Right Wing Watch In Focus
A series of reports from People For the American Way and People For the American Way Foundation.
November 5, 2009 Right-wing pundits and political leaders committed to the destruction of the Obama presidency have been openly fomenting racial resentment or tolerating those who do. In one breath, they accuse President Obama of being racist and in the next they and their media allies howl with indignation if their own racial rhetoric is challenged. Read more >
September 30, 2009 The How To Take Back America conference held in St. Louis September 25 and 26 drew some 600 activists and, according to organizers, 100,000 online viewers. The gathering was an expanded version of the annual conference held by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, co-hosted this year by radio personality and far-right activist Janet Folger Porter and promoted by other right-wing bloggers and radio shows. Read more >
September 23, 2009 If the Values Voter Summit last weekend in Washington, D.C. confirmed the tight mutual embrace between the Religious Right and the national Republican Party, the How to Take Back America conference taking place in St. Louis, MO this coming weekend demonstrates national GOP figures’ willingness to embrace even the most extreme elements of the right-wing political movement. Mike Huckabee, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), and Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) have agreed to speak at the event, which is hosted by activists who are actively promoting the most extreme, inflammatory , and false charges and conspiracy theories now making the rounds on the far right fringes. Read more >
September 17, 2009 National Religious Right organizations that bankrolled the effort to put Proposition 1 on the ballot in Maine descended on the state this past weekend with a SWAT team of anti-gay leaders and veterans of last year’s Prop 8 battle in California. The Religious Right’s collective targeting of Maine’s new marriage equality law demonstrates the huge importance right-wing leaders have placed on reversing gains by marriage equality advocates in the northeast. Religious Right activists must not be allowed to set back this achievement with another massively funded campaign of deception. Read more >
August 27, 2009 Vituperative attacks on Democratic-led efforts to reform the nation’s health care system reflect right-wing leaders’ strategic decision to do everything in their power to destroy the Obama presidency. Read more >
July 31, 2009 Religious Right leaders have enthusiastically joined Republican-led opposition to health care reform efforts. Much of the Religious Right's organizing energy has been devoted to incendiary and false claims about the administration's alleged stealth plan to force every health plan to cover -- and force all doctors to provide -- abortion services. None of these approaches are actually included in the plans working their way through Congress. In fact, anti-choice members of Congress are using health reform to institute a new nationwide abortion ban in private insurance plans taking away coverage women already have. Read more >
July 23, 2009 Right-wing leaders geared up months ago to oppose any Supreme Court nominee that the Obama administration might have an opportunity to make, and they have doggedly followed their script through the announcement of David Souter's intention to resign, the announcement of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination, and her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. For all their professed concern about the "politicization" of the judiciary, right-wing leaders have been planning since before President Obama's inauguration to treat any Supreme Court nominee primarily as a chance to begin political attacks on red and purple state Democrats with an eye to elections in 2010 and 2012. Read more >
July 15, 2009 Anti-gay organizations have been fighting the steady advance of federal hate crimes legislation with rhetoric that is increasingly unhinged from reality. When the U.S. House of Representatives passed a hate crimes bill on April 29 with a bipartisan 74-vote margin, Religious Right leaders and some of their congressional allies were inspired to new heights (or depths) of literally incredible accusations. Read more >
June 18, 2009 Shortly after anti-government terrorist Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, President Bill Clinton urged Americans to challenge those who use powerful political and media platforms to promote the kind of inflammatory falsehoods that poison public discourse, make civil conversation impossible, and can ultimately lead to violence. The reaction from right-wing leaders of the day was sadly predictable and by now familiar: they claimed that Clinton was seeking to "silence" voices of dissent, even though his speech affirmed that the First Amendment protects both the purveyors of irresponsible speech and those who challenge him. Read more >
May 8, 2009 A day after news of Justice Souter’s planned resignation broke in the news, "dozens" of right-wing leaders representing more than 60 groups got together for a strategy call organized in part by the Judicial Confirmation Network to get everyone fired up and on message. Right-wing leaders and strategists see this nomination battle as an opportunity to portray Obama and his nominees as extremists, regardless of the truth about their records, in order to set up campaign attacks on Democrats who vote for the nominee. Read more >
April 22, 2009 Religious Right leaders are vehemently opposed to federal hate crimes laws in large measure because they resist any legal recognition of LGBT people (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender). They know that most Americans support hate-crimes legislation, anti-discrimination laws, and legal protection for gay couples. So they create confusion by portraying these steps toward equality as dire threats to religious liberty. This is part of a larger political strategy by Religious Right leaders to advance their policy goals and mobilize supporters with alarmist claims that Christians in America are on the verge of being jailed for their religious beliefs. Read more >
March 12, 2009 Efforts to bring down discriminatory legal barriers to marriage equality have met with fierce resistance led by Religious Right organizations. Anti-equality leaders routinely blur the distinction between civil and religious marriage in order to portray legal marriage equality as a threat to their religious liberty. The truth can be a powerful weapon against that deception: when Americans understand that allowing same-sex couples to be legally wed would not require any church or congregation to bless or perform such weddings, support for legal equality jumps substantially. In fact, it is Religious Right leaders who undermine the constitutional principles of religious liberty and equality under the law by demanding that their own religious view of marriage be imposed by law on all Americans, including those whose religious beliefs and traditions support full marriage equality for same-sex couples. Read more >
March 4, 2009 Now that the Religious Right and the Republican Party are regrouping from significant electoral defeats, many progressives as well as pundits are tempted once again to dismiss the movement or the continued threat it poses to the constitutional principles of equality, privacy, and separation of church and state. But the legal, political, grassroots, and media infrastructure that has been built steadily over recent decades is still largely in place. It maintains a powerful ability to shape public debate and mobilize millions of Americans. And it is finding a renewed focus in opposing the Obama administration and obstructing progressive change. Read more >
February 19, 2009 Right-wing political and legal organizations have unleashed a coordinated campaign of over-the-top attacks on the qualifications, records, and fitness of President Obama’s nominees for important positions in the U.S. Justice Department. The rhetoric used in the attacks suggests that the campaign may be less about actually stopping any of these nominees and more about getting right-wing activists, pundits, and lawmakers warmed up for similar attacks on eventual Obama nominees to the federal judiciary, and in particular to the U.S. Supreme Court. Right-wing leaders want to tarnish the image of Obama to strengthen their hand when they try to block his judicial nominees. But the deceptive and distorted nature of the attacks should signal to senators, journalists, and others the importance of questioning the credibility of those charges when they come. Read more >
February 6, 2009 On February 5, 2009, the U.S. Senate took up an amendment introduced by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) to strip church-state protections from the stimulus bill. The amendment failed 43 to 54 after DeMint repeated the inflammatory claims he had been making all week and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) swiftly and effectively refuted them. The creation of a phony crisis that DeMint's amendment was supposed to solve is a case study of Religious Right leaders' strategic use of false alarms about threats to religious liberty &emdash; and of the willingness of right-wing media and elected officials to play along. Watch now, in the wake of the amendment’s defeat, for Religious Right leaders to use the vote as "evidence" that Democrats are hostile to people of faith and to try to undermine support from religious Americans for the new administration. Read more >
Right Wing Watch In Focus is a joint project of People For the American Way and People For the American Way Foundation. This series will feature in-depth reports from People For the American Way or People For the American Way Foundation and will be so identified on each report. Additional research about the Far Right can be found on People For the American Way's RightWingWatch.org blog.
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