#433: Cathie Adams

Cathie Adams is a homemaker from Dallas, Texas, former chairman of the Republican Party of Texas (unseated in 2010), and long-term Texas President of the Eagle Forum. For several decades Adams has hence been an important opponent of abortion, same-sex marriage, and the United Nations, and a crusader for maintaining aChristian nation.

Given the staple paranoia-fuelled inclination toward hyperbole among Adams’s kind of people, she is naturally opposed to presidentObama’s attempt to carry out a Marxist revolution in the US: “President Barak Hussein Obama has failed America. His vision for our children and grandchildren is bleak because his worldview is Marxist. He wants to ‘fundamentally transform’ the U.S. socially, economically, and environmentally through global government regulations and control. It is his, and his fellow progressives’, utopian dream, rooted in Marx & Engels’ Communist Manifesto.” Note that Adams, five years into Obama’s presidency, still cannot spell his name right (it is not a typo, for the spelling is repeated throughout the rant), though the content of the quote doesn’t indicate a care for accuracy in any other respect either. Obama is also exactly like Hitler, of course, since Adams has a vague sense that Hitler is bad and that communism is bad, so therefore Hitler and communism and Obama must be the same thing. According to Adams, Obama is using the so-called “green agenda” as cover to implement Marxism in America; talk of “sustainable development” or “social justice” are just code words for Marxism (how is this anything less of an insane conspiracy theory than those promoted by last entry’s Ken Adachi?), culminating in a rather peculiar claim that the conflicts that plague the continent of Africa would end when the people of Africa learn to “turn their hearts toward their creator,” which is an astonishingly insightful and non-prejudiced assessment of the situation in African countries. Proof of the harmfulness of Obama’s policies? The 2012 initiative on the ballot in Colorado to legalize marijuana is apparently a glaring example: “I'm telling you, Barack Hussein Obama has got to have a teleprompter because he fried his brain on drugs.”

Environmentalism, by the way, is a conspiracy. Adams pointsto climate change science, sustainable development efforts, and a school children’s song “Earthlings Unite” (which she describes as “classroom abuse”) as proof that the UN wants to “supplant God’s directive to man to care for the earth with government dominion”.

In 2007 Adams opposed a ballot measure providing $300 million annually over 10 years for cancer research. Voters approved the measure, of course, and so did even Rick Perry and then-President George Bush. But Adams didn’t, falsely claiming that the money would be used in embryonic stem cell research, and medical researchers are monsters: “Scientists are on the verge of cloning humans, injecting them with diseases and studying them, then killing them.” Her aptitude for accuracy, reality or reason was also on brilliant display when Governor Rick Perry showed a momentary lapse of insanity to issue an executive order requiring all girls entering the sixth grade in Texas to receive the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer. For Adams, however, the HPV vaccine was just part of a liberal plot to make Texas youths more promiscuous (or – a more charitable interpretation of her statement – a plot to remove part of God’s just punishment for promiscuity). She is of course a staunch defender of the dominance of failed abstinence-only programs in Texas schools. When the state’s sky-high rates of teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases were pointed out to her, Adams blamed it on the supposedly inferior morals of Mexican immigrants.

In 2008 Adams – predictably – lauded Sarah Palin’s apparent support for creationism: “It’s very exciting to have a person who holds the faith. I’m sure this is a woman who believes, as I do, let’s present evolution and creationism on a level playing field, because when that happens, we know education is happening, not brainwashing, not politics in the classroom,” which is a rather Orwellian representation of the Texan situation as manifested in the battles of the Texas Board of Education. In 2010 Adams’s Texas Eagle Forum actually gave Don McLeroy a “Patriot Award” for his efforts to remake the state's textbooks and curriculum.

Diagnosis: Though hyperbole is the order of the day among wingnuts, one gets the feeling that Adams’s incoherently insane tantrums, to a larger extent than most, accurately reflects her actual beliefs. Adams is hysterically crazy, and still a powerful force against freedom, sanity, decency and truth.