The Fascist Tyranny of the Gay Left and its Obama Police Gangs

Boston mayor sends letter to Chick-fil-A:

There’s no place for you here

 by Allahpundit     at HotAir

(If you don’t march along with the Obama Marxist-Democrat Army , there is no room for you in Boston.)

Two sure signs that we’re past the “earnest debate” stage of this story and firmly into “people milking it for advantage” territory. One: Menino sent his letter to Chick-fil-A fully five days ago but only today, apparently, did a copy turn up on Boston’s official community Facebook page. Sounds like somebody’s enjoying their star turn as new SSM hero and is looking to stretch the grandstanding a bit. Two: I’m doing my second post on this topic in less than four hours. What can I say? I whiffed traffic-wise on the Ted Cruz post and the Scott Walker post. If you guys want to take batting practice on Menino and Chick-fil-A instead, I’ll pitch.

Here is Menino’s letter to Cathy:

To Mr. Cathy,

In recent days, you said Chick-fil-A opposes same-sex marriage and said the generation that supports it has an “arrogant attitude.”

Now — incredibly — your company says you are backing out of the same-sex marriage debate. I urge you to back out of your plans to locate in Boston.

You called supporters of gay marriage “prideful.” Here in Boston, to borrow your own words, we are “guilty as charged.” We are indeed full of pride for our support of same sex marriage and our work to expand freedom to all people. We are proud that our state and our city have led the way for the country on equal marriage rights.

I was angry to learn on the heels of your prejudiced statements about your search for a site to locate in Boston. There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it. When Massachusetts became the first state in the country to recognize equal marriage rights, I personally stood on City Hall Plaza to greet same sex couples coming here to be married. It would be an insult to them and to our city’s long history of expanding freedom to have a Chick-fil-A across the street from that spot.

Sincerely,

Thomas M. Menino
Mayor, City of Boston

There’s no place for freedom to disagree on the Freedom Trail?

I wonder if he knows that barring Chick-fil-A would be unconstitutional. There’s just enough ambiguity in that letter to suggest that he does — he’s telling them they’re not welcome, not warning them that he’ll challenge them legally — but who knows. Would any Boston liberals object if he did file suit to try to stop them, full in the knowledge that he’s doomed to fail?

Actually, the Boston Globe editorial board would:

[W]hich part of the First Amendment does Menino not understand? A business owner’s political or religious beliefs should not be a test for the worthiness of his or her application for a business license.

Chick-fil-A must follow all state and city laws. If the restaurant chain denied service to gay patrons or refused to hire gay employees, Menino’s outrage would be fitting. And the company should be held to its statement that it strives to “treat every person with honor, dignity and respect — regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation, or gender.” But beyond the fact that Chick-fil-A is closed on Sundays, the religious beliefs of the company’s top executive don’t appear to control its operations…

If the mayor of a conservative town tried to keep out gay-friendly Starbucks or Apple, it would be an outrage.

Ironically, Menino is citing the specific location along the Freedom Trail as a reason to block Chick-fil-A. A city in which business owners must pass a political litmus test is the antithesis of what the Freedom Trail represents. History will render judgment on the views of Chick-fil-A executives. City Hall doesn’t have to.

Is the Globe editorial page normally that righteous or did it take an unusual expression of schmuckery from Mayor Mumbles to drive them to it? I think I know the answer, but I figured I should put that out there for Bostonians. Exit question: Tom Menino, the worst big-city mayor in America? Exit answer: Not on your life.

Update: From Cuffy Meigs:

Obama Government to Confiscate Catholic family Business for being Catholic

DOJ: Family Can’t Run Their Business

as Catholics

 

By Terence P. Jeffrey

July 25, 2012

http://cnsnews.com/blog/terence-p-jeffrey/doj-family-cant-run-their-business-catholics

 article sent by Mark Waldeland:

William, Paul and James Newland and their sister, Christine Ketterhagen, who together own Hercules Industries, have no right to conduct their family business in a manner that comports with their Catholic faith.

The federal government can and will compel them to either surrender their business or to engage in activities the Catholic faith teaches are intrinsically immoral.

This is exactly what President Barack Obama’s Justice Department told a U.S. district court in a formal filing last week.

Never before has an administration taken such a bold step to strip Americans of the freedom of conscience — a right for which, over the centuries, many Christian martyrs have laid down their lives, and which our Founding Fathers took great care to protect in a First Amendment that expressly guarantees the free exercise of religion.

As the Founders understood, no government has legitimate authority to take this right away, because it does not come from government. It comes from God. The very purpose of government is to protect this right. A government that seeks to strip it away from the people is by that very process stripping away its own legitimacy.

What we are seeing from the Obama administration today — in its attack on religious liberty — is simply evil. When government seeks to compel individuals to act against their consciences and to engage in activities that, if willfully done, would imperil their immortal souls, there is no other word for it.

The Newland family owns and operates Hercules Industries, a Colorado-based corporation that manufactures heating, ventilation and air-conditioning equipment. Through their hard work and dedication, and through their willingness to reinvest their own money in building their family business, they have managed to create jobs for 265 people while exerting a positive influence on the communities they serve.

The Newlands believe the morality the Catholic faith teaches them must animate their lives not only within the walls of the churches they attend, but literally everywhere else, as well — in the way they deal with their families, their neighbors and, yes, their business.

The Newlands sued to protect their free exercise of religion in this regard because Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a regulation, under the Obamacare law, that requires virtually all health care plans to cover — without cost-sharing — sterilizations, artificial contraception and abortifacients.

Under Obamacare, businesses that employ more than 50 people must provide their employees with insurance or pay a penalty, and the required insurance must include the mandated cost-sharing-free coverage for sterilizations, artificial contraception and abortifacients.

At Hercules Industries, the Newlands provide a generous self-insured health-care plan to their employees.
It does not cover sterilization, artificial contraception or abortifacients.

“The Catholic Church teaches that abortifacient drugs, contraception and sterilization are intrinsic evils,” says the Newlands’ lawsuit.

“Consequently, the Newlands believe that it would be immoral and sinful for them to intentionally participate in, pay for, facilitate or otherwise support abortifacient drugs, contraception, sterilization, and related education and counseling as would be required by the Mandate, through their inclusion in health insurance coverage they offer at Hercules,” says the suit.

The Catholic Bishops of the United States endorse this view. At a meeting in Atlanta last month, they unanimously adopted a resolution calling the HHS regulation an “unjust and illegal mandate” and a “violation of personal civil rights.” They declared that the regulation created a class of Americans “with no conscience protection at all: individuals who, in their daily lives, strive constantly to act in accordance with their faith and moral values.

“They, too,” said the bishops, “face a government mandate to aid in providing ‘services’ contrary to those values — whether in their sponsoring of, and payment for, insurance as employers; their payment of insurance premiums as employees; or as insurers themselves — without even the semblance of an exemption.”

In a letter read during Sunday Mass in most dioceses around the country earlier this year, many of the nation’s bishops flatly said: “We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law.”

In response to the Newlands’ complaint that ordering them to violate the teachings of the Catholic Church in the way they run their business is a violation of their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion, the Obama administration told the federal court that a private business has no protection under the First Amendment’s free exercise clause — especially if the business is incorporated.

“The First Amendment Complaint does not allege that the company is affiliated with a formally religious entity such as a church,” said the Justice Department. “Nor does it allege that the company employs persons of a particular faith. In short, Hercules Industries is plainly a for-profit, secular employer.”

“By definition,” said the Justice Department, “a secular employer does not engage in any ‘exercise of religion.'”

“It is well established that a corporation and its owners are wholly separate entities, and the Court should not permit the Newlands to eliminate that legal separation to impose their personal religious beliefs on the corporate entity or its employees,” said the Justice Department.

This is just as if the Justice Department were to tell a family owned newspaper that it must publish editorials calling for a confiscatory estate tax, basing its coercion of the newspaper on the supposition (which lawyers for the Alliance Defending Freedom argue DOJ is by analogy making) that as a for-profit secular and incorporated employer, the paper has no First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

My Congressman, Erik Paulsen, Corrects Obamalies about “Fair Share” in Paying Federal Taxes

Great piece on tax fairness‏

by Ari Fleischer…..the Wall Street Journal

article sent by Minnesota 3rd District Congressman, Erik Paulsen:

“If fairness in paying taxes means the amount you pay is based on the amount you make, then the only group in America paying at least a “fair share” is the top 20%-people who make more than $74,000. For everyone else, the tax code is a bargain.

You wouldn’t know this from President Obama’s rhetoric, but our tax system, according to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), is incredibly progressive. Consider: The top 1% of income earners pay an average federal tax rate of 28.9%. (See the nearby table.) The average federal tax rate on the top 20% is 23.2%. The 20% of taxpayers earning between $50,100 and $73,999 pay an average 15.1%, and so on down the line. The CBO report includes payroll as well as income taxes paid.

There’s also another way of looking at fairness, and that’s the tax burden. Here, consider the top 20% of income earners (over $74,000). They make 50% of the nation’s income but pay nearly 70% of all federal taxes.

The remaining 30% of the tax burden is borne by 80% of the taxpayers, those who make less than $74,000. In short, this group’s share of taxes paid, 30%, is lower than the share of income they earn, 50%.

Yet President Obama says that “for some time now, when compared to the middle class,” the wealthy “haven’t been asked to do their fair share.”

He’s right that the system isn’t fair, but not because the top 1% pay too little. It is because they pay too much.

Mr. Obama has said that some wealthy employers pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries. True, some are able to lower their effective federal tax rate by giving millions to charity. Or because they derive much of their income as capital gains or from tax-free municipal bonds.

But middle- and low-income Americans who do not invest also pay lower rates thanks to the deductions they receive, such as a $1,000 per child tax credit (which phases out for couples who make more than $110,000), or the Earned Income Tax Credit, which no one making more than $50,000 is supposed to receive.

The CBO report (“The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2008 and 2009”) covers the years 1979-2009. It makes plain that the impression conveyed by the president about what upper-income Americans pay in taxes does not hold up to scrutiny.

First of all, the share of taxes paid by the top 20% has gone up over the last 30 years, while the share of taxes paid by everyone else has gone down. It has gone up despite the tax cuts enacted by President Clinton in 1997 and by President Bush in 2001 and 2003. But that makes no difference to the president. The only group of taxpayers he calls on to “sacrifice” are those already doing all the tax sacrificing.

The top 20% in 1979 made 44.9% of the nation’s income and paid 55.3% of all federal taxes. Thirty years later, the top 20% made 50.8% of the nation’s income and their share of federal taxes paid had jumped to 67.9%.

And the top 1%? In 1979, this group earned 8.9% of the nation’s income and paid 14.2% of all federal taxes. In 2009, they earned 13.4% of the nation’s income but their share of the federal tax burden rose to 22.3%.

Meanwhile, the federal tax burden on middle- and lower-income earners is lighter. In 1979, the bottom 20% paid barely any taxes at all, just 2.1%. Now their share of taxes is a minuscule 0.3%. The burden on the middle-income earners ($34,900 to $50,100) has dropped too. In 1979, they paid 13.6% of all federal taxes; in 2009 they paid 9.4%.

One reason our country is so divided is because the president keeps dividing us. If taxes need to be raised to fight a war or fund a cause, the president should ask everyone to pitch in. If the need is national, the solution should be national-and that includes all of us.

But that’s not how Mr. Obama governs. We learned during the 2008 campaign that he believes in spreading the wealth around. And recently we learned he doesn’t believe that successful people made it on their own. Without the government, the president tells us, job creators and entrepreneurs would not be able to make it in America.

It’s really the other way around. Without job creators and the successful, the government wouldn’t have any money. So next time Mr. Obama meets someone in the top 1% or even the top 20%, instead of saying they’re not paying their fair share, he should simply say thank you.”

-Ari Fleischer, Wall Street Journal

Raise the Minimum Wage?….Increase the Unemployment!

Minimum Wage Myths that Keep Our Teens Out of Work

from the National Center for Policy Analysis:

Recently, both the Economic Policy Institute and President Obama have supported a higher minimum wage while simultaneously lamenting the current lack of employment opportunities for young adults. The evidence suggests that accomplishing that second goal means giving up on the first, says Pamela Villarreal, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, minimum wage workers are more likely to be teenagers, college students or secondary earners, rather than heads-of-households supporting families. About half are younger than age 25. It’s this inexperienced group most affected by changes in the minimum wage whose employment has declined in recent years.

• In July 2007, the unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-old workers was 15.3 percent; three years later, following a 41 percent increase in the federal minimum wage, the rate was 25.9 percent.
• In some urban areas, the unemployment rate for teenagers is exceptionally high.
• For instance, the teenage unemployment rate in Washington, D.C., last summer was 50 percent, the highest in the nation.

The recession has played a role in this teen employment crisis, but a wide body of economic research suggests minimum wages are also to blame. In their 2008 book Minimum Wages, economists David Neumark and William Wascher reviewed evidence on both sides of the minimum wage debate, and concluded that the “preponderance of evidence” pointed to job losses for young employees following a minimum wage increase.

Summer jobs are crucial for providing youth some real-world work experience, and minimum wage increases put them further out of reach. Reforming the education system and promoting characteristics that increase individual wages — such as finishing high school and improving skills through college or trade/vocational schools — would also do more to lift wages and the economy than an additional government wage mandate.

Source: Pamela Villarreal, “Minimum Wage Myths that Keep Our Teens Out of Work,” The Hill, July 20, 2012.

For text:

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/239251-minimum-wage-myths-that-keep-our-teens-out-of-work

For more on Economic Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=17