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In early February, the Nation published a leaked draft of an executive order titled Establishing a Government Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom. The language is, for lack of a more damning adjective, chilling to any proponent of the Constitution. The order aims to eradicate federal protections for LGBT Americans and their familiesand undermine reproductive rightsunder the guise of religious freedom.

The order announces a lofty intention: protecting Americans from being coerced by the Federal Government into participating in activities that violate their conscience. It then sets out, over four dense pages, its dubious means of doing so: authorizing those who hold extreme and discriminatory views to act on them, while guarding against a violation of conscience by licensing a violation of others fundamental rights.

Upon review, it rapidly becomes clear that Trump cant expect the order to survive judicial review intact. He tips his hand by instructing agencies to issue regulations to implement provisions as legally feasible. The purpose of the order is to normalize and even privilege a set of positions and viewpoints, not to legalize all of them.

The order gives Americans total religious freedom in all activities of life. Lest the sweeping nature of all activities of life be limited by interpretation (or by a deficit of imagination), Trumps draft order suggests specific scenarios: Americans do not forfeit their religious freedom when providing social services, education, or healthcare, earning a living, seeking a job, or employing othersor when interacting with government at any level. Never mind that 61 percent of Americans oppose allowing belief-based service refusals.

From a Michigan pediatrician to a Colorado baker, service providers and business owners who have objected to accommodating same-sex couples would have an affirmative right to discriminate. While it is not illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in public accommodation in 29 statesthe pediatrician in Michigan faced no legal consequence, for examplethere is a vast difference between failing to make discrimination illegal and explicitly protecting discrimination in lawfederally. While LGBT Americans may be the most obvious targets, unwed parents and their children, for example, could also be discriminated against with impunity under the proposed language.

Unsatisfied by having spelled out the right to refuse to provide social services, Trump dedicates a subsection to making it more difficult for those on the wrong side of the far rights religious beliefs to have a family and care for their children. Adoption agencies and support services would be explicitly granted the right to refuse adoptive parents and families based on belief. This is, of course, redundanthes already bestowed that right. The point of the subsection is political and social.

This subsection is a prcis of the failed Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act of 2014, the first of several such measures too extreme for Congress to pass that Trump incorporates to establish his far-right bona fides. It is a particularly short-sighted gesture. More than 420,000 children are in the foster care system. Same-sex couples are six times more likely than straight couples to foster children; we are four times more likely to adopt. But if Trumps executive order were implemented, agencies and service providers could deny not only opportunities to foster and adopt but also critical services and benefits to any family whose structure is inconsistent with their religious beliefs. Trumps text then turns to ensuring the right of corporations to discriminate by codifying Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., in which the Supreme Court held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, which limits government infringement on religious exercise, protects some closely held corporations as well as individuals. Passed in response to clashes between government agencies and Native American religious beliefs, RFRAand offshoot state legislationhas become a favorite vehicle for justifying discrimination in an ever-widening array of settings.

Trump would also resurrect the Russell Amendment, which would have allowed employers to refuse to hireas well as fireindividuals who clashed with the employers religious belief even simply by being gay. He elsewhere mandates federal employers, contractors, and grantees to proactively protect employees prerogative to, in effect, preach prejudice and discriminate openly. Conversely, Trump would kill the Johnson Amendment. On the campaign trail and again at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump promised religious conservatives that he would do away with this 1954 tax provision barring some tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from endorsing political candidates. Trump cant actually repeal legislation, but he canand here doestell the IRS not to enforce it. The result is the same.

There are more than 1,300 megachurchesthat is, churches with more than 2,000 regular attendeesin the United States. Their total annual income tops $8.5 billion. The Second Baptist Church of Houston alone has 24,000 members and an budget of $53 million. If Trump signed this order, these organizations would change the electoral landscape overnight, especially at the state level.

And Trump does more than license churches to enter the political arena: He grants special protections to organizations like churches and to federal employees who act consistent with any of four enumerated, extreme viewpoints: Marriage is between one man and one woman, sex is for such marriages only, gender is immutable and defined at or before birth, and life begins at conception. Organizations advocating opposite views, by the way, could still be penalized for doing so. But theres limited cause to worry that this provision will survive judicial scrutiny. The first three beliefs come from a Mississippi religious freedom bill that a federal district court ruled unconstitutional. Finally, although Trump had promised not to rescind Obamas executive order creating workplace protections for LGBT employees, in two devastating bullets Trump instructs agencies to reverse all current agency rulings, guidance, and regulations inconsistent with the orderdeclaring that the new document supersedes any previous, related executive orders.

In sum, the order would erase almost all existing federal efforts to affirm LGBT rights, which are still in a nascent and unprotected state as neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has codified protections. The Obama administration established rights through executive orders and administrative maneuvers. For example, agencies interpreted Title VII, which forbids sex discrimination in employment, to encompass gender identity and sexual orientation. These are now vulnerable. Only independent agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, would continue to honor these measures if the order were signed.

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Resurrecting the Culture Wars - Pacific Standard

Corey Stewart struggles to be heard. Photo credit: Washington Post.

Corey Stewart is one of those politicians that you either love or love to hate. Hes a conservative populist who built a state-wide reputation on his pugnacious, in-your-face opposition to illegal immigration. And as the prominent Virginia politician to align himself mostly closely with Donald Trump, he is surely loathed by many.

Whatever you might think about Stewart, though, hes entitled to speak his views like anyone else.

Its one thing to denounce him as a bigot and a white supremacist his enemies are entitled to free speech, too but quite another to disrupt his campaign appearances. Lefties may think theyre accomplishing something by shutting him down, but its probably not what they think theyre engendering sympathy for a not-very-sympathetic guy.

Stewart visited the Peoples Republic of Charlottesville a couple of days ago to defend the statue of Robert E. Lee, which City Council had previously voted to remove. On social media, he had urged people to defend Virginias heritage, and likened those who wanted to remove the statue to tyrants and Nazis, according to the Washington Post.

His appearance was met by protesters who drowned out his interviews and conversations with shouts of, White supremacy has got to go! Hoistingsigns saying, Ban Bigots, and No tolerance for white supremacy, protesters yelled at him to go back to Prince William County. As he left, they shouted, Whose town? Our town!

If anyone has that kind of treatment coming, its Stewart: His rhetoric toward illegal immigrants has been harsh and uncompromising. And if Charlottesville lefties want to vent online or hold their own demonstrations, Im fine with that.But I have to say, Stewart handled the disruption with class.

Stewart took it in stride, frequently grinning and trying to chat up his detractors, the Post writes.

Stewart welcomed the protests and the attention they would bring, believing they would buttress his pitch as a conservative standing up to an intolerant left and political correctness.

Im calling them out for who they are, Stewart said. Its really a symptom of the left and their unwillingness to listen to alternative points of view.

Score one for Stewart.

Lefties in Charlottesville and elsewhere make much of their desire for inclusiveness. But their version of inclusiveness and tolerance includes only those groups friendly to their point of view.A truly inclusive viewpoint would say, Sure, well keep the Robert E. Lee statue because many people still revere him as a hero. Well build statues for our own heroes and heroines. Our community can tolerate them all because we embrace the diversity of cultures, sub-cultures and viewpoints.

But thats not the Lefts approach.They wantto expunge the heroes of their ideological enemies. They want to exclude other points of view from the public realm. Their viewpoint is relentlessly negative. Erecting a statue of a politically correct hero would be a positive action. But if anyone has proposed doing so, the effort hasnt gained enough steam to be noticed. The Lefts advocacy of diversity applies to race and ethnicity only. It is a pinched and intolerant view that excludes anyone who thinks differently, including dissenting views of blacks, gays and other minorities.

I part ways with Stewart because I think there are ways to justify restrictions on illegal immigration without demonizing millions of people who came to this country not to create mayhem but to better their lives. It is possible to both sympathize with the aspirations of those who want to live hereeven while saying firmly, sorry, this is a nation of laws, and if you want to live here, you cannot enter and stay in this country illegally. We can deal with the issue in a humane way.

Corey Stewart is not the guy I want to be making thestand against political correctness in Virginia. But hes the one doing it, and the Left is making him look good by comparison.

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Tag Archives: Culture wars - Bacon's Rebellion

The men and women who reportedly handcuffed small children and the elderly, separated a child from his mother and held others without food for 20 hours, are undoubtedly ordinary people.

Something is just plain fishy about Trumps Putophilia.

Hatred of immigrants as poor and working people assumed to be lazy, immoral, and given to dependency on American largesse animated U.S. nativism from its birth.

These men and women who proved to be some of the bravest, most selfless people this planet has, not only gave us a chance at success, they fought on our side and paid a high price for it.

The man in charge of America seems to believe that being a killer is a good thing, because the head of a nation should be a skull-cracking, throat-kicking action hero, that he too has created an atmosphere of hostility against journalists that could spill into something real and bloody.

Mr Trumps and Mr Sessionssclaims of permanent, rising crime have consistently been debunked.

Its the greedy leading the blind.

I find it very hard to believe that you did not know that you had tobacco stocks.

We have some of the bankers here. Theres nobody better to tell me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie, so youre going to tell me about it.

From his influential post in the White House, Cohn will seek to unleash the animal spiritsof the market by advancing a regulatory rethink in the financial sector that is, he wants the government to let Wall Street do what it wants and how it wants it.

New FCC chair Ajit Pai openly despises and wants to do away with the 2015 Open Internet Order, which reclassified broadband as a utility-like service, and cemented the net neutrality rules.

Since 2014, the cost of twin pack of Evzio [naloxone] has jumped from $690 to $4,500 without any apparent reason for such a dramatic change in cost.

Tell people who say it that they are grossly wrong and should never speak again about anything until they learn how to decipher truth from right-wing lie.

A House committee voted on Tuesday to eliminate an independent election commission charged with helping states improve their voting systems as President Donald Trump erroneously claims widespread voter fraud cost him the popular vote.

I knew it would help a little bit, but I had no idea that it would solve our labor problem.

All of the nonsense behind the misogynistic fear of a female president has been coming to fruition in Donald Trumps first weeks in office.

So instead of seeing this as an abuse of young women, [some legislators] were seeing this as something we needed to protect for certain cultures.

Apparently theres a big underground movement of right-wing bodybuilders thousands.

At which point he stabbed the book with the sword, piercing the hidden bladder and spraying blood upon nearby attendees.

LifeWay got into a similar controversy in 2012 over the use of the word vagina.

I firmly stand by my statement that neo-Nazis are assholes.

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The culture wars are class war, and vice versa (2.12.17) - Patheos (blog)

Salman Rushdie, the writer marked for death by the Ayatollah of Iran for writing The Satanic Verses, is working on a new novel set in contemporary America.

His new book, The Golden House, is a thriller set against the backdrop of modern-day American culture. It covers the eight-year Obama presidency and incorporates the cultural zeitgeist. It includes the rise of the conservative Tea Party movement, 2014s GamerGate hashtag campaign, social media, identity politics, and the ongoing culture war against political correctness.

In other words, its the modern world through the lens of Salman Rushdie, an author who received numerous death threats and even attempts on his life after he penned a novel critical of Islam.

Many stores refused to carry the book following its publication in 1988, and those that did were targeted by terrorists with firebombs and explosives.

The Iranian government put out a hit on Rushdie, which lasted until 1998, calling on jihadists and their allies to take the authors life.

In more recent years, Rushdie has called for the defense of freedom of speech. As the target of assassination attempts over his ideas and writing, the Booker Prize-winning author is uniquely intimate with the subject.

During the election last year, Rushdie spoke out against the furor over the pro-Trump chalk slogans in Emory University in what became known as #TheChalkening. Campuses that saw the rising incidences of chalk messages banned the calcium carbonate writing tool.

Rushdie called the dust-up silly and said there was no reason for art to be politically correct.

When people say, I believe in free speech but , then they dont believe in free speech, he said. The whole point about free speech is that it upsets people.

Its very easy to defend the right of people whom you agree with or that you are indifferent to, Rushdie said. The defense [of free speech] begins when someone says something that you dont like.

There are no safe spaces against offensive ideas, said Rushdie.

Rushdie has come to lose his confidence in the progressive leftincluding those who once defended his controversial book. Speaking in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Rushdie expressed dismay at the leftist protests that followed the PEN writers association to honor the fallen artists and writers.

Speaking to French magazine LExpress, Rushdie said that people learned the wrong lessons from the threats he faced in the 80s and 90s.

Instead of realizing that we need to oppose these attacks on freedom of expression, we thought that we need to placate them with compromise and renunciation.

Ive since had the feeling that, if the attacks against The Satanic Verses had taken place today, these people would not have defended me, and would have used the same arguments against me, accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority, said Rushdie. We are living in the darkest time I have ever known.

In Rushdies new book, the main villain is described as a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting makeup and colored hair. Make what you will of that.

The books publishing director at Jonathan Cape, Michal Shavit, describes The Golden House as being about identity, truth, terror, and lies for a new world order of alternate truths. Its out this September.

Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken mediacritic. You can reach him through social media at@stillgray on Twitterand onFacebook.

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Salman Rushdie's New Novel is About Political Correctness and the Culture Wars - Heat Street

In a sign of whats to come for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), President Donald Trump told pharmaceutical company CEOs Tuesday that his administration will be cutting regulations at a level no one has ever seen before.'

George W. Plunkitt. He Seen His Opportunities, and He Took Em.

Ryan claims that Obamacare has put Medicare under deeper financial stress. Precisely the opposite is true.

I love this new world, I no longer have to be politically correct.

Spencer and Miller first came to know each other in the late 2000s as students at Duke University, where they both belonged to the Duke Conservative Union.

Anything we can do to keep from having abortions, or to keep them from not knowing what is available, I will support.

The State of Oklahoma strongly urges you to contact them if you are pregnant.

Repealing the Affordable Care Act would result in 32 million Americans losing their health insurance by 2026, according to an analysis published [Jan. 17]by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation. The CBO also calculated that in the first new plan year after enactment, premiums for those in the individual market would have risen by 20-25 percent, and then would almost double by 2026.

Brandis could be the story of thousands of LGBTQ men and women born to evangelical families.

Jewish community centers in 17 states were evacuated [Jan. 18]following a wave of bomb threats, which echoed a similar grouping of threats on Jan. 9.

Maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people whonever show up.

Most Trump evangelicals I talk with love his recent executive order banning refugees from Muslim countries.

While the White House scrambled to contain the widening furor over his ban on refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, the administration was laying the groundwork for a vast expansion of the nations deportation system.

The program, Countering Violent Extremism' or CVE, would be changed to Countering Islamic Extremism or Countering Radical Islamic Extremism, the sources said, and would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.

This action benefits no one, except facilities who have harmed animals and dont want anyone to know.

Quite simply, Trump is trying to bully federal judges out ofruling against him andsuggesting those that do are not legitimate members of the federal courts.

So every policy move Trump makes can be used to enrich himself and his family personally with no legal obligation for anyone outside the family to know about it.

The resolution to erase the prepaid rules are just the beginning of the new administration and legislatures action to weaken the CFPBs ability to protect consumers and financial regulations.

I have a very hard time believing that the net effect of pumping $40 billion worth of weapons into the world in a single year can possibly be to reduce the level of global violence and or avoid increasing the lethality of conflict.

Where alt-facts prove more devilish than old-school lies, even the cleverly concealed ones, is in their abandonment of reality altogether, their leap from the verifiable to the realm of pure belief.

Historical studies suggest that it takes 3.5 percent of a population engaged in sustained nonviolent resistance to topple brutal dictatorships.

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The culture wars and the class war have merged - Patheos (blog)