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Hartzler

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10/08/2024

by

Kyle Mantyla

Former Rep. Vicky Hartzler is angry that students are being taught meditation, yoga, and mindfulness in schools to deal with mental health issues because those are based on Buddhism and Hinduism: "They should tell them that Jesus loves them."

ctr-attack on gay marriage:  religious rights/freedom [hobby lobby]

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-christian-legal-army-behind-masterpiece-cakeshop/

The Christian Legal Army Behind ‘Masterpiece Cakeshop’
A special investigation into the rise of Alliance Defending Freedom.
By Sarah Posner

September,Representative Vicky Hartzler, a Missouri Republican, held a press conference with four of her congressional colleagues to announce their support for Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker. The conservative Christian and “cake artist” had been found in violation of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law when he refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Phillips is now the plaintiff in one of the most closely watched cases on the Supreme Court’s docket this term, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. Additional research by Eli Clifton, Queen Arsem-O’Malley, Evan Malmgren, and Jake Bittle.

Hartzler had just spent a good part of her summer pressing for a ban on transgender people in the military because she believes they constitute a “domestic threat.” She was one of 86 Republican lawmakers who had just signed onto an amicus brief supporting Phillips’s novel claim that baking and decorating a wedding cake is constitutionally protected artistic expression. Phillips has also argued that he should not be required to deploy his creative talents on behalf of a same-sex couple, because doing so would violate his religious beliefs.

“A government that tells you what you must say and what you must do, and punishes you if you don’t, is frightening,” Hartzler said. “That kind of state power should scare all of us.”

...

Although Ike Skelton, the long-time representative in Missouri’s fourth congressional district, was far from a supporter of LGBT equality, Vicky Hartzler, the Republican who defeated him in this year’s election, hasbased her political career on supporting discrimination against gays and lesbians.

A former state legislator, she was the spokeswomanand public face of the Coalition to Protect Marriage in Missouri, which successfully amended the state Constitution to include a ban same-sex marriage (which was already banned by statute) in 2004. The New York Times writes that her group used “church functions, yard signs and a ‘marriage chain’ of rallies across the state,” and Hartzler “said she hoped that the outcome would send a loud message to the rest of the country: ‘Here in the heartland we have a heart for families, and this is how deeply we feel about marriage.'”

Her work helped her receive praise from Religious Right leaders like Mike Huckabee, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, andPenny Nanceof Concerned Women PAC.

Mother Jones positedthat Hartzler might be the “most anti-gay candidate in America”– she believes that repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell will “put us at risk,” maintains that sexual orientation is a choice and therefore gay people aren’t entitled to civil rights, and dubbed hate crimes legislation one of the “the extreme agenda items of the gay movement.”

Paul Guequierre of the Human Rights Campaign told Mother Jones that while “Ike Skelton has not been a friend of the LGBT community,” unlike Hartzler, “he does not wake up in the morning thinking about what he can do to harm the LGBT community.”

A staunch anti-choice activist, Hartzler supported legislation which “would have allowed for prosecutors to charge women who obtained late-term abortions with murder” and “also have permitted second-degree murder charges to be filed against doctors who performed such procedures.” She was also the chief sponsor of a billthat would pressure women seeking an abortion to view their sonograms. Throughout her career in the State House, she consistently receivedperfect ratings from the right-wingMissouri Family Network.

Hartzler wrote a book for Christian activists running for office called “Running God’s Way: Step by Step to a Successful Political Campaign,” which “discusseshow to run a political campaign by using events and stories in the Bible as a guide.” Phyllis Schlafly gave her alaudatory introduction at an Eagle Forum event, calling her book “a manual for action.”

In a profileby the American Family Association, Hartzler said that she found inspiration from God to run for public office at the age of nine, and her book maintains that “Christians must become more active in politics if they are to have the impact God calls them to have.” Hartzler said that her book provides Christian candidates with “the tools and inspiration they need to bring God’s light in a darkening world.”

According to one sympathetic reviewin a local newspaper, Hartzler’s book “praises Absalom — a rebellious son of King David, God’s anointed leader for Israel and according to Christian theology an early example of divinely ordained rule prefiguring that of Jesus Christ — as being the ‘first politician’ and an example for modern political leaders. In Hartzler’s words, ‘Absalom won over the hearts of the people of Israel using time-tested campaign strategies. We, too, can campaign successfully following these same guidelines.'”

A climate change denier, Hartzler assertedthat she does not believe in climate change since she read “some articles that [said] it’s actually decreasing, that we have climates getting colder…and certainly, I don’t believe that if there is a climate change that man has a very significant role in that.”

Hartzler ran an uglyanti-immigrant adagainst Ike Skelton, in which she claimed that by voting to reauthorizethe Children’s Health Insurance Program Skelton supported “welfare benefits” for “illegal immigrants,” and criticized him for opposing a measure that would prohibit illegal immigrants from attending public schools as “giving illegal immigrants free education.”

She appealed to Tea Partiers by slamming government spending, as she blastedCongress’s spending plans and said that “we just want the government to leave us alone here in Missouri’s 4th.” However, according to the Kansas City Star, Hartzler’s“farm has received $774,325 in federal subsidies from 1995 to 2009.” She defended the government farm subsidies as a “national defense issue,” and claimed that she would not support cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or defense.

In an editorial board interview, she couldn’t name any programs she would cut funding to other than “the Lady Bird Highway Beautification projects. She indicated that garden clubs could do some of this work along the highways, saving public funds.”

However, Hartzler does appear to support spending money to expand the role of the Navy in Missouri– she arguedthat under Skelton’s watch the landlocked state has “the smallest Navy here that we have had since the early 1960s.”

Hartzler blended her Tea Party lip service and Religious Right advocacy to topple one of the most powerful members of the House, and will now bring her years of experience in anti-equality and anti-choice activism to become a prominent voice of the Far Right in the GOP-led House.

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ALEC Alumni in Congress include[1][2]:

Former ALEC Alumni in Congress include Former Assistant Minority Leader Don Nickles, Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Former Deputy Majority Whip and subject of the 2006 page scandal, Mark Foley.[3]

References

  1. ↑ American Legislative Exchange Council, "Senate," organization website, accessed April 18th, 2012
  2. ↑ American Legislative Exchange Council, "House of Representatives," organization website, accessed April 18th, 2012
  3. ↑ American Legislative Exchange Council, 2001 Annual Report, organizational report, 2002
This article is a stub. You can help by expanding it.

This is a list of groups or individuals associated in some capacity with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

small words

7. Vicky Hartzler, R-MO: Like many Tea Party Republicans, Hartzler has expressed doubts about Obama’s citizenship. When questioned about the birth certificate the president released she said, “You know, I have a lot of doubts about all that. But I don’t know, I haven’t seen it.” She also opposes same-sex marriage with the old slippery slope argument that associates it with polygamy and pedophilia. She asks, “Why not allow one man and two women or three women to marry? [...] Why not allow a 50-year-old man to marry a 12-year-old girl if they love each other and they are committed?”