It will also support global advocacy initiatives that advance LGBTI rights and complement efforts at the local level.

Republican Legislator Calls for an End to Second-Class Citizenship

Oh, if only Venango County, home-base for the viciously anti-gay hate group, the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, had such humanity, and leadership, among its public officials!

The Freedom to Marry

from The Advocate:

When two of the most prominent spokesmen for their sides of the marriage equality fight sat down on Monday for a 10-minute debate over what's happening in New Jersey, you knew it would be worth watching.

Evan Wolfson, president of Freedom to Marry, set about dismantling the "torrent of talking points" that Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, unloaded during the televised discussion on Up Close With Diana Williams.

When Brown insisted gay rights activists in New Jersey were trying to "redefine marriage" with a bill legalizing same-sex marriage, Wolfson shot back that, "Marriage is not defined by who is denied it."

And when Brown claimed that "democracy doesn't count here" because Wolfson opposes a proposal by Gov. Chris Christie to put same-sex marriage up for a statewide debate and vote, it was answered with a civics lesson on American values:

"I disagree with Mr. Brown's explanation of how the United States is supposed to function," Wolfson said on New York's WABC-7. "Here in the United States, we actually believe there are basic rights, basic freedoms, that are protected for everybody under the Constitution. And it's exactly what we don't do is have a big debate about whether you should have freedom of religion, or whether I should have freedom of speech, or whether you should have the freedom to marry. We are all Americans, and we are all entitled to basic rights and protections. And we don't put that up to an up-or-down vote."

Is the AFA Censoring Bryan Fischer Again?

Poor Bryan Fischer, national spokesperson of the Venango County-based hate group, the American Family Association of Pennyslvania.


He regularly says that liberals, gays and Muslims want to censor him, but it seems that it's his own employer that is actually doing the censoring.

from Right Wing Watch:

The American Family Association’s spokesman and Director of Issues Analysis Bryan Fischer keeps finding that his own organization censors articles he posts to the AFA’s website, including one where he claimed that welfare encourages African Americans to “rut like rabbits” and one in which demanded that all immigrants must “convert to Christianity.”

Now, Fischer is finding himself in trouble for an article condemning Newt Gingrich, which the AFA has yanked from its website.

Why? Because AFA founder and chairman emeritus Don Wildmon endorsed Gingrich and is a member of his Faith Leaders Coalition, and claims that only a Gingrich presidency can save Western civilization and the human race.

Fischer, who is not one to apologize, began his radio show last month to by offering “my apologies for yesterday” for the “intensity” of his attacks on Gingrich over his marital affairs, and had his post labeling Gingrich “a serial adulterer” had been pulled off the AFA’s homepage.


For a radio host who constantly complains that Muslims, liberals and gays and lesbians are trying to suppress his views, it seems that the only one actually censoring Bryan Fischer is none other than his own employer.

Here’s the original article before the AFA took it off their website:

The Fatal Amnesia of American Conservatives

A Lesson for Venango County from Tennessee

Tennessee Restaurant Owner Kicks Out Anti-Gay Senator

Over Offensive Anti-Gay Comments

from AddictingInfo.com:

Last week, Republican Tennessee state senator Stacey Campfield (right) told LGBT journalist Michelangelo Signorile that it was “virtually impossible” to get HIV/AIDS through heterosexual sex, and that only gay people get the disease. He also claimed that HIV began after a gay man had sex with a monkey. Of course, we all know that Campfield’s claims are wrong because heterosexuals contract HIV as well. Take former NBA legend Magic Johnson for instance. He’s a heterosexual male who contracted the disease because he had sexual intercourse with multiple women over the course of his career. Countless other heterosexual men and women have contracted HIV over the decades. This is part of the alternative knowledge system that David Frum was referring to in December of last year. In it, homosexuality is the root cause of AIDS and should be demonized. Conservatives get away with such blatant lies because they live in a bubble safe from criticism. This time, though, Campfield’s outrageous comments have landed him in hot water and one local restaurant in Knoxville, Tennessee is teaching him a lesson.

The owner of Bistro at the Bijou booted Senator Campfield out of the establishment because of his false and inflammatory comments about the LGBT community and HIV/AIDS as well as his failed ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill. A post on the restaurant’s Facebook page, which has over 1300 likes in 18 hours, reads;

“I hope that Stacy Campfield now knows what if feels like to be unfairly discriminated against.”

Martha Boggs, the owner of the bistro, told the Knoxville News Sentinel, “He’s gone from being stupid to dangerous. It’s just my way of standing up to a bully.”



There is a Facebook campaign to oust Campfield from office and you can also sign this petition.

Republican lawmakers have taken aim at the LGBT community more frequently in recent years, and many anti-gay advocates have added their own hateful rhetoric and false claims. One activist, Linda Harvey, told her listeners on her radio broadcast that there isn’t any proof that LGBT people exist , and Right Wing pastor Mark Driscoll said that masturbation is a form of homosexuality. Undoubtedly, more hateful rhetoric will occur as same-sex becomes legal in more states and those afraid of equality and change become increasingly frantic that history is passing them by.

A Sign From Above

Religious Conservatives Struggle to Influence GOP Nomination

from McClatchy Newspapers on PostBulletin.com, Jan. 28, 2012:

Austin, Texas -- In the beginning, religious conservatives wanted a Republican presidential victor who'd be the answer to their prayers.

It hasn't turned out that way.


After 30 years of burgeoning political clout, the Christian right has struggled to find its place in an election season in which the economy has replaced the culture war.

Its backers can't agree on a GOP nominee, its issues aren't defining the debate and its national leaders seem to have lost influence over the flock.

How that plays out will affect fortunes not only of Republicans in their fight against President Barack Obama this fall but also may swing the outcome of many congressional races.

And their votes, which have been split among the GOP field, will be up for grabs again Tuesday in the Florida primary.

William Martin, a Rice University professor and author of a book about the rise of the religious right, "With God On Their Side," said evangelicals unhappy with their choices have to decide:

Will they remain political purists (and stay home in November if they don't like the nominee) or pursue a pragmatic course with a flawed candidate who can win the White House?

Martin said that in the end, he expects pragmatism to prevail.

"For Republicans in general and Christian conservatives who make up a large segment of Republicans, so many things have been subsumed under one overwhelming desire _ defeat Barack Obama."

Historically, opposition to abortion and gay marriage are top issues for religious motivated voters.

This year, some have sought to redefine the moral agenda to include economic issues, including taxes, debt and government spending. In political terms, the economy has become the new morality.

Rick Santorum, who won Iowa with considerable backing from Christian conservatives, has tried to link moral issues with economic success, citing studies that show children raised by married parents are less likely to live in poverty than kids in single-parent homes.

Before he dropped out of the presidential race last month, Rick Perry bridged religious faith and economic well-being at a prayer rally in South Carolina. That was modeled after his seven-hour revival in August in Houston that effectively kicked off the Texas governor's run for the White House.

"Father, give us hope in this country that through you, this country can prosper, that it can be healed," Perry prayed before several thousand at an arena in Greenville, S.C.

Among those supporting Perry in his presidential bid was Maggie Wright of Burleson, Texas, who traveled to South Carolina as a volunteer and attended the Greenville rally, where she touted Perry's credentials.

"He doesn't mind getting up publicly and reading out of that Bible," she said while a choir sang on stage in advance of Perry's appearance. "He knows that it's up to God whether our nation succeeds or not."

Wright nodded when Nancy Sabet, a Perry volunteer from Massachusetts, added something else to the religious agenda. "And he'll get America back working again," she said.

But if Perry's record made him a favorite among evangelicals, doubts about his electability after poor debate performances doomed his prospects.

"A lot of people expressed a lot of excitement when Governor Perry first got in the race," said University of Akron professor John Green, an expert on politics and religion. "They felt he fit their values very well. But then people would tell me, 'That was until he opened his mouth.'"


Likewise, if doubts about Newt Gingrich's marital infidelities and Mitt Romney's Mormonism have raised red flags among some evangelicals, their potential to defeat Obama has gained them support.

Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College, a Christian school in Massachusetts, said the religious right has matured over the last 30 years and is more likely to back a slightly imperfect candidate with winning potential when it serves its interest.

"Evangelicals in 1980 were hoping that with the election of Ronald Reagan, they'd be able to enact a political agenda that would fit their framework. It simply did not happen," he said.

They've recognized, particularly on the domestic policy front, that movement is slow.

"So the compromise has been they simply want to have a seat at the table. They want to feel like they have some of their people who are in senior policy positions so that some of their agenda items get enforced," Lindsay said.

Settling on the best contender to topple Obama has not been easy among evangelicals, who've been divided among Santorum, Romney and Gingrich.

Tensions were evident this month at a meeting of Christian leaders on a ranch near Brenham, Texas, aimed at consolidating around a conservative alternative to Romney.

A majority voted to make Santorum the consensus candidate, but Gingrich backers left the meeting unwilling to fall in line and angry over comments by influential Christian leader James Dobson, who warned against having "a woman who was a man's mistress for eight years" as first lady should Gingrich win.

Last week, in a conference call to social conservatives, Dobson redoubled his support for Santorum. He said that if candidates "don't get around to talking about the Lord, about biblical principles and are determined to defend those things in the culture, then we ought to find another candidate."

Eventually, Republicans will pick a nominee, and several social conservative leaders said in interviews that they expect evangelicals will turn out and vote for him.

"Don't underestimate Barack Obama's unique ability to unite people around his opponent," said Richard Land, who heads the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

If it's Romney, whose Mormonism and mixed record on abortion issue might be a problem for some, the prospect of winning in November will cover a multitude of sins, Land said.

"As long as he's beating Obama, that salves a lot of their pain," he said.

Evangelicals have split their support among the Republican presidential candidates in the early contests.

In Florida, which has its primary Tuesday, evangelicals are expected to make up as much as a third of the turnout.

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

This article presents some very important ideas for the leadership in Venango County, home-base for the Hate Group, the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, to mull over as they struggle to move the region forward in challenging times.

by Stephanie Pappas, Senior Writer for LiveScience.com:

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. (Pictured: Diane Gramely, President of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania.) Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

"Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood," he said.

Controversy Ahead

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

"They've pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics," said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. "When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it's bound to upset somebody."

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience.

"The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this," Nosek said, referring to the new study. "It's not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists."

Brains and Bias

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured.

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.


Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority." Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as "I wouldn't mind working with people from other races." (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson's work can't speak to this "underground" racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

"This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice," said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

A Study of Averages

Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren't implying that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The research is a study of averages over large groups, he said.

"There are multiple examples of very bright conservatives and not-so-bright liberals, and many examples of very principled conservatives and very intolerant liberals," Hodson said.

Nosek gave another example to illustrate the dangers of taking the findings too literally.

"We can say definitively men are taller than women on average," he said. "But you can't say if you take a random man and you take a random woman that the man is going to be taller. There's plenty of overlap."

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

"Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order," Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. "Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice."

In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link.

Simple Viewpoints

Hodson and Busseri's explanation of their findings is reasonable, Nosek said, but it is correlational. That means the researchers didn't conclusively prove that the low intelligence caused the later prejudice. To do that, you'd have to somehow randomly assign otherwise identical people to be smart or dumb, liberal or conservative. Those sorts of studies obviously aren't possible.

The researchers controlled for factors such as education and socioeconomic status, making their case stronger, Nosek said. But there are other possible explanations that fit the data. For example, Nosek said, a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like "every kid is a genius in his or her own way," might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

"My speculation is that it's not as simple as their model presents it," Nosek said. "I think that lower cognitive capacity can lead to multiple simple ways to represent the world, and one of those can be embodied in a right-wing ideology where 'People I don't know are threats' and 'The world is a dangerous place'. ... Another simple way would be to just assume everybody is wonderful."


Prejudice is of particular interest because understanding the roots of racism and bias could help eliminate them, Hodson said. For example, he said, many anti-prejudice programs encourage participants to see things from another group's point of view.

That mental exercise may be too taxing for people of low IQ.

"There may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective of others, particularly foreigners," Hodson said. "Much of the present research literature suggests that our prejudices are primarily emotional in origin rather than cognitive. These two pieces of information suggest that it might be particularly fruitful for researchers to consider strategies to change feelings toward outgroups," rather than thoughts.

Washington State Republicans Bravely Break With Party on Marriage Equality

Here's what life looks like outside the hate group bubble of the Venango County-based American Family Association of Pennsylvania:

from The Advocate:

Two Republican senators have made waves in Washington State after announcing their support for a marriage equality bill proposed earlier this month by Gov. Christine Gregoire. And one told The Advocate he's not afraid of the retaliation promised by antigay groups.

Washington is poised to become the seventh state in the country, plus the District of Columbia, to allow same-sex marriage. Introduced last week, the measure is expected to easily pass the House but needs one more vote in the state Senate. As of Thursday, 24 members of the 49-strong body have pledged their support, but the bill needs 25 votes to pass. Democrats control both chambers.

Five members of the Senate remain undecided — two Republicans and three Democrats — and there is a solid group of 20 “no” voters (including two Democrats).


Steve Litzow was the first Republican in the Senate to endorse Gregoire’s proposal and has since been praised for his decision to step outside party lines. The Seattle Times recently published an editorial praising Litzow’s support as “outstanding” and “commendable.”

“Litzow is a profile in courage, a freshman lawmaker willing to act on conviction,” the Times wrote.

The senator is much more modest. He said when the governor first brought up the idea of statewide marriage equality late last year, he knew it was the right thing to do.

“It’s really consistent with the fundamental tenets of individual freedom and personal responsibility,” he said in an interview with The Advocate. “It’s all about people getting to live the life they want to live without the government getting involved. It’s a core principle of the type of Republican I am.”

Less than a week later, fellow Republican senator Cheryl Pflug joined Litzow. Pflug couldn’t be reached for comment due to ongoing power outages across the state brought on by heavy snow and ice storms.

Litzow, up for reelection in November, said reaction so far has been “overwhelmingly positive,” and his endorsement wasn’t influenced by the end of his term. He shrugged off a recent pledge by the antigay National Organization for Marriage to put up $250,000 to challenge any Republican Washington senator who supports the bill.

“I am very comfortable with my position in the Senate, and I’m willing to take on any and all competitors,” Litzow said. “The games have started. ... I continue to say if they want to [play them], let’s go. Game on.”

Zach Silk, campaign manager for Washington United for Marriage, said the views of Republicans like Litzow and Pflug are increasingly in line with those of mainstream voters statewide and nationally. The two represent what Silk calls “Evans Republicans” (named after Republican Dan Evans, a former U.S. senator and three-term governor of Washington), who are fiscally conservative but socially moderate — the type of Republicanism that’s been prevalent throughout the state for the past century.


Even though it looks as if marriage equality has a good chance of passing, Silk said his organization is preparing to defend the bill at the ballot box. Washington has a fairly low bar regarding the number of signatures needed to put the measure on the ballot — it’s slightly over 120,000 for this bill — but Silk is optimistic that even if it heads to the voters, it’ll still pass.

An October poll out of the University of Washington found 55% of voters were in favor of marriage equality. Washington also made history in 2009 when voters passed Referendum 71, which upheld a legislative action that made the state the first in the country to extend relationship rights and “everything but marriage” to LGBT couples.

“It’s a daunting challenge,” he said. “But with the kind of coalition we’re building with moderate Republicans, we can battle and win at the ballot box too.”

Thalia Zepatos, Freedom to Marry’s director of public engagement who’s based in Portland, Ore., said if the measure passes in Washington, the drive for marriage equality could easily spread south.

“That will be a huge message for Oregon — the states are so linked in that Northwest identity that it could come up and pass very quickly in the next couple of years,” she said. “These things don’t happen in a vacuum.”

Hearings for the bill start today, and Litzow hopes it will come to the Senate floor shortly after — but he does expect the vote will be close.

“I think it will pass by one or two votes,” he said. “It’ll probably be a 24-25 or a 23-26 vote.”

But Litzow said he’s firmly on the side of marriage equality and has been for years, no internal debates about it.

“Quite frankly, this has been a very easy decision,” he said.

Do You Remember When?

THE PROPAGANDISTS: Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association and the Demonization of LGBT People

The Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association, the Mississippi-based Hate Group that is the focus of a disturbing new Intelligence Report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, summarized below, is based in Venango County. (The AFAofPA's activities are chronicled in the Emmy Award-winning film "Out In The Silence.")


It is from Venango County where vicious attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are broadcast (on the airwaves of American Family Radio station WAWN, 89.5 FM, Franklin), and it is from Venango County where the AFA of PA's president, Diane Gramley (pictured), launches vitriolic attacks and smear campaigns against LGBT people and their allies across the state.

Until Venango County's elected representatives, opinion leaders, and other voices of influence publicly denounce this organization's hateful and harmful activities, it must be assumed that they condone them.

In this case, cowardly silence must be seen as support.

THE PROPAGANDISTS:
Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association & the Demonization of LGBT People

Executive Summary

The American Family Association (AFA) is one of most powerful religious-right groups in the nation, with a $20 million budget, a network of 200 radio stations and two Internet television channels. Its spokespersons have appeared on all major networks and cable news channels, and in leading print and radio media. It is also one of the leading purveyors of lies about LGBT people and homosexuality.

The AFA has come under fire repeatedly over the years since it was founded in 1977 by the Rev. Donald Wildmon, who was sharply criticized in the 1980s for suggesting that obscene content on television and in the movies is largely due to the media being con- trolled by Jews. It once demanded that an openly gay Arizona congressman be barred from speaking at the Republican National Convention and suggested that he be arrested under a state law criminalizing sodomy. It regularly attacked corporations like Disney, which it described as a “two-faced” company that “welcomed hordes of homosexuals to celebrate their sexual perversions.”


But in the last three years, since hiring a radical Idaho preacher named Bryan Fischer (pictured) as its director of issue analysis, the AFA has gone even further. Since moving to Mississippi to join the group, Fischer has declared that “homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler … the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews” — a complete falsehood, as any historian knows. He has suggested that gay sex be recriminalized. He has routinely claimed that gay men molest children at rates far higher than those of heterosexual men — another falsehood, as all the relevant professional scientific associations have long agreed. Fischer has said that President Obama “nurtures a hatred for the white man” and suggested that welfare incentivizes black “people who rut like rabbits.” He has said that non-Christian religions “have no First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion,” claimed that the “sexual immorality of Native Americans” was part of what made them “morally disqualified from sovereign control of
American soil,” and suggested that the best way to deal with promiscuity would be to kill the promiscuous.

Words like these have consequences. While the AFA would certainly deny it, it seems obvious that its regular demonizing of members of the LGBT community as child molesters and the like creates an atmosphere where violence is all but inevitable. And that violence is dramatic. A study by the Southern Poverty Law Center found, based on an analysis of 14 years of FBI hate crime data, that LGBT people were by far the American minority most victimized by such crimes. They were more than twice as likely to be attacked in a violent hate crime as Jews or black people, and four times as likely as Muslims. And that doesn’t take into account the anti-gay bullying that has resulted in so many recent teen suicides.

Based on the foregoing and other evidence, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) last year began listing the AFA as a hate group. The listing, as was said at the time, was based on the group’s use of known falsehoods to attack and demonize members of the LGBT community — not, as some have gratuitously claimed, because the organization is Christian, or because it opposes same-sex marriage, or because it believes that the Bible describes homosexual practice as a sin.

Many thoughtful Christian commentators have said as much. Warren Throckmorton, a respected professor and past president of the American Mental Health Counselors Association, wrote last year that the AFA and other “newly labeled hate groups” were seeking to “avoid addressing the issues the SPLC raised, instead preferring to attack the credibility of the SPLC.” Reviewing an SPLC list of myths propagated by anti-gay religious-right groups, he said many are “provably false” and “rooted in ignorance.” The criticisms, Throckmorton concluded, are “legitimate and have damaged the credibility of the groups on the list. Going forward, I hope Christians don’t rally around these groups but rather call them to accountability.”

We hope public figures will do the same.

We've Just Begun to Fight -- A Lesson for Venango County from Minnesota

A Question for the (Venango County) Republican Party?

by Faith In America:

An ad that appears today in the Raleigh News and Observer as part of Faith in America’s current billboard campaign asks the question: “Is the Republican Party the party of religion-based bigotry?”


The answer is no in respect to the ideals upon which the GOP was founded upon. The Republican Party when founded in the later 1800s by people opposed to slavery, certainly set forth at its origination ideals that are in direct conflict to treating a group of people as inferior and undeserving of human dignity.

However, the influence of anti-gay religious organizations during the previous 30 years has branded the Republican Party as a political party that fully embraces religion-based stigma and hostility toward gay and lesbian Americans. Such an embrace has been a powerful force of oppression. It has been one of the key ingredients in the mortar mixture that has held in place a wall of prejudice, misunderstanding and discrimination. Most importantly yet sadly, is has aided and abetted the destruction of young lives.

When certain conservative religious organization in the early 1980s began to identify opposition to LGBT equality as a political tool to recruit new members and motivate existing constituencies, they turned the Republican Party to fortify those efforts. Sara Diamond, an author who has written several acclaimed books on the history of the Religious Right, describes in “Not By Politics Alone” how the GOP had by that time already formed a foundation for such a alliance through its support of other Religious Right causes – mainly desegragated church schools and the Equal Rights Amendment for women. The Religious Right’s terribly oppressive message that gay and lesbian Americans – because of their “homosexual lifestyle” – were a threat to society began to be injected into the rhetoric of Republican candidates seeking to capture votes at the behest of the Religious Right. The marriage between the Christian Right and GOP has been tenuous at times and still today but no one can dispute how hostility toward gay Americans has been used in Republican political rhethoric and as a tool to garner votes.

We still see remnants of the prejudices toward other minorities that were involved in that early history of the Religious Right’s alliance with the Republican Party.

Just last week, Republican Oklahoma lawmaker Sally Kerns said she apologized “for my statements last night about African Americans and women.” Here in North Carolina, Republican State Senator James Forrester last year was quoted in a Statesville Landmark article to say “slick city lawyers and homosexual lobbies and African-American lobbies are running Raleigh.” Kern is best known for saying gay folks are the “biggest threat our nation has” at a 2008 gathering of Republicans. Forrester introduced an anti-gay marriage initiative this year in the N.C. General Assembly – as he has done numerous times in the past.

As an organization whose mission is to bring awareness and understanding about the harm caused by religion-based bigotry, Faith in America is compelled to address how this awful form of bigotry has been widely promoted through the political discourse.

It is incumbent of both Republicans and Democrats to stand against the harm that is unleashed on LGBT individuals and society by such an oppressive force. LGBT youth literally are ending their lives because of a societal climate of stigma and hostility – a climate that has been both justified and promoted through anti-gay religious organizations’ influence within the Republican Party.


The Associated Press reported on April 17 that suicide attempts by gay teens — and even straight kids — “are more common in politically conservative areas where schools don’t have programs supporting gay rights, a study involving nearly 32,000 high school students found. Those factors raised the odds and were a substantial influence on suicide attempts even when known risk contributors like depression and being bullied were considered, study author Mark Hatzenbuehler, a Columbia University psychologist and researcher, was quoted to ay in the article.

It is not difficult to understand how such bigotry is making its way into the minds of our children. It also is not difficult to understand how such stigma and hostility affects gay and lesbian youth in such a hurtful way.

Imagine the 13-year-old gay teen in Raleigh reading a newspaper in the school library in which Mecklenburg Republican County Commissioner Bill James was quoted to say the purpose of the proposed anti-marriage amendment is “to put a big letter of shame on the behavior. We don’t want them here. We don’t want them marrying.”

The messages to gay youth being promoted by the anti-gay religious groups and their political cohorts are: You deserve to be shamed by society, you are a threat to your family and society as a whole, and you are not wanted.

There can be no doubt about the emotional and psychological harm that such messages inflict on LGBT people, youth and their families and on a community as a whole.

No political party should ever embrace putting a group of American citizens, especially young kids, in the path of such harmful bigotry, prejudice and discrimination.


We ask Republican lawmakers, dedicated to the ideals on which their party was founded, to stand against religion-based bigotry toward North Carolinas gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender citizens. We ask Democratic lawmakers to stand with their Republican colleagues in this effort.

We sincerely believe such a stance will be in keeping with the majority of North Carolinian Republicans and nationwide as well, as evidenced by a recent poll that showed 51 percent of Republicans favor legal recognition of same-sex couples’ relationships. We have no doubt that trend will continue as that same poll found greater support from Republicans under age 50.

As new voices of social justice and equality are being heard around the world, we are hopeful North Carolina lawmakers will raise their voices against religion-based bigotry and the injustice and inequality it seeks to promote against this state’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender citizens.