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On 10/15/10, Keith In Tampa <keithintampa@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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>
> --
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>
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--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
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