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Eyes Right Tea-Party Kids Wayne Bell, the publisher of Coloringbook.com, is promoting a Tea Party coloring book, which he says is selling so quickly he cannot keep it in stock. A blurb on his website (www.coloringbook.com) describes the book:
On the Los Angeles Times Culture Monster blog, Christopher Knight characterized the book as “[c]heerful in tone, semi-literate in its writing and factually challenged… Run-on sentences are rife,” he added, “which would have caused my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Adams, apoplexy.” Bell says that he is not promoting any particular political point of view, noting that Coloringbook.com also publishes a Barack Obama coloring book. He claimed on FOX News that he’s received death threats because of the book. Bringing Up Baby-Terrorist The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, originally passed to guarantee citizenship for freed slaves by insuring that anyone born in the United States is a citizen, is coming under increasingly heavy fire since the passage of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, SB1070. Representative Brian Billbray (R-CA) was a sort of anticitizenship pioneer: since 1995, he has filed yearly bills in Congress that, in contravention of the amendment, would deny citizenship to children born here whose parents are not citizens (Billbray’s mother was not a citizen, but his bill contains an exemption that would grandfather him in). Congressional Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) stepped up the rhetoric even further. In a late-June speech to the House of Representatives, he introduced his notion that terrorists were sending pregnant women to the United States to have their babies. Then, he said, the women take the babies home, “to be raised and coddled as future terrorists.” They could come back in 25 years, Gohmert said, “and blow us up.” Gohmert elaborated in an interview with Fox Business News host Eric Bolling on July 1. When Bolling asked Gohmert about his “theory,” Gohmert replied, “It’s not just a theory.” Citing the attempted bombing of Manhattan’s Times Square by a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen, Bolling agreed that Gohmert’s fear was reasonable. “Start from the cradle,” he said. More recently, Gohmert proposed a new solution to poverty. Speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives in September, he suggested giving farmland to welfare recipients. According to Media Matters’ Political Correction blog, Gohmert said, “We’ll give you so many acres that can provide land where you can live off of it, make a living and we’ll give you seed money to start, but you have to sign an agreement that you’ll never accept welfare again. How ‘bout that? We got plenty of land.” Gohmert serves on the Subcommittee for National Parks, Forests and Public Land. Kentucky-Fried Cure In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month in October, writes Amie Newman of the RH Reality Check blog, Kentucky Fried Chicken was selling special pink chicken buckets and donating 50 cents from each sale to Susan G. Komen For the Cure, a breast-cancer advocacy group. KFC planned to sell between 2 million and 16 million buckets of chicken, to raise between $1 million and $8 million. Newman notes, however, that KFC’s French fries contain unusually high amounts of acrylamide, a probable human carcinogen. A recent study found that women with the highest acrylamide levels were at 43 percent greater risk for hormone-positive breast cancers. The Antibullying Conspiracy Bradlee Dean, the head of You Can Run But You Can’t Hide International (YCR), an antigay ministry, and the drummer for the Christian rock band Junkyard Prophet, which performs for school assemblies, said on his radio show in October that antibullying programs were really plots by homosexuals to “go after the kids,” according to the Minnesota Independent website. Six suicides, three by youths who were probably gay, recently took place in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District. Dean said: The state-run media is going after the schools for resisting the homosexual indoctrination. [T]he homosexuals are now blaming their stance as the reason that young homosexuals are committing suicide because of the schools’ intolerance to the lifestyle of homosexuality…I’m tired of this. Why do they go after the schools so hard? Why do they want the kids? “Folks, these people hate the law,” Dean continued. “Little boys aren’t hooked up to be with little boys, and little girls aren’t hooked up to be with little girls. God didn’t create us that way, and nature definitely doesn’t teach us that. Dogs don’t do that.” Dean regularly causes controversy in Minnesota and nationally because of statements like this and his praise for Muslim countries that execute homosexuals, which he said were following the Bible more correctly than Christians with tolerant attitudes. Last spring, LGBT groups boycotted Target, because the corporation had contributed to the Minnesota gubernatorial campaign of Republican Tom Emmer, who supports Dean and YCR. Interview with the Vampire author Anne Rice, who converted to Christianity, said in July that she was leaving the church because of people like Dean. She is still a Christian, “but following Christ does not mean following His followers,” she said, according to the City Pages website. DeMint Calls for Restrictions on Gays and Single Moms as Teachers In October, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) told a Greater Freedom Rally at the First Baptist North in Spartanburg, South Carolina, that he believed homosexuals and pregnant, unmarried women should be barred from teaching. “[When I said those things,] no one came to my defense,” he said, according to GoUpState.com. “But everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn’t back down. They don’t want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion.” LGBT and women’s groups immediately called upon DeMint to apologize. “It is salt in the wound in our community,” said Rea Carey, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “It’s irresponsible for Sen. DeMint to reassert this position in this day and age. I would ask him to apologize.” DeMint was reaffirming a position he first articulated in 2004, during a debate with the state’s Education Superintendent, Inez Tenenbaum, who told him his statement was “un-American.” |
Fall 2010
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