Reagan’s Son: Churches Should Condemn Same-Sex Marriage Just Like Polygamy, Bestiality, And Murder

President Ronald Reagan’s negligence during the AIDS crisis combined with his empowering of social conservatives in the religious right make him pretty unpopular among the LGBT community, but even he opposed California’s Briggs Initiative, a proposed law to ban gays and lesbians from being teachers. His son Ron Reagan, Jr. has in turn been an outspoken supporter of gay rights, but it seems his son Michael has taken to being even more conservative than his father.

In a op-ed today in Ohio’s Ironton Tribune, Michael Reagan excoriates the “Protestants, Jews, and Catholics” for not expressing enough “moral outrage” about same-sex marriage. Churches, he believes, should start “fighting for America” to protect it from the “serious threat” marriage equality presents:

This fight over Proposition 8 isn’t just about saying it should be legal in the eyes of government for two people of the same sex to get married in California.

It’s ultimately about changing the culture of the entire country; it inevitably will lead to teaching our public school kids that gay marriage is a perfectly fine alternative and no different than traditional marriage.

There is also a very slippery slope leading to other alternative relationships and the unconstitutionality of any law based on morality. Think about polygamy, bestiality, and perhaps even murder.

Perhaps more social conservatives should start claiming that same-sex marriage will lead to legalized murder. With arguments that absurd and offensive, they might lose the fight against equality even more quickly. (HT: Jeremy Hooper.)

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Why The Response To A Philadelphia Abortion Doctor’s Ongoing Murder Trial Gets It All Wrong

A Philadelphia-area abortion doctor is currently on trial for murder, based on gruesome reports about the illegal techniques that he and his staff used to perform late-term abortions for desperate, low-income women. Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s high-profile case is sparking understandable outrage, as evidence has emerged that he may have taken advantage of vulnerable women, violated multiple medical codes, and performed inhumane surgeries.

According to prosecutors, Gosnell’s clinic went 17 years without an inspection — and abortion opponents are leveraging that to go after other abortion clinics that have no affiliation with Gosnell or his crimes. “Unfortunately and tragically in Pennsylvania, facilities were going uninspected for years,” Maria Gallagher, a lobbyist with the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, said in reference to the ongoing trial. That’s a big reason why abortion opponents like Gallagher were able to push Pennsylvania legislators to tighten restrictions on abortion clinics in 2011, updating state law to require abortion clinics to adhere to the same standards as outpatient surgery centers. According to NPR, Gosnell’s case was “mentioned frequently” as Pennsylvania lawmakers considered, and ultimately approved, the unnecessary new restrictions.

If proven guilty, there’s no doubt that Gosnell and his staff committed horrific crimes. But the knee-jerk reaction to his murder trial — the assumption that most abortion doctors aren’t adhering to medical standards, and that the women who visit health clinics are in grave danger of receiving unsafe care — is off-base. In fact, as the right-wing pushes for tighter abortion clinic standards to make sure nothing like this ever happens again, that crusade could end up having exactly the opposite effect.

Pennsylvania’s abortion clinic restrictions fit into a larger anti-choice effort across the country that is solely intended to force abortion clinics to close their doors. In states like North Dakota, Virginia, Indiana, Mississippi, and Texas, abortion opponents are pushing legislation to force abortion clinics to adhere to unneccesary new regulations in the name of “ensuring women’s safety.” That sounds like a noble goal. But these measures — known as the Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP — aren’t really about ensuring women’s safety at all. As Mississippi’s Republican governor once admitted behind closed doors at an anti-choice event, TRAP laws are about indirectly restricting women’s access to abortion by shutting down health clinics.

In Pennsylvania specifically, one Planned Parenthood affiliate was forced to spend nearly a half a million dollars to get two of its clinics into compliance with the new regulations. That involved unnecessary updates like installing hands-free sinks, replacing the floors, and updating the air-conditioning system. The affiliate’s CEO, Dayle Steinberg, explained to NPR that the state’s stricter requirements didn’t actually do anything to improve the care provided to the women at her clinics, where the complication rate is already less than one-tenth of 1 percent. “They were thinly disguised as improving patient safety, when really it was about increasing the cost for abortion providers — hoping that some of them wouldn’t be able to afford it,” Steinberg said.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Women’s health advocates consider TRAP measures to be some of the most dangerous threats to women’s access to safe abortion services across the country. In North Dakota, where anti-choice Republicans are advancing the most stringently anti-abortion legislation in the nation, one doctor warned lawmakers that the new TRAP law will force women into dangerous, “backroom” abortion procedures. Retired pediatrician Ted Kleiman worked at a hospital before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, and he watched women die from botched abortions. “The thought of returning to those days is really beyond imagination,” Kleiman told his state lawmakers, urging them not to shut down the only abortion clinic left in North Dakota.

Women’s health advocates, particularly those who work at health clinics, are extremely concerned about ensuring that women receive the highest standards of reproductive care. But clinics that allow women to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester of pregnancy — which involves taking a pill, and is not actually a surgical procedure — aren’t analogous to Gosnell’s clinic, which performed incredibly late-term, illegal abortion services. Over-regulating the clinics like Planned Parenthood’s, where the vast majority of patients are already receiving incredibly safe care, will actually limit women’s options instead of keeping them safe. That could lead more desperate women who feel like they don’t have any other options left to seek out doctors like Gosnell.

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How A Straw Purchaser Allegedly Enabled The Colorado Prison Chief’s Murder

On Thursday, the Denver Post reported how Evan Ebel, the accused killer of Colorado prisons chief Tom Clements, used a straw purchaser to acquire the 9mm semiautomatic handgun used in the shooting.

Ebel, a white supremacist gang member, was a felon and thereby was barred under federal law from possessing a gun.  Had he tried to go into a gun store a buy a gun, he would have failed the background check.  So instead Ebel used the most common method criminals use to acquire firearms: a straw purchaser.  In this case it is alleged that Stevie Marie Vigil, a 22-year-old woman, went in to High Plains Arms to buy a gun on Ebel’s behalf.

The pattern is remarkably similar to the Christmas Eve ambush-murder of two firefighters in Webster, NY.  In that case, a 62-year-old felon named William H. Spengler allegedly relied on a neighbor, Dawn Nguyen, to buy the Bushmaster semiautomatic assault rifle he would use.

In 2009, I led a New York City undercover investigation of illegal gun sales at out-of-state gun shows than showed how easy it is to get away with even a blatant straw purchase – and how some licensed gun dealers are complicit in the practice. The following video, from a gun show in Tennessee, shows a gun dealer enabling an obvious straw purchase where the buyer gets “my friend over here to do some paperwork for me.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), has reported that straw purchasing is the single most common method by which guns get diverted from the legal market to the illegal market.  An ATF study showed that fully 46% of guns related to illegal trafficking involved straw purchasers.

Criminals rely on straw purchases because it’s easy, it’s hard to get caught, and the penalties are light even when cases are brought.

It’s hard to get caught because under federal law, there are no background checks or record-keeping on gun transfers by unlicensed private sellers.  That means it’s legal in most states to buy one gun or 10 and later sell them to someone else.  It’s illegal to buy a gun with the intent of transferring immediately to someone else – but with no background checks, straw purchasers know they are very unlikely to be caught.

And, even if the straw purchaser is caught – which usually happens as in Colorado and Webster, NY after the gun was used in a prominent murder – the penalties are weak.

As Brad Beyersdorf, spokesman for the ATF Denver field division said speaking of the Ebel case, “There’s little-to-no punishment for being a straw purchaser. Gang members know it, drug trafficking organizations know it.”

What’s the solution?  Simple: pass the gun bill that that is coming up for a vote in the Senate next month, which would require universal background checks and substantially raise the penalties for straw purchasers and gun traffickers.

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Longtime Criminal Set A Trap To Murder Firefighters, Say Police

The Webster, New York man who fired on firefighters responding to a blaze, killing two, is a felon convicted of manslaughter, according to local police. Webster Police Chief Gerald Pickering told a press conference this morning that the suspect was William Spengler, who served roughly 18 years on manslaughter charges for killing his 92 year old grandmother. Spengler had a number of run-ins with the police after that, according to Pickering.

Because Spengler was convicted a felon, he was supposed to be legally barred from owning a gun. However, because of the so-called “gun show loophole” — a National Rifle Assocation (NRA) supported-policy that allows “private” gun sales to take place without background checks — it’s possible Spengler could have purchased his weapon without the seller even checking whether he could legally own a gun or had a history of violence. Guns bought in this manner are used in 80 percent of violent firearm crimes across the country. Moreover, it’s very easy, as a consequence of another set of NRA-supported changes to federal law, for some felons to get their right to own guns reinstated.

When asked about the nature of Spengler’s murderous assault on the firefighters, Pickering said that, from what they could tell so far, “it was a trap.”

According to police, Spengler was armed with a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle — the same gun used by Adam Lanza in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

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