By way of follow up...Marc Levin did not win the ACC Board of Trustees election but there is a runoff election beginning in a couple of weeks. The runoff is scheduled for Saturday, June 19th with early voting June 7th-15th at ACC Campuses. The Texas Freedom Network has compiled this useful biography of Levin that provides additional insight into why we should nip his political aspirations in the bud:
Attorney Marc Levin – candidate for Place 6 on the Austin Community College Board of Trustees – currently serves as vice president of the Texas Review Society, a non-profit organization that publishes far-right public policy newspapers and journals in Texas. He has served as president of the far-right Texas Federalist Society and as state vice chairman and general counsel for the Young Conservatives of Texas. The Young Conservatives of Texas are known for outrageous stunts like “bake sales” on university campuses in which members charge women, African American and Hispanic customers lower prices for pastries to protest affirmative action programs.
Although he is seeking a spot on the governing board of a large, urban public community college with a racially diverse student body, Mr. Levin is a staunch opponent of affirmative action programs. He has led numerous groups that want to dismantle affirmative action programs across the country, including service as president of the American Freedom Center, vice-president of Students for a Colorblind Society and executive director of The Campaign for a Color-Blind America. Levin is also an adviser to the Sacramento-based American Civil Rights Institute, headed by Ward Connerly, who in 1995 persuaded fellow members of the University of California Board of Regents to end an affirmative action program for student admissions. Mr. Levin was staff attorney to Texas Supreme Court Justice Steven Wayne Smith, attorney for the seven plaintiffs in Hopwood v. Texas, the case that ended affirmative action in Texas. When UT Professor Lino Graglia said “Blacks and Mexican-Americans are not academically competitive with whites in selective institutions,” Mr. Levin publicly defended those remarks.
Mr. Levin’s activism goes far beyond just opposition to affirmative action. His published statements on a broad range of policy issues demonstrate his out-of-the-mainstream views.
• “There is evidence that gay people have a shorter life span,” Levin has said in arguing against adoption by gay men and lesbians. “And it is not in the best interest of the child to be in a family that will not only be subject to ridicule, but statistically dead at an earlier age.”
• Mr. Levin has said that the federal Fair Housing Act – which prohibits housing discrimination based on race, gender and other characteristics – increases crime and protects illegal drug users.
• Mr. Levin calls respected commentator and former presidential press secretary Bill Moyers a “socialist” and a “Marxist,” accuses Children’s Defense Fund founder Marion Wright Edelman of being a “Communist,” and asserts that The League of Women Voters “advocates left-wing positions.”
• Mr. Levin advocates racial profiling of Arabs.
• Although he is running to serve a public education entity, Mr. Levin advocates taking money from public schools to subsidize tuition for religious and private schools.
• Mr. Levin has criticized the Houston Chronicle for giving money to Planned Parenthood and aligned himself with radical-right groups like Greater Austin Right to Life Committee and Texas Eagle Forum.
• Saying “Texas could become Mexico’s nursing home,” Mr. Levin filed formal complaints with several urban hospitals in Texas, charging that they were illegally providing “unlimited free health care to illegal immigrants” and saying “the only difference between an illegal Mexican immigrant who successfully crosses the border and a Mexican citizen who remains in Mexico is that the former has broken our laws.”
• Mr. Levin believes institutions of higher education, especially the University of Texas at Austin, are indoctrinating students with “socialism, lesbian studies and deconstructionist claptrap.”
• Mr. Levin says the Kyoto treaty is “disastrous,” dubs global warming “uncertain science,” and was a Charles G. Koch Fellow at the Center for Market Processes (now the Mercatus Center at George Mason University), a group that promotes environmental deregulation and has close ties to other far-right groups like Citizens for a Sound Economy and the Institute for Humane Studies.
• At the University of Texas at Austin, Mr. Levin opposed the Women’s Resource Center and Minority Information Center.
(Citations were included in the original Word version of this - please let me know if you'd like any of them.)
Posted by sarah at May 24, 2004 6:29 PM | TrackBack