August 7, 2011

HYPOCRISY:The 10th Amendment Sacred-Except for Abortion& Gay Rights




The 10th Amendment is sacred to the right -- except when it comes to fighting abortion and gay rights

BY ED KILGORE
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James Davis/New Balance/ has given over $500Kto Mitt Romney's


You might know New Balance as the major brand of shoes and athletic wear found at marathons, road races, and gyms around the country.
Here's what you might not know about the company: their Chairman, James Davis, has given upwards of $500,000 to Mitt Romney's campaign for President -- the same Mitt Romney who just signed a viciously anti-gay pledge from the National Organization for Marriage that amounts to a full-on assault on the civil rights of LGBT Americans.
{the pair of shoes BELOW being shown were picked by adamfoxie* & they belong to
Finish Line by Amazon. Amazon is a backer of LGTB}
New Balance's Davis was revealed as a major donor to Romney's campaign this week, after a filing with the Federal Election Commission disclosed a number of Romney's top supporters. With a $500,000 donation, Davis is quite the Romney backer. And as such, his cool half million is going to support a Presidential campaign that has taken a sharp and increasingly anti-gay turn.
Which is why it's time to send New Balance a message asking whether they stand by their Chairperson's donation to an extremely anti-gay politician who wants to take marriage rights away for same-sex couples. Send the company a message now.
The pledge Romney signed this past week, from the (officially dubbed a hate group) National Organization for Marriage, is particularly cruel, in that it argues that LGBT families should be broken apart, that same-sex marriage should be banned in the U.S. Constitution, and that married couples in places like Washington, D.C. should have their relationships voided.
But it gets even worse. When Mitt Romney signed the pledge, he agreed to -- should he win the 2012 presidential race -- appoint judges and an Attorney General supportive of banning same-sex marriage, and to appoint a Presidential Commission to investigate LGBT rights supporters.
And the Chairman of New Balance is happy to give a candidate who supports this anti-gay platform half a million dollars? So much for New Balance being known for its shoes. It's now known as the company with the Chairman who'll give $500,000 to fund an extremely anti-gay candidate for President.
Send New Balance a message that this type of political support for divisive, anti-gay politics is unacceptable. The Chairman of the company is the public face of New Balance, and as such, his political donations reflect directly on the company. What's their answer to Mitt Romney's support for a hate group's anti-gay pledge?
Earth to New Balance: your customers are waiting for an answer.
Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
Posted by adamfoxie*blog International at 11:51 AM 0 comments Links to this post
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All Guns No Roses- No butter or bread either


BY JAMES TRAUB | foreignpolicy.com  

I have been trying, and failing, to think of a period when Americans seemed as eager as they are now to shed their global burden -- while at the same time insisting on depleting the national treasury to pay for the military. During past periods of national self-absorption, including the generation before the civil war and the decades after World War I, standing armies and military expenditures shrank or remained modest. No longer: At a moment when many Americans want to reduce the role of government at home and especially abroad, the debt deal just concluded is likely to preserve the country's hypertrophied defense budget -- at least if congressional Republicans get their way. One is left asking: What do you want to do with all that money?
Step back for a moment and think about the terms of the deal that emerged from the debt ceiling debate this week. The first installment of cuts, totaling about $900 billion, is to be achieved through across-the-board cuts to the budget, including the Pentagon; the second tranche, of at least $1.2 trillion, will be decided by a bipartisan congressional commission. In order to ensure Republican compliance with the commission's recommendations, a budgetary sword of Damocles has been positioned over the one form of expenditure the party holds most dear: the defense budget, which will bear half the cuts should the commission fail to agree on a formula, or should Congress ignore its proposal.
 Actually, it's worse than that: The GOP won a concession that the cuts would come out of "security" rather than only "defense" spending. Since "security" includes diplomacy and foreign aid (as well as homeland security), the party could thus eliminate the traditional tools of foreign policy in order to reduce the cuts to the military. And there's no reason to doubt that they would do so, since Republican legislators have sought to virtually get rid of the U.S. Agency for International Development, to gut development assistance, and to block increases in spending on the State Department. The United States would be left with a colossal military and a Ruritanian diplomatic corps.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Republicans knew why the United States needed to maintain its "position of unparalleled military strength," as President George W. Bush's 2002 National Security Strategy put it: to fight the "terrorists of global reach" who had launched an unprecedented attack on American soil. The fight required the United States to be prepared to respond at a moment's notice to terrorist threats, but also to "extend the benefits of freedom across the globe," whether through regime change, diplomacy, or the strategic use of foreign aid.
Ten years after the terrorist attack, both the fear of a sequel, and the faith in America's capacity to shape a better world, have ebbed. Or perhaps that's an overly analytical way of describing a national mood of sullen disillusionment with America's imperial role. The killing of Osama bin Laden has licensed a widespread desire to escape from the swamp of Afghanistan, to bring the boys home as they are already coming home from Iraq. Large majorities of Americans now say that the U.S. "should not be involved" in Afghanistan, or that they oppose the war there. The number of Americans who believe that promoting democracy abroad -- the heart of the Bush Doctrine -- should be a "top long-range priority" is minute, and shrinking fast. 
President Barack Obama acknowledged the spirit of fatigue when he declared in his June 22 speech charting the planned withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan that "it is time to focus on nation-building here at home." But while the president conceded that "this decade of war has caused many to question the nature of America's engagement around the world," he admonished his listeners that "we must embrace America's singular role in the course of human events." It is precisely this obligation, however, that many Americans now want to dispose of like a boom-era mansion with a hopelessly underwater mortgage.
We no longer accept the obligation, but we're still prepared -- or at least the GOP is still prepared -- to bankrupt ourselves in order to keep up payments on the mansion, currently running to $529 billion a year. It feels more like a reflex than a policy. Moreover, how can a party so deeply persuaded that government is bad, and government spending the enemy of the free market, make so immense an exception for a bureaucracy as vast and as deeply entrenched as the Pentagon? Of course those hundreds of billions create powerful economic interests which perpetuate spending; but so do farm supports, and even they seem more endangered than Raytheon contracts these days.
I understand the position of the remaining "greatness conservatives" -- Sens. John McCain and Marco Rubio, William Kristol or David Brooks -- who still believe deeply in America's singular role in the world, and are prepared to pay for it. That wing of the GOP and its constituency actually believes in government, if limited government. The new breed of Republican does not. Of course Tea Party conservatives like Michele Bachmann are aggressive exponents of "American exceptionalism," but they see the state not as an instrument of American greatness but as an impediment to it. American people are good; American government is bad. Except for defense spending, of course.
Some of us, on the other hand, have a view of American singularity -- if not "greatness," a word with too much breast-beating in it -- in which the state plays an indispensable role. Americans are neither better nor worse than other people, but at various time in its history the United States, as a national entity, has acted as a force for good in the world. The American military came to Europe's rescue twice in the 20th century and contained the threat of Russian aggression for half of it. The world takes shelter under the American nuclear umbrella. But much of the good the United States has done over the last several generations has involved diplomacy and statecraft, rather than force. In the progressive internationalist view that Obama seems to share, the nation's willingness to diminish its own power after World War II by pooling it into global institutions like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund is the clearest sign of American exceptionalism. Such institutions are rightly known as "global goods."
The United States is entering a grim period of national diminution -- not, chiefly, because such contraction is being forced upon us by events, but rather because we no longer believe in the institutions and instruments through which American leaders have acted in the past. The national sense of purpose has been diminished as well. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnellasserted that the central purpose of his party was to unseat the incumbent president, he was admitting as much; the mere fact that he was willing to say so shows how little store McConnell puts in nonpartisanship. The two leading impulses of today's GOP are partisan pettiness and theological grandiosity. The steely gaze of this basilisk has paralyzed the Democrats.
The two parties will spend the next 15 months feverishly catering to a hostile electorate by competing over formulae to shrink the state. At least there may be some spectator sport in watching the Republicans make the awful choice between accepting the modest revenue increases Democratic members of the commission are likely to demand, and protecting the sacred defense budget. In the meanwhile, sleep safely, children, for nothing is likely to stop the Pentagon from spending $300 billion on the new F-35 Lightning II fighter aircraft.
Posted by adamfoxie*blog International at 11:08 AM 0 comments Links to this post
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NPR Got Wrong it Defending The Falsely Balanced Ex-Gay Story : 10 Reasons why



Last evening, National Public Radio’s ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, responded to criticism about Alix Spiegel’s story on ex-gay therapy that aired Monday morning. The nine-minute piece, which profiled ex-gay Rich Wyler and ex-gay survivor Peterson Toscano, had two major flaws. First, itcreated a false balance by suggesting that ex-gay therapy may be legitimate and is still up for debate. Second, it omitted the fact that Wyler makes his entire living perpetuating the false ideas of ex-gay therapy. Rather than admit the mistakes of the piece and apologize for the potential harm done by it, Schumacher-Matos, Spiegel, Spiegel’s editor, and NPR’s senior vice president all defended the piece, making only very small concessions about how it was reported. In doing so, they continued propagating false ideas about ex-gay therapy and the false balance of their reporting. Here are 10 problems with NPR’s response:
1. TOSCANO’S REMARKS MISREPRESENTED: Spiegel defended her piece by saying “From Toscano’s perspective, there might be a handful of people like Wyler who benefit from this therapy.” But that was a complete misrepresentation of what Toscano said, as he clarified on his own blog yesterday:
TOSCANO: In particular Alix Spiegel summarized something I said and reported that I felt that reparative therapy can help a handful of people. No, absolutely not. Over at Beyond Ex-Gay we recognize that some say they have been helped by ex-gay treatment. For our part the treatments did not work and usually caused us damage. From meeting over 1,500 ex-gay survivors and seeing up close the lives of many ex-gays and from understanding the positive outcomes from working with ethical trained professionals compared, I believe ex-gay treatment is unnecessary, ineffectual, and most often damaging.
2. LISTENERS BLAMED FOR BAD REPORTING: Spiegel and her editor Anne Gudenkauf conceded that it might have been more helpful to provide context about the harms of ex-gay therapy at the beginning of the piece, rather than the end, but passed the blame onto listeners for not being better informed:
SPIEGEL & GUDENKAUF: We did not label Mr. Wyler as the minority experience and Mr. Toscano as the majority until late in the piece.That was because we believed that our listeners are well informed about (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) issues and thus would not need to have this spelled out at the start of the story.
If it’s not the reporter’s job to investigate a story, spell out its full context, and critically analyze it for the audience, whose job is it? And even if the context of how ineffective and harmful ex-gay therapy is were at the beginning of this piece, it still would have otherwise had false balance. This is a pitiful and insulting excuse.
3. MORE FALSE BALANCE – THE DEBATE EXISTS: Spiegel and Gudenkauf also defended reporting that a debate was “raging” among psychologists, saying:
SPIEGEL & GUDENKAUF: We did not mean by this to suggest that the two sides are even in numbers. We did mean to suggest that the proponents on both sides feel strongly about the disagreement.
They’re still insisting upon a false balance, when in fact they are absolutely wrongthat there’s any debate among psychologists. There is the entire professional body of psychologists who completely agreed (a long time ago, as Spiegel knows) that sexual orientation cannot be changed, and then there are fringe unlicensed (and often repudiated) “coaches,” “counselors,” and ministers like Wyler, Marcus Bachmann, and Janet Boynes who promote ex-gay therapy without any foundation in social science whatsoever.
4. NO NEW DATA PROVIDED ON EX-GAYS: NPR’s acting senior vice president for news, Margaret Low Smith, admitted the story lacked the information it needed to present ex-gay therapy as a fringe practice:
SMITH: But as Alix and Anne suggest, the story needed much more context. We should have put the whole idea of conversion therapy into perspective. Not doing so meant the listener had no data to understand how common this practice is and how many people seek it out. The absence of context undercut the value of our reporting.
And yet Schumacher-Matos fails to include any additional statistics on reparative therapy, its prevalence, its scientific credibility, or its success rate — or lack thereof. What better response could there have been if NPR had followed up its call to put conversion therapy “into perspective” with the education it missed the first time around?
5. “FASCINATING STORIES” CAN DO HARM: Because ex-gay therapy is too “complicated” for a nine minute piece, Schumacher-Matos argues that the goal was simply to provide some “insight” through “fascinating story-telling.” This completely misses the point. Ex-gay therapy is harmful, and any suggestion that it might be the least bit effective or worthwhile increases the risk that people will subject themselves to it — or be subjected to it against their will (in the case ofyoung people). Morning Report is a news show, and news reporters are responsible for the information they share beyond whether the story is “fascinating.”
6. RELIGIOUS BELIEF USED AS CRUTCH FOR HARM: NPR attempts to foister its biased reporting off on religion, arguing that a perceived disconnect between religion and homosexuality warrants conversion therapy:
SCHUMACHER-MATOS: A particular clash that has been attracting attention in recent years is between our religious and sexual selves, especially among Christians who believe in a literal reading of the Bible, which they say condemns homosexuality.
First, the Bible can be interpreted to condone slavery. The Qur’an permits men to beat their wives. The Torah commands stoning. But society does not support these practices nor does NPR write “balanced” features highlighting slaves or stoning victims. By scapegoating religion, NPR is merely borrowing the very same tactic ex-gay therapists use to shame their clients’ sexual orientation.
Secondly, NPR neglects to mention that many of the “Christians who believe in a literal reading of the Bible” are Mormons. As Joanna Brooks notes, “Mainstream Mormonism teaches that homosexuality is incompatible with the will of God.” Instead of identifying Wyler as a Mormon and exploring the ties between his Journey into Manhood programming and Mormon anti-gay ideology, NPR simply labeled him as a “conservative Christian.” Given that Mormons make up only 1.7 percent of the US adult population, attributing the stance of one ideology to a failure of religion is an egregious misrepresentation.
7. NO “BLURRY LINE” BETWEEN CONVERSION THERAPY AND REGULAR TREATMENT: In his effort to describe the psychological understanding of ex-gay therapy, Schumacher-Matos muddies the water further by suggesting that the American Psychological Association does support “identity therapy” for religious people who do not wish to act upon their sexual orientation. He goes on to say that the “lines are blurry between conversion and identity therapy.” No, they’re not. They are in no way similar. Here is how APA’s task force on sexual orientation change efforts described “identity therapy”:
APA: Sexual orientation identity exploration can help clients create a valued personal and social identity that provides self-esteem, belonging, meaning, direction,and future purpose, including the redefining of religious beliefs, identity, and motivations and the redefining of sexual values, norms, and behaviors. We encourage LMHP [licensed mental health providers] to support clients in determining their own (a) goals for their identity process; (b) behavioral expression of sexual orientation; (c) public and private social roles; (d) gender role, identity, and expression; (e) sex and gender of partner; and (f) form of relationship(s).
Note that APA does not support any effort to change or deny a person’s sexual orientation, the defining characteristics of conversion therapy. There are no lines to blur; Schumacher-Matos is defending misinformation with misinformation.
8. RELIGION AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION CAN BE RECONCILED: NPR takes its religion defense to the next level, setting up a hard choice between faith and homosexuality:
SCHUMACHER-MATOS: In some ways, the process is to help people prioritize their feelings. Those who become priests and nuns, for example, prioritize religion over sexuality.
Homosexuality and Christianity — or any faith for that matter — are not mutually exclusive. Seventy percent of gays identified themselves as Christian in 2009. To suggest that one must prioritize one over the other — and to such an extreme as choosing celibacy — is again catering to ex-gay ideology.
9. EX-GAYS ARE MOST DEFINITELY ANTI-GAY: Still oblivious to the harm inherent in ex-gay therapy, Schumacher-Matos thinks that Wyler is perfectly fine with gay people:
SCHUMACHER-MATOS: Wyler himself says in the piece that while he didn’t feel right living a gay life in Los Angeles, far from his family and church, he understood that it was right for others. I took that to mean that he didn’t denounce being gay, or think it was wrong.
Wyler makes his living off people who pay him to try to de-gay themselves. The only reason people would ever want to change their sexual orientation is if society convinces them they should change their sexual orientation. Stigma is the primary fuel for ex-gay therapy, and it would be incredibly naive to ever believe that anyone supporting such harmful ideas could simultaneously be LGBT-friendly. By making people like Wyler look innocent and approachable, Schumacher-Matos is only making it easier for them to hurt people.
10. MORE FALSE BALANCE – WYLER AND TOSCANO BOTH PROFIT: Conceding that they should have better contextualized Wyler’s work, Spiegel and Gudenkauf try to make the case that “Toscano, too, profits from his experience.” This comparison epitomizes the false balance NPR still wishes to strike in the portrayal of ex-gay therapy. Toscano is a performance artist who educates audiences about LGBT issues. It’s true that he helped found Beyond Ex-Gay, an online support community for survivors of ex-gay therapy, and that he had a show — now retired — called “Doin’ Time in the Homo No Mo’ Halfway House,” which humorously informed audiences about the true trauma of his own experiences trying to change his orientation. He now does anti-bullying presentations for middle and high school students and performs plays about transgender Bible characters and his mother’s cancer, while still speaking out about the harms of ex-gay therapy.
To compare Toscano’s work trying to help people fight shame to Wyler’s work profiting off people’s shame is insulting to Toscano’s art and the pain he experienced. Wyler is spreading lies and Toscano is trying to debunk them and undo the damage done by them. NPR seems uninterested in providing any real context about Wyler’s organization or taking any responsibility for providing it free advertising by highlighting his story.
That this is the best response NPR could provide shows just how little the public knows about the harms of ex-gay therapy and how far the media has yet to go in appropriately portraying the experiences of the LGBT community.
Full disclosure: I co-host a weekly podcast with Peterson Toscano.
Sarah Bufkin contributed to this post.
UPDATE
GLAAD has also spoken out that NPR’s responses to criticism are “inadequate.”
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