“The curse of Ham,” an old-time Biblical (mis)interpretation used to vilify black people and justify slavery and laws against racial intermarriage, is still alive and spreading bigotry in the United States.

The Appleby Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, is among this country’s scattered, independent fundamentalist churches still openly promoting the idea that the Biblical Noah pronounced a curse on descendants of his son, Ham. Ham had sexually molested Noah as he slept in a drunken stupor, and Noah realized it, the story goes. The curse ultimately fell on Canaan, Noah’s grandson, whose descendants were black and fated to be an underclass of slaves, according to this version of the Bible, which has been widely discredited by mainstream religious scholars. ( continue to full post… )

The assassination-style killings of two prosecutors in Texas are precipitating the postings of vile, anti-Semitic, almost-gleeful public comments by assorted racists and white supremacists. ( continue to full post… )

White supremacist student Matthew Heimbach, a thorn in the side of Maryland’s Towson University who has led two racist campus organizations, says his White Student Union (WSU) will start patrolling the campus at night next week in order to halt what his group characterizes as a “black crime wave.”

Heimbach, a 21-year-old who has said he had his “racial awakening” while still in high school, has been in the national news since earlier this month, when he and fellow WSU member Scott Terry interrupted panelists at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with a series of racist arguments. Terry advocated “separate but equal” policies, described slavery as providing food and shelter to black people, and allegedly muttered, “Why can’t we just have segregation” in the exchange. The event, caught on videotape and broadcast nationally, was a severe embarrassment to CPAC, which has tried to avoid being tarred as racist. ( continue to full post… )

Proud heterosexuals — a small and nameless handful of them, anyway – are on the march. And they’re not being very nice about it.

Back in June 2012, the Facebook page “Heterosexual Awareness Month” (HAM) was created to “celebrate heterosexuality.” According to the page’s administrators, who are anonymous (though one goes by “Dr. HAM”), July is “Heterosexual Awareness Month.” The page’s mission is to “educate the world, commemorate our heritage, celebrate our culture, and liberate our people.” The site goes on to say that Heterosexual Awareness Month is meant to highlight straight people’s “growing struggle of the rights and related civil rights put in jeopardy.”

The page includes status updates, images and comment threads that range from mild to genuinely offensive. And though Dr. HAM told the Huffington Post in December that “I would like to say we are not about hate in any way,” the facts seem to pretty plainly belie him. HAM moderators have posted comments about “the gay agenda” and baselessly linked homosexuality to pedophilia. They have posted Photoshopped images like the one of a gay pride marcher whose sign has been altered to read, “My Butt Hurts.” One post compares the “fertile garden” of heterosexuality to the “toxic waste zone” of homosexuality. Another urges gay people to stop “acting like animals” and “evolve already.” HAM allows most anyone who agrees with it to post comments. But you will be banned, it says, if you post “accusations of racism” or if you call women derogatory names. Comments supportive of LGBT people do appear on the threads, but are typically followed by anti-gay responses. ( continue to full post… )

It began about two weeks ago, when a local television station in Memphis, Tenn., allowed a man with a hooded face, identifying himself only as “Edward” and speaking on what was apparently his own rear deck, to announce to the world that he would soon be bringing “thousands” of Klansmen to a protest with no date.

From there, the thin little tale morphed into something of a national story about what is being characterized as “one of the biggest KKK rallies of all time.” Articles have run in New York City newspapers and even abroad about the event, now planned for March 30 while officials weigh the Klan’s permit application, and national TV networks are considering covering it. Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong is asking for help from local and federal law enforcement agencies. The NAACP has decried the event, and a local university art professor created a 600-member Facebook page called “Challenging the Klan’s Message.”

But is the rally — which is a protest of an earlier decision to rename three Memphis parks that honored the Confederacy, including one named after the first national leader of the Ku Klux Klan — really going to be that big? Not even remotely likely. It would be a surprise if the event drew 40 Klansmen, and it will likely be considerably fewer than that. ( continue to full post… )

John Guandolo, the former FBI agent who has made a living calling out high-ranking government officials as secret plants working for the Muslim Brotherhood, may have finally crossed the Rubicon into total outrageousness.

Oh sure, he’s already gone after college professors who weren’t sufficiently anti-Muslim. He’s identified mosques that he says are bases of operation for militant Islam. He’s asserted that Muslims have no First Amendment rights in America and aim only to “subjugate” the nation. But it was just last week that he made what may be his most remarkable claim yet, insisting that John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency, is secretly a Muslim convert working to undermine the Constitution. ( continue to full post… )

Godwin’s Law, an Internet adage started by lawyer and writer Mike Godwin in 1990, states, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

The law’s point, Godwin explained in a 1995 article for Wired magazine, was the Internet seems to lead to glib comparisons between various politicians’ behavior and Hitler and Nazis which “invariably … trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis”.

Godwin’s Law proved true once again on Friday, when TeaParty.org, a particularly vicious faction of the nebulous right-wing movement, treated subscribers to an E-mail blast titled “Stop America’s Hitler,” featuring a picture of President Obama sporting a Hitler moustache. If that wasn’t enough, the E-mail also included a photograph of two Nazis executing a victim with a pistol. ( continue to full post… )

A reported member of the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens is running for a seat on a suburban Kansas City, Mo., school board on a platform that includes “removing materials that promote racial diversity” in a district that is becoming increasingly diverse.

The candidate, Edward Stephens, a 25-year-old electrical engineer, came in fifth – dead last – with 5% of the vote when he first ran for a seat on the seven-member Park Hill School board in Platte County in 2012. A candidate who dropped out of the race before the election even got more votes than Stephens. ( continue to full post… )

Religious-right extremists who have spent most of their energy in recent years vilifying LGBT people or fighting the nation’s culture wars on other fronts have found a new demon to slay: gun control.

It might seem odd that those who profess allegiance to the teachings of Jesus Christ would be so vociferous about making sure that Americans have continued, unfettered access to assault rifles. But in the wake of the massacre of schoolchildren in Connecticut, which ignited the most heated debate about gun control in this country in a decade, some of the religious right’s most rabid voices are joining the fight. ( continue to full post… )

Michael Kleen, the Republican candidate for mayor of Rockford, Ill., is running on an innocuous “safer streets” platform, pledging “appreciation for commonsense and moderation” on a campaign website that sparkles with sweet reason, offering a profile of a trustworthy, public-spirited candidate.

But Hatewatch has discovered that there’s more to Kleen than the sanitized information his campaign offers. The citizens of Rockford — the third largest city in Illinois, with a population that is 20% African-American and 16% Latino — may not realize that Kleen has published his very controversial views on immigration, secession and education on hate-oriented sites such as VDARE.com and WorldNetDaily.com. He also participated in several interviews on The Voice of Reason Radio Network, a mouthpiece for the white nationalist movement that went offline last August. ( continue to full post… )