Ex-GOP Chair to Evangelicals: ‘Don’t Ever Preach to Me Again!’

For a long time now I have been making the argument that it is becoming increasingly impossible for an honest and moral person to remain a Republican.  That argument applies even more so to evangelical Christians.  Honesty and true morality and their allegiance to Donald Trump are simply mutually exclusive.  A growing number of Republicans - I wonder how long until some leave the GOP entirely - have become utterly nauseated with the Trump/evangelical love fest.  The other day, I quoted in part from a column by former George W. Bush White House official Michael Gerson and, much to my surprise, I received a personal email from him thanking me for reading his columns and further elaborating on his frustrations. Now, we have Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, stating on national television that he is disgusted by and basically washing his hands of evangelicals loyal to Trump.  Raw Story looks at this  honest and heartfelt statement of the truth:

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele blasted Family Research Council president Tony Perkins for giving President Donald Trump a “mulligan” on paying hush money to former adult film star.

“When it comes down to giving Trump a pass, some top evangelical leaders are turning a blind eye to his past discretions and came to his defense following recent reports about his alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels,” host Chris Matthews explained.

“I have very simple admonition: just shut the hell up and don’t preach to me about anything ever again,” Steele suggested.

“After telling me who to love, what to believe, what to do and what not to do and now you sit back and the prostitutes don’t matter, the grabbing the you-know-what doesn’t matter, the outright behavior and lies don’t matter, just shut up!” Steele blasted.

“They have no voice of authority anymore for me,” Steele concluded.

Steele is 100% correct - I was watching when he made the statements - and my Republican "friends" who continue to blindly vote for GOP candidates and then park their butts in church pews on Sunday mornings need to take a good look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves what happened to their honesty, integrity and simple morality?   You do not get to have it both ways.  Kudos for Steele for speaking the truth. 

Trump Is Trying to Erase the LGBTQ Community

This blog originated as part of my coming out saga at the recommendation of my therapist who was helping me overcome the emotional and psychological abuse I experienced being raised in a conservative Catholic household. The blog eventually morphed into a LGBT rights and political blog.   Along the way, including the 2008 LGBT Blogger Summit in Washington, DC - underwritten by Microsoft and Progressive Insurance - I had the good fortune to meet a number of amazing LGBT activists and bloggers with whom I have remained in contact over the last almost 10 years.  Over the last almost 12 months, the Trump/Pence regime has waged an unrelenting war against LGBT Americans.  The most recent salvo is the establishment of a "Conscience and Religious Freedom" division of the Department of Health and Human Services which will allow Christofascists who are health care providers or pharmacists to refuse provide services to LGBT individuals, those seeking abortions or who otherwise "offend their religious sensibilities." A piece in Time recommended by one of my activist friends looks at Trump/Pence's efforts to erase the LGBT community and to deny us the rights afforded other citizens.  Here are highlights:

It’s been almost a year to the day since my life – both personally and professionally – changed profoundly. It can only be described as moving from a place of possibility and progress to a nightmare for myself, my family and the LGBTQ community at large.

Personally, under the Obama administration, I stood on the White House lawn with my wife and our twins for the Easter Egg Roll. I attended LGBTQ Pride receptions and helped plan LGBTQ panel discussions at The White House. I celebrated as the White House was lit in a rainbow after marriage equality became law of the land.

More importantly, however, during those years LGBTQ rights and visibility expanded in new, historic and unprecedented ways. In fact, throughout my life there has always been forward motion — albeit sometimes trudging — on LGBTQ rights.

But on January 20th of last year, Donald Trump assumed the presidency of the United States, and since day one – when references to LGBTQ people were purged from the White House website – the LGBTQ community was forced to face a new world order.

The administration’s anti-LGBTQ actions are as numerous as they are insidious. President Trump announced his attempt to ban transgender people from the military, the LGBTQ community was erased from the National Survey of Older Americans, a budget was proposed that cuts funding to HIV and AIDS research, guidance protecting transgender youth in schools was rescinded, World AIDS Day passed without any mention of LGBTQ people and I could go on. But it’s not only about policy, it’s also about culture. Trump is waging a culture war with our communities, the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime. He aims to roll back rights and protections, but also general acceptance of LGBTQ people in society and culture. The White House was radio silent during LGBTQ Pride Month for the first time in eight years. At GLAAD we wake up and go to work every day to create a culture of visibility and acceptance for LGBTQ people. Think about LGBTQ young people who are just coming out now in an environment where they’re being attacked daily and erased by our own government. That world is not acceptable to us, and we will resist it.

GLAAD and the LGBTQ community have always been fighters – that is our legacy. Everything that our communities have achieved in the course of our history, we have fought for, and this time will be no different.

In response to the administration’s onslaught of erasure and hate, GLAAD created the Trump Accountability Project to hold Trump and those in his administration accountable for their actions and statements. We joined other LGBTQ people in the streets during the Women’s March and protests against the rollback of DACA and the implementation of the travel ban. Our community spoke out when Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and their allies tried to write discrimination into law with “religious exemptions” guidance.

GLAAD also leaked audio of Mark Green, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Army, making discriminatory remarks towards transgender people, which resulted in Green’s decision to withdraw from consideration. And when there were rumblings of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention censoring certain words from their 2018 budgets, including “transgender” and “diversity,” LGBTQ leaders were some of the first to denounce it. We will not be removed. And to those young people coming out right now in this political environment – we have your backs. We will shape the future — our future — together.

Amen to the author's sentiments.  As for "friends" who continue to support Trump/Pence and the vile attacks on people like me and my husband, do not delude yourself into thinking that were are not watching your conduct. The time is coming when your must decide whether you are on the side of hate, ignorance and bigotry or not.  Yes, your friendships are at risk.  And for those friends who are actively resisting the cancer that Trump/Pence and  the Christofascists represent on American society, we must redouble our efforts to defeat Republicans whenever and where ever possible until Trump and Pence and their GOP enablers are driven from office.  To do otherwise will set America on a path akin to what Germany witnessed in the 1930's.  Good and decent people must resist.  Silence is equal to complicity. 

The Trump Voter Paradox

Like many progressives, I find myself at a loss at times understanding how friends and acquaintances who seemingly are nice and decent people can support today's Republican Party much less have voted for Donald Trump.  Why do they look the other way when Der Trumpenführer engages in the use of language and behavior that they would never tolerate at their country club or yacht club - indeed, such behavior (e.g., "pussy grabbing") might cause one to have one's membership suspended.  Similarly, how do they support a party agenda that directly harms those they act as if they care about. Is the friendly facade and civility just a charade?  Yes, there are truly foul supporters of Trump - e.g., white supremacists and Christofascists - but these labels don't outwardly apply to many.  It is a paradox that has led me to unfriend some on Facebook and lessen social interaction with some.   Equally baffling is the fact that some of these Republicans, if engaged in a one on one conversation actually support policies much more liberal and compassionate than what they political party stands for.  A column in the New York Times looks at this bizarre paradox.  Here are excerpts:

Roy Moore’s decisive victory over Luther Strange in the Republican Senate primary runoff on Tuesday in Alabama confirms — as I have reported before — that many Republican voters have a strong sense of white identity, that they harbor high levels of racial resentment and that they sometimes exhibit authoritarian leanings.

At the same time, that’s not a complete picture.

A 2013 study of red and blue America, conducted well before the seismic events of the last two years, sheds additional light on the Republican electorate and provides a more complicated understanding of contemporary conservatism.

In “Divided We Stand: Three Psychological Regions of the United States and Their Political, Economic, Social, and Health Correlates,” Peter J. Rentfrow, a reader in the psychology department at the University of Cambridge, along with five co-authors, explores the results of standardized personality tests given to 1.6 million people in the United States from 1999 to 2010.

The Rentfrow paper breaks the country into three “psychological regions” and ranks each region on personality dimensions known as the big five traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience.

The most conservative and most Republican of the three psychological regions — which Rentfrow labels “Cluster 1: Friendly and Conventional” — extends across the northern tier of the United States from Montana to Michigan, down through the Midwest to almost all of the South for a total of 26 states. Rentfrow found that the Cluster 1 region is

less affluent, has fewer highly educated residents, and is less innovative compared with states in the other regions. States in this region also appeared to have higher levels of social capital and less social tolerance compared with states in other regions. Moreover, friendly and conventional states were more politically conservative and Protestant compared with other regions.

My question went as follows:

Some research shows that Republicans, and Trump voters in particular, score high on measures of authoritarianism and on critical, if not hostile, views of African-Americans and immigrants. How does this fit with your finding that residents of the most Republican region are friendly, sociable and considerate?

Rentfrow replied that

individuals high in authoritarianism score low in openness. So in this sense, the patterns of results we find at the regional level are consistent.

Many whites in the South, he argued, abide by an “honor culture.” As long
as everyone is respectful and abides by the social norms, everyone is happy and agreeable. But when threats are made against one’s reputation or values, acts of violence and physical aggression are considered appropriate forms of retribution. In some ways, the profile we observe touches on the surface of this profile — the friendly and considerate aspect when all is well. But I think we’re now beginning to see more of the aggressive aspects. I think many people, perhaps especially in this region, have begun to feel threatened by the changes taking place in society and are reacting with anger.

Karen Stenner, the author of “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” pointed out that the Rentfrow study found that red state voters were simultaneously “friendly” and less “socially tolerant.”  Stenner explained this seeming contradiction by noting that

it is a lot easier to be generous and considerate and civic-minded and invested in one’s community if one’s community is full of people much like oneself. The kinds of behaviors we get out of authoritarians depend critically on how and where they have drawn the boundaries of “us” and “them.” They can be very attentive to “us,” but also tend to be very particular about whom “us” includes.

John Jost, a professor of psychology and politics at N.Y.U., expands upon the implications of the word “conscientiousness” in describing red state voters:

Conscientiousness is correlated with measures of racism, sexism, homophobia, prejudice, authoritarianism, social dominance, and system justification. I suspect that this personality factor has more to do with a need for order or desire for rule-following, which can easily take an authoritarian turn, than other aspects of conscientiousness that we might associate with, say, honesty or integrity.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business . . . cited an essay that he and Emily Ekins, the director of polling at the Cato Institute, published in February 2016, “Donald Trump supporters think about morality differently than other voters.” In contrast to Republican primary voters who supported candidates other than Trump, they noted, voters who supported him “score high on authority/loyalty/sanctity and low on care.” These voters, according to Ekins and Haidt, “are the true authoritarians — they value obedience while scoring low on compassion.” In fact, authoritarian voters with a sense of besieged white identity are more than a “grain” in the Republican electorate. . . . And the clout of the authoritarian, white identity wing of the Republican Party is such that Trump is governing to please this wing first and foremost.

From his apocalyptic threats to Kim Jong-un to his call for the firing of protesting N.F.L. players, from his pardon of Joe Arpaio to his defense of pro-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville, Trump has remained the leader of hard-right, white America.

This strategy won him the presidency in 2016 when millions of non-authoritarian white Republicans — sympathetic, kind, affectionate, conscientiousness, persevering, thorough and reliable — made a pact with the devil and chose party loyalty over conscience.

The take away?  Some friends and acquaintances seem to put order - which equates to blacks, gays, and other minorities "knowing their place" - above kindness and compassion. To me, that is a serious moral defect. I am left still not sure of how to interact with such people when I must do so. I surely am left feeling that I cannot trust them.