Re: The Right-Wing Think Tank Where Christine O' Donnell Learned Her ABCs of Homophobia

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 9:16 AM, Tommy News <tommysnews@gmail.com> wrote:

The Right-Wing Think Tank Where Christine O' Donnell Learned Her ABCs
of Homophobia

The real story of Christine O'Donnell's time at the Claremont
Institute is how thoroughly she absorbed its viciously antigay
politics.
October 13, 2010  |     LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
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       In the past few weeks, Delaware Congressional candidate
Christine O'Donnell has come under ridicule for seeming embellishments
to her résumé. A CV posted on the networking site LinkedIn transformed
a 2001 summer seminar she attended in rented space at Oxford
University into a term of study at the school, and represented a
week-long fellowship at the right-wing think tank the Claremont
Institute as graduate coursework at Claremont Graduate University.
Although, at O'Donnell's request, the profile has since been taken
down—her campaign claimed the enhanced resume was a fake posted to
embarrass her (a charge LinkedIn expressly would not confirm, and
other sources seem to refute), the real story is what O'Donnell
actually did learn at the Claremont Institute, and how thoroughly the
candidate absorbed its viciously antigay politics.

The Claremont Institute, which shares no official affiliation with the
consortium of seven interconnected schools that make up Claremont
Colleges but which lists a number of Claremont McKenna College faculty
as fellows or scholars, works on a number of projects, including
hawkish advocacy for ballistic missile defense programs. But its most
feverish passion seems to be opposition to gay rights, evident in the
Institute's advocacy against gay teachers or Boy Scout leaders and in
support of "reparative" gay conversion therapy. The Institute, which
publishes the right-wing Claremont Review of Books, was founded in
1979 by students of Harry Jaffa, a philosophy professor who studied
under neocon patriarch Leo Strauss and the author of Barry Goldwater's
famous call for "extremism in defense of liberty." The institute
praises extremism in its own right, this year bestowing its
Statesmanship Award on Dick Cheney. O'Donnell's fellow Tea Partier,
Sharron Angle, claims that in 2004 she was awarded its Ronald Reagan
Freedom Medallion.

But like many right-wing institutions investing in conservatism's
future, the institute focuses on new faces in the movement, offering
two fellowships for young conservative leaders, including the Lincoln
Fellowship O'Donnell was awarded in 2002. Participant lists for the
fellowship are a catalogue of Congressional staffers, state Republican
party operatives and conservative pundits in the making, including
Andrew Breitbart, who went on from his fellowship to accuse former
USDA appointee Shirley Sherrod of racism against whites this summer,
and National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez. One past participant, Brian
Lee, a former staffer for the staunchly anti-choice Congressman Jeff
Fortenberry, called the institute a premier "training ground for a
lifetime campaign in the trenches of political warfare." Another, 2009
fellow Jon Fleischman of FlashReport.com, compared the fellowship to
"taking the 'red pill' " of The Matrix. The Institute itself says it
is targeting "rising stars of the conservative movement … to teach
them how to be 'able and orthodox teachers.'"

Political orthodoxy lessons for Lincoln Fellows come from Institute
associates, including Jaffa, a Lincoln scholar and professor emeritus
at Claremont McKenna and Claremont Graduate University, who continues
to be one of the Institute's most prominent faces. Other notable
Institute mainstays include conservative pundit and former Bush I drug
czar William Bennett, a fellow Straussian who made headlines in 2005
for suggesting black abortions could lower crime rates, and Ken
Masugi, who became a speechwriter for Alberto Gonzales. But it's Jaffa
who has shaped the culture of the Institute—so much so that Institute
followers are nicknamed "Jaffanese Americans"—and one of the core
values he's inculcated is a venomous homophobia.

In a series of similar essays stretching over decades, Jaffa's chief
mode is using Lincoln or other founding fathers to further antigay
arguments, charging in "the premier publication" of the institute's
Center for the Study of Natural Law, that the same natural
understanding of morality that declares slavery wrong, because of the
natural understanding of shared humanity, also must declare
homosexuality wrong, because of the natural understanding of
differences between the sexes. If sodomy is not condemned as
unnatural, Jaffa wrote in a 1993 debate over a book review, then
nothing is unnatural, and nothing is wrong. The resulting slippery
slope from accepting gay rights, he has argued in numerous articles
and letters, would justify slavery, genocide, cannibalism and,
predictably, the atrocities of Hitler and Stalin. Not one to shrink
from bombastic analogies, in 1989 Jaffa contributed an article for the
Claremont Colleges' weekly magazine, Collage, composed of an imagined
conversation (modeled, he explained, on Thucydides) between Ted Bundy
and a victim, wherein Bundy justifies murder and rape because other
biblical sins, namely sodomy, were no longer condemned by society.

Jaffa's focus on "natural law," explains Gary Segura, a political
science professor at Stanford University, follows from a school of
political thought that holds that the "just order of society is rooted
in the design of nature." Consequently, Jaffa and his heavily
Straussian colleagues at the Institute would argue homosexuality "is
contrary to the order of nature and therefore inherently in conflict
with the foundational principles of free government. If all 'rights'
are rooted in the natural law, there can--by definition--be no 'right'
to same sex equality, marriage, etc."

Jaffa continued to court controversy by applauding a conservative
parody of a LGBT awareness event at Claremont Colleges that promoted
"Bestiality and Incest Awareness Days," and later calling for the
resignation of the Deans Committee that denounced the parody campaign
since, Jaffa wrote, they were putting students' physical and moral
health at risk by celebrating the rights of the "sodomite lifestyle"
that he argues is responsible for AIDS. Instead, Jaffa writes,
"Sodomites should be returned to the closet, where they were of
relatively little danger to themselves and others." (Writing in
critique of Jaffa, Philip Dynia, Chair of Political Science at Loyola
University, New Orleans, wryly distilled Jaffa's natural law arguments
as: "nature will guard the traditional family, even it means killing
every queer on the planet.")

Translating this ideology to action, the iInstitute filed an Amicus
brief in the 2000 Supreme Court Case between the Boy Scouts of America
and James Dale. In the brief, the iInstitute referred back to its 1996
publication, On the Front Lines of the Culture War: Recent Attacks on
the Boy Scouts of America, written by William Donohue, the bellicose
head of the Catholic League: For Religious and Civil Rights who
famously argued that Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who
prefer anal sex and abortions to families and children, and who
suggested in his institute book that gays form alternative "Gay
Scouts" or "Girl Boy Scouts." In 1998, just weeks after the murder of
Matthew Shepherd, the institute co-sponsored a conference in Los
Angeles with the National Association for Research and Therapy of
Homosexuality, which promotes the idea that homosexuality is a
developmental disorder that can be cured—a practical extension of
Jaffa's assertion in his essay "Why Sodomy Is Not Gay" that
homosexuality is a genetic birth defect.

Although the institute has no official ties to the Claremont Colleges,
there is significant crossover of faculty, particularly in the
Government department of Claremont McKenna, which Segura notes is a
particularly strong outpost of Straussianism. Strauss himself taught
at Claremont Men's College, before it became Claremont McKenna. Other
Claremont Institute fellows and scholars include eight CMC Government
and Political Science professors who together compose the entirety of
CMC's Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom
(named for its Goldwater campaigning founder), and indicate the extent
of overlap between the Institute and the school. In this conservative
culture, another CMC professor, Ken Miller, who is not among the
Institute's fellows or scholars but who spoke at an Institute
conference on California public policy, later became the only
credentialed political scientist to testify in defense of California's
Proposition 8.

Graduating from a school of thought like this, it's no wonder that
Christine O'Donnell's history, including recent examples from her
campaign, has been marked by hostility to gay rights. Prior to her
attendance, O'Donnell publicly argued that AIDS funding should be
slashed and that gay advocacy groups "get away" with too much,
including blasphemy and perversion. As founder of the conservative
Christian group Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT), she
became involved with the "ex-gay" movement that claims homosexuality
is a treatable illness when, in 2000, her then-spokesperson Wade
Richards described at a Washington press conference how he was cured
of homosexuality, kicking off a national tour with O'Donnell promoting
Richards's conversion story. After Richards came back out to O'Donnell
a year later, he alleged in a recent YouTube video, O'Donnell refused
further contact with him.

While O'Donnell has dismissed other past embarrassing statements—on
witchcraft and masturbation—as the zeal of a new convert, as recently
as 2006 she told a Wilmington reporter that homosexuality is "an
identity disorder." And in her campaign this year, O'Donnell has
repeatedly dipped into homophobic tactics, arguably furthering a rumor
that her primary opponent, Mike Castle, is gay, calling his campaign
"unmanly" and bidding him to, "Get your man pants on."

With a history of homophobic statements stretching back to 1997,
O'Donnell's perspective wasn't formed by the Claremont Institute, but
its likely influence in cementing her views is easy to imagine. Given
her recent track record on gay issues, it seems she learned the
institute's lessons well.

More:
http://www.alternet.org/story/148500/the_right-wing_think_tank_where_christine_o%27_donnell_learned_her_abcs_of_homophobia?page=entire
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy

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