PRESSURE WORKS: Abercrombie and Fitch has stopped selling its "Christmas Field Guide" full of pornographic photos well before the end of the Christmas shopping season, though it claimed this was not in response to boycotts. But when Anne Morse called company headquarters, she obtained some interesting information. "CEO Mike Jeffries and his staff were not available, but an employee who gave his name as 'Brennan' said the company had been, over the last two weeks, received [sic] 300 calls per hour from people announcing they were boycotting A&F stores until the clothier stopped selling the quarterly. . .," she wrote on National Review Online on December 1. "Who was behind the boycotts? 'Ever hear of Dr. Dobson?' Brennan asked." Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family was one of the leaders of the boycott.
LIEBERMAN GOES GAY: . . .gay marriage rights, that is. The Democrats' most conservative presidential candidate and professed Orthodox Jew, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D.-Conn.), is still opposed to protecting millennia of marriage law despite the Massachusetts supreme court's ruling forcing same-sex marriage on the state-and possibly on the nation, if the U.S. Supreme Court rules that other states must recognize all "marriages" performed in Massachusetts. "Although I am opposed to gay marriage, I have also long believed that states have the right to adopt for themselves laws that allow same-sex unions," Lieberman said in a statement after the ruling. "I will oppose any attempts by the right wing to change the Constitution in response to today's ruling, which would be unnecessary and divisive."
GEPHARDT'S CLAIM: Rep. Dick Gephardt (D.-Mo.) is distinguishing himself from the rest of the Democratic presidential field by emphasizing his anti-free trade credentials. "I am the only candidate in this race who voted against NAFTA," Gephardt told a South Carolina audience last month on the tenth anniversary of House passage of the agreement. "Senators Kerry and Lieberman both voted for NAFTA and Gov. Dean supported NAFTA, fast track, and permanent trade relations with China. Senators Kerry, Lieberman, and Edwards all voted for the recent China trade deal that has sent thousands of South Carolina textile jobs overseas. All of my opponents are now saying that if elected President, they would never support a trade agreement that jeopardized American workers, but where were they when American workers really needed their support?" Gephardt also supports having the World Trade Organization set an international minimum wage. "The creation of such a wage would guarantee that workers all over the world earn a livable wage," says his campaign website. "It also would keep U.S. workers competitive in the global marketplace. Countries could offset lower wages with trade concessions, and more developed nations would share in the burden facing less developed nations."
HERE IT COMES: Based on the logic of the Lawrence v. Texas U.S. Supreme Court decision that "legalized" sodomy nationwide and the Massachusetts gay "marriage" finding, how many legal scholars are wondering if polygamy and incest can continue to be held illegal? A Utah polygamist thinks not. The Associated Press explained on December 2 "that the lawyer for a Utah man with five wives is arguing that his bigamy convictions should be thrown out because of the Texas sodomy law ruling that what gay men and women do in the privacy of their homes is no business of government. It's no different for polygamists, argued attorney John Bucher to the Utah Supreme Court." Utah prosecutes polygamy, which has been repudiated by the Mormon church but is still practiced by Mormon splinter groups.
GETTING NASTY: Censorship didn't work, so now officials at Texas A&M are trying something else to stop conservative students from making their points. Bill Byrne, the university's athletics director, suggested that the school's sacrosanct sports program could suffer as a result of conservatives' activities. "I'm disappointed over the national attention that Texas A&M University received recently because of a few individuals and their idea of a protest," wrote Byrne on the university website. He claimed that recruiting for A&M's sports teams could now suffer. He was referring to a bake sale put on by the Young Conservatives of Texas that was based on the principles of so-called affirmative action: White men were charged more for brownies than minorities and women, etc.
