Dem Altered Immigration Law to Further 'Gay' Agenda

Since 07-19-06

By Jeff Johnson
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer

July 10, 2006

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=/SpecialReports/archive/200607/SPE20060710a.html

(CNSNews.com) - A Republican candidate for the Massachusetts congressional seat currently held by Democrat Barney Frank is reigniting debate over whether changes to U.S. immigration laws Frank sponsored made it easier for the 9/11 hijackers to enter and remain in the United States. Frank continues to deny the charge, but GOP challenger Chuck Morse accuses Frank of opening the "turnstiles of terrorism" by denying immigration officials the power to bar or remove non-U.S. citizens from the country based on their ideology.

Cybercast News Service has learned that while Frank has routinely claimed he advocated the changes because immigration law was "unduly restrictive on political grounds," the avowed homosexual lawmaker spent ten years fighting to change the statute primarily to eliminate a long-standing ban on homosexual foreigners entering the U.S.

Morse: Barney Frank ... opened the 'turnstiles of terrorism'

"Barney Frank was the author of legislation, a series of legislative initiatives but, particularly, one that bears his name, the 'Frank Amendment,' that made it easier for terrorists and those who support them to come into this country legally," Morse told Cybercast News Service. "It raised the bar for our immigration officials and our State Department in terms of who could be denied a visa and it made it more difficult for our government agencies like the FBI and others to investigate those visiting the country while they were here and to detain people suspected of terrorist activity and to deport them."

Morse was more direct with his accusations in a mid-June speech to the Massachusetts Republican Assembly.

"Barney Frank ... opened the 'turnstiles of terrorism' in America by sponsoring legislation that made it nearly impossible for federal agencies to deny visas to terrorists," Morse charged. "As a result of its passage, the 'Frank Amendment' tied the hands of the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other agencies for the better part of two decades, while terrorists formed their sleeper cells and plotted this nation's demise."

Morse originally made the allegation during his failed 2004 campaign against the 13-term Democrat. Frank denied the charge then and again in 2005.

"Several of my right wing political opponents have recently made the entirely inaccurate claim that immigration legislation on which I worked in the 1980s through 1990 is somehow connected to the entry into this country of the 9/11 terrorists," Frank wrote in an April 15, 2005, online statement. "This is totally untrue."

Prior to the passage of the Frank Amendment in 1990, aliens could be denied entry into the U.S. for three reasons related to their ideology:

-- Participation in activities that would be prejudicial to the public interest or public safety;

-- Membership in subversive organizations or teaching or advocating subversive views;

-- Likelihood of engaging in subversive activities after entry into the country.

The Frank Amendment eliminated those and all other "ideological" prohibitions, substituting a new rule that aliens could not be excluded or deported "because of any past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations which, if engaged in by a United States citizen in the United States, would be protected under the Constitution of the United States."

As James R. Edwards, Jr., author of "The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform," noted in an Aug. 30, 2005, panel discussion at the Center for Immigration Studies, the Frank Amendment "sought to extend the First Amendment to the world - despite foreigners' lack of corresponding duties that U.S. citizens bear or the status of being subject to the U.S. government's jurisdiction.

"Indeed, this law made it much easier for aliens who hold radical, dangerous, anti-American or subversive political beliefs to enter and remain in the United States," Edwards explained. "This perversion of the First Amendment means the guy who preaches hatred, pollutes hearts and minds, steeps persuadable people in reasons to harm Americans and wage war from within against America ... gets a free pass."

That, Morse argues, is precisely what happened when the 9/11 terrorists, the majority of whom had known associations with militant Islamic groups, entered and remained in the U.S. And Frank's GOP challenger is not alone in that allegation. Conservative educator, author and columnist Samuel L. Blumenfeld also blamed Frank for the ease with which al Qaeda terrorists infiltrated the U.S. in a Sept. 17, 2004, column published by WorldNetDaily.

"I have just finished reading the 500-page '9-11 Commission Report' and what becomes quite apparent is that the weakest link in our antiterrorism defense system prior to 9-11 was the Immigration and Naturalization Service," Blumenfeld wrote. "It was so weak that it became a revolving door for al-Qaida sleeper terrorists who were issued visas that permitted them to come and go as they pleased.

"And the one man responsible for creating this revolving door was Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, whose 1989 Frank Amendment to INS procedures paved the way for the 19 hijackers to freely enter this country, take flying lessons, and quietly prepare for their deadly attack with no notice from our intelligence agencies," he concluded.

Blumenfeld also cites a section of Gerald Posner's post-9/11 book "Why America Slept," which also accuses Frank of creating a legal environment that made it easy for terrorists to enter and remain in the U.S.

"Congressman Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who was a strong advocate of protecting civil liberties, led a successful effort to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act so that membership in a terrorist group was no longer sufficient to deny a visa," Posner wrote. "Under Frank's amendment, which seems unthinkable post-9-11, a visa could only be denied if the government could prove that the applicant had committed an act of terrorism."

But Frank points to an exchange between 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean and himself during Kean's appearance before the House Select Committee on Homeland Security on Aug, 17, 2004, that, Frank argues, proves him blameless.



FRANK: "Can I just say here that the key point here is under the statutes, as they now exist, those people were excludable if the right procedures had been followed?"

KEAN: "That's exactly right."

Frank also defends the new law, noting that it does allow State Department officials to deny entry to any alien "who a consular official knows or has reasonable ground to believe has engaged, in an individual capacity or as a member of an organization, in a terrorist activity or is likely to engage after entry in a terrorist activity."

Frank's stated and lesser-known reasons for changing immigration law

The debate will likely continue as to whether the changes to U.S. immigration laws Frank gained in 1990 when Democrats controlled Congress made it easier for the 9/11 terrorists to gain entry to and remain in the country. But one point repeatedly made by Frank has not been challenged, until now.

In the August 2004 exchange with Kean, Frank explained his motivation for the immigration law changes saying, "I thought they were unduly restrictive on political grounds with people coming in."

In an April 22, 2004 memorandum to the media posted on his website, Frank described his goal similarly.

"We worked successfully to change the law that permitted American officials to refuse to allow people into America because we didn't like their political opinions," Frank wrote.

"[I]n a law inherited from the early fifties ... Congress instructed the Executive Branch to exclude from America people whose political views we found offensive," Frank contends. "The amendment we adopted dropped from the law the authority to exclude people because their views would be politically unpopular, but continued to allow exclusion of people who would commit acts of violence, terrorism, etc."

But in his contribution to the pro-homosexual political how-to book "Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights" entitled "American Immigration Law: A Case Study in the Effective Use of the Political Process," Frank offered a different explanation for his ten-year-long effort to limit the grounds on which citizens of other countries could be denied entry into the United States.

"Interestingly, it is both the least well known of all the legislative battles that supporters of gay and lesbian rights have fought, and it is also the one that was the most successful," Frank wrote. "... in 1990, I had the enormous satisfaction of sponsoring a successful amendment to American immigration law that repealed the homophobic [sic] provisions of that statute in all of its permutations." (Frank uses the term "homophobic" throughout his writing to refer to any person or group that objects to the homosexual lifestyle.)

While he did acknowledge his general interest in abolishing the "ideological exclusion," the Massachusetts Democrat - who had not initially acknowledged his participation in the homosexual lifestyle - stressed his primary reason for wanting to change the law.

"I do not remember exactly when I first became aware that American law flatly banned gay, lesbian, and bisexual foreigners from coming to the United States, and did so in the most inaccurately insulting terms," Frank wrote. "But I do know that by 1981 I was aware that as a gay American I had joined an institution - the U.S. Congress - that had sixteen years before done everything it could to protect my fellow citizens from foreigners who were like me.

"And I was determined," he continued, "to do everything that I could to abolish this abomination."

Frank's article also explains that when he "came out" on June 1, 1987, it gave him a psychological advantage over lawmakers who might have otherwise opposed his proposal.

"Before I came out, my colleagues respected my insistence on the repeal of the antigay provision as they would respect any colleague's strong feeling on an issue," Frank wrote. "But once I had acknowledged that I was gay, this moved from being simply an issue with which I was concerned to something that was obviously deeply personal.

"Automatically, this meant that those of my colleagues who wished to preserve good working relationships with me understood how important this matter was to me," Frank continued, "and their willingness to accommodate me increased accordingly."

Frank similarly acknowledged that he pursued the broader repeal of the ideological exclusions because he knew a stand-alone repeal of the ban on homosexuals visiting or immigrating to the U.S. would almost certainly have failed.

"Evidence of this came early for me when (in 1981) the House of Representatives voted 281 to 199 to overrule a District of Columbia City Council repeal of the city's sodomy law," Frank explained. "It occurred to me that just as the antigay exclusions had been first written and then tightened as part of a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws, my best chance to wipe them out was to do it in that same comprehensive context."

While it took Frank ten years to accomplish that goal, he brags about the success of his stealth approach from both the political and public relations perspectives.

"People - including gays and lesbians - know little about our successful fight to repeal the anti-gay-and-lesbian provision of immigration law in large part because we won," Frank wrote, "In our time, failure generates a good deal more attention than success."