Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Politics Document Dump Shows Christian Right Scripted Sen. Mae Beavers on Anti-Gay Law
Posted by Jeff Woods on Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 10:53 AM
Just for fun, we pulled the file marked “Sen. Mae Beavers." Right off the bat, we were delighted to discover an email to her from David Fowler—the Ralph Reed of Tennessee’s Christian Right and the driving force behind the state law. In this email, Fowler shockingly treats Beavers like a puppet on a string (does the Christian fundamentalist lobby really hold such power in Nashville?) and instructs her precisely what to say about the Tennessee Family Action Council’s bill. He obviously views Beavers as not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, but useful just the same as his bill's sponsor.
“The bill itself is not that complicated,” Fowler writes. “We don’t need more regulation of business and business sure doesn’t need the 348 different cities coming up with their own ideas of what a discriminatory practice is. That’s the line and you just repeat it like Glen Casada did last night when the bill passed the House 73 to 24.”
“Will the homosexuals be upset?” Fowler then asks. “Sure. But to be honest, they seem to be rather resigned on this bill.”
Whoops! Fowler misread the temperature of gay activists there. Outraged by his law, they launched a campaign to embarrass just about every major corporation in Tennessee into renouncing it. When that was done, they filed their lawsuit painting the state legislature as a bunch of bigots.
Also in the Beavers’ file, there were a lot of emails from constituents thanking the senator for beating back the homosexuals at the gate.
“Be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might!” one said succinctly. Another called homosexuality “an abomination to God.”
In another email, Nashville car salesman Lee Beaman, also a big advocate for Fowler’s law, hails Beavers as “a true Christian American patriot!”
The Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land gives a bizarre little treatise on homosexuality in his letter to Beavers.
“Attempts to discover a genetic source of homosexuality have failed,” he writes. “There is no evidence to dictate equating homosexual behavior with immutable distinctiveness. To do so mitigates the value of inalienable rights and trivializes the effort of those who seek to protect them.”
It’s not clear whether any of this will help the plaintiffs in the gay rights lawsuit. They need to prove that lawmakers adopted their law, not for their stated purpose of preventing burdensome new business regulations, but because of bias against gay people. Fowler’s email can be read either way. The bill stops confusing business regulations—“that’s the line” he wants Beavers to recite. It’s certainly Fowler’s script. It may (or may not) be subterfuge.
The emails in Beavers’ file show a lot of people obsessed with gay bashing, but there’s no smoking gun.
Comments (27)
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What if the legislature has no particular agenda beyond placating anti-gay political supporters? Certainly bias by proxy — where certain members of the legislature are basically empty pneumatic tube carriers who do nothing but act as a delivery system for politically convenient bills — is the same thing as actual bias. Morally, but not necessarily legally.
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Wow! Great, revealing stuff, Mr. Woods. Keep dipping your beak! And @CMaldonado: I love the pneumatic tube metaphor for our empty legislators who carry our corporate overlords' dictates intact into law.
“Attempts to discover a genetic source of homosexuality have failed,” he writes. “There is no evidence to dictate equating homosexual behavior with immutable distinctiveness. To do so mitigates the value of inalienable rights and trivializes the effort of those who seek to protect them.”
That is an outright LIE! Although a specific genetic marker has not been found, it has been roundly proven the sexuality is set in-utero (meaning we really are "born this way"). Further, numerous scientific and medical associations have indicated that sexuality is in fact immutable and any attempts to change ones sexuality are dangerous and detrimental to the health and well being of the individual.
Shane. The point Land is trying to make(as many of his ilk do) is that a chosen lifestyle is not entitled to equal rights the same as being born that way.
This of course ignores the fact that ALL religion is a lifestyle choice. I think Mr Land's alleged leader once said it well "woe unto you....hypocrites....)
Good to know.. I was actually about to buy a car from Beaman, but not anymore.
So, we should be surprised to lean that Fowler and Land and that nitwit Mae Beavers are motivated by their bigotry and their desire to demean, debase, and discriminate against gay Americans? That guys like Land rationalize their intolerance and mean-spiritedness by quoting Bible verses and citing dubious "studies"?
These are fundamentally bad people. They are a disgrace to the very idea of decency.
From the Beaman Automotive website: OUR VISION
Our vision is to forever remain the absolute best automotive dealership!
OUR MISSION
Our mission is to treat our associates, customers and our community with the utmost respect and dignity and achieve excellence by emphasizing trust, loyalty and ethics!
PEOPLE
We trust our associates as valuable members of our Beaman Automotive Group Family and pledge to treat one another with loyalty, respect and dignity. We recognize and affirm the unique and intrinsic worth of each individual, whether associate or customer.
INTEGRITY
Integrity is never compromised. Our conduct is socially responsible and commands respect for our integrity and positive contribution to society. Our doors are open to women and men to meet our standards and share our visions.
Obviously dignity and respect to them does not include the GLBT community. Their donations to anti-GLBT groups over the years show that to be true. Boycott Beaman.
There is no denying the wrongness of this legislation but Fowler is no ordinary lobbyist dictating to a legislator. Fowler is a lawyer and a former state senator. If anyone is qualified to write draft legislation, it would be Fowler. Interestingly as a Senator, Fowler almost brokered a deal to amend the TN Constitution so that there would be an income tax. The problem was that Fowler's version would have written the maximum income tax rate into the Constitution so that a Legislature could not just raise it over and over.
That would have created much more tax fairness and served as a control on spending. Of course, extremists on both sides hated one or the other results so it never passed. But it is unfair to treat him as just one more ideologue.
Shane, I agree with you about sexuality. It is clearly not nearly as much the result of nurture as nature. But that brings up an interesting issue. Once the genetic marker is found, will parents be allowed to test for its presence in their unborn children? Will parents using in vitro be allowed to test the embryos? Just curious.
Snooze.
The Scene finds that someone wrote proposed legislation for a State legislator.
It happens all the time, not just on the state level and on BOTH sides of the aisle.
Of course the Scene would filter half those cases. Take a guess which half.
And that stilted reporting puts just about everything they report on in question.
Mark, it is not necessarily a genetic marker someone has and someone doesn't. We all have worlds of genetic components that are either switched on or switched off but are present in all of us. Also, there is evidence the mix of maternal hormones a baby is exposed to in the uterus has great effect on sexual orientation and gender identity.
I have questions about the soy-containing baby formula in widespread use for many years -- Enfamil, Similac, etc. Read the cans. Soy behaves like a hormone -- estrogenic; it plugs into the estrogen receptors in the body -- and is used in a lot of estrogen replacement for women after menopause. Soy actually interferes with estrogen in the body.
I have to add that I think identity and orientation originate, for the most part, at the soul level.
James Brown might agree.
But most biologists would want to know where in the body the "soul" is located. Besides the pelvis and rockin' knees.
It's a line, a dimension, of polarity, and we're all on it somewhere. More of us may be clustered at or near the poles, but it's hardly likely all of us would be.
Probably a clue here, and I venture to say "something" directs methylation in all of us:
"Bocklandt has collected DNA from two groups of 15 pairs of identical twins. In one group, both twins are gay. In the second, one twin is gay, and the other is straight. Identical twins have the same DNA, but the activity of their genes isn’t necessarily the same. The reason is something called methylation.
"Methylation turns off certain sections of genetic code. So even though we inherit two copies of every gene—one from our mother, one from our father—whether the gene is methylated often determines which of the two genes will be turned on. Methylation is inherited, just as DNA is. But unlike DNA, which has an enzyme that proofreads both the original and the copy to minimize errors, methylation has no built-in checks. It can change from one generation to the next and may be influenced by diet or environment. It’s in this mutability that Bocklandt hopes to find the secret, by seeing which flipped genetic switches correlate with homosexuality.
“'For each pair we expect to see a whole lot of things that are random—sometimes someone smoked, or medication was used for long periods of time,' Bocklandt says. 'But basically we compare the gay results with the straight ones and see if any region shows up multiple times for these subjects.'"
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/born-…
@Donna Locke: Since there's no way for the average person or even a way above average person, or even another scientific-type person to easily check Bocklandt's work, and maybe there will be no way ever to check it, his results are liable to be what he wants them to be. Not to say his work is without merit but this is one of those "research investigations" that needs to be watched with a jaundiced eye.
His research is just one of a number of related endeavors, gast. I mentioned his because of the reference to methylation, which ties in with one of my earlier comments here.
Any valid conclusions drawn from such research are interesting to me but won't affect my own conclusions and feelings about natural development (my view) as opposed to deliberate choice. My experience and intuition simply override.
Nature guides its interests/programming in terms of reproduction, but there are more than two genders. A polarity continuum. Forget what the body looks like. The physical has its limitations in the primary sex characteristics. But there is a lot of blurring in the secondary sex characterisitcs, reflective of hormonal and possibly other genetic molding.
The brain is sensitized early on by exposure to hormones, maternal and innate. We are confined, limited, and governed to great extent by our brain wiring and our glandular systems, but we are not our bodies. Beyond this expression in this world we exist apart from yet inclusive of any dualities; we are the Androgyne -- my belief. Perhaps human evolution is revealing more of this reality. You (in general) don't have to believe it; just don't dictate what others must believe and how they must live their lives, particularly when they aren't bothering you in the least or affecting/harming your life in any way.
I'm working backwards here, stay with me.
gast thinks everything is prejudiced that doesn't fall directly out of Rupert Murdoch's butt. It makes it easy for him to delude himself and easy for us to dismiss his conclusions.
Check out the big brain on Ms. Locke! rrrrRRRRrrrrrrr. I could listen to you wax on about glandular systems all night! Now, if only you were single, hetero, age appropriate, willing to live on half your income and look at least a little like Suzy Kolbert...ALL my dreams could come true.
I don't remember ever agreeing with Perry Aubric about anything. I guess you have to leave a little room in life to be surprised, but should I feel this queasy?
Hey I posted a response, respectful as always and now it's gone.
I think you got rid of my post at the same time you got rid of the obvious spam post.
LOL Brother Gast! They are one and the same! They are like peas in the libtard pod! Anyways, what these turds don't understand is that, like me, David Fowler has been targetted for conversion by militant homos! They won't stop harassing him and giving him the evil eye! So he knows what he speaketh!
Aw, Smoothy. But I'm probably old enough to be your mom, I don't know who Suzy is, and people have told me I look like Doris Day (I don't see it, and you may not even know who that is). I'm hetero though.
This is off topic but relates to what I wrote about soy above and is offered as a caution. Because of the hormonal properties of soy, I advised my daughter, and would advise any pregnant woman, to avoid soy-containing foods during pregnancy, as the soy may interfere with pregnancy hormones and fetal development and may also (I have no evidence to back this up) contribute to the increasingly early puberty onset in girls. The soy-containing baby formula is possibly a related problem, too. All of this may affect boys as well.
There is some research on this.
My sincerest apologies to Mr. Aubric, for a momentary lapse of memory. Nothing could be worse than being mistaken for one of gast's cohorts. Just the notion makes me want a hazmat shower.
Ms. Locke, Doris Day? Woof. You'd have to be mid to late seventies to be my mom. You should google Suzy Colbert. I think you'd approve. As a grade schooler her parents sued the school board for her right to join the boys football team. She's a sideline reporter and commentator for ESPN's coverage of the NFL. We can work around the rest, what about living on half your income though?
I've lived on a tiny fraction of my income. My plan is to become one of the 1 percent. Buy my next book. If you can figure out my alter ego.
I think we know what Jeff Woods' brain looks like more than Fowlers' or Beavers' brain. I guess it's better for every city to come up with their own ideas of what a discriminatory practice is, rather than let our legislatures determine what's best for each state. Elections do have consequences and are acceptable to liberal Democrats and gays, until conservative Republicans win elections and control the legislatures.
