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To bring down the high chlamydia infections rate among Tennessee teenagers, an anti-abortion pregnancy center in Athens, Tenn., has proposed spending federal tax dollars on a life-sized version of the Game of Life.

The “Teen Life Maze” is just one of the ideas put forth by a cluster of crisis pregnancy centers that are receiving government grants to conduct abstinence education as part of President Obama’s health-care reform law.

Records obtained by The American Independent show that the government is paying for abstinence programs run by centers that promote dubious medical information. For example, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) receiving funding through the program claim that “reliable studies” have shown a link between abortion and breast cancer.

One of the centers says it seeks to help students understand “the lack of effectiveness of condoms/birth control in STD protection and pregnancy.”

TAI previously reported that a South Dakota anti-abortion CPC that requires its volunteers to be Christians received funding under a program created by Obama’s stimulus bill.

Between 1996 and 2009, taxpayers spent more than $1.5 billion on abstinence-only education, paid for by federal grants and state matching funds, according to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. In 2004, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) released a report that found that these programs often contained false or distorted information about sex and reproductive health, such as claiming that condoms have a high failure rate at preventing HIV and pregnancy, women who have abortions have a high risk of becoming sterile, and HIV can be transmitted through sweat and tears.

Shortly after taking office, Obama moved to cut off federal funding for most abstinence-only education.

However, during the intense negotiations over the health-care-reform bill in 2009 and 2010, Congress attached a $250 million grant program for abstinence-only instruction (granting up to $50 million annually, through 2014). Under the program, state health departments apply for abstinence funding and can then allocate sub-awards to various organizations across the state, including county health departments, schools, community groups, and faith-based nonprofits.

So far, at least three anti-abortion CPCs have received funding through this provision. They’re all in Tennessee, which has the nation’s 11th highest teen birth rate, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In January, the Tennessee Department of Health announced it was dividing $3.2 million in abstinence funding among 13 agencies through 2014 to “support comprehensive, evidence-based and medically accurate community-based education programs.”

A total of about $650,000 of that money was awarded to the three CPCs: Full Circle Women’s Services in Athens, Life Choices Pregnancy Support Center in Dyersburg, and Women’s Care Center of Rhea County, Inc., in Dayton. Per the terms of the grant program, each grant recipient has to match 75 percent of the award.

When they’re not teaching teens not to have sex, these centers are seeing women – sometimes teens – facing unplanned, and often unwelcomed, pregnancies. They seek to discourage abortion, offering women various services including counseling and free pregnancy tests. The websites of two of the centers – Full Circle Women’s Services and Life Choices Pregnancy Support Center – feature an array of misinformation about abortion, including claims that abortion causes breast cancer and depression.

Despite widespread rejection of an abortion-breast cancer link from major medical institutions such as the American Cancer Society, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the National Cancer Institute, these CPCs imply that there is a connection, claiming on their websites that “a number of reliable studies have demonstrated connection between abortion and later development of breast cancer.”

According to the American Cancer Society, “At this time, the scientific evidence does not support the notion that abortion of any kind raises the risk of breast cancer or any other type of cancer.”

Both Full Circle Women’s Services and the Women’s Care Center are affiliated with Care Net, a national network of crisis pregnancy centers that prohibits its members from recommending, offering, or referring “single women” for contraception

Whereas proponents of comprehensive sex education encourage teaching teens how to protect themselves against unplanned pregnancy and diseases while acknowledging that condoms are not guaranteed to work 100 percent of the time, abstinence-education advocates often claim that teaching about proper condom use offers young people a “false sense of security.”

On their websites, Full Circle, Life Choices Pregnancy Resource Center, and the Women’s Care Center cite identical statistics emphasizing what they portray as the lack of effectiveness of condoms. These centers tell readers that “consistent” condom use during vaginal sex reduces the risk of “HIV by 85%”; human papillomavirus “by 50% or less”; and gonorrhea, Chlamydia, herpes, and syphilis “by about 50%.” The statistics come from various studies compiled by the Medical Institute, a nonprofit organization whose advice for preventing STDs is: “Avoid sexual activity if you are single. Be faithful to one uninfected partner for the rest of your life.”

Richard A. Crosby, a professor and chair at the Department of Health Behavior at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health, told TAI that these statistics are misleading.

“These are not statistics that are widely supported by the literature,” Crosby said. “They are confounded by a lack of accounting for the correct use of condoms. Consistent use alone is not enough. … When you do not account for the correct use, you have an underestimate of the effectiveness.”

Crosby, who has received federal grants to research HIV prevention, is currently working on a “highly controlled, rigorous” study funded by the National Institutes of Health to determine the value of consistent and correct condom use in preventing three common STIs: Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and trichomoniasis.

“All of these numbers are way low,” Crosby said, referring to the pregnancy centers’ statistics (with the exception of the rate of condom-use effectiveness at preventing HPV, which he said is supported by studies). He said the claim that condoms are 85 percent effective in reducing HIV infection is “really misleading” and not supported by many research studies that isolate for consistent and correct use.

‘Innovative Approaches’

Full Circle Women’s Services – awarded $154,200 – is the anti-abortion pregnancy center that proposed trying to curb teen sex with a giant “Teen Life Maze.” The center cited the game as one of its “innovative approaches” to abstinence instruction in a grant application submitted to the Tennessee health department in May 2011. The maze is described as a “large game board of rooms designed to let teens experience the consequences – both positive and negative – of life choices. It is effective in that teens get to play along in seeing firsthand the results of good decisions and bad decisions ranging from making trips to the doctor for a lifelong STD or the satisfaction in staying on course and graduating from high school.”

In a subsequent document, the center explained that inspiration for the game comes from Georgia, where life mazes have been hosted in several schools across the state, and that Full Circle was “in the planning stages of bringing this event to Athens.”

Other innovative approaches proposed by Full Circle include hosting a game show about the risks of having sex and screening the film Look Before You Leap, described in the proposal as “an adrenaline rush of drama, action, and humor that takes relationship education to extreme heights.”

Full Circle, founded in 1998, has been offering privately financed abstinence-education services to mostly elementary and middle schools in McMinn County for a few years now. In its grant proposal, the center explained that the extra cash would be used to hire more educators. Currently, the center’s program, called On TRAC (Teaching Teens Responsibility and Consequences), relies on abstinence curriculum called “Think on Point” and “Life on Point,” created by On Point, a youth-development group in Chattanooga, Tenn

“Think on Point” is a five-day program offered once a year to sixth- through ninth-graders during physical education class. According to the program description, “[t]he curriculum includes homework assignments, in-class handouts, role-playing activities, and focused small-group discussion. … Lessons at every grade level discuss the topics of abstinence, sexually transmitted diseases, media influence, and standards and boundaries; other more specific themes include pregnancy, pornography, abuse, value and self-worth, and the essence of real love.”

“Life on Point” is designed to dig deeper into risky activities. The center also proposed bringing five-day abstinence instruction to older teens in high school life skills and health classes.

All of the abstinence-only programs funded under Tennessee’s Affordable Care Act grant had to submit short- and long-term program objectives. Full Circle Women’s long-term goals include curbing rates of teen pregnancy, school dropouts, and STDs in McMinn and Meigs counties, and also a “decrease in percentage of children being raised by single mothers below the poverty line.” Short-term goals include “increased knowledge of STDS and pregnancy risks” and “understanding the lack of effectiveness of condoms/birth control in STD protection and pregnancy.”

To make the case for giving Full Circle money to target 10- to 17-year-olds in McMinn, Meigs, and Polk counties (in southeastern part of the state), Full Circle’s grant application cited statistics showing STD rates among teens are high in the area, including “Tennessee Department of Health reports that the number of reported cases of Chlamydia in McMinn County has increased a staggering 1200% from 1994-2007.”

Full Circle Women’s Services Executive Director Anne Montgomery turned down TAI’s request for an interview.

In line with the eight-point federal guidelines of abstinence education, the other two CPCs receiving Affordable Care Act funding similarly offer plans to educate teens about the repercussions of sexual activity and advocate abstinence as the only means to avoid those repercussions.

Here is part of how the Women’s Care Center promotes its abstinence program, called The Edge:

While “until marriage” may sound like practically forever, let’s get a little perspective on this. The average age of initial marriage in the United States is 26 years old. That gets even lower in more rural areas. And the payoff of sexual abstinence is that you have the rest of your married life to enjoy your sexuality without having to suffer the consequences of emotional baggage, crotch-crippling STDs, or teen pregnancy. That sounds to me like a pretty good deal.

Among the desired outcomes of Life Choices Pregnancy Resource Center’s abstinence-until-marriage program, Right Choices of West Tennessee, are “increased knowledge regarding the effects of teen sexual behavior and sexually-transmitted diseases” and “increased commitment to abstinence until marriage.”

The directors of Life Choices Pregnancy Support Center and the Women’s Care Center did not return requests for interviews.

Earlier this month, the CDC released new data showing that America’s teen birthrate is the lowest it has been since 1946. The Guttmacher Institute, a proponent of comprehensive sex education, credited that drop, in part, with improvements in contraceptive use.

But Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, said high rates of STDs among teens means the abstinence-only message is still necessary.

“While teen birth rates have reached historic lows, STD rates among teens are at historic highs, so condom-centered education is certainly not sufficient to deal with even the physical consequences of sexual activity since 2 of the 4 most common STDs are easily transmissible with a condom,” Huber told TAI in an email. “Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) abstinence education makes sense from a public health perspective and also as an approach that both resonates with teens and protects them from any of the consequences of sexual activity, not the least of which is pregnancy.”

Bennet was seeking to rally support for the bill as it moves to the Republican-controlled House and to take measure of how the legislation translates for people working on campus and in the city of Boulder with victims and perpetrators of stalking, domestic violence and sexual assault.

“It’s nice to meet with people working on the ground, particularly when politics in Washington is as screwed up as it is right now,” Bennet told roughly 30 people gathered in a conference room hemmed in by the Flatiron mountains.

He referenced his time as the superintendent of the Denver Public School system. “There’s not much of a feedback loop [in Washington]. You watch laws get passed, but on the ground sometimes they don’t make a lot of sense. It can be a one-way game of telephone.”

Representatives from rape centers and legal assistance offices told Bennet that funds provided by the Act were critical in establishing resources. Barb Paradiso from the University of Colorado Denver said there was no office or staff to deal with the issue on her urban campus just three years ago. She said grant money awarded through the Act was crucial to getting services up and running and hiring employees.

“In just three years, we’ve come a long way. We have a foundation [on which] to build now,” she said.

Bennet said it was unfortunate that the Senate five year reauthorization would slash $150 million from the Act’s previous $800 million budget. That was a response to fiscal realities, he explained.

“I call Washington the land of flickering lights, because the standard these days is just to manage to keep things running.”

The people gathered at CU told Bennet that, although great strides have been made in providing help for victims, the culture surrounding the issue hasn’t changed in ways that would work to head off the violence and decrease the number of victims.

“We reach out to victims but we don’t reach out to perpetrators,” said Celeste Montoya, a political science professor and faculty adviser for the campus Gender Justice League. She said a lot could be done to intervene before any crime or harassment takes place. “We know where to begin,” she told the Colorado Independent, “the sports teams and the fraternities.

“We have a great policy on paper to support victims but to target prevention, funding for that would be tremendously appreciated.”

The Violence Against Women Act, originally sponsored by now-Vice President Joe Biden, was passed in 1994 and has been reauthorized consistently. It pays for programs that provide, for example, legal assistance and temporary housing for victims, enforcement of court-ordered protection services and youth prevention programs.

This year, however, reauthorization has been charged with election-year politics. Democrats added provisions that would extend services to same-sex and undocumented immigrant victims. Conservatives have argued that Democrats are, in effect, daring them to vote against reauthorization, looking to gain more material to fill out a portrait of the party as insensitive to women.

Bennet, secure in his seat for another four years, is nevertheless the poster boy for “war on women” election campaign strategies bubbling up across the country.

As a candidate in 2010, Bennet looked to win over women across Colorado by highlighting the hardline social conservative policy stances struck by his Republican opponent Ken Buck. Bennet, appointed to office two years earlier when Ken Salazar became Secretary of the Interior, was an underdog in the race. It was the first time he had ever run for office and it was the year Republican candidates notched victories in record numbers coast to coast.

Yet Buck, who as Weld County district attorney years before had declined to prosecute a rape case partly because he thought a skeptical jury would see the defendant as merely suffering a case of “buyer’s remorse,” was portrayed by critics as an unyielding relic of a past era. In the end, Bennet succeeded in winning the votes of women by a wide margin and did so in a contest where every vote mattered. He elbowed past Buck at the finish line, winning the election by something like 10,000 of roughly 800,000 votes cast.

[ Image of Senator Bennet at CU by The Colorado Independent ]

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State legislators, musicians, poets, community leaders, and ordinary Coloradans will speak about current legislation in Colorado and other states. Following the rally, attendees will march around the State Capitol and back around Civic Center Park to where they started.

Presenters at the Rally will include:

State Representative and US Congressional Candidate Joe Miklosi; State senators Morgan Carroll, Rev. Lucia Guzman, and Betty Boyd; State Senate Majority President and U.S. congressional candidate Brandon Shaffer; state representatives Crisanta Duran and Lois Court; attorney Beth Klein; musical comedy by The Raging Grannies; Unitarian Universalist Reverend Dr. NoriRost; Rosemary Harris Lytle, CO NAACP state president; poetry slam artists, Suzi Q and Jen Rinaldi; and music by The Foxfield Four.

State Senator Morgan Carroll speaking at the Capitol. (Kersgaard)

“Extremists in Congress are deliberately increasing the cost of health care for millions of women. At the same time, they have let the Violence Against Women Act expire. It is outrageous” said Miklosi.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis (Pic via dol.gov)

African-American and Latina women, who now make up an important part of the U.S. workforce, face higher rates of poverty and unemployment than white and Asian working women.

The U.S. Department of Labor wrote Thursday: “On the same day last week that she announced that the economy created another 121,000 jobs in March, and that the unemployment rate ticked down, Secretary [Hilda] Solis joined President Obama at a White House event focused on ‘Women and the Economy.’”

The Department of Labor also released a report showing that despite important advances, women in the United States continue to face barriers to participation in the work- and marketplace.

The report, “Keeping America’s Women Moving Forward” (.pdf), states that women make up almost 50 percent of the workforce, own 30 percent of small businesses, but still make 77 cents for every dollar men make and have to pay more for their health care than men, and about 2 million women are victims of domestic violence each year.

Solis writes, ”Women—especially vulnerable women—have had to carry a heavy burden in our economic recovery. We must ensure that all women have the support they need to thrive and to avoid being thrust into poverty.”

While the unemployment rate in the U.S. fell .2 percent in March, African-American and Latina adult women still have higher rates of unemployment, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ March 2012 employment report, released last week.

The report indicates that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for adult women stood at 7.4 percent. When broken down by race the report shows that number jumps to 12.3 percent for African American women. The report also revealed that unemployment rate (not seasonally adjusted) for Hispanic women was 10 percent.

According to the report “Challenges and Conditions of the Latina Workers in the United States,” “in 2010, Latina women earned $508 in median weekly earnings and only earn a meager 60 cents for every dollar earned by a white man, representing the largest wage gap of any other group of working women.”

The report, released by the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement adds “in 2010, Women of Latino ethnicity earned $508 in median weekly earnings, compared to their African-American ($592), white ($684), and Asian ($773) counterparts.”

The Labor Council adds that “Latina working women represent 12.8 percent of women in the U.S. workforce and their jobs are among the most dangerous and least compensated in the nation.”

“Challenges and Conditions” also shows that 12 percent of Latinas and 12.7 percent of female African-American workers suffer from “high levels of poverty.”

The report also shows that in 2009 almost 30 percent of Latina women had no health insurance coverage while almost 11 percent non-Latina whites were uninsured.

The report adds that in the U.S. the “Latino community holds the highest percentage of people without health insurance; nearly one in three (32.4%) lack health insurance coverage compared to 21% of African-Americans, 17.2% of Asians, and 12% of non-Latino whites.”

Latina immigrants to the U.S. are also among the most vulnerable population, according to the report:

• In 2011, 45 percent of all Latina immigrants in the U.S. were uninsured.
• Some surveys also estimate that there could be up to 6 million undocumented Latinas.
• Two million, or 37 percent, of non-citizen Latinas live in poverty. A majority of these women (55 percent) earn less than $15,000 a year.
• Nearly two-thirds of all non-citizen Latinas were not covered by employment-based health care, compared to 42 percent of their naturalized equivalents.
• Immigrant Latina women made less than half ($24,461) what the average non-Latino white male made ($49,643) in 2010.
• Sexual assault allegations have been reported in nearly every U.S. immigration detention center.

The controversial initiative taps into the increasingly heated tug of war over social issues waging between Christian organizations and representatives of the government, most recently, for example, on the question of whether employers should be required to provide insurance coverage for contraception.

As submitted, the title of the initiative contains one sentence. It proposes to add “an amendment to the Colorado Constitution expressing the public policy of the state of  Colorado that government may not burden a person’s or religious organization’s freedom of religion (pdf).”

An initiative title is the language that appears on ballots for voters to read. It describes the intent of the initiative and is required to be written in as straightforward a manner as possible.

According to sources at the hearing, the board yesterday made only small, non-substantive changes to the religious freedom title language before approving it.

Initiative proponent Tom Minnery, executive director of CitizenLink, Focus on the Family’s political arm, was not immediately available for comment.

Initiative opponents, however, told the Colorado Independent that the initiative language is deceptive, that it would not so much protect religious freedom as blow open exemptions in state and federal law, effectively setting up a separate legal standard for any person or group claiming to be motivated in their actions by faith.

The opposition is being led by a coalition of groups that include gay-rights organization One Colorado, the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, among others. Coalition representatives told the Independent they are determined to challenge the title as too vague and legally fraught, either by appealing to the title board, challenging the title in court, or both.

“We’re prepared to go to the [state] Supreme Court,” said One Colorado Executive Director Brad Clark. “The measure is not only vague, it’s also unnecessary. Protections for religious freedom are already written into the  state and U.S. constitutions. We think [the initiative] is redundant, which raises questions about the true intent here. We think there should be a lot more public discussion about this proposal.”

Supporters of the initiative have made the case for it in the past by citing the fact that displays of faith in the public sphere have come under fire. They point to the case in Littleton, Colorado, for example, where legal wrangling bogged down efforts to erect Christian memorials at Columbine, the public high school where 13 people died in the tragic shootings of 1999.

Clark and others, however, say Columbine, although a powerful point of reference, is perhaps less relevant than more recent battles over contraception, abortion and gay equality. Those battles, they say, provide context vital to understanding what’s at stake.

“We’re concerned about the civil rights implications,” Jeremy Shaver, executive director of the Colorado Interfaith Alliance, told the Independent. “We think the way the initiative is written could provide legal cover for discrimination.”

Shaver said employers might lean on the amendment to refuse to hire divorced women. Landlords could avoid renting to unmarried couples. Doctors or pharmacists could decline to treat or serve gay patients and customers.

Cardozo School of Law Professor Marci Hamilton, who specializes in constitutional state and religion questions, has argued for years against what she calls the new wave of “extreme state religious freedom… legislation.” She says initiatives like the one Focus on the Family is proposing for Colorado would lift important legal protections that guard the public against potentially harmful actions motivated by religious belief.

Hamilton has said that women seeking abortions and gay people seeking housing or employment are examples that come immediately to mind, but that children are perhaps the most vulnerable population in these matters. In testifying against similar proposals elsewhere (e.g.: pdf), Hamilton has pointed out that children have been forced by adult minders of various faiths to go without inoculations or to depend on prayer alone to cure illness, for example, and that they have also been subjected on a vast scale to physical and sexual abuse that can be covered over with reference to religious belief or ritual.

Hamilton says the legal history tied to the struck-down federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 and the subsequent state versions that cropped up in its wake documents a struggle to balance legal priorities and to shift burdens to protect or to not infringe upon constitutional rights.

“The very name of the Religious Freedom Restoration acts connote America and apple pie,” she wrote in a 2010 essay. “Who could disagree with a law in favor of restoring religious freedom, which is our constitutional right?

“Yet, providing such a low threshold for a religious group or individual to avoid… accountability virtually guarantees that such groups will be able to hide behind high legal barriers.”

In addition to mounting a challenge to the initiative title, One Colorado has already submitted a sort of companion initiative to the state that seeks to clarify laws governing “actions related to religious belief” by tying them more specifically to the private sphere (pdf).

Clark called the One Colorado initiative “definitional” and described it as “just another avenue” to expand public safety and equality safeguards.

For politics and religion watchers in Colorado, the battle this year over the initiative recalls a battle fought in 2010, when Focus on the Family, acting with the Catholic Church, submitted a first-round version of its religious freedom proposal. That version drew similarly strong opposition and the proponents pulled it in the face of an impending Supreme Court challenge.

One of the initiative proponents in 2010 was Jenny Kraska, director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, the political wing for the Church’s three dioceses in the state. Representatives of the Catholic Church have not signed on as proponents of this year’s version nor yet declared public support for it, although the Church is supporting similar efforts around the country, including in North Dakota and Kansas.

Messages left with the Colorado Catholic Conference were not immediately returned.

[ Image of Focus on the Family headquarters, a travel blog photo via TravelPod page: The Best of Colorado Springs ]

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The meeting came on the Wednesday of midterm week just days before spring break, so officials said they were encouraged but not surprised by the fact that roughly 150 students turned out. They told the Colorado Independent that young people seemed at least as energized in their support for Obama this year as they were in 2008, when members of the 18-to-29-year-old demographic voted for Obama over Republican rival John McCain by a record-setting two-thirds majority.

“Young voters. They’re the X-factor,” said a Colorado campaign official, shaking his head, raising his eyebrows and leaving his mouth open in a way that meant obviously!

A national staffer told the Independent that the reelection campaign, free from the need to wage a Democratic Party primary fight this year, is seizing on the advantage of time to ramp up outreach to young people and to enlist them early and in greater numbers to take on the kind of vital voter-contact and registration efforts young Obama supporters excelled at in 2008.

Indeed, the Obama event in Boulder was already the ninth of the “Greater Together Student Summits” the campaign has hosted at swing-state campuses since February, part of a campaign initiative launched last October. The summits lean heavily on promotion through online networks and usually feature celebrities in addition to senior campaign staffers and local Obama campaign volunteers.

Although pitched as an interactive discussion of key policy issues, the meeting in Boulder had the feel of a traditional campaign rally mashed up with a corporate motivational seminar.

Staffers, dressed in neat casual attire, sat on high stools and passed a microphone back and forth before an enormous screen bearing Power Point-style slides, tweeted questions from the audience and, to wrap the event, the 17-minute campaign video called “The Road We’ve Traveled” made by Davis Guggenheim, the producer and director behind blockbuster documentaries such as “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Waiting for Superman” and “It Might Get Loud.”

The narrative arc of the film appears to have set the pattern for the campaign’s summit presentations.

It begins by listing the crises that met the Obama administration on inauguration day in 2009 and then underlines the series of decisions made by the president to address them. A somber soundtrack thrums as references to disasters from 2009 roll across the screen: the mortgage debacle, the frozen financial markets, the failing Wall Street firms, the skyrocketing national debt, the impending auto-industry collapse and the avalanche of job loss.

Obama Adviser David Axelrod stares into the camera with weary eyes and drooping mustache and describes his state of mind during a post-election briefing on the economy.

“All I was thinking at that moment was Can we get a recount?”

Students at the summit responded to the film’s opening catalog of horrors with a mix of groans and ironic or exasperated laughs.

Obama for America Policy Director James Kvaal argued that young people should not view the 2012 election as a mere retread of 2008. It’s no less pressing, he said, even if it may seem less historic. He highlighted initiatives taken by the administration over the last four years of particular interest to young people: health care reform, middle class tax breaks and expansions in gay rights, tuition assistance and the renewable energy sector.

“This reelection is different from other reelections,” he said. “We’ve done a lot… but the important thing to remember is that we’re not done. If you compare it to the Bush reelection campaign of 2004, for example, at that point, President Bush had essentially carried out what he had set out to do. We were already engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan and he had cut taxes for the wealthy twice. He didn’t do that much in his second term.

“All of the Republican candidates for president have vowed to roll back the progress we’ve made. There truly is a tremendous amount at stake… There is much left to do.”

Several speakers touched on a theme sure to be repeated often before November when they argued that all of the Republican candidates for president were vowing to repeal or defund laws and programs they disliked but that they offered no alternative plans to take the place of those laws and programs.

“Mitt Romney wants to ‘repeal and replace’ the Affordable Care Act,” said OFA National Operation Vote Director Buffy Wicks. “There are 2.5 million Americans in their twenties who now have access to health insurance through their parents’ plans. That includes 44,000 young Coloradans. Romney is running to take away health insurance from 44,000 Coloradans. What is he offering in exchange?”

“Think of the time and energy Republicans have dedicated to getting rid of Planned Parenthood,” she said later in response to a question on where the candidates stand on women’s issues. “This is something that provides the sharpest contrast– the low-cost preventive care, STD screening, well-women visits [provided by Planned Parenthood]… Again, what are the Republicans offering in exchange?”

Summit attendees interviewed by the Colorado Independent after the event rated it mostly successful.

“It could have been more interactive, less of a lecture format and more focused on action. Practical stuff. What do we do now? What are the next steps?” said Rhiannon Riccillo, a CU senior from Pueblo, who volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008.

“The message was motivating, though… I guess it’s time to get started again. Since 2010, you can really see the Republican agenda. I mean, close Planned Parenthood? End contraception?”

As the Colorado Independent has recently reported, youth-vote analysts have been parsing statistics from the last two presidential elections and watching turnout so far for this year’s Republican primary, and they are concluding that the GOP seems effectively to be writing off the youth vote.

“Are the [Republican] candidates making an effort to get young people to participate? Are they speaking to youth? I see very little of it,” Abby Kiesa, youth coordinator and researcher at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, told the Colorado Independent.

The Obama campaign is clearly keyed in to the ground game mechanics that researchers at the Pew Foundation and scholars like University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket have explored in depth since 2008. Young people didn’t just vote for Obama, according to the researchers, they were also unusually active in his campaign. Nearly 30 percent of young Obama voters said they attended at least one campaign event that year. Those mobilized supporters mobilized more supporters.

In Colorado and the other battleground states, Pew found that young people were contacted in much greater numbers by the Obama campaign than were contacted by the McCain campaign. Battleground youth voters were also more likely to be contacted than were older battleground voters, which Pew reported was a “significant reversal from past patterns.”

In a few key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, Florida and Indiana, the percentage of young voters contacted by the Obama campaign reached up to 50 percent and 60 percent, doubling and tripling McCain campaign efforts and notching some of Obama’s biggest and/or most significant point spreads on Election Night.

The Obama campaign’s “Greater Together” effort is being launched with the guidance of top staffers and it has been underway for months. It has also carved out a major presence at the reelection website.

The campaign for GOP frontrunner Romney by contrast seems to have no staffers dedicated to the youth vote. There is no youth-voter section listed at the campaign website. And the campaign message for young people, according to Kiesa, is centered almost entirely on paying down the national debt.

Messages left with the Romney campaign were not immediately returned.

[ Image: Screen shot from "The Road We've Traveled" ]

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Personhood USA co-founder Keith Mason (Pic via personhoodusa.com)

State lawmakers in Oklahoma this week took up a piece of legislation that would grant “personhood” status to human embryos. The measure, which was passed by the state Senate, advanced through the House Public Health Committee, despite warnings that it could endanger the lives of women.

Oklahoma Senate Bill 1443 would require that the laws of the state be interpreted and construed “to acknowledge on behalf of the unborn child at every stage of development all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”

Though personhood supporters say their aim is to outlaw abortion, critics warn that fetal personhood measures would have a host of unintended consequences and could outlaw birth control, in vitro fertilization and some types of medical research.

An amendment brought by state Rep. Jeannie McDaniel, D-Tulsa, which read, “Nothing in this act would prevent a doctor from terminating a pregnancy to save the life of the mother,” was tabled during yesterday’s committee.

The bill’s House sponsor, state Rep. Lisa Billy, told the committee her bill is simply a “statement of purpose” that recognizes what she said is “the irrefutable scientific fact that life begins at conception.”

At least 22 states–including Colorado–are currently pushing personhood measures.

The Human Rights Campaign on Monday released a chunk of records unsealed by a federal court in Maine, products of NOM’s failed legal challenge against Maine’s campaign finance law. In 2009, NOM sued the state after Maine’s ethics commission attempted to investigate whether or not the organization had violated the state campaign finance law. The investigation was triggered by a complaint (PDF) that political activist Fred Karger filed with the ethics commission, in which he accused NOM of “money laundering.” At the time, Karger suggested that the Stand for Marriage Maine Political Action Committee, the main group trying to repeal a recent marriage equality law, might be a front group for NOM — a way for the national anti-gay-marriage group to help overturn the law while keeping its donors secret.

The new documents help illuminate NOM’s strategy for intervening in anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives at the state level while circumventing campaign finance disclosure laws.

It has been widely reported that NOM President Brian Brown was on the executive committee of Stand for Marriage Maine PAC at the same time that he was heading NOM. Additionally, Stand for Marriage Maine used Schubert Flint Public Affairs, the same campaign public affairs firm used by NOM to support California’s Proposition 8 amendment in 2008.

In these documents, NOM reveals that it planted the seed money that created Stand for Marriage Maine.

In a document NOM produced outlining its “victory strategy” for 2009, NOM talks about how it helped created Stand for Marriage Maine:

NOM has helped create and manage the StandforMarriageMaine.com referendum committee and is pleased to report that we are now close to having the signatures necessary to be on the ballots for the November, 2009 election. Schubert and Flint Public Affairs who managed the successful Proposition 8 campaign is managing the Maine campaign. We are working closely with the Catholic Church and Bishop Malone of Portland. NOM Executive Director Brian Brown serves on the Executive Committee of the Maine Campaign alongside Marc Mutty the Catholic Church’s Director of Public Affairs. The seed money that NOM initially provided has encouraged Bishop Malone to lead the fundraising effort—to date he has raised $150,000 and more than matched our initial funding.

Central to the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics & Election Practices’ investigation into NOM was how much NOM spent on fundraising efforts specifically targeting Maine’s marriage campaign. Based on documents The American Independent reviewed last year, NOM’s argument was that the money it donated to Stand for Marriage Maine — estimated by the ethics commission to be a little under $2 million — came out of NOM’s general fund. In other words, NOM claimed it did not solicit money exclusively to fund the Maine campaign, which would have been in violation of a provision in Maine’s campaign finance laws that states that organizations raising or spending more than $5,000 “for the purpose of initiating or promoting a ballot question” are required to register and to file campaign finance reports as a ballot question committee. (Under Maine law, groups do not have to register with the state if their sole financial activity is making a contribution to a PAC.)

In excerpts from a court deposition from 2010, obtained by TAI, Brown maintains the position that NOM did not fundraise specifically for the Maine campaign. He tells Assistant Attorney General Thomas Knowlton, who is representing Maine ethics commission attorney Walter F. McKee and other defendants, that NOM never formed a PAC in Maine because NOM’s counsel said it was unnecessary.

In his testimony, Brown reveals how involved he was with Stand for Marriage Maine while NOM was helping to fund the campaign. He tells Knowlton that he helped fundraise for the Stand for Marriage Maine executive committee.

“I wore two hats,” Brown says. “I wore the hat of being an executive committee member and so we would encourage folks to give directly to StandforMarriage Maine. … [S]o I did that also, but obviously from the beginning because, you know, NOM had, you know, given a substantial amount to California, we always thought that NOM would give a substantial amount to Maine, but ideally it would be a lesser substantial amount rather than a bigger substantial amount. ”

Brown says that NOM was going to give Stand for Marriage Maine about $1 million and that the PAC had budgeted to raise $3 million. But as gay-marriage-rights advocates began outspending Stand for Marriage Maine, NOM started to kick in more money, Brown explains.

Brown: [U]nlike California, we were greatly out spent in Maine and, therefore, in order to keep up and get our message out, we had to do more — there had to be more money.

Knowlton: How was it that StandforMarriage Maine asked NOM for money? And I say that because you were wearing two hats. You were on the executive committee of StandforMarriage Maine and you were also the executive director of NOM. So how did that happen?

Brown: Well, it happened in a number of ways. Obviously the campaign manager when a campaign is laid out and you have a certain budget, when you’re not meeting that budget, he’s going to say we need to raise more money and then everyone is going to go out and try to raise the money. One of the functions I had was to have — you know, to have NOM give money to StandforMarriage Maine when it was — when it was needed and to also make sure that there was other fundraising going on.

Knowlton: And so as the summer of 2009 progressed, would you discuss during your weekly NOM executive committee phone calls the potential for increasing the amount of money that NOM was going to give to StandforMarriage Maine?

Brown: Yes.

[...]

Knowlton: How was it decided that ultimately NOM would give roughly 1.8 million to StandforMarriage Maine?

Brown: Well, there was complete consensus that this was an important fight and that we should increase what we originally thought we were going to give.

Later in the deposition, Brown tells Knowlton that NOM’s purpose in giving money to the Maine PAC was to help pass the referendum but maintains that NOM did not inappropriately solicit funds.

Knowlton: What was the most important issue in October of 2009 with respect to NOM’s efforts?

Brown: Maine.

Knowlton: So that being the case, isn’t it likely, if not certain, that you would have mentioned the Maine campaign in your solicitations to any donors in September or October of 2009?

Brown: Yeah, we mentioned it with major donors and we also made clear that we don’t accept designated gifts and that any donations we receive would go to our general treasury and it would be up to us to figure out how to spend them.

Knowlton: Okay, but you do agree that you or anyone else from NOM who was asking for money in September or October of 2009 certainly mentioned Question 1, the Maine campaign and how important that was to NOM?

Brown: Well, I don’t know that all of those things were said in each of the conversations. Often, you know, we might not have brought up Maine, the donor himself might have brought up Maine, but in response to any of that we would say that if you want to give directly to the Maine campaign, you can give directly to StandforMarriage Maine. Any donations to NOM are to our general treasury and they’re not designated or earmarked and that any donations to us were going to be put into our general treasury and we would decide where they would go. [...]

Knowlton: That was the most important issue to NOM at that time, correct?

Brown: Correct.

Knowlton: And to NOM’s donors, correct?

Brown: I think some donors were still, you know, quite concerned about the California — the Perry case. So I don’t know that that is necessarily the case. We did not have many donors in Maine, so often many of the donors were focused on California. So I don’t know that that’s correct.

Knowlton: But, Mr. Brown, all the materials that I’ve seen made clear that NOM was trumpeting Maine as a chance to beat back same sex marriage in a blue state.

Brown: Um-hum.

Knowlton: This was a national issue, agreed?

Brown: Agreed.

Knowlton: So it wasn’t just a regional Maine issue?

Brown: No.

Knowlton: So donors who were like-minded to NOM would have great interest, would they not, in promoting Question 1?

Brown: Yes.

Knowlton: In the Maine referendum?

Brown: In general they would.

Phyllis Gardiner, an attorney for the Maine ethics commission who works in Maine’s attorney general’s office, told TAI that the Maine ethics commission’s long-stalled investigation into NOM is scheduled to get back into gear next month. What that investigation reveals is likely to shed even more light on NOM’s involvement in the anti-gay-marriage campaign and why the group has tried so vigorously to conceal its donors.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo (Pic by Nieve44/La Luz, via Flickr)

This past Friday, a judge ruled in favor of the Obama administration in a legal challenge filed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over the religious group’s loss of federal funding.

Late last year, the Bishops lost millions of federal dollars for their relief program for victims of human trafficking. They lost the funds because they refused to refer victims for contraceptives or abortion. Three other groups were awarded the grants instead. Following the loss, the group filed legal action.

Mother Jones reports today, however, that the Obama administration did not “impose its views on contraception and abortion through its control of taxpayer dollars,” which is what the Bishops were alleging in their complaint.

According to Jones:

On Friday, a federal judge in Massachusetts essentially validated the Obama administration’s position, ruling in favor of the ACLU in the lawsuit over the contract. Even though the bishops no longer have the contract, they had joined with the ACLU in asking the judge to rule in the case to settle the constitutional issues. US District Judge Richard Stearns explained why the bishops were in the wrong. He wrote:

To insist that the government respect the separation of church and state is not to discriminate against religion; indeed, it promotes a respect for religion by refusing to single out any creed for official favor at the expense of all others….This case is about the limits of the government’s ability to delegate to a religious institution the right to use taxpayer money to impose its beliefs on others (who may or may not share them).

Stearns also cited an earlier Supreme Court ruling that found that the Framers “did not set up a system of government in which important, discretionary governmental powers would be delegated to or shared with religious institutions.” The judge’s ruling is potentially a big one: It calls into question the entire basis of the federal faith-based contracting initiative, implemented by George W. Bush, which gave tremendous power to groups like USCCB over taxpayer dollars. Stearns found, in fact, that it was USCCB that was making the decisions about how the federal anti-trafficking law should be administered—a job that properly rests with the government, not the church.

For years, Catholic groups have asked to be exempt from federal mandates that non-religious groups have to follow, particularly when it comes to birth control and abortion services. They are only asked to these follow mandates when they receive taxpayer funding. Throughout most of this time, powerful groups such as the Conference of Bishops have won their fights for exclusion — but lately the feds are reconsidering some programs.

The bishops have become well known for using their political power to roll back important protections and legal rights, mostly in the realm of reproductive rights. The Bishops have been described as a “group of men with no real background in law or medicine, but blessed with a strong personal interest in women’s bodies [who] have quietly influenced all of the major anti-abortion legislation over the past several years. “

Pic by Ceridwn, via Wikimedia Commons

Last week, doctors and reproductive rights advocates announced that they will lobby the FDA to include birth control in a list of drugs that can be offered without prescriptions.

Bloomberg reported:

The agency discussed at a hearing [last week] whether cholesterol, asthma, migraine and blood-pressure medications should be sold over-the-counter, a regulatory change intended to lower costs and ease access to drugs for people with chronic ailments. Reproductive-rights advocates today urged that any expansion of nonprescription drugs include birth control.

…

The FDA began its two-day public hearing yesterday to discuss way to enhance pharmacists’ roles in chronic treatments or supplement drug labels in an interactive way that helps people determine whether they have a condition and need a drug, said Janet Woodcock, director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. The agency hasn’t taken a position on oral contraception.

Last December, the federal government struck down the FDA’s effort to expand access to the morning after pill, or Plan B, without prescriptions. Plan B is a form of emergency contraception that has caused controversy among anti-abortion activists who believe taking the drug is similar to having an abortion.

The morning after pill is currently available without a prescription to any woman 17 or older with a photo ID. Anyone younger than 17 needs a prescription. Reproductive rights advocates have long warned that the restriction creates a longer wait time that is ill-advised for any woman seeking emergency contraception.

After the federal government’s intervention in that decision, women’s health advocates sent a petition to the Obama administration denouncing the move.

Groups have long lobbied for the FDA to allow women to obtain birth control without a prescription.