(Note: Obama’s speech begins at about 40 minutes in, but there are some good moments before that.)

Tennessee legislators are back at it. They’re looking to enact legislation that would ban the word “gay” from school classrooms. They’ve tried for the last few years, but have fallen short each time. It hasn’t stopped them from trying again though.

This time, they’re not only looking to ban the word, but they’re going to require teachers to out their gay students to their parents.

Among the provisions of SB 234:

At grade levels pre-K through eight (pre-K-8), any such classroom instruction, course materials or other informational resources that are inconsistent with natural human reproduction shall be classified as inappropriate for the intended student audience and, therefore, shall be prohibited.

The preceding passage would also seem to indicate that talk of contraceptives is inappropriate, since it’s inconsistent with natural human reproduction. Moreover, it would seem to prohibit discussion of in vitro fertilization (IVF).

The provision that requires counseling seems innocuous on its face, until you realize that if a school counselor or other administrator learns a student is gay during counseling, that person must inform the parents:

(2) A school counselor, nurse, principal or assistant principal from counseling a student who is engaging in, or who may be at risk of engaging in, behavior injurious to the physical or mental health and wellbeing of the student or another person; provided, that wherever possible such counseling shall be done in consultation with the student’s parents or legal guardians. Parents or legal guardians of students who receive such counseling shall be notified as soon as practicable that such counseling has occurred;

Parents wouldn’t need to be informed if the school official believes that the parent or guardian is in any way responsible for the sexual abuse of the student.

Campfield has tried this act before, and was even featured in 2008 in a fauxtography scandal when locals altered a photo to show him holding a bumper sticker saying confederate values.

Campfield’s positions have been highlighted here in the past as well. He’s previously been noted as being a birther.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Campfield’s focus on gayness is in part due to misguided notions about AIDS as well.

That Campfield construes gayness to be a dangerous act may be rooted in his faulty understanding of HIV and AIDS. ‘My understanding is that it is virtually—not completely, but virtually—impossible to contract AIDS through heterosexual sex,’ he said during a radio interview last year. ‘Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community—it was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, I believe.’

(Renowned scientist Jacques Pepin’s book The Origin of AIDS differs greatly from Campfield’s account.)

True to the wording of his bills, Campfield does find homosexuality unnatural. Homosexuals ‘do not naturally reproduce,’ he says. ‘It has not been proven that it is nature. It happens in nature, but so does bestiality. That does not make it right or something we should teach in schools.’ And he does find homosexuality dangerous: ‘What’s the average lifespan of a homosexual? It’s very short. Google it.’

Read the whole thing here.

A hangman’s noose.

For two decades, that’s what the elite Albuquerque Police Department unit assigned to the city’s worst criminals has used as its symbol.

It will no more. After Journal inquiries, Police Chief Ray Schultz said in an email late Thursday that he is doing away with the noose image. He ordered one of his deputy chiefs to remove it from all documents and apologized “to anyone who may have been offended” by it.

When the Journal first asked another high-level APD officer about the symbol, which appeared on an internal APD wanted poster that came to light last week as part of a lawsuit in state District Court, the officer’s initial reaction was to question whether it was indeed a hangman’s noose.

APD Cmdr. Doug West, who oversees the Repeat Offender Project, known as the ROP team, said early Thursday he was “not a knot expert” when asked about the noose image. “The simple way I look at it is that it’s a rope, and it’s the ROP team. I don’t read into the hangman’s noose. I don’t know a whole lot about knots,” West said. “… It’s something that we need to look at and get rid of … because people would construe this as, like you, you’re looking at it as a hangman’s noose, and if that’s how people are perceiving this, it’s the wrong signal that we need to send. We need to not send that.”

[…]

Take a look for yourself:

Does that look like a noose?

I’d say Cmdr. West was playing dumb, but I don’t know whether he was playing. More from the article:

When asked about the image in a telephone interview, West said he was not familiar with it, had never seen it on any document and didn’t know whether it had anything to do with the ROP team.

After putting the reporter on hold for several minutes, West came back on the line and said it has been the ROP team’s ‘symbol’ for 20 years and that APD now plans to change it.

The noose image is frequently used on internal documents such as wanted posters and is even painted on the wall of the unit’s office, officials said.

[…]

APD has faced repeated criticism in recent years over a litany of incidents that critics say points to a culture of brutality and disrespect toward the community within the department. Officers have shot 24 people since 2010, 17 of them fatally. Several officers have been disciplined for posting inappropriate comments on social media websites. And revelations that the police union had been paying officers involved in shootings up to $500 rocked the department earlier this year.

The U.S. Department of Justice has been considering since August whether to launch a full-scale civil rights investigation into APD, and many have called for Chief Schultz to resign.

The department has implemented numerous policy changes the past year. Schultz maintains that APD does not have a cultural problem and says the changes in policies adequately address the public’s concerns.

Seventeen dead suspects in less than two years? And officers paid by their union for each one? A full-scale civil rights investigation is way overdue.

Do read the whole thing, even though you have to ‘answer a question’ to see it all if you’re not a subscriber. It’s less intrusive than the old ‘watch an ad’ process they used to have.

Buzzfeed has posted video of Barack Obama from 1991, when he was president of the Harvard Law Review, speaking at Professor Derrick Bell’s protest for diversity. Andrew Kaczynski explains the context of this clip: At Harvard, Obama Dived Into Diversity Fight.

It was perhaps Barack Obama’s most intense immersion in the charged campus racial politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s: As President of the Harvard Law Review in the spring of his final year there, 1991, he aligned himself with Professor Derrick Bell’s dramatic protest for diversity on the faculty of Harvard Law School.

Bell was the first black tenured professor at the school, and a pioneer of “critical race theory,” which insisted, controversially, on reading issues of race and power into legal scholarship. His protest that spring was occasioned by Harvard’s denial of tenure to a black woman professor, Regina Austin, at a time when only three of the law school’s professors were black and only five women. He told Harvard he would take a leave of absence — a kind of academic strike — “until a woman of color is offered and accepted a tenured position on this faculty,” and he launched a hunger strike to dramatize his point.

Obama was a major figure on campus, the first black president of the Law Review. Some friends, in a prescient joke, just referred to him as “the first black president.” He had a reputation as a conciliatory figure, not a confrontational one like Bell.

“”How Obama would react to Derrick Bell’s protest was a matter of some interest,” New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote in his exploration of Obama and race, The Bridge.

It was a situation in which clear lines had been drawn, and Obama sided with Bell.

Could this be the BREITBARTOCALYPSE promised by the shiny-faced mini-Breitbarts earlier this week? If so, I sure hope Buzzfeed didn’t spoil it for them.

A pretty amazing statement (and not in a good way) from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who made an argument against a measure legalizing gay marriage by comparing it to the civil rights movement — and ended up saying that the civil unrest of the 1950s and 60s could have been avoided by letting states vote on whether African Americans should have human rights.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie says the turmoil of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s could have been avoided, had states simply put African-Americans’ rights and integration to a vote.

“People would have been happy to have referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South,” Christie said on Wednesday.

Christie was comparing the civil rights movement to the fight for same-sex marriage, calling for a referendum on gay marriage in New Jersey, rather than the passage of marriage equality by the legislature.

This is Ron/Rand Paul’s argument against the Civil Rights Act, of course, and it comes from some kind of wingnut fantasy version of the civil rights struggle that’s exactly opposite from reality. The entire reason for the violence and civil disobedience was because those Southern states were allowed to vote on rights for black people, and they voted NO. This was the era of Jim Crow laws. If African Americans had just sat back and let these states hold referendums on it, there’d still be segregated lunch counters today in Alabama.

Jim “Dim” Hoft and company are upset that “Bare Naked Islam” has been taken down after a CAIR complaint and FBI investigation. (Note: I’m not a big fan of CAIR as they also have a history of hyper-sensitivity, some bad associations, and in the past they sent the FBI after Charles. The Muslim community can find better representatives.)

After seeing the news story I’m going to say “kudos” to Wordpress. They can’t be forced to host blogs that make specific terrorist threats against houses of worship.

Our nation was formed in part to create a country where religion could be practiced freely; threats against Mosques aren’t just anti-muslim, they are anti-american. Wordpress has the right and the duty to shut down the blog based on their terms of service.

A prominent national Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization today called on the FBI to investigate a number of threats of violence targeting mosques posted online on an anti-Islam hate site, including the comment “I want [Muslim] blood on my hands” by an individual who claims he regularly drives past a Virginia mosque.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also urged WordPress.com to remove the hate site because its calls to violence violate the hosting company’s terms of service,” which prohibit blogs that “contain threats or incite violence towards individuals or entities.”

[NOTE: At CAIR’s request, WordPress.com last year deleted a similar blog containing posts that advocated burning mosques, making false bomb threats implicating Muslims, desecrating Muslim graves, and that recommended the “proper way to shoot a muslim [sic].”]

CAIR said articles and comments posted on the anonymous blog “Bare Naked Islam” (BNI) routinely urge attacks on and desecration of American and European mosques.

[NOTE: Grammatical errors have been maintained for all posts and comments below.]

“Keith Mahone (aka Charles Martel),” who states that he regularly drives by a Virginia mosque, wrote: “[I]f you see a Muslim licking an ice cream cone in the park and you blow his head off you are technically committing an act of self defense…Muslims must learn they they are not safe anywhere outside a Muslim country…My heart does a back flip to see a mosque “desecrated”…Burn every mosque to the ground in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and kill every Muslim twice…I want their blood on my hands as a matter of principle.”

As we pointed out on Monday, Andrew Breitbart shamelessly tried to promote a completely fake, utterly dishonest story that Barack Obama “marched with” the New Black Panther Party during a 2007 event in Selma, Alabama. In fact, there were more than 10,000 people at this event, and it had nothing to with the NBPP — it was a commemoration of the 1965 Voting Rights March.

And to drive home the point that Breitbart’s story is pure right wing race-baiting with no basis in fact whatsoever, Adam Shah discovered a Reuters photo that shows who Obama was really marching with that day: civil rights hero Fred Shuttlesworth (seated in wheelchair), who died yesterday at the age of 89:

It’s an absolute disgrace that the entire right wing blogosphere parroted this false story, without even a token attempt to discover the facts.

LGF reader LawHawk discovered another photo from this 2007 event in Selma, showing President Bill Clinton greeting Obama and Rev. Shuttlesworth:

Another American visionary died today, a man whose influence on the social landscape of the United States cannot be measured: Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Civil Rights Pioneer, Dies at 89.

The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a pioneer of the civil rights movement, died Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala. Shuttlesworth led Birmingham’s battle against segregation — a battle that focused the national spotlight on the violent resistance to equal rights in the South and forced change. He was 89.

As Birmingham goes, so goes the nation. That belief was the driving force behind Shuttlesworth’s crusade for equality.

“He was the soul and heart of the Birmingham movement,” Georgia Rep. John Lewis said. It was Birmingham, he said, that brought the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“Fred Shuttlesworth had the vision, the determination never to give up, never to give in,” Lewis said. “He led an unbelievable children’s crusade. It was the children who faced dogs, fire hoses, police billy clubs that moved and shook the nation.”

A decade before that infamous standoff between authorities and young protesters in Kelly Ingram Park, Shuttlesworth was already pushing for change in what had come to be called “Bombingham.” Dozens of black homes and churches were bombed, the cases rarely investigated by the city’s all-white police force. In 1955, the charismatic young pastor of Bethel Baptist Church led a delegation of ministers who petitioned for black police officers.

Historian Horace Huntley of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute said Shuttlesworth personally challenged just about every segregated institution in the city — from schools and parks to buses, even the waiting room at the train station.

“They had a white section and a colored section. Fred and his wife bought tickets, and they sat in the white section,” Huntley said. “That was revolutionary for Birmingham of the 1950s.”

This morning, Andrew Breitbart is peddling yet another race-baiting fake outrage: » Shock Photos: Candidate Obama Appeared And Marched With New Black Panther Party in 2007 - Big Government.

It’s a classic example of Breitbart’s sleazy smear tactics. Notice that in his whole long overheated screed, Breitbart never actually tells you what this event was about. The headline and story strongly imply that the New Black Panther Party sponsored the event, and were walking hand-in-hand with Obama. The evidence is … one photo of Obama standing at a podium, and one photo of NBPP leader Malik Shabazz at the same podium. At different times.

Very scary angry black radical

Very scary angry black radical

So what was this mysterious and very scary event that the evil leftist media is trying to cover up?

It was a commemoration of the 1965 Voting Rights March and “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, a historic moment in the civil rights movement, and there were at least 10,000 people there, including President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary. The evil media tried to cover up Obama’s participation by writing dozens of stories about it; for example, this article in little-known publication TIME Magazine: Clintons, Obama Cross Paths in Selma - TIME.

The bridge to voting rights was crossed Sunday by the Democrats’ top two vote seekers. Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama marched over the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., site of “Bloody Sunday” in 1965, an historic moment in the civil rights battle.

A shirt-sleeved Obama pushed Birmingham civil rights legend Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth along the route in a wheelchair. On the opposite side, Hillary and Bill Clinton linked arms with Al Sharpton and Congressman John Lewis, a civil rights leader who annually organizes the Voting Rights March reenactment.

The two candidates criss-crossed each other all day, but spoke only briefly. They smiled and sang along with the marchers along the path. While the original march in 1965 was met midway on the bridge by law enforcement, who beat the participants, today, all stopped for prayer at the site before crossing the bridge. Selma police estimated a crowd of 10,000 turned out to view and participate in the march.

Strange way to cover something up. But of course, Breitbart isn’t writing for people who care about facts and logic — he’s stoking up the racist rage of the right wing base by relentlessly trying to portray President Obama as an angry black radical who hates white people. And his audience responds like Pavlov’s dogs, with a deluge of whining and complaining that they’re being falsely accused of racism, mixed in with numerous openly racist remarks, conspiracy theories, and bigotry of all kinds. As usual.

He cares about color - he hates white people.

[…]

Don’t forget, Obamao is half whitey! He must really hate himself!!! Does this make him a self-hating Whyte?!!

[…]

America elected the first black supremacist president! What a milestone!

I wonder how much hs black half hates his white half.

[…]

White guilt will get you killed.

[…]

Now, can you imagine our country should Obama be reelected? A gangsta president without any accountability to the American people?

[…]

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he’s a member of the Muslim Brotherhood…

[…]

Ok, so we oughtin’ to impeach him, we oughta hang him is what yer sayin’?

Also see:
Breitbart Smear: Obama (And Thousands More) ‘Marched With’ New Black Panthers

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

PBS NewsHour has a terrific compilation of archival videos, documentaries, commentaries, discussions and reports about King’s life, legacy and the Civil Rights movement: Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.