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Sabrina Haake is running for congress in the home state of Mike Pence. (haakeforcongress/ Instagram)

A lesbian lawyer who wants to tackle the climate crisis is running for congress in Indiana, the home state of Donald Trumps notoriously anti-LGBT+ vice president Mike Pence.

Sabrina Haake is running for Indianas 1st congressional district, which has been Democratic since the 1930s, although most congressional seats in Indiana are held by Republicans.

Haake lives with her wife and three rescue dogs in the city of Gary, Indiana, and she told LGBTQ Nation that her campaign will focus on the climate crisis.

Indiana-born Pence has repeatedly refused to declare that climate change is threat to national security, and in 2014 he said the scientific community had not resolved whether climate change was a man-made issue.

But Haake believes she can reach people by outlining the economic benefits of renewable energy, and said that 40,000 new jobs could be created in Northwest Indiana alone if more federal investment could be secured.

She said: Everyone we know can drive electric cars, but at the end of the day if we dont get industry to convert, it wont make any difference.

Its just reality. Industry needs federal resources to convert. We cant ask steel to just invest billions and trillions into infrastructure upgrade.

Of course LGBT+ rights have a personal significance to Haake and, according to her website, she promises to be a fierce advocate for legislation such as the Equality Act, which would make discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity illegal under existing civil rights law.

She continued: Aside from the White House efforts to deny job protection to gay people, its no secret that the current environment in Washington is hostile to LGBTQ people.

The president has repeatedly narrowed the rights of trans people, including the right to serve in the military, and the White House has rescinded protections for the rights of trans students in federally funded schools.

Republicans at every level of government routinely draft legislation to deny gay people rights to basic human needs, like housing, employment healthcare and education.

These attacks hurt all of us, but they especially hurt low-income communities of colour.

In contrast, Pence advocated for taking away healthcare from trans people in the US military, before helping to ban them from serving completely, and said same-sex marriage would lead to societal collapse.

Haake said she had a tough upbringing which lead her to plan, if elected, to assess children in first grade for signs of trauma, and to focus on increasing mental health support in Indiana.

She wrote on her website: I had a tough upbringing, I wont hide it. As is true for many families today, we struggled.

My home life was fraught with chronic and extreme domestic violence, untreated mental illness, and acute substance abuse.

We need to stop the stigma and have a bold, honest discussion about trauma in the home so that children living with violence and substance abuse know they are not alone.

Pence voted against making coverage of mental health conditions equal to coverage of physical health conditions.

Although her life experiences inform the issues she fights for, Haake said she doesnt want her sexuality to be the focus of her campaign.

She told LGBTQ Nation: I dont think thats a qualification. I think thats part of who I am as a person.

Read the original here:
Lesbian environmentalist runs for congress in the home state of Mike Pence - PinkNews

The Heritage Foundation, where President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence often look to for policy guidance and support, is boosting its team to take on threats of socialism and academic liberalism driving that challenge to democracy.

The Capitol Hill-based think tank that has advised Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to Trump told Secrets that it has brought on four visiting scholars who are experts and advocates of American exceptionalism, and who will help it tackle the socialistic trend exploding on colleges campuses and among politicians in and outside of Washington.

Their academic credentials will allow Heritage to more forcefully engage on some of the biggest issues confronting our country: the decline in civics, the lefts takeover of our educational institutions, the rise in popularity of socialism, and challenges to our form of government, said the organization in its announcement.

The new team:

The four, who Heritage plans to feature in its regular and social media, will allow Heritage to more forcefully engage on some of the biggest issues confronting our country: the decline in civics, the lefts takeover of our educational institutions, the rise in popularity of socialism, and challenges to our form of government, it said.

Heritage noted, for example, that Guelzo has tackled the New York Times 1619 Project on slavery. The 1619 Project is not history. It is conspiracy theory, Guelzo told a Heritage audience in October 2019. This is polemic, and a polemic born in the imagination of those whose primary target is capitalism itself, and who hoped to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery, he added.

Heritage President Kay C. James said, From its inception, the Heritage Foundation has always worked to bring together the best minds in the country to develop solutions to the pressing issues that America faces. These new scholars in the Feulner Institutes Simon Center are no exception. We are truly excited about the work they will undertake and we hope it will provide the foundation to inspire and unify the American people under a common purpose and a common set of principles.

Heritage is relocating the Simon Center for American Studies within the Feulner Institute, named for Heritage founder Edwin J. Feulner.

See the article here:
Heritage expands team in war on socialism and academic liberalism - Washington Examiner

On Tuesday, right-wing, flag-loving,pro-Trump pastor Hank Kunneman and his wife, Brenda, appeared on pastor Benny Hinns television program, where Hank delivered a prophetic message from God that Vice President Mike Pence will be elected president in 2024.

Kunneman kicked things off by repeating his claim that God had told him that President Donald Trump would get two terms in office, with each term representing one of the World Trade Center towers that fell on 9/11. But, he added, the two towers represent not only two terms for Trump, but also two presidencies for godly leaders.

Kunneman then claimed that he recently had a vision in which he saw the foot of the Lord slam down on America and smear itself back and forth across the nation.

And then the voice of the Lord spoke, Kunneman said. He said, They tried to impeach Moses. I never thought about that in all of my understanding. They tried to remove him. They didnt like him. They complained about his leadership They got the people to complain and become the devils prophets. Yet God raised up this man because he saw something in Moses that the people werent seeing. You know what it was? He stood up for God and he stood up for the nation.

God had a plan and an agenda to rescue a nation, he added. And when his foot came down in that vision, he said these words, he said, Who is on the Lords side? So this is very important in this time that we side with God and we side with what he is doing.

Kunneman then related yet another vision in which he claimed that God showed him the words payback and recompense, with an emphasis on the last syllable as Pence.

Why do you think God allowed a man to be raised up with the name Trump? Kunneman asked. The Lord said, Im standing in the midst of the man and my spirit is attached to him and Im putting Trump and Im calling it tr-i-umph, with Im standing in the middle. Why do you think theres the word Pence? Because there is something of Gods plan if we pray and cooperate with God prophetically.

Hinn was elated by the revelation.

Lets believe that the church will do that, Hinn said. That the church will turn things around and Pence will become president in 2024. Somebody say hallelujah. The church needs a born-again, Holy Ghost tongue-speaking president in the White House. We all want that.

Go here to see the original:
God Told Hank Kunneman That Mike Pence Will Be President in 2024 - Right Wing Watch

Instagram, and its parent company Facebook, took down posts regarded as too sympathetic to Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated January 3 in a controversial US airstrike. The news website Coda (1/10/20) was credited with breaking the news, and Newsweek (1/10/20) also reported that:

Iranian journalists have reported the censorship of their Instagram accounts. Posts about Soleimani have disappeared from Instagram, which is currently the only operational international social media site within Iran.

According to the Facebook corporation, as quoted by CNN (1/10/20), removal of such posts is required by US sanctions; the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, of which Soleimani was a commander, was designated as a terrorist organization by the US government in April:

As part of its compliance with US law, the Facebook spokesperson said the company removes accounts run by or on behalf of sanctioned people and organizations.

One might rightly ask: What constitutes a post supportive of the late military commander? According to the CNN report, merely posting a photo of the general could get the Facebook authorities to take a post down.

The International Federation of Journalists condemned the censorship:

The measures have gone even further, and some accounts of Iranian newspapers and news agencies have now been removed from the social media platform. This poses an immediate threat to freedom of information in Iran, as Instagram is the only international social media platform currently still operating in the country.

The Washington Times (1/11/20) reported:

Ali Rabiei, a spokesperson for the Iranian government, complained from his Twitter account on Monday this week about the disappearance of social media discussions about Soleimani, accusing Instagram of acting undemocratic and unashamed.

Much of the coverage has centered on the fact that Instagram is one of the few social media networks not widely restricted in Iranthus, the blackout serves as a way of censoring information going into Iran. In fact, the US government news agency Voice of America (1/7/20) reported that the Iranian government was clamping down on social media posts too critical of Soleimani, and NBC News (8/21/19) reported on how Iranians used networks like Instagram to skirt government regulation. (The irony here is thick.)

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But this news has also gotten journalists and press advocates worried about what this means for free speech and the First Amendment in the United States. On the one hand, as a private company, Facebook is free to make its own rules about acceptable content. Yet if the network is removing content because it believes it is required to do so by law, that is government censorshipand forbidden by the Constitutions guarantee of freedom of the press.

Shayana Kadidal, a senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told FAIR that while it was possible for the US government to restrict media companies from coordinating with sanctioned entities and providing material support to the IRGC, the US government cannot restrict Americans from engaging in what he called independent advocacy.

Independent advocacy, as the law stands, cant be banned, he said. For [Instagram] to remove every single post would mean it was pulling posts that are protected.

The Washington Post (1/13/20) reported that free speech advocates were worried, with the director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation calling it legally wrong. Others concurred:

Eliza Campbell, associate director at the Cyber Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, [said] that the existing laws had failed to keep up with online speech, calling it a field of law that hasnt been written quite yet.

The terrorist designation system is an important tool, but its also a blunt instrument, she said. I think were walking down a dangerous path when we afford these platformswhich are private entities, have no oversight, and are not elected bodiesto essentially dictate policy, which is whats happening right now.

Emerson T. Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Councils Digital Forensic Research Lab, [said] that Facebook and Instagram are taking a very aggressive position and it may not be sustainable. He said it could result in Facebook removing any speech of any Iranian mourning Soleimanis death and could represent a harsh new precedent.

Regardless of whether the government directed Facebook to take this action, the fact that a media company felt the need to do so is proof of a chilling effect on speech. Who, specifically, is to decide what is so unabashedly pro-Soleimani material that it violates US sanctions? Is an article that merely acknowledges that many Iranians mourned Soleimani and denounced his killing a violation? Is an anti-war editorial that doesnt sufficiently assert Soleimani was no angel constitute such a crime? Could satirical material that facetiously supported the Tehran regime get censored? (The last item isnt so hypothetical: A Babson College professor was fired for jokingly encouraging Iran to follow Trumps lead by targeting US cultural sites.)

All of these questions, and all this ambiguity, should be enough evidence that this kind of censorship would be capricious and unfairly applied, and thus inappropriate in the face of free speech protections.

Free press advocates in the United States should think seriously in the coming days about how to respond. If sanctions can be invoked by a social media network to take down certain content, what is next? In order not to find out, well need a concerted pushback to Facebooks censorship from journalists and civil libertarians.

Go here to read the rest:
Facebooks Soleimani Ban Flies in Face of First Amendment - Common Dreams

Legislators at every level have adopted an operational ethos of ignore all relevant laws and sign it." This is a deeply concerning trend, and one that will result in dystopian realizations as politics continue moving toward the extremes. However, my fragile hope for the future remains intact thanks to the courts consistent rejection of this ethos. The University of Michigan is only the latest subject of both this trend and justices ruling in a case concerning our most potent liberty: speech.

On May 2, 2018, the Universitywas sued by Speech First, an organization dedicated to upholding the First Amendment on college campuses. The subject of the legal dispute was the Universitys Bias Response Team (BRT), which, according to Speech First, stifled freedom of speech and was therefore unconstitutional. In September 2019, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the BRT acts by way of implicit threat of punishment and intimidation to quell speech," and the Universityagreed to disband the BRT. This case is hugely symbolic, more so than it may appear.

The most basic freedom belonging to each person is life, defined by their freedom of conscience. Both life and free conscience are impossible to breach without direct action perpetrated by one unto another. Freedom of speech, therefore, is the concretization of our freedom of conscience. And fundamentally, this is why Speech First v. Schlissel is so symbolic: The courts defended our most basic right.

No student at the University should ever feel discriminated against. Yet, while the BRT held this same belief as its cornerstone, the metric used to determine if an offense had occurred the Universitys anti-harassment policy did not offer any objective definitions as to what constituted a violation. And here lies the unconstitutionality, as described by the Department of Justice: The University imposes a system of arbitrary censorship of, and punishment for, constitutionally protected speech.

This broader conflict is not unique to the University. Colleges across the country face similar challenges in trying to secure welcoming campus environments without infringing upon students First Amendment rights. In this, Im sympathetic with the universities. Were riding a 50-year wave of legal victories for equality in a number of areas; so, in keeping with the trend, lets try to fix campus speech, right? Sure, but not like this.

Todays political climate is one of friction and frustration on both sides. Any comment not perfectly impartial sets off a firestorm, regardless of the reasoning behind the statement, the context or the speaker. We are on a hair trigger. So, how, in this era so characterized by scrutinizing the most minute actions and verbiage, did the University fly right by the First Amendment?

Sadly, today, the legitimacy of actions taken in pursuit of something noble are largely ignored. Those in charge act impulsively without considering their actions. The University wanted to create a safer campus climate, so it created an agency capable of implicitly punishing students who voiced opinions that offended others. To me, this sounds like a paragon of this trend, a laudable end to be achieved by censorship. And the courts said no.

At last, herein lies my optimism for the fate of America: the judiciary. Currently, it seems the shared methodology to enact change, among both parties, is to act now and consider legality later. And yet, the courts have stood tall. The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of California for violating Article 1, Section 10; a federal judge blocked Alabamas abortion ban; and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Universitys Bias Response Team. This case was altogether important and worrying, but I find its conclusion reassuring for the future. The courts remain the protectors of our fundamental rights amidst brazen violations, and it looks like they might just continue holding the torch even if legislators at every level keep trying to blow it out.

David Lisbonne is a junior in the College of Engineering and can be reached at lisbonne@umich.edu.

See the rest here:
Op-ed: Did the University forget about the first amendment? - The Michigan Daily