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Gingrich: Religious Rights Of Catholics Are ‘Outlawed’ By Gay Rights (Video)

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Newt Gingrich claimed on Sunday’s “Meet The Press” that the religious rights of Catholics are being “outlawed” by gay rights in what he sees as a one-sided national debate. “But what I’m struck with is the one-sidedness of the desire for rights,” Gingrich curiously interjected into a conversation that was about the possibility of a Republican president supporting same-sex marriage. “There are no rights for Catholics to have adoption services in Massachusetts,” the twice-divorced, thrice-married, former Speaker of the House told NBC’s David Gregory. “They’re outlawed.

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Gingrich concluded that it is “impossible for the Catholic Church to have an adoption service in Massachusetts that follows Catholic doctrine.”

Newt Gingrich is lying.

What is “outlawed” is a private institution accepting public funds but not abiding by the state’s anti-discrimination law — which, for those falsely claiming same-sex marriage has anything to do with the adoption controversies, predated marriage equality by more than a decade.

What Catholic Charities did was choose — over “a unanimous vote by the agency’s 42-member board to continue facilitating adoptions by gay people” — was to close their publicly financially-supported adoption service rather than continue to let same-sex couples adopt.

Catholic Charities “voluntarily ceased doing adoptions after the state’s four Catholic Bishops got wind that gay parents had been adopting kids through Catholic Charities from an October 2005 Boston Globe story,” writes award-winnng journalist Laura Kiritsy at GLAD.

READ: America Spends $71 Billion Annually Subsidizing Tax-Exempt Religion

“The Globe reported that over the course of about two decades, Catholic Charities placed 13 children with gay parents, out of about 720 adoptions they facilitated during those years,” Kiritsy, herself a “product” of Boston’s Catholic Charities, reports:

For the record, those 13 children were considered hard to place with adoptive parents because they were older or had physical or emotional difficulties, meaning had they not found loving parents who happened to be gay, they’d likely not have parents. Catholic Charities was accepting state funds to provide adoption services and was thus bound by the state’s gay-inclusive anti-discrimination law not to reject qualified adoptive parents based on sexual orientation.

On “Meet The Press,” Gingrich continued, asking if “being able to be gay in America” means “that you have to actually affirmatively eliminate any institution which does not automatically accept that, and therefore, you’re now going to have a secular state say to a wide range of religious groups — Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Mormons, and frankly, Muslims — ‘You cannot practice your religion the way you believe it, and we will outlaw your institutions?'”

Newt Gingrich and his friends are welcome to start and privately fund a religion-based adoption agency in Massachusetts or any other state, not accept any public funding, and make decisions on who can and cannot adopt children based on whatever religious principles they choose to observe.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

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Note: The New Civil Rights Movement published the entire clip because we want our readers to see the excellent responses from Joy Ann Reid, editor of The Grio, and, in our opinion, the offensively misogynistic manner in which National Review editor Rich Lowry dismisses her and insists on interrupting her.

Hat tip: Towleroad

 

Related:

Adoption: Another Anti-Equality Argument Disappears

To Avoid Giving Benefits To Gays, Catholic Charities Cuts Benefits To All Employees

Gingrich: Discrimination Against Blacks May Be Wrong But Against Gays Is Right

Newt Gingrich: Gay Marriage Is A “Temporary Aberration”

Gingrich: I See No Hypocrisy In My Affair While I Prosecuted Clinton

 

 

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‘Grifters’: A MAGA Civil War Is Eating Away at Its Own Power

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A MAGA “civil war” is playing out across the right-wing ecosystem, sapping attention from the ideas that once powered the base and held GOP leaders to power. Now, the movement appears more consumed by infighting than achieving political goals.

MAGA is being drained of “its political muscle, leaving it defenseless as the Trump administration revisits policies previously opposed by the base,” according to Axios. The strength of MAGA “lies in its ability to rally influencers, politicians and activists behind a hard-charging conservative agenda.” But that “superpower is faltering amid a cascade of bitter personal feuds.”

The National Pulse’s editor-in-chief Raheem J. Kassam told Axios, “There’s no focus on anything philosophical or even ideological right now.”

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“It’s all just a cacophony of grifters tussling over audience and ego,” Kassam said. “So, corporate America gets to wield power with the admin virtually unencumbered by scrutiny from the base.”

Serving up a series of examples, Axios reported that on issues such as artificial intelligence, marijuana, Venezuela, and redistricting — all of which “would have triggered significant MAGA backlash” earlier — there has been “mostly crickets.”

Trump reportedly will loosen federal regulations on marijuana soon — an act that once would have attracted MAGA influencers to scream about “pothead culture,” Axios noted. This time, however, the news “barely made a ripple on right-wing social media.”

The “America First” president seizing a tanker loaded with Venezuelan oil and refusing to rule out boots on the ground to overthrow the Maduro regime “barely pinged on MAGA’s radar.”

MAGA influencer CJ Pearson told Axios that “the movement is wholly consumed right now on personality clashes. That is a recipe for electoral doom, and it’s unfortunate to see the unity that we saw after Charlie [Kirk]’s death dissipate so quickly.”

READ MORE: ‘His Heart Just Ain’t in It’: Report Reveals Trump’s ‘Achilles Heel’

 

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‘Political Vendetta’: DOJ Blasted for Suing Fulton County Amid Debunked Fraud Claims

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President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, demanding records related to the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.

Trump “has increasingly pressured his administration to find widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, despite those claims having been debunked and dismissed in dozens of cases by the courts,” The Washington Post reported.

The lawsuit calls for Fulton County to hand over to DOJ “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”

READ MORE: ‘Wall of Resentment’: Trump’s ‘Affordability Weave’ Isn’t Working Says Columnist

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, according to the Post. “indirectly and without evidence accused Georgia officials of ‘vote dilution'” in a statement.

“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Dhillon said.

“At this Department of Justice,” Dhillon added, “we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”

Trump in a recorded telephone call told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

READ MORE: Trump Is the ‘Biggest Security Threat’ Facing America: Columnist

Two years later, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump on racketeering charges. The case ultimately was recently dismissed after setbacks and that Trump, having since become a sitting president, could not be indicted.

Democracy Docket, which covers voting rights, elections, and the courts, called the move “a major escalation in the Trump administration’s dangerous effort to revive President Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen.”

The news site also reported that Kristin Nabers, the state director for All Voting is Local, said in a statement: “This administration’s unending obsession with the 2020 election results in Georgia uses outright lies to compensate for the fact that they lost.”

“With this terrible overstep of power, the DOJ is now weaponizing laws meant to protect voters for their political vendetta,” Nabers added.

Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics called it “More insane nonsense.”

READ MORE: ‘Where Is Antifa Headquartered?’: FBI Official Struggles Defending Top Threat Label

 

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‘Wall of Resentment’: Trump’s ‘Affordability Weave’ Isn’t Working Says Columnist

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President Donald Trump’s “signature” weave — where he goes off-script and off-topic — is not working for Americans when it comes to affordability.

That’s according to CBS News correspondent John Dickerson, writing at The Atlantic.

His weave was “on display” this week during a speech that the White House promoted as focused remarks on the economy, but his comments included, Dickerson noted, “the topics of tariffs, U.S. Steel, fracking, wind turbines, electric-vehicle mandates, immigration, crime, gender policies, Obamacare, the Fed, his election victories, rare-earth negotiations, a D.C. terror attack, and ‘the lips that don’t stop’ of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.”

READ MORE: Trump Is the ‘Biggest Security Threat’ Facing America: Columnist

The problem, he noted is, “now that the engine of the U.S. economy is smoking, the American people are looking for a technician, not an improv comic.”

Trump is hitting “a wall of resentment,” according to Dickerson, who pointed to a Politico poll which, he noted, found that “nearly half of voters—including 37 percent of Trump’s own 2024 coalition—said that the cost of living is the ‘worst they can ever remember.'”

There’s more.

“Only 31 percent of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, a new AP/NORC poll found, down from 40 percent in March,” he reported. “It’s the lowest economic approval that AP/NORC has registered in either of Trump’s two terms. In a recent CBS News/YouGov survey, a majority of respondents said that his policies are driving up food and grocery prices.”

During times of crisis other presidents have worked to get results:

“Franklin D. Roosevelt passed 15 major bills in 100 days. Ronald Reagan, in the teeth of double-digit unemployment, pushed for sweeping tax cuts week after week. Bill Clinton built an economic ‘war room’ before he even took office, and his team introduced what has now become a political cliché: focusing ‘like a laser beam’ on the economy. Barack Obama instituted a morning economic briefing that put the issue on par with national security. Each practiced the same principle: If you can’t solve the problem fast, at least get caught trying.”

READ MORE: ‘Where Is Antifa Headquartered?’: FBI Official Struggles Defending Top Threat Label

He say that now, Trump is trying. “Kind of.”

Despite talking about “affordability” during his Pennsylvania speech, he also knocked it.

“The president’s most focused message on affordability is that affordability concerns are a hoax. He used that word, or an equivalent, several times on Tuesday, as he has in Oval Office remarks, in a Cabinet meeting, and on social media.”

The “unavoidable truth, no matter how hard you weave,” Dickerson wrote, is that “his argument is weak because he has to overcome people’s lived experience.”

READ MORE: ‘You’re a Loser Dude’: Carville Scorches Trump as ‘Done’

 

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