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Exposed: Extreme Right Wing Physicians’ Group Behind Anti-Trans Laws
The American College of Pediatricians, a small, right-wing extremist group of physicians who for two decades has struggled to gain traction finds itself for the first time with more power than it has ever had as the far-right takes greater hold on America.
But along with their new-found power comes a deep dive into at least 15 years worth of their internal documents, the result of the group reportedly publishing a link to its own unsecured Google drive in April, which WIRED uncovered and reported on back in May.
The Washington Post combed through 10,000 of the group’s documents, and on Thursday publishing its exposé on the American College of Pediatricians, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.
“The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is a fringe anti-LGBTQ hate group that masquerades as the premier U.S. association of pediatricians to push anti-LGBTQ junk science, primarily via far-right conservative media and filing amicus briefs in cases related to gay adoption and marriage equality,” SPLC writes in its extensive report.
According to The Washington Post, the American College of Pediatricians is a “small group of conservative doctors” that “has sought to shape the nation’s most contentious policies on abortion and transgender rights by promoting views rejected by the medical establishment as scientific fact.”
The American College of Pediatricians promotes the discredited practice of “conversion therapy,” which has been called “torture” by some who have been subjected to it. Conversion therapy, which purports to change a human being’s sexual orientation or gender identity, is outlawed in several states, while most credible medical organizations have denounced it.
The group’s success comes at the expense of transgender youth.
“The organization’s quest to ban the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors has culminated in a string of recent legislative wins following lobbying in at least eight states, internal documents show,” The Post reports. “Arkansas first enacted such a law in 2021, after Michelle Cretella, then executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, described such care as ‘experimental and dangerous‘ to legislators. A federal appeals court temporarily blocked it.”
“Versions of the law have since passed at least 20 other state legislatures, including Florida, Idaho, Indiana, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri, Montana, Texas, North Dakota and Louisiana this spring alone; some face court challenges and one was vetoed by a governor. Similar bills are making their way through legislatures in North Carolina and Ohio.”
In other words, lawmakers in about half the country are working to harm transgender children, with the help of the American College of Pediatricians.
Also among the American College of Pediatricians’ more dangerous efforts over the years have been its attacks on homosexuality.
“Internal records from 2010 show how the group tied homosexuality to health risks — even death — in a letter campaign to educators, citing a 1991 study to demonstrate that for each year adolescents delay ‘self-labeling as ‘gay’,’ the risk of suicide decreases by 20 percent.”
That claim we know today is false.
“According to more recent research, suicide risk rises with therapy directed at changing sexual orientation. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people who experienced conversion therapy were almost twice as likely to think about suicide and to attempt suicide compared with peers who had not experienced conversion therapy, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law,” The Post adds.
2010 may seem like light years ago, but LGBTQ rights were very much a large part of the national conversation back then.
In 2010, President Barack Obama directed the federal government to extend spousal benefits to same-sex couples. A critical portion of the anti-LGBTQ federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act, was ruled unconstitutional by a federal court. President Obama also signed into law the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that year. And a federal judge ruled California’s infamous Prop 8 was unconstitutional.
But also in 2010, just as LGBTQ people were starting to be able to access the rights and recognition they had always been denied, the American College of Pediatricians sent a letter, The Post reports, “to 14,800 public school superintendents [that] urged school officials not to affirm any student expressing homosexuality. It directed them to a website operated by the group that pushed ‘sexual reorientation therapy’ for those with ‘unwanted homosexual attractions.'”
The Heritage Foundation, a once-vaunted right-wing think tank that has succumbed to pro-Trump MAGA far-right extremism, is a big fan of the American College of Pediatricians.
“They have had the courage to take stands in court and to speak as medical professionals in relating their experience when it comes to questions of human dignity in unborn life, freedom of conscience, and the protection of children,” Roger Severino, Heritage’s vice president of domestic policy, told The Post.
Severino, a far-right religious extremist, served in the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights.
In 2020 Severino, as The New York Times reported, “finalized a regulation that will erase protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies, a move announced on the four-year anniversary of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando and in the middle of Pride Month.”
In its report on Thursday, The Washington Post adds that Severino “said [he] relies on the American College of Pediatricians for scientific expertise.”
Amplifying far-right wing anger that the LGBTQ Pride flag was hanging from the White House during President Joe Biden’s historic Pride celebration over the weekend, the Heritage Foundation lashed out, attacking the entire LGBTQ community and the Biden administration.
On Wednesday the Heritage Foundation declared that the LGBTQ Pride flag “does not represent anything good and it certainly does not represent America.”
The ‘Pride Flag’ does not represent anything good and it certainly does not represent America. It should have never disgraced the South Portico of the White House.
We are one Nation and we salute one American flag. #FlagDay pic.twitter.com/htrMD1qLqI
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) June 14, 2023
Image by David Prasad via Flickr and a CC license
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President Donald Trump, his team, and his allies are “saboteurs” who are “wrecking” all the institutions that brought America prosperity and prestige, says a fascism expert who warns that the president may take action to disrupt — or even cancel —a future election.
Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and a scholar of fascism, is an expert on authoritarianism and strongmen. She spoke with Politicon’s James Carville and Al Hunt on Friday.
When asked whether it is “accurate” to call Trump a fascist, Dr. Ben-Ghiat replied, “He’s got many fascist qualities, and they’re recycling Nazi slogans now,” she observed.
Trump, she continued, “made a campaign video that said that he was going to — he was going to create a ‘unified Reich.'”
READ MORE: Trump Warns CNN and MS NOW: Stop Booking Ty Cobb and Miles Taylor
“They’re taking from the fascist playbook,” she added, noting that they “love” Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and “all autocrats.”
“They are trying their best to have an authoritarian state and destroy our democracy,’ she warned.
Ben-Ghiat agreed that she is worried that Trump would try to do something to intervene in the elections, perhaps by not holding one.
The “more they feel backed into a corner,” she observed, “and these are people, these strong men, who live in fear of being — getting into a position where they can be held accountable.”
“It’s inconceivable that he would just leave office normally,” she noted. “So you can’t underestimate what they’re going to do.”
“It could be the Insurrection Act, it could be trying to have a state — some kind of state emergency to cancel the election,” she said. “ICE could be used in violent ways or intimidating ways to get people to stay home.”
READ MORE: ‘God Doesn’t Care if You Score a Touchdown’: Critics Torch Christian Sports Movement Op-Ed
“All kinds of tricks could be used.”
“They’re not gonna give up without a fight,” she warned.
Ben-Ghiat also said, “I have been saying since February — and people thought I was like a conspiracy theorist — that Trump and company are saboteurs.”
“They’re trying to sabotage America so thoroughly that it’ll be wrecked for generations, and that’s why they’re wrecking medical research, scientific research, child welfare. All the things that brought America prosperity and prestige in the world have to be wrecked.”
“I truly see Trump as in office in part to solve Putin’s problems. And to make autocracy flourish.”
“He’s trying to take down America in every way. So that it has its role in the Western hemisphere, and then Xi can do his thing in Asia, and Putin can prosper, and all the failed, horrible states can have a new life, because the U.S. military or the U.S. — they’re not gonna come after them.”
READ MORE: ‘This Is How It Begins’: Alarm Bells Erupt Over FBI Midterms Email to Election Officials
President Donald Trump, in what appeared to be an attempt to pressure two major cable news networks, warned against booking two prominent former officials from his first administration.
Trump targeted CNN and MS NOW — formerly MSNBC, which he called “MSDNC” — while denouncing attorney Ty Cobb, a former member of the White House legal team who reported directly to the president, and former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor.
The president called Cobb “one of the Worst Lawyers in Washington, D.C.,” and a “WHACKJOB, who I hardly knew,” and said Taylor is “another major Loser … who I have no idea who he is.”
He charged that both “make livings talking about me like they know me well.”
READ MORE: ‘God Doesn’t Care if You Score a Touchdown’: Critics Torch Christian Sports Movement Op-Ed
“So, when you watch these two guys on Television, which, fortunately, doesn’t happen often because there’s very little audience at either CNN or MSDNC,” he wrote, “remember, they know nothing about me — Just two DOPES trying to make a ‘buck’ by pretending to know something about someone who turned out to be very famous.”
Trump already was the president when they served in his administration.
“These two Networks are forewarned not to put them on the air again, because they have no knowledge or credibility with respect to anything have [sic] to do with DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Last month, Cobb “claimed President Trump is experiencing a ‘significant decline’ in his mental faculties,” according to The Hill.
“I think the dementia and the cognitive decline are, you know, palpable, as do many experts, including many physicians,” Cobb said.
Trump’s social media post came just about the same time that he or someone with access to his social media account deleted what many, including several prominent Republicans, denounced as a racist meme that depicted former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.
READ MORE: ‘This Is How It Begins’: Alarm Bells Erupt Over FBI Midterms Email to Election Officials
Image via Reuters
Ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl, a Washington Post guest opinion piece praising the deliberate growth of the Christian sports movement is being met with criticism by readers who appear to largely disagree with professional sports becoming overtly religious.
“Today athletes are some of the most prominent Christians in public life, far exceeding any pastor or priest,” writes Paul Putz, director of the Faith and Sports Institute at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary. “And the interviews offered at the end of sporting events may be the only time many Americans will hear a proclamation of faith.”
“Christians will be prominently featured during the biggest sports Sunday of the year. Seahawks receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Patriots quarterback Drake Maye have already used the run-up to the game to share their faith in Christ,” he notes. “When the contest starts, players will be found at various points kneeling in prayer, and pointing upward to God in celebration.”
READ MORE: ‘This Is How It Begins’: Alarm Bells Erupt Over FBI Midterms Email to Election Officials
Putz also points to the event’s popular commercials, which he says for the fourth year will include “the latest Jesus ad from the ‘He Gets Us’ campaign.”
“And during the postgame interviews they’ll hear the winners give glory to God, while the losers try to make sense of the disappointment, perhaps turning to the Bible for solace.”
Putz makes clear that this “transformation” from a largely secular game to one infused with religion “did not happen by accident,” but is “the result of a Christian sports movement that has been growing since the 1950s.” He points to evangelical sports ministries such as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Pro Athletes Outreach, and Athletes in Action.
The Fellowship of Christian Athletes reportedly has come under scrutiny over the years for its recruitment efforts in public high schools, and for its statements against homosexuality.
Readers offered sharp criticism.
READ MORE: ‘I Have Stopped Nuclear Wars’: Trump Defends Letting US-Russia Arms Treaty Expire
“People of faith have always been in sports. They just didn’t feel the need to ram it down our throats before,” wrote one reader in the most popular comment.
“I hate to break it these athletes but God doesn’t care if you score a touchdown. God hopefully has more important things to be concerned about,” said another.
“Performing public Christianity is not Christianity, which Republicans do not seem to get at all. Aren’t we all just sick of politics and culture war dressed up as religion?” asked still another.
“Football Christianity and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes…really?” asked another reader. “What does that have to do with the Sermon on the Mount, Beatitudes, compassion teachings, taking care of the poor, the hungry, the stranger, the ill? Where are they in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles? When people were being rounded up, beaten, shot, pepper sprayed, dragged from their homes and automobiles?”
READ MORE: Another Georgia Republican Bails as Mike Johnson’s House Sees Even More Exits
Image via Reuters
Fascism Expert Warns Trump Could Invoke Emergency Powers to Cancel the Election
Trump Warns CNN and MS NOW: Stop Booking Ty Cobb and Miles Taylor
‘God Doesn’t Care if You Score a Touchdown’: Critics Torch Christian Sports Movement Op-Ed
‘This Is How It Begins’: Alarm Bells Erupt Over FBI Midterms Email to Election Officials
‘I Have Stopped Nuclear Wars’: Trump Defends Letting US-Russia Arms Treaty Expire
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