Stephanie works in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. A Utah native and graduate of a crappy public university not worth mentioning, she has spent the last year hanging out with angry white people who occasionally don tricorne hats and come to lunch meetings heavily armed.
Stephanie covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She is the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. A contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, a former investigative reporter at the Washington Post, and a senior writer at the Washington City Paper, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2004 for a Washington Monthly article about myths surrounding the medical malpractice system. In 2000, she won the Harry Chapin Media award for reporting on poverty and hunger, and her 2010 story in Mother Jones of the collapse of the welfare system in Georgia and elsewhere won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.
Earlier this week, the media were atwitter with poll results showing that GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney was surging among women voters. Until the first debate, women, particularly single women, had been strong backers of President Obama, who in April this year was winning women by 19 points over Romney—and single women by 36 points. But on Monday, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told USA Today that since Romney's strong first debate performance she'd noticed a "a major surge among women in favorability for Romney" in "every poll."
But after surging in the lady polls after the first debate, Romney whiffed on an important women's rights question in the town hall-style debate on Tuesday night. Asked about gender equality, he tried to address the issue with his record on gender as Massachusetts governor. Instead, he ended up suggesting that he sees women as a compartmentalized problem to be dealt with through office supplies—"binders full of women."
Don't be surprised if, in the wake of the "binder" mess, women decide they don't like Romney after all. Romney has never won a majority of women voters in any of his previous election runs. During the 2012 Republican primary, he lost women voters in many states to the sanctimonious and rigidly anti-abortion Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, a famous philanderer. He won the Massachusetts gubernatorial race in 2002 thanks only to men, losing women voters by 4 percent. During his first Senate race in 1994, Romney even managed to lose women voters by 24 points to Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) in a year when Kennedy was struggling to overcome an image as a womanizer.
Romney was no more successful at hiring women to work for him at Bain Capital. Women held fewer than 10 percent of vice president positions during Romney's tenure there, a problem he dismissed in 1994 by saying that private equity was "a profession that has yet to attract many women and minorities."
Romney's had lots of time to prep for a question on this topic. Kennedy bashed him with the issue to great effect in 1994, pointing out his horrible record at hiring women at Bain in TV ads. But in answering the question, Romney came off not like the nation's stepdad, but like every woman's worst boss. He's the condescending guy who cuts you off in meetings, dismisses your ideas, and who then also believes there's no such thing as gender discrimination. (His talking over moderator Candy Crowley certainly didn't help his attempts to prove his respect for women in the workplace, either.)
Like the idea of "self-deporting" immigrants, Romney's response to the debate question about gender inequality showed that he still thinks women "self-discriminate" by not flocking to high-finance or political jobs because, you know, they want to be home for dinner. Gender inequality, in Romney's view, is not something that requires substantive national policy solutions, just more enlightened, paternal men at the top to generously fish women out of a binder and graciously give them jobs.
Update: On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected an attempt by Ohio to shut down early voting the weekend before Election Day for everyone but members of the military and their families, a major victory for the Obama campaign.
The Supreme Court's highly politicized and intensely criticized decision in the landmark case Bush v. Gore was so bad for the court that it reportedly made former Justice David Souter weep and contemplate quitting. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens lamented bitterly that the majority opinion "can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land." When asked about the decision, Justice Antonin Scalia usually tells audiences, "Get over it!"
In the 12 years since the conservative court majority stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidential election to Republican George W. Bush, it has studiously avoided revisiting that decision. Bush v. Gore has become The Case That Shall Not Be Named. Not once has the court cited the opinion in another decision. By comparison, in the decade after Brown v. Board of Education, the court referenced that decision more than 25 times. But an unexpected litigant may soon force the court to confront the logic of what it did in 2000: the Obama campaign. And how the court decides that case could swing the election. Again.
Obama for America has been in court in Ohio challenging the state's move to close early voting three days before the actual election for everyone but military and overseas voters. The state had implemented early voting in 2005 after criticism of its performance in 2004, when thousands of voters faced huge lines on Election Day and many people were turned away because they didn't vote before the polls closed. In 2008, 100,000 people, many of whom might be considered to lean Democrat (women, minorities, poor people), voted early during the weekend before the election. So last year, Ohio's Republican-dominated state legislature decided to pull the plug on early voting, except for the people who might be more inclined to vote Republican, namely people in the military.
The Obama campaign challenged the move, and in August, a federal judge agreed that Ohio had violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause by allowing some people to vote early but not others. In early October, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision and ordered Ohio to keep the polls open for the weekend for everyone if they do it for the military and overseas voters. The state has filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court to overturn the order. The Obama campaign, naturally, is opposed, and has filed a brief arguing that Bush v. Gore demands that the court protect the integrity of the voting process. (In that case, the court stopped the Florida vote recount because it argued that the state's procedures failed to treat all ballots equally and thus had violated the 14th Amendment.)
As a result, the court now will have to prove whether it was serious or simply partisan when it sided with Republicans by declaring that "[t]he right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise. Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise." The Ohio case could provide the court with an opportunity to "heal the wound of confidence" that Stevens so eloquently identified in his 2000 dissent. This time, though, if the court sticks with this earlier precedent, it might be helping hand the election to the Democrats, making the case a serious test of the conservatives' true commitment to the idea of equal protection at the ballot box.
Anti-gay activists tend to find evidence of the "homosexual agenda" lurking around every corner: in Teletubbies, Campbell's Soup, even American Girl dolls. Most recently, though, they've focused their attention on programs designed to combat bullying in schools, which they see as a dangerous movement to bring impressionable youth into the gay lifestyle. As Bryan Fischer, the director of issues analysis at the American Family Association (AFA), one of the leading opponents of anti-bullying programs, has explained, "[H]omosexuals cannot reproduce, so they have to recruit; it's the only way to swell their numbers."
AFA and other anti-gay groups like the Traditional Values Coalition has been fairly apoplectic about anti-bullying programs and legislation around the country that has been enacted in the wake of suicides of gay teenagers who had been bullied at school. They've directed their wrath at people like Kevin Jennings, formerly the Obama administration's safe schools "czar," who made anti-bullying programs a big part of the administration's education agenda. (Conservative outrage against Jennings was so bad that he was the target of numerous death threats.) The most recent campaign, though, is targeted at an anti-bullying effort called "Mix It Up At Lunch Day," created by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Mix It Up Day, this year on October 30, consists almost entirely of forcing kids to sit with someone new at lunch. That's it. The idea behind it is that forcing kids to interact with kids they don't normally hang with helps break up cliques that form in schools and which foster bullying. But behind this rather innocuous project, the AFA sees the "homosexual agenda." According to their website:
"Mix It Up" day is an entry-level "diversity" program designed specifically by SPCL [sic]to establish the acceptance of homosexuality into public schools, including elementary and junior high schools.
AFA is encouraging its members to keep their kids home from school on the 30th if their schools participate, and also to pressure schools to abandon the project. The SPLC finds AFA's outrage—and characterization of the program—a bit preposterous. Maureen Costello, the director of the center's Teaching Tolerance program, told the New York Times, "We've become used to the idea of lunatic fringe attacks, but this one was complete misrepresentation."
But the AFA isn't likely to be dissuaded. After all, these are people who found the gay agenda hiding in a Starbucks coffee cup. Indeed, Fischer told the Times, "[The day is] just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda. No one is in favor of anyone getting bullied for any reason, but these anti-bullying policies become a mechanism for punishing Christian students who believe that homosexual behavior is not something that should be normalized."
In 2009, the GOP candidate introduced Glenn Beck at a fundraiser for a school that promoted the work of a conservative "nutjob" eschewed by the Mormon church.
In 2009, Mitt Romney, who is now trying to campaign for president as a moderate, lent his star power to an unusual charitable project: celebrating right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck to raise money for an unaccredited Utah-based college, which was founded by acolytes of the late W. Cleon Skousen and promoted the work of this fringe conservative figure. Much-touted by Beck, Skousen was an anti-communist crusader, a purported political philosopher, a historian accused of racist revisionism, and a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He contended that the Founding Fathers were direct descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, claimed that a global cabal of bankers controlled the world from behind the scenes, and wrote a book that referred to the "blessings of slavery." Skousen, who died in 2006, taught Romney at Brigham Young University.
On May 30, 2009, George Wythe University (named after the first law professor in America, who was a teacher of Thomas Jefferson), held a fundraising gala at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Beck, who was then riding high as a Fox News host, was the special guest, tapped to receive the school's annual "Statesman Award." Romney introduced him.
In a video message—obtained by Mother Jones—that was recorded for the event, Romney praised Beck and this school, which the US Department of Justice has called a "diploma mill." He hailed George Wythe University and its supporters for "building statesmen" and "moving forward the cause of liberty and building men and women of virtue and wisdom, diplomacy, and courage." He introduced Beck as a "man who is really making an impact in our entire country today." Romney noted that Beck's "approach is refreshing" and that he "tries to focus his message on action…on learning the principles of freedom and liberty, on standing up and making your voice heard, on reading and applying the wisdom of our nation's founders to the challenges of today." Beck, he asserted, was "a statesman in his own right." Here's the video:
At the time of the fundraiser, Beck had established himself as a champion of the far right who peddled extreme and conspiratorial views. In the weeks prior to this event, he had declared that President Barack Obama was "clearly" a socialist who had "surrounded himself with Marxists his whole life," and Beck had told listeners of his radio show that Obama will "surely take away your gun or take away you ability to shoot a gun." Yet Beck was a towering figure on the right and a favorite of the emerging tea party movement. It was not odd that Romney, anticipating another presidential run, would seek to win his favor and proclaim him a "statesman." His endorsement of George Wythe (pronounced "with") University was more curious.
The school was founded in 1992 by Oliver DeMille, along with two other Skousen associates. DeMille is described in a 2007 university catalog as "a popular keynote speaker, writer, and business consultant" who earned a master's degree in "Christian Political Science" and a doctorate in religious education at the unaccredited and now-defunct Coral Ridge Baptist University. In 1992, DeMille published an over-the-top tract, The New World Order: Choosing Between Christ and Satan in the Last Days, in which he and his coauthor wrote:
The term "New World Order" means the same thing today—abolishment of Christianity and the adoption of Satan's plan—whether spoken in lodges and meetings of secret societies or on national television by George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. This does not mean that Bush or Gorbachev are Satan-worshippers, but they have accepted his plan—that governments should use force to make people live correctly.
The book also noted:
During the coming year the secret combinations and the governments they control will do a number of things to build a Satanic New World Order. President Bush and many Congressmen, who are controlled by the secret societies, will attempt to further this cause and to continue the curtailment of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.
DeMille's book endorsed an assortment of conservative conspiracy theories, including the notion that the "Establishment" was going to turn the United States into a socialist state, disarm the American military and put it under United Nations control, and merge the country with Mexico, Canada, and other Latin American countries. (According to an official history of GWU, DeMille later considered the publication of this book a mistake.)
In the program for the 2009 Beck-Romney fundraiser, DeMille's welcome message sounded the alarm: "The figurative redcoats are at our door as threats to our liberty, prosperity, and sovereignty are no longer ideological or symbolic, but very real and immediate." One way to preserve liberty, he noted, was to donate to George Wythe University.
The school was established in a hunting lodge in southern Utah purchased by William Doughty, a Skousen devotee who also wanted to create a self-sufficient alternative community for conservatives who believed that the Constitution was being dismantled by the US government. The initial plans called for a center devoted to Skousen and his writings and a constitutional theme park populated by Benjamin Franklin and Patrick Henry impersonators. Skousen and his family donated more than $100,000 and gave their blessing to Doughty's fundraising efforts.
The constitutional utopia never materialized. Doughty came under investigation for allegedly bilking investors and donors out of $1 million. (No further action was ever taken against him.) But George Wythe University held on and continued to advance the work of Skousen, a conspiratorialist in his own right, who advocated extreme views across a wide range of subjects.
In a 1962 book, Skousen denounced homosexuality and noted, "Every boy should know that masturbation may be the first step to homosexuality." In his 1970 book, The Naked Capitalist, Skousen asserted that a sinister "secret society of the London-Wall Street axis"—which included the Council on Foreign Relations—controlled the world and manipulated global events, financing revolutions and aligning itself with "dictatorial forces" to preserve its power. In a 1970 article, Skousen, who was active with the John Birch Society, claimed that criticism of the Mormon church for prohibiting African Americans from its priesthood was nothing but a communist conspiracy against the church. (He also recorded a spoken-word album for the John Birch Society on the dangers of LSD.) In The Five Thousand Year Leap, a supposed history influenced by Mormon theology and published in 1981, Skousen contended that the Constitution is rooted in the bible. (Beck has heavily promoted the book to his listeners and viewers and wrote the introduction to a new edition.)
In 1979, the Mormon church issued a directive distancing itself from an organization started by Skousen. Five years ago, the conservative National Reviewreferred to Skousen as an "all-around nutjob."
Still, until 2010, George Wythe University taught Skousen's work as part of its core curricula, alongside such classics as Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Tom Paine's Common Sense. Freshmen were assigned The Five Thousand Year Leap and The Making of America, which came close to idealizing slavery, as in a passage in the book quoting a 1934 essay: "If the pickaninnies ran naked it was generally from choice, and when the white boys had to put on shoes and go away to school they were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates." While promoting The Making of America, Skousen called for eliminating a host of federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency; for selling off national parks; for ending the direct election of US senators; and for weakening the separation of church and state.
In a 2007 radio interview, Romney said that he had not read The Making of America, but that it was "worth reading." Romney cited another Skousen book to explain Mormon theology regarding the second coming of Christ. In another radio interview that year, Romney recalled taking a class at BYU on the Bible taught by Skousen, whom he called "a brilliant man and a wonderful story teller."
George Wythe University has never been accredited, and for most of its history, its leadership has been comprised of people who earned their academic credentials from other unaccredited schools. (Andrew Groft, a recent president whose degrees came from George Wythe, was caught in a prostitution sting shortly after leaving the school.) For years, the school handed out generous "life experience" credits toward a Ph.D. in a host of different specialties. One of the school's most famous doctorate recipients is former Michigan congressman Mark Siljander. He served for a couple of years as a George Wythe trustee and earned a Ph.D. in international business from the school after writing a 10-page dissertation and attending no classes. In 2010, Siljander pleaded guilty to charges he had been an unregistered lobbyist for an Islamic charity with terrorist ties. In his sentencing memo, the Department of Justice labeled George Wythe University a "diploma mill."
Since its inception, the school has suffered financial difficulties. In recent years, it has been plagued with declining enrollment. Shortly before the Beck fundraiser, the university reported that its enrollment was half of what it had been the previous year, with only about 150 students. More recent money troubles have stemmed from ill-advised real estate deals in an effort to build a much larger campus. The high-profile endorsements from Beck and Romney did not do much to place the school on better footing. The gala itself, according to school officials, "failed to net any gains."
GWU has recently closed its doctorate program, and this spring announced that it was abandoning ambitious plans for the new campus. Its main building in Cedar City is for sale, and the school is now operating out of an office suite in Salt Lake City. Enrollment is down to a mere 60 students.
There are conflicting accounts as to how Romney came to endorse George Wythe. Shanon Brooks, a former GWU president and head of the committee that organized the 2009 gala, tells Mother Jones, "I believe that the video was secured via members of his family who had a connection with him." But Andrea Saul, a Romney campaign spokeswoman, says, "Glenn Beck asked Gov. Romney to introduce him, and the governor agreed to do it." By this telling, Romney, as he was eyeing his next presidential bid, endorsed a conspiracy-promoting school of iffy standing to score points with a conspiracy-minded conservative icon—and ended up making common cause with crackpot thinking shunned by the Mormon church and the National Review.
Mia Love speaks at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.
When she spoke at the Republican National Convention last month, Mia Love, a GOP rising star who's vying to become the first black Republican woman elected to the House, wowed delegates with her parents' up-by-their-bootstraps tale. She said their story of coming to America from Haiti with $10 in their pockets formed the basis for her own belief in self-reliance and her staunch opposition to government handouts.
Love—mayor of the small town of Saratoga Springs, Utah—has been widely spotlighted as a pol who's going places in the GOP, and she's linked herself closely to GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney. Recently, she served as an official surrogate for Romney on a campaign swing through Nevada, and she MC'd a fundraiser for him in Utah last Tuesday. Though a child of immigrants, Love has embraced much of her party's tough stance on immigration. She has implied that she would back deporting the US-born children of illegal immigrants so as not to reward "bad behavior." Yet by Love's own account, she is what Republicans derisively call an "anchor baby"— someone born to immigrant parents specifically to game the immigration system and secure legal status for family members.
