TNCRM’s Scott Rose Asks California Commission To Prosecute NOM
The National Organization for Marriage‘s “Yes on 8” — the group responsible for getting Prop 8 on the ballot and getting it passed — has admitted guilt in 18 counts of violating California state election finance laws.
NOM now is hoping that the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) will accept NOM’s offer to settle on NOM’s rampant law breaking for only $49,000.
This reporter sent the FPPC the message below, explaining why strict deterrent penalties must be imposed on the malevolently anti-gay NOM bigots who have admitted to breaking laws.
FPPC officials to whom this e-mail (below) was sent include Commission Chair Ann Ravel, Executive Director John Wallace, Chief of the Administration Division Tina Z. Bass, General Counsel Zackery P. Morazzini, Chief of the Technical Assistance Division Lynda Cassady, and Chief of the Enforcement Division Gary Winuk.
From:
Scott Rose
Minorities Anti-Defamation Professional
To the Entire California Fair Political Practices Commission:
This regards your case against the anti-gay-rights group “Yes on 8,” which is part of The National Organization for Marriage.
NOM is to American LGBTers what the KKK is to blacks and Jews.
NOM wants to settle your case against it, in order to evade full criminal justice accountability for its law-breaking ways.
Meanwhile, the organization is spending umpteen millions upon tens of millions around the country and the world, demonizing sexual minorities on the basis of known falsehoods (i.e. demonizing lies), hate-mongering and inspiring to violence against us.
In state after state, NOM has apparently violated election finance laws, and then tied up the courts bringing apparently frivolous challenges to the laws, not caring about the waste of tax payers’ resources in pursuing those apparently frivolous cases through appeals. If all of these NOM election law violations-related cases had been brought in a single court system, instead of the court systems of many different states, a court almost surely would already have barred NOM from filing any such cases in the future.
NOM must now be given an effective deterrent penalty for having broken at least 18 of California’s state campaign finance laws.
As stated above, NOM hate-mongers and incites to violence against sexual minorities.
NOM sponsors anti-gay hate rallies where its hand-selected speakers yell through megaphones that homosexuals are “worthy to death.”
To see a video of one such NOM anti-gay hate rally, go here.
NOM also incites people to believe that gays are not human. For example, NOM’s Wiliam Duncan led a symposium in an all-day anti-gay hate fest titled “Homosexuals or Homo Sapiens; Who Deserves Protected Class Status?” You can see documentation for NOM’s William Duncan having done that, here.
To spell this out for you: NOM says that homosexuals are not human and deserve to die.
We are sick and tired of these arrogant, tyrannical, hateful heterosupremacists believing that they are above the law.
Many top NOM officials also are top officials with other anti-gay hate groups. NOM founder Robert George, for example, is a board member of the Family Research Council, a Southern Poverty Law Center-certified anti-gay hate group. The SPLC classifies groups as hate groups when they continually promulgate demonizing lies against a minority. The SPCL 2012 Intelligence Report on NOM is titled “National Organization for Marriage Continues to Spread Lies Against Gays.” You can view that SLPC report here.
NOM founder Robert George also is senior fellow of The Witherspoon Institute, whose president Luis Tellez is a NOM board member.
The Witherspoon Institute funded a sociological “study” from the University of Texas at Austin’s Mark Regnerus, booby-trapped with malice aforethought to make gay parents look bad. First, Witherspoon/NOM gave Regnerus a $55,000 “planning grant” for a study on gay parents’ child outcomes. After seeing Regnerus’s “plan,” booby trapped to make gay parents look bad, Witherspoon/NOM arranged for Regnerus to have a known minimum total of $785,000 in study funding; a jaw-dropping amount for a sociological study that only surveyed 2,988 total people, only 250 of which were labelled, inappropriately and unscientifically, as having been raised by “same sex parents.”
Witherspoon/NOM have now fully weaponized that scientifically invalid study, and are deploying it pitilessly against gay people and their rights. You can read a letter signed by over 200 Ph.D.s and M.D.s, complaining about the study’s lack of intellectual integrity as well as about the suspicious circumstances under which it got published, here.
To read about the circumstances of the corrupt peer review through which the Witherspoon/NOM commissioned anti-gay hate speech got published in a scientific journal, go here.
Whereas Witherspoon and NOM share top officials in common, NOM is a 501(c)4 while Witherspoon is a tax exempt 501(c)3. There is a strong appearance that in its funding of the Regnerus “study,” Witherspoon and NOM were playing a tax laws shell game, paying for the Regnerus study through the 501(c)3 Witherspoon Institute, even though the study was conceived primarily for use as a NOM weapon to defeat President Obama. To read details about Witherspoon/NOM’s possible violations of IRS tax laws, go here.
As you see, NOM knows no boundaries for its violations of human decency in attacking its LGBT victims.
NOM now wants to settle with the Fair Political Practices Commission on its 18 counts of campaign finance law violations — for only $49,000 — Â so it can move ahead as though nothing had happened, continuing to violate laws in its hateful and unwarranted attacks against gay human beings. As mentioned above, in state after state, NOM has apparently violated election finance laws, and then tied up the courts bringing apparently frivolous challenges to the laws, not caring about the waste of tax payers’ resources in pursuing those apparently frivolous cases through appeals. If all of these NOM election law violations-related cases had been brought in a single court system, instead of the court systems of many different states, a court almost surely would already have barred NOM from filing any such cases in the future.
NOM must now be given an effective deterrent penalty for having broken at least 18 of California’s state campaign finance laws.
A wrist-slap, easy-does-it settlement of $49,000 does not faze the malicious anti-gay bigots of NOM one iota. The “planning grant” they gave for a weaponized, fraudulent study booby trapped against gay parents was $55,000, leading to a full study grant of $785,000. And as mentioned above, NOM meanwhile is spending umpteen millions upon tens of millions around the country and the world, demonizing sexual minorities on the basis of known falsehoods (i.e. demonizing lies), hate-mongering and inspiring to violence against us.
NOM is laughing in advance at the California Fair Political Practices Commission, believing that the Commission will settle with NOM instead of referring NOM to appropriate authorities for criminal prosecution.
The California Fair Political Practices Commission absolutely must not allow NOM to have the last laugh in their 18 violations of state campaign finance laws.
Sincerely,
Scott Rose
New York City-based novelist and freelance writer Scott Rose’s LGBT-interest by-line has appeared on Advocate.com, PoliticusUSA.com, The New York Blade, Queerty.com, Girlfriends and in numerous additional venues. Among his other interests are the arts, boating and yachting, wine and food, travel, poker and dogs. His “Mr. David Cooper’s Happy Suicide†is about a New York City advertising executive assigned to a condom account.
Enjoy this piece?
… then let us make a small request. The New Civil Rights Movement depends on readers like you to meet our ongoing expenses and continue producing quality progressive journalism. Three Silicon Valley giants consume 70 percent of all online advertising dollars, so we need your help to continue doing what we do.
NCRM is independent. You won’t find mainstream media bias here. From unflinching coverage of religious extremism, to spotlighting efforts to roll back our rights, NCRM continues to speak truth to power. America needs independent voices like NCRM to be sure no one is forgotten.
Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Help ensure NCRM remains independent long into the future. Support progressive journalism with a one-time contribution to NCRM, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you. Click here to donate by check.
 |
President Donald Trump is under fire after a New York Times bombshell revealed he wants $230 million from the Justice Department over two investigations targeting him during his campaign.
The Times explained that there is “no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims.” The paper of record also called it “the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department.”
Critics are blasting the president.
“It’s hard to think of an action more purely corrupt than a …. president ordering the executive branch to pay him hundreds of millions of dollars,” wrote David French, a New York Times opinion columnist. “I cannot wait to read the MAGA defenses of this (and there will be many). They’ll display Soviet levels of sycophancy.”
READ MORE: Not a ‘Gut-Wrenching’ Problem: Ron Johnson Shrugs Off Millions Losing Subsidies
Attorney Andrew Weinstein, a former Obama and Biden appointee, noted that “$230 million could feed every homeless veteran in America for more than 3 years.”
Jesse Lee, a former Obama and Biden official, remarked, “What a g– crook.”
Marlow Stern, who teaches at the Columbia Journalism School and is a former Rolling Stone senior editor, asked, “now he’s extorting… the u.s. justice department?”
Mother Jones reporter Dan Friedman quoted the Trump White House Press Secretary: “’I think it’s frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit,’ Karoline Leavitt said in May. ‘He left a life of luxury and a life of running a very successful real estate empire for public service.'”
Political historian Brian Rosenwald commented, “Like come the f– on, this is the most blatant corruption in American history. He’s just stealing from us the taxpayers.”
Derek Martin, founder and president of Pathfinder Research, wrote: “Trump is demanding taxpayers write him a check for $230 million while Republicans tell us they can’t afford to help ordinary Americans pay for health insurance. Cartoonishly evil.”
Jeff Hauser, who writes the Revolving Door Project on Substack, observed: “The dude is desecrating the White House and extorting the Treasury during a shutdown [after] several million Americans protested him. It’s kind of now or never for an opposition party to be provocative in attacking corruption. Trump is too busy enriching himself to govern.”
Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz wrote: “The president of the United States is attempting a smash-and-grab on the U.S. Treasury, and the people with the ability to say no are his former personal lawyers, this is insane.”
READ MORE: ‘Sick’: Jeffries Torches Trump’s ‘Out of Control’ Press Secretary
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump reportedly appears to be demanding the U.S. Department of Justice pay him $230 million in compensation after multiple investigations during his presidential campaign.
“The situation has no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims,” The New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter, reported.
Noting that President Trump has installed his former personal lawyers at the top of the DOJ, the Times called it “the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts.”
Trump, according to the Times, in 2023, submitted a claim that “seeks damages for a number of purported violations of his rights, including the F.B.I. and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.”
READ MORE: Not a ‘Gut-Wrenching’ Problem: Ron Johnson Shrugs Off Millions Losing Subsidies
Another complaint, filed the following year, “accuses the F.B.I. of violating Mr. Trump’s privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence in Florida, in 2022 for classified documents.”
Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University, told the Times it was “a travesty.”
“The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it,” Gershmann said. “And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
READ MORE: ‘Sick’: Jeffries Torches Trump’s ‘Out of Control’ Press Secretary
Image via Reuters
Does religion drive Americans to support or oppose economic inequality? That’s a question explored by a Ph.D. candidate at The Ohio State University who recently examined ten years of a megachurch’s sermons in a published paper: “‘I Thank God We’re Rich’: Justifying Economic Inequality in an Evangelical Congregation.”
“To investigate how evangelical leaders confront the conflict between inequality and egalitarian passages of the Bible, I conducted a sermon analysis study of New River, a Midwestern suburban megachurch,” wrote Dawson P. R. Vosburg.
“New River’s approach to inequality was one of clear justification of the status quo, centered on the justification of wealth accumulation and the minimization of inequality’s moral importance,” Vosburg added.
The church’s pastors, he found, “justified economic inequality in several ways: proclaiming that God did not condemn ownership of vast wealth; minimizing domestic inequality in comparison to global inequality; selectively spiritualizing economic passages of the Bible; and saying that God owns everything and thus the status quo distribution is justified.”
READ MORE: Not a ‘Gut-Wrenching’ Problem: Ron Johnson Shrugs Off Millions Losing Subsidies
Hemant Mehta of The Friendly Atheist examined the paper. He writes that Vosburg found sermons “that discussed anything financial—by searching for terms like ‘rich,’ ‘tithe,’ ‘debt,’ ‘billionaire,’ etc.—and analyzed the results to see how this typical white evangelical megachurch minimized the wealth gap.” He also noted that Vosburg anonymized the name of the church.
Mehta looked at the four ways New River downplayed wealth inequality:
“They condemned ‘rich shaming’ anyone”
The pastor, Mehta found, “delivered an anecdote about a rich couple that left another church and came to his because they felt personally attacked when their previous pastor condemned wealth from the pulpit. (At their new home, of course, their tithes would go into New River’s coffers.)”
“They downplayed U.S. inequality by focusing on global inequality”
Essentially, pastors told congregants that compared to the world’s poor, they were doing quite well.
“They re-interpreted Bible verses about poverty—even the direct ones”
When it comes to preaching about the poor, Mehta wrote, the pastor was “not talking about financially poor people, he’s talking about spiritually impoverished people.”
READ MORE: ‘Sick’: Jeffries Torches Trump’s ‘Out of Control’ Press Secretary
Vosburg told Mehta that pastors stressed tithing “over 150 times across 16 separate sermons.”
“They said God owns everything, anyway”
Ultimately, Mehta explained, the pastor’s point was to not be mad “at people with private jets and yachts and multiple summer homes.”
“The takeaway from all this,” Mehta wrote, “is that conservative policies that benefit the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else in society are going to be supported by congregations like this one that are being brainwashed into thinking God loves the rich and the poor deserve their lot in life.”
Mehta also blasted the New River pastor.
“Pastors like this one hollow out Christ’s teachings until all that’s left is a gilded throne for the wealthy. In their hands, Scripture is a weapon to shame the poor, a shield to protect billionaires, and a drug to keep their congregations quiet while the cancer of inequality grows around them.”
READ MORE: ‘Existential Threat’: U.S. on Path to Authoritarianism Warn Ex-Intelligence Officials
Image by Mor via Flickr and a Creative Commons License
Not a ‘Gut-Wrenching’ Problem: Ron Johnson Shrugs Off Millions Losing Subsidies
‘Travesty’: Trump Reportedly Seeking ‘Bizarre’ $230 Million Payout From DOJ
How Megachurches Use the Bible to Defend and Promote Wealth Inequality: Report
‘Smash-and-Grab’: Trump Torched for ‘Corrupt’ $230 Million Payout Push
‘Smash-and-Grab’: Trump Torched for ‘Corrupt’ $230 Million Payout Push
‘Travesty’: Trump Reportedly Seeking ‘Bizarre’ $230 Million Payout From DOJ
How Megachurches Use the Bible to Defend and Promote Wealth Inequality: Report
Not a ‘Gut-Wrenching’ Problem: Ron Johnson Shrugs Off Millions Losing Subsidies
Survey Shreds Trump’s Claim Millions of Protesters Don’t Represent America
News2 days ago‘Not Right in the Head’: Notorious Far Right Leader Fuentes Goes Off on ‘Weird’ Trump
News2 days agoGuns and Guided Missile Warheads: Trump Admin Surged Domestic Weapons Spending Report Says
News1 day agoSurvey Shreds Trump’s Claim Millions of Protesters Don’t Represent America
News1 day agoCNN’s Pam Brown Spars With GOP Rep. Blaming High Prices on Biden
News14 hours agoNot a ‘Gut-Wrenching’ Problem: Ron Johnson Shrugs Off Millions Losing Subsidies
News9 hours ago‘Travesty’: Trump Reportedly Seeking ‘Bizarre’ $230 Million Payout From DOJ
News10 hours agoHow Megachurches Use the Bible to Defend and Promote Wealth Inequality: Report
News7 hours ago‘Smash-and-Grab’: Trump Torched for ‘Corrupt’ $230 Million Payout Push
