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Policy reforms ‘demoralizing’ teaching profession, scholar argues

A provocative new article in the American Journal of Education argues that many teachers in the age of rigid curricula, high-stakes testing, and reduced classroom autonomy are finding it difficult to access the “moral rewards” of their profession. This demoralization of teaching threatens to drive away even the most passionate and dedicated of teachers.

“The moral rewards of teaching are activated when educators feel that they are doing what is right in terms of one’s students, the teaching profession, and themselves,” writes Doris Santoro, a professor of education at Bowdoin College. But, she argues, current policy reforms often take away a teacher’s ability to be responsive to students’ needs, and blunt the sense that a teacher is doing what is right for students. This in turn leads to feelings of frustration and hopelessness that are too often misdiagnosed as “teacher burnout.”

“However, the burnout explanation fails to account for situations where the conditions of teaching change so dramatically that moral rewards, previously available in ever-challenging work, are now inaccessible,” Santoro writes. “In this instance, the phenomenon is better termed demoralization.”

To illustrate her point, Santoro describes the experience of Stephanie, a teacher Santoro interviewed in 2008 for a project on why once-passionate teachers decide to leave the profession.

Stephanie taught at a diverse elementary school in Virginia she felt was “a collaborative, respectful environment that enjoyed a cooperative relationship with parents and the community,” Santoro writes. “Stephanie felt as though she was able to exercise her professional judgment and engage in good teaching … and students, while underprepared, were eager to learn.”

Stephanie drew moral rewards from her freedom to respond to her students’ needs. For example, she told Santoro how she relished finding innovative ways to help her students understand scientific and mathematical terminology in her Spanish-language immersion classes. But Stephanie’s sense of having the authority to do good work for her students was ultimately undermined by a new set of statewide curriculum standards adopted in Virginia. The reforms prioritized testing over “real teaching,” Stephanie lamented. She came to see herself as not a teacher but as a dictator of facts.

“What had been hallmarks of good teaching for Stephanie – connecting student learning with their experiences, helping them learn to think in ways that will transfer to success in higher-order analysis and their everyday needs, and maintaining creativity in her work and her students’ problem-solving – was being jettisoned by the exigencies of passing the test” and satisfying state standards, Santoro writes. “The moral rewards that she enjoyed previously by learning about her students’ needs, finding new ways to reach them, and connecting learning to concerns beyond the school became stunted by mandated curriculum and scripted lessons.”

Stephanie ultimately decided that, “This is not what I signed up for,” and left the profession.

What happened to Stephanie is not burnout, Santoro argues. Burnout indicates a personal failing on the part of a teacher – an inability to cope with the stresses inherent in the work, or an exhaustion of the personal resources needed to do the job. Stephanie’s case was not one of personal failing. Rather it was a case in which the profession itself changed in a way that nullified the moral rewards of doing good work.

“Policy makers, educational leaders, and teachers need to find ways to promote, protect, and assess quality teaching that takes into account good teaching and successful (or effective) teaching,” she writes. “Attracting practitioners with the moral significance of the work, while at the same time eliminating the moral dimension of the practice in assessing teacher quality, is a recipe for demoralization.”

Doris A. Santoro, “Good Teaching in Difficult Times: Demoralization in the Pursuit of Good Work.” American Journal of Education 118:1 (November 2011)

Founded as School Review in 1893, the American Journal of Education acquired its present name in November 1979. The journal seeks to bridge and integrate the intellectual, methodological, and substantive diversity of educational scholarship, and to encourage a vigorous dialogue between educational scholars and practitioners. To achieve that goal, papers are published that present research, theoretical statements, philosophical arguments, critical syntheses of a field of educational inquiry, and integrations of educational scholarship, policy, and practice.

Contact: Kevin Stacey
kstacey@press.uchicago.edu
401-284-3878
University of Chicago Press Journals

Creating markets to pay for public good offer promise, peril

Over the past 50 years, 60 percent of all ecosystem services have declined as a direct result of the conversion of land to the production of foods, fuels and fibers.

“This should come as no surprise,” say seven of the world’s leading environmental scientists, who met to collectively to study the pitfalls of utilizing markets to induce people to take account of the environmental costs of their behavior and solutions. “We are getting what we pay for.”

Their report, “Paying for Ecosystems Service: Promise and Peril,” was published in the Nov. 4 issue of the journal Science.

Society pays for the products of agriculture, aquaculture and forestry, and has developed well-functioning markets for these products, these experts say. However, markets for important ecosystem services such as watershed protection, habitat provision, pest and disease regulation, climate regulation and storm buffering are nearly nonexistent.

“The problem is that many ecosystem services are public goods,” says Ann Kinzig, lead author, professor in Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences and chief research strategist with ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability. “Some lie outside the control of any one government, and the science for others is still only poorly understood. There is no one-size payment mechanism that fits all cases.”

However, bad payments mechanisms can be worse than no payment mechanisms at all, the study’s authors warn, pointing to the lessons learned from four decades of agricultural subsidies. Subsidies encouraged the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, two of the main reasons for the growing number of dead zones in the world’s oceans.

A similar lesson can be found in the first generation of cap-and-trade systems, they say. The first U.S. markets for sulfur dioxide emission rights collapsed because of faulty design: They failed to take into account the interactions between multiple pollutants across state boundaries.

The scientists’ report is timely given the growing enthusiasm for the use of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes that allow governments and non-governmental organizations to pay for environmental public goods. For example, carbon sequestration is being paid for through the United Nations’ Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries or REDD scheme. The scheme pays countries to not cut down their forests, which in turn puts the breaks on loss of biodiversity, in addition to curbing carbon emissions.

Many existing schemes fall short, the scientists find.

• Some schemes ignore uncertainties in the science.
• Some generate markets that are too “thin” (involve too few trades) for prices to track environmental conditions.
• Some focus on one service only, creating perverse incentives for other services.
• Many channel income support to particular groups of landholders, rather than signaling the scarcity of ecosystem services.

The authors note too that while ecosystem services that are produced on private lands can benefit from carefully designed payment schemes, many ecosystem services are produced on public lands or seas, or on land and sea areas beyond national jurisdiction.

For such services, different measures of the importance of ecosystem services are needed, they say. The scientists assert that governments need to generate measures that have the same form and status as the measures used to reckon such things as the Gross National Product (GNP). These measures should track changes in the value of publicly owned environmental assets in the same way that society currently tracks changes in the value of buildings, financial stocks or infrastructure.

“Paying for what we need demands that we understand what we collectively lose when we allow the world’s ecosystems to degrade,” say the authors. “To pay for the services we want, we need to know how much they are worth, how they are produced and by whom. Then we need to design payment mechanisms that will work. Our study indicates how.” The study’s authors include Kinzig, Charles Perrings, Terry Chapin III, Steve Polasky, Dave Tilman, V. Kerry Smith and B.L. Turner II, experts in economics, business, urban planning and ecology at Arizona State University, University of Alaska and University of Minnesota. The study was supported by the Global Land Project of the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme and the International Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Programme, both part of the International Council of Science.

Contact: Margaret Coulombe
margaret.coulombe@asu.edu
480-727-8934
Arizona State University

Experts challenge government on special needs reforms

Academics, activists, young people, parents and carers will debate government plans to involve parents in the assessment process and introduce a legal right to give them control over funding for their child’s support. The proposals, which are laid out in a Green Paper published in March 2011, claim to give parents a greater choice of schools, along with the power to set up special free schools in their communities.

The proposed changes would fulfil a promise by the coalition government to ‘prevent the unnecessary closure of special schools, and remove the bias towards inclusion’. But event organiser Professor Dan Goodley, at Manchester Metropolitan University, argues that such measures would lead to the greater isolation of disabled children.

“There never has been a bias towards inclusion,” he said. “Disabled children are already more likely to face isolation and unfair treatment, and we know that disabled children are currently more likely than their non-disabled peers to be excluded from mainstream school, and to be set apart in their communities.”

“Our big fear is that more and more disabled kids will be taken out of mainstream schools and put into special schools,” he added. “We could end up with disabled kids being pushed even further away from their communities than they are now.”

Professor Goodley and colleague Dr Katherine Runswick-Cole are drawing on previous research funded by the ESRC called ‘Does every child matter, post Blair?’ The project’s findings show that disabled children and their families continue to suffer exclusions in their day-to-day lives in schools, hospitals, social care and in their leisure activities.

The research also found that narrowing definitions of what represents a ‘normal’ childhood are helping to create increased discrimination and belittlement for disabled children. Expectations for disabled children are low and, despite recent changes in policy and practice, many children are still being denied the opportunity to fulfil their potential.

The debate comes as the government embarks on a period of testing its proposals in local areas from September 2011. The Department for Education plans to set out detailed plans to implement the reforms by the end of the year.

“There are no easy answers, but time is right to debate inclusion,” said Professor Goodley.

For further information contact
Professor Dan Godley
Email: d.goodley@mmu.ac.uk
Telephone: 0161 247 2526

ESRC Press Office:

Danielle Moore
Email: danielle.moore@esrc.ac.uk
Telephone 01793 413122
Jeanine Woolley
Email: jeanine.woolley@esrc.ac.uk
Telephone 01793 413119

Notes for editors:

1. Time to end the bias towards inclusive education?
Organiser: Professor Dan Goodley, Manchester Metropolitan University
Date: 5 November 2011 14.00-16.00
Venue: Museum of Science and Industry, Liverpool Road, Manchester
Audience: Suitable for parents/carers, practitioners, academics and representatives from charities and disabled people’s organisations
For more information: Time to end the bias towards inclusive education?

2. This release refers to the findings from from ‘Does every child matter, post Blair? The interconnections of disabled childhoods’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and carried out by Professor of Psychology and Disability Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. The research examined the effects of the Every Child Matters agenda on disabled children aged 4 to 16 and their families. For more details please visit the project website: post-blair.posterous.com

3. The project involved interviews with disabled children and parents and professionals, along with eighteen months’ observation of families and practitioners as users of health, education and leisure services.

4. The Festival of Social Science is run by the Economic and Social Research Council which runs from 29 October to 5 November 2011. With events from some of the country’s leading social scientists, the Festival celebrates the very best of British social science research and how it influences our social, economic and political lives – both now and in the future. This year’s Festival of Social Science has over 130 creative and exciting events aimed at encouraging businesses, charities, government agencies; and schools or college students to discuss, discover and debate topical social science issues. Press releases detailing some of the varied events are available at the Festival website. You can now follow updates from the Festival on twitter using #esrcfestival

5. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK’s largest organisation for funding research on economic and social issues. It supports independent, high quality research which has an impact on business, the public sector and the third sector. The ESRC’s total budget for 2011/12 is £203 million. At any one time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and independent research institutes. More at www.esrc.ac.uk

Contact: Press Office
Pressoffice@esrc.ac.uk
Economic & Social Research Council

Hiring foreign talent has a positive impact on the national workforce

Researchers at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid are participating in a study that has determined that when high quality players from foreign countries are drafted to play on sports teams within a determined country, there is an improvement in the performance of that country’s national team.

This research attempts to analyze the impact caused by the liberalization of the labor market in the world of sports brought about by the Bosman Rule. Specifically, the scientists have evaluated the repercussions that the large influx of foreign players caused on national competitions and on the performance of national teams. “This liberalization process has stimulated domestic competition and improved the performance of the national teams that play in national leagues more open to the entrance of foreigners”, declares one of the researchers, Juan de Dios Tena, of the UC3M Statistics Department.

This conclusion contradicts the popular cliché that claims that a huge influx of foreign players to a football league is harmful to the national team. “It’s funny that we (Spain) won the World Cup precisely when the number of foreign football players in the Spanish league increased so dramatically, because up until now, nobody had mentioned the fact that the foreign players could have a positive impact on the national players’ training”, comments Professor Tena. “Science – he adds – offers analytic explanations for facts that doesn’t always support popular beliefs”.

This work, recently published in the journal Labour Economics, was carried out by the Sports Economics research group, whose members are Professor David Forrest, of Salford University (England), Ismael Sanz, of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (King Juan Carlos University), and Jaime Álvarez, of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. The general objective of this group, which also includes Ramón Flores, of UC3M’s Statistics Department, is to use sports economics as an experimental field in which to study questions of interest to society, such as the impact of globalization on industry competitiveness. “The great advantage of sports economics is that, unlike other areas of economics, the impact of policy actions can be clearly observed in the results of competitions”, the researchers explain.

Important in creative industries

The results of the study can be extrapolated to other industries in which creativity is important, according to the researchers. That is, local workers can benefit, in terms of skills and ability, from contact with new techniques and practices that foreign “drafts” use. “We have shown – Professor Tena concludes – that the liberalization of the labor market in creative industries improves and stimulates internal competition and industry performance at the national level”.

In carrying out the study, the scientists used statistical analysis and econometric tools to compare the competitive sports balance before and after the enactment of the Bosman Rule. In addition, they examined the results of nearly fifty national basketball teams over a period of more than twenty years, taking into account the number of foreign players in their domestic matches and controlling the impact of other factors, such as the power of the clubs, countries, etc. In this way, they have managed to demonstrate, as the study shows, that an increase in the number of foreigners in a national league tends to generate a subsequent improvement in the national team’s performance, although that team is made up of only domestic players.

Contact: Ana Herrera
oic@uc3m.es
Carlos III University of Madrid
This release is available in Spanish.

Tobacco companies use corporate social responsibility for political purposes

Corporations may use corporate social responsibility programmes not only to improve their public image, but also to gain access to politicians, influence agendas, and shape public health policy to best suit their own interests. In a research article led by Gary Fooks from the University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group in the UK and published in this week’s PLoS Medicine, these programmes are revealed as “an innovative form of corporate political activity”.

The authors document the persistent efforts of British American Tobacco (BAT, the world’s second largest publicly traded tobacco company, which has won several awards for its social and environmental programmes) to re-establish access with the UK Department of Health, following the Government’s decision to restrict contact with major tobacco companies.

In a detailed case study that involved searching BAT documents made publicly available as a result of litigation in the US (for the period, 1998-2000), the authors illustrate how the company used its corporate social responsibility programme in its dialogue with policymakers to influence the priorities of public and elected officials in the UK, encourage them to take notice of proposals that best suited the company (for example, to make regulation voluntary), and to revise the Government’s concerns about whether the industry could be trusted to work in partnership.

The authors document examples of correspondence from Martin Broughton (BAT’s chair between 1998 and 2004) and notes from meeting with politicians, including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, to show how BAT was able to link its preferred policies to political and societal values, such as harm reduction, child health, and cooperation between business and government.

The authors argue that their findings underline the need for broad implementation of Article 5.3 of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (an international treaty that aims to reduce the harm associated with tobacco use) which aims to protect public-health policies on tobacco control from tobacco industry influence. Successful implementation will require measures to ensure transparency in all interactions between all parts of government and the tobacco industry and to increase awareness across government of what tobacco companies hope to achieve through corporate social responsibility, report the authors.

The authors say: “our case study underlines the value of understanding BAT’s [corporate social responsibility programme] as an innovative form of corporate political activity. This approach to conceptualising [corporate social responsibility] has potentially important implications for public health given the widely documented impact of tobacco companies’ political activity in delaying and blocking health related policies. ”

They continue: “More generally, it is likely to be relevant to understanding the impact of [corporate social responsibility] in other industrial sectors, such as alcohol and food, where corporate social responsibility also seems to have been used to shape government policy.”

The authors add: “we suggest that our findings – and the absence of strong evidence suggesting that co-regulation is capable of aligning the business models of big food and drinks companies with the demands of public health – suggest that the role of corporate social responsibility in the [UK Government's Public Health Responsibility] Deal needs to be subjected to closer scrutiny.”

Citation: Fooks GJ, Gilmore AB, Smith KE, Collin J, Holden C, et al. (2011) Corporate Social Responsibility and Access to Policy Élites: An Analysis of Tobacco Industry Documents. PLoS Med 8(8): e1001076. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001076

Funding: GJF and CH are supported by the National Cancer Institute of the United States National Institutes of Health (grant number: 2 R01 CA091021-05). ABG is funded by a Health Foundation Clinician Scientist Fellowship (Developing and evaluating policies to reduce tobacco use and harm in the UK, November 2006-2011). During manuscript preparation KES was supported by the Smoke Free Partnership (SFP) through a CR-UK grant (CR-UK is one of the SFP partners [www.cancerresearchuk.org]), the others being the European Respiratory Society (ERS at www.ersnet.org), and the Institut National du Cancer (INCa at www.e-cancer.fr). JC receives research funding for tobacco document research from the NCI of the US NIH (grant number: 2 R01 CA091021-05). The funders had no influence on the research design, data collection, data interpretation or the writing of this article.

Competing Interests: JC and ABG were part of a WHO Tobacco Free Initiative (TFI) Expert Committee convened to develop recommendations on how to address tobacco industry interference with tobacco control policy, and as such travel to a meeting in Washington D.C. was reimbursed by WHO TFI. ABG was previously an unpaid Board member of Action on Smoking and Health. KL is on the Editorial Board of PLoS Medicine.

IN YOUR COVERAGE PLEASE USE THIS URL TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE FREELY AVAILABLE PAPER:

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001076

CONTACT:
Katharine Barker
Press and Publications Officer
University of Bath 01225 386319 07966 341431
K.Barker@bath.ac.uk

Notes:

1. This work was funded by the US National Cancer Institute (at the National Institutes of Health).

2. The University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group is part of the UK Centre of Tobacco Control Studies (UKCTS) a network of nine universities in the UK working in the field of tobacco control.

Contact: Clare Weaver
press@plos.org
44-122-344-2834
Public Library of Science

Stock markets can regulate themselves

A look at the history of the markets offers an insight into the effects of regulation on the success of initial public offerings

Whenever crisis threatens the financial markets, voices are loud in calling for greater control. It is dubious, however, whether tighter regulation would actually offer investors better protection against losing their capital. “Economic history shows us that strictly regulated stock markets do not necessarily function better than those that are given a free hand,” says historian and economist Carsten Burhop of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn.

Based on selected sample cases, he and two British colleagues, economist David Chambers and legal expert Brian Cheffins, have studied and compared the success of initial public offerings on the Berlin stock market and two subsections of the London stock exchange between 1900 and 1913. “We were interested in seeing whether detailed statutory regulation is a necessary precondition for successful trading in initial public offerings. The parameters we chose by which to judge success were survival rates, returns and fluctuations subsequent to flotation,” as Carsten Burhop explains their approach.

In choosing the Berlin exchange, they picked a prime example of a strictly regulated market. “Following the company and securities law reforms of 1884 and 1896, public share offerings were substantially more tightly regulated and the protection afforded to external investors greatly increased.” In comparison with Prussian market bureaucracy, the attitude in both sectors of the London Stock Exchange at the start of the 20th Century was distinctly laissez faire. The state largely kept its distance from affairs on the London markets. There was virtually no legislation governing share issues, and even company law offered little in the way of direct protection for small investors. “As a result the merchants who ran the London Stock Exchange were left to decide for themselves which initial public offerings were admitted to the market,” Burhop adds. In addition to the main market for officially quoted companies, there was a second segment in which initial public offerings were traded over the counter in an even more liberal manner.

In comparison with the Berlin stock exchange, the researchers found that over the same period of time there were substantially more initial public offerings on the London markets, covering a far broader range of industries. On the other hand, stocks traded over the counter in London proved to be an extremely risky venture for investors. “Failures were regular events between 1900 and 1913,” they observed. “19 percent of companies went bankrupt within the first five years.” Whereas on the Berlin stock exchange that was heavily regulated on Prussian principles, failures were exceptional occurrences. “They amounted to less than one percent,” says Burhop. Taken on its own, the official market at the London Stock Exchange was not far behind with failure rates of three to four percent. Measured by their development over an extended period, London stocks actually performed better than their Berlin counterparts, since the average returns in London were higher than in Berlin – that is when one considers that in the faster growing German economy, share prices generally climbed more steeply. In Berlin, on the other hand, prices were more stable.

“Our findings show that a stock market cannot function entirely without rules,” Burhop concludes. However, measures designed to provide investor security would appear in the long term to be bad for business. Similarly, the development in officially quoted securities on the London stock exchange has shown that markets are well able to control themselves, the researchers believe. “On the basis of our study, it is relatively unimportant whether control is exerted by statute and by a state commissioner as in Berlin, or by knowledgeable merchants as on one of the two London market segments.”

Preprint of the original publication:
Carsten Burhop, David Chambers, Brian Cheffins
Is Regulation Essential to Stock Market Development? Going Public in London and Berlin, 1900-1913

Link: http://www.coll.mpg.de/?q=node/2696

Contact: Dr. Carsten Burhop
burhop@coll.mpg.de
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

FDA should invest in developing a new regulatory framework to replace flawed 510(k) medical device clearance process

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration should gather the information needed to develop a new regulatory framework to replace the 35-year-old 510(k) clearance process for medical devices, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. The 510(k) process lacks the legal basis to be a reliable premarket screen of the safety and effectiveness of moderate-risk Class II devices and cannot be transformed into one, concluded the committee that wrote the report.

FDA’s finite resources would be better invested in developing a new framework that uses both premarket clearance and improved postmarket surveillance of device performance to provide reasonable assurance of the safety and effectiveness of Class II devices throughout the duration of their use, the committee said. The agency should also ensure that the new process allows devices to reach the market in as rapid and least burdensome a fashion as possible. Read more

Donald Trump: It’s the Media’s Fault I’m a Birther Nut (Video)

(ChattahBox Political News)—Donald Trump is full of it. He penned an op/ed in USA Today this morning blaming his birtherism on the media. He indicated that he was done talking about the racist conspiracy theory that seeks to delegitimatize President Obama, our first African-American president. But of course, he still perpetuated it, by suggesting President Obama is hiding a deep dark secret from the American people. “Only Obama is in a position to put to rest this long overdue and controversial issue. If there is nothing to hide, come clean,” wrote Trump. Still, Trump said “I have spoken my piece on this issue.” One, two, three. Well, that didn’t last long, As Talking Points Memo writes, “Just this morning in fact — as his USA Today op-ed was hitting the carpet outside hotel room doors everywhere,” The Donald appeared on CNN to spew more of the same birther nonsense about Obama’s place of birth. “I don’t know why he doesn’t just show his birth certificate,” said Trump. When pressed on his “ludicrous” birther conspiracy theory, Trump became combative and scolded the CNN hosts for bringing up the issue. Read more

Republicans’ Lunatic Tea Party Problem: They’re ‘Crazy’ (Video)

(ChattahBox Political News)—Carny huckster, birther and reality TV star Donald Trump is now the voice of the GOP. It’s no secret that the Republican Party has gone off the rails. The influence of the radical tea party and a renewed embrace of the paranoid conspiratorial beliefs of the John Birch Society, made new again by Fox News’ Glenn Beck, has spawned new labels for the many categories of 21st century Republican lunatics. Tenthers, birthers, deathers, tea-baggers, Glenn-Beckians. But really, they are the same bigoted far right-wing Birchers promoting the same tired anti-Semitic, Illuminati and New World Order conspiracy theories that nearly destroyed the GOP decades ago.

They’re baaaaack! The last few years, Republican lawmakers have mainstreamed the crazies, and now they are paying the price. Good. You reap what you sow. But with the 2012 presidential election right around the corner, the GOP establishment is trying to distance themselves from the fringe crazies, especially the birthers. It’s too late. A new YouTube video showing a compilation of interviews with South Carolina tea party members, shows just how far off the right-wing cliff Republicans have gone. Nutjobs. They are all nutjobs. Read more

GOP’s Fav. Hate Group: End Welfare to Blacks ‘Who Rut Like Rabbits’

(ChattahBox Political News)—The Republican right-wing tea party birther base is a boiling cauldron of hate. Hate for gays, hate for liberals, hate for that socialist Kenyan usurper (scary black guy) in the White House, hate for Muslims and anyone else who doesn’t look and think like them. Republican presidential contenders, hoping to tap into some of that ugly hate vote, know where to go. Bryan Fischer’s gay-hating and Muslim-hating conservative ‘Christian” radio show. Fischer, a certified bigoted crackpot, who hates gays so much he wants to throw them in jail, and who despises Muslims so much he wants to deport them, is the director of issues analysis for the American Family Association. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently added the AFA to its list of hate groups. Fischer’s latest contribution to the fetid sewer of hate and bigotry that GOPers, such as Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty, can’t seem to get enough of, demonizes poor black families receiving welfare support. According to Fischer, Jesus wouldn’t approve of the current welfare system, because it turns black people into lazy freeloaders “who rut like rabbits.” Every reporter, every media outlet and every Democrat should force the GOP hopefuls to repudiate Fischer’s vile hate, or make them own it. Read more

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