The American Political Right Descends into Insanity

Protesters listen during a rally against face
masks being required in schools (Rick Egan/AP).

Once upon a time, certainly while I was growing up and during my period as a Republican city committee member, the Republican Party valued education, respected science and knowledge and was epitomized by "country club Republicans."  Now, it is the party of  ignorance, insane conspiracy theories, and where scientific and medical experts are trashed and undermined if the inconveniently undermine the agenda of far right extremists and, of course, the dangerous buffoon who inhabits the White House.  In the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, this transformation of the GOP is not just disturbing, it is literally life threatening and shows the extremes of the self-centered nature of so-called conservatives who care nothing about those they endanger and may infect with Covid-19. How did this happen?  As I have often stated, in my view, it began with the infiltration of the GOP by evangelicals and other "conservative Christians" - who are anything but true followers of Christ - who deny evolution and claim the earth is less than 10,000 years old and reject any form of science and knowledge that threatens the myths upon which they have based their religion and very small scale world view.  Once these forces grabbed hold of the party base it was only a matter of time before open racists and every kind of crackpot was welcomed into the GOP base.  At the same time, sane, educated people fled the GOP which is why the suburbs have shifted so strongly against the GOP.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the insanity of the GOP and far right.  Here are excerpts:

In 2018, Bob Woodward recounted then-White House chief of staff John Kelly’s view of President Trump. “He’s gone off the rails,” Kelly said. “We’re in Crazytown.”

Two years later, it feels as if the entire country resides in the Greater Crazytown Metropolitan Area.

In Provo, Utah, this week, anti-mask demonstrators, some wearing Trump 2020 paraphernalia, stormed a county commission meeting, forcing its adjournment.

In Tulsa, anti-mask protesters, some in MAGA gear, taunted, threw water and waved money at a black minister reading the Bible through a bullhorn and calling for reparations.

In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) sued to stop Atlanta from enforcing mask-wearing to mitigate the spread of the pandemic.

In Florida, longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, after the president commuted his sentence, said of his and Trump’s opponents: “They’re satanic.”

And here in Washington, Trump surpassed 20,000 falsehoods uttered as president while his administration temporarily took coronavirus data offline, his daughter posed with a can of beans and his trade adviser published an error-laden attack on the government’s top infectious-disease scientist.

The Great American Crackup is underway.

A week ago, I argued that Trump’s conspiracy theories “are spreading faster than covid-19 among his supporters, inducing mass delusion.” So I asked scholars to put this moment into historical and psychological context.

For the first time in our history, a president and a major political party have weaponized paranoia, to destabilizing effect.

Conservatives are inherently no more conspiratorial than liberals; only low education (and, relatedly, income) predict such tendencies. The difference, Uscinski says, is “we have a president who has built a coalition by reaching out to conspiracy-minded people.”

Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan finds that “our political elites are amplifying the fringe more than we’ve seen” in modern times, while a president mounts a “grinding attack on factual evidence.” The result, he says, is “conspiracy theories and misinformation become yoked to partisanship in increasingly powerful ways.”

There has always been what the late historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in U.S. politics: witch hunts, Illuminati, Red Scares. William Jennings Bryan promoted conspiracy theories. Richard Nixon believed in them. But Trump is unique in promoting conspiracy thinking from the bully pulpit, and in building a system in which elites — Republican Party leaders — validate the paranoia.

Americans, by nature, are more distrustful of authority than citizens of other advanced democracies. “You always hear Americans say, ‘I know my rights,’ but you never hear an American say, ‘I know my responsibilities and obligations,’ ” Stanford University public-opinion specialist Morris Fiorina observes. The distrust is compounded by polarization of the political system: the collapse of local media (replaced by coastal national media); the growing tendency to live, work and worship among people of similar beliefs; . . . .

An April study by Uscinski and others found Trump’s supporters were the most likely to believe the covid-19 threat was exaggerated — particularly Trump backers who paid the most attention to politics. This, the researchers said, was “likely a consequence of President Trump and other Republican/conservative elites publicly lending credence to this idea.”

And so strong Trump partisans refuse to wear masks. “The science is very clear: People take cues from political leaders,” Nyhan says. Leaders typically rejected conspiracy theories, and the public followed. Now, Trump embraces them, and his followers concur — some out of partisan solidarity, others out of genuine belief.

“Human psychology has not changed,” Nyhan says. What’s changed is we’re discovering that “democratic systems don’t work well when political elites don’t deal in factual information.”

In other words, it’s not us. It’s him.

Be very afraid as Trump tries to now hide accurate information about the pandemic and his followers are increasingly dangerous loose canons. 

The Virginia GOP's Slow Suicide

As a former Republican and Republican activist - I held a City Committee seat in Virginia Beach for eight years roughly two decades ago - watching the Virginia GOP's slide from power has been watching a form of slow moving suicide, a process which, as I have said before, began when Republicans foolishly began embracing far right Christians and, worse yet, voting them onto city and county committees. To my mind, that move that focused on short term advantage set the stage for the exodus of moderates and educated suburban voters from a party that became increasingly defined by an embrace of ignorance, rejection of science and knowledge and hatred to anyone deemed "other" - a category that includes basically anyone who is not a white right wing Christian.  The move also ushered in the beginning of the GOP's embrace of white supremacy since so may evangelicals in my experience are racist as exemplified by The Family Foundation which traces its roots to supporters of "Massive Resistance" when confronted with school desegregation.  As Virginia's urban and suburban areas have grown, a critical mass was reached where these regions can out vote the racist, knuckle dragging rural regions.  This new reality is not going to change and unless the Virginia GOP can reform itself - something not likely in my view given the grip the Christofascists have on the party even as Millennials exit religion entirely - Virginia will be a "blue state" for the foreseeable future (a view confirmed by Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball).  A Washington Post editorial looks at this new reality.  Here are highlights: 

IN POLITICAL terms, Virginia is no longer a Southern state; it’s an Eastern one that tilts heavily Democratic. That transformation, affirmed in Tuesday’s watershed elections that flipped both state legislative chambers to the Democrats’ control, was long in the making and helped by Republicans who fell radically out of step with the increasingly diverse voters who populate the state’s booming suburbs.

Long before anyone imagined Donald Trump in the White House, Republicans such as Corey A. Stewart, last year’s failed GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate and the soon-to-be-former top official in Prince William County, rose to prominence as right-wing culture warriors. Mr. Stewart, assessing this week’s Democratic gains, said Republicans would be “toast” in Virginia for 10 years. That may be right; if it is, Mr. Stewart himself was a prominent toaster.

Mr. Stewart’s brand of Republicanism — immigrant-bashing, Confederate-monument-revering, gun-loving, abortion-blocking, trash-talking and, lately, Trump-lionizing — has been ascendant in Richmond and elsewhere. It has methodically alienated moderate and swing voters, especially in the vote-rich suburbs of Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads. In a state that won the competition for Amazon’s second corporate headquarters partly on the strength of a well-educated, multicultural workforce, Republicans who threw red meat to their base by attacking undocumented immigrants found their appeal waning.

[T]he GOP’s problems have deep roots. No Virginia Republican has won a statewide election in a decade. And in Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun counties — Washington suburban localities that together comprise nearly a quarter of Virginia’s population of 8.5 million — elected Republicans at any level are now an all-but-vanished breed.

The party’s enfeeblement was accelerated by its rejection of moderate, substantive GOP officeholders such as former lieutenant governor Bill Bolling and former congressman Thomas M. Davis III. And it signed its political death warrant by blowing up the summer’s special legislative session on gun safety after just 90 minutes, without considering a single bill. That act of cluelessness and arrogance came weeks after a mass shooting in Virginia Beach left 12 people dead.

Virginia Republicans are at a defining moment. If they reverse course and tack to the center, they may again become a force in a state that would benefit from a vibrant two-party competition. If not — if they double down by continuing down the Trumpian path blazed by Mr. Stewart and his like — they might become “toast” not for a decade but for a generation.

Virginia Could Soon Place the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. Constitution

As the Washington Post is reporting, the Virginia Senate today voted to pass the federal Equal Rights Amendment with seven Republicans joining Democrats on a 26-to-14 vote.  Now the vote goes to the far more reactionary House of Delegates where Republicans hold a one vote majority - at least until the 2019 Virginia elections in November.   The Washington Post looks at the vote:

The GOP-led state Senate voted Tuesday to make Virginia the 38th and final state to ratify the federal Equal Rights Amendment.

The measure passed with bipartisan support, with seven Republicans joining Democrats on a 26-to-14 vote. The measure faces tougher odds in the House of Delegates and beyond, including hurdles related to long-expired deadlines for passage. . . . . The Senate resolution now heads to the House, where comparable House legislation remains in committee.

Advocates hope they have more momentum this year with Republican sponsorship of the Senate resolution. Sen. Glen H. Sturtevant Jr. (R-Chesterfield) sponsored the legislation and joined a bus tour promoting it last year.

A piece in New York Magazine looks at the bigger picture should the House of Delegates likewise pass the ERA amendment.  Here are article excerpts:

For those of us who came of age at a time when the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment seemed as inevitable as it was overdue, the ERA’s sudden revival in the Trump era has been a marvelous development. Today the Virginia Senate ratified the amendment, which means the Old Dominion is halfway through the process of becoming the crucial 38th state — three-fourths of the 50 states — to get onboard since Congress passed the ERA in 1972.

The amendment’s language is extremely simple:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Its practical implications may depend on what Congress does to implement it, but in effect, it would serve as a constitutional backdrop to more specific protections of gender equality, and as an ongoing basis for challenging discrimination in the courts.

The ERA was long thought to be comatose, if not dead, after only 35 states ratified it prior to the expiration of a 1982 ratification deadline set by Congress. But inspired by doubts about the constitutionality of ratification deadlines, and perhaps some defiance toward the manifest pigginess of the 45th president, momentum for the ERA resumed, with Nevada ratifying it in 2017 and Illinois in 2018.

Perhaps the big shift toward Democrats in 2017 House elections in Virginia, and the strong possibility that Democrats could take control of that chamber this November, could motivate Republicans to stop their obstruction of the ERA. It’s certainly a good sign that seven Republican senators joined all 19 Democrats in voting for the ratification in the upper chamber.

If Virginia does ratify the amendment, the legal maneuvering will begin, as the New York Times noted last year:

Expect a legal showdown, intense lobbying and constitutional fireworks …

[T]he debate would be interesting, and would offer the Grand Old Party yet another opportunity to recant its abandonment, under the influence of the conservative movement, of an ancient party tradition of supporting an ERA, as Katie Kilkenny observed in 2015:

Republicans installed the first woman in Congress and shepherded the 19th Amendment through a Republican-dominated Congress in 1919. . . . .

And Republicans began putting the ERA into party platforms in 1944, and didn’t definitively begin rejecting the amendment until Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the leadership of the party in 1980.

At a time when women are repudiating Republicans at the polls to a remarkable extent, it would be a good time for the GOP to wake up and embrace equality as sufficiently central to American principles to merit inclusion in the Constitution.

Who would lead the opposition?  Christofascists who want to be able to subordinate women and angry white men fearful of losing even more patriarchy based privilege. 

No Wonder There’s An Exodus from Religion

I often believe that if Christianity ends up largely dying in America as has happened in parts of Europe and some other developed nations, one of the leading causes will be the hypocrisy and general unloving behavior of Christ's purported most outspoken adherents.  What is an interesting correlation is that between the increased involvement of the so-called Christian Right - I call them Christofascists - in the Republican Party and the acceleration of the numbers of Americans identifying themselves as "None" - those who have forsworn religious affiliation.  With the Trump/Pence regime, the hypocrisy has gone off the charts as a column in the Washington Post notes.  Meanwhile, the exodus from religion continues.  Here are column excerpts:

Do you wonder why the proportion of Americans declaring themselves unaffiliated with organized religion has skyrocketed in recent decades?

This trend is especially pronounced among adults under 30, roughly 40 percent of whom claim no connection to a religious congregation or tradition and have joined the ranks of those the pollsters call the “nones.”

To understand how so many now prefer nothing to something when it comes to religion, ponder the news over the past few days.

The same newspapers and broadcasts that were reporting on how President Trump finally admitted that he had indirectly paid a porn star to keep quiet about an alleged affair also offered accounts of what we’ll call Jesuitgate, the controversy over who should be the chaplain of the House of Representatives.

 

Ryan had said he asked the cleric to quit because he had provided inadequate “pastoral services,” but denied that Conroy was ousted because of a mild prayer for justice he delivered during the debate over the GOP tax cut.

That phrase “pastoral services” must inspire a chuckle from your typical millennial agnostic. . . . Conroy also quoted Ryan’s chief of staff, Jonathan Burks, as telling him “something like ‘maybe it’s time we had a chaplain that wasn’t a Catholic.’ ” Ryan’s office vehemently denied this (the Catholic vote is substantial), but the speaker announced he didn’t want to have a “protracted fight” and that Conroy could stay.

But think about it: The House Republican leadership was more inclined to push out a chaplain than to impose accountability on a president who is a proven liar and trashes the rule of law for his own selfish purposes day after day.

This degree of partisan irresponsibility only aggravates the already powerful skepticism among the young about what it means to be religious. In their landmark 2010 book, “American Grace,” the scholars Robert Putnam and David Campbell found that the rise of the nones was driven by the increasing association of organized religion with conservative politics and a lean toward the right in the culture wars.

Revealingly, Putnam and Campbell found that millennials with tolerant and open views on homosexuality were more than twice as likely to be religious nones as their statistically similar peers with conservative or traditionalist views on homosexuality. Many young people came to regard religion, in Putnam and Campbell’s words, as “judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical and too political.”

If you want a particularly exquisite hypocritical moment, consider that on Thursday, the very day when Trump had to admit his lies on the Stormy Daniels payoff, the president held a White House commemoration of the National Day of Prayer. 

Conroy was getting at this in the most uncontroversial way possible when he spoke in his now-contested prayer of how “our great nation” has created “opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle.” If a chaplain could be rebuked for voicing that simple and undeniable truth, what’s the point of the “religious liberty” that Trump and his GOP allies celebrate?

And when will those who advertise themselves as religion’s friends realize they can do far more damage to faith than all the atheists and agnostics put together?

Yes, the image above was just too good to pass up.

Boycott the Republican Party

At the risk of boring long time readers, I used to be a Republican at a time when the Party was in the equivalence of a galaxy far, far away and bore no resemblance to the hideous phenomenon that it is today.  I held city committee seat for eight (8) years, was a precinct captain and worked on many a campaign.  But then something happened.  The Christofascists became ascendant in the Party and the Party's agenda became more and more homophobic and racists (in my experience, most Christofascists are racists as are the so-called lily white "family values" organizations). I left the Party and decided that the only way to "save" the Party was to work against it and see it suffer as many electoral defeats as possible.  Hopefully, at some point some sane people would rise up and work to expel the  Christofascists and racists from the Party.  To date, that has not happened and the result has been that the Party has descended deeper and deeper into hate and insanity, the election of Donald Trump being the ultimate consequence of the degeneration of the Party and the exodus of morally decent people from the GOP.  Now, other are coming to the same conclusion that I reached many years ago: the Republican Party needs to be boycotted and defeated whenever and wherever possible.  A piece in The Atlantic by two moderate conservatives makes the case as to why such a boycott is necessary.  Here are article excerpts:

A few days after the Democratic electoral sweep this past November in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere, The Washington Post asked a random Virginia man to explain his vote. The man, a marketing executive named Toren Beasley, replied that his calculus was simply to refuse to calculate. It could have been Dr. Seuss or the Berenstain Bears on the ballot and I would have voted for them if they were a Democrat,” he said. “I might do more analyses in other years. But in this case, no.

Count us in, Mr. Beasley. . . . . This, then, is the article we thought we would never write: a frank statement that a certain form of partisanship is now a moral necessity. The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to do as Toren Beasley did: vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).

We’re suggesting that in today’s situation, people should vote a straight Democratic ticket even if they are not partisan, and despite their policy views. They should vote against Republicans in a spirit that is, if you will, prepartisan and prepolitical. Their attitude should be: The rule of law is a threshold value in American politics, and a party that endangers this value disqualifies itself, period. In other words, under certain peculiar and deeply regrettable circumstances, sophisticated, independent-minded voters need to act as if they were dumb-ass partisans.

For us, this represents a counsel of desperation. So allow us to step back and explain what drove us to what we call oppositional partisanship.

So why have we come to regard the GOP as an institutional danger? In a nutshell, it has proved unable or unwilling (mostly unwilling) to block assaults by Trump and his base on the rule of law. Those assaults, were they to be normalized, would pose existential, not incidental, threats to American democracy.

Future generations of scholars will scrutinize the many weird ways that Trump has twisted the GOP. For present purposes, however, let’s focus on the party’s failure to restrain the president from two unforgivable sins. The first is his attempt to erode the independence of the justice system. This includes Trump’s sinister interactions with his law-enforcement apparatus: his demands for criminal investigations of his political opponents, his pressuring of law-enforcement leaders on investigative matters, his frank efforts to interfere with investigations that implicate his personal interests, and his threats against the individuals who run the Justice Department. It also includes his attacks on federal judges, his pardon of a sheriff convicted of defying a court’s order to enforce constitutional rights, his belief that he gets to decide on Twitter who is guilty of what crimes, and his view that the justice system exists to effectuate his will. Some Republicans have clucked disapprovingly at various of Trump’s acts. But in each case, many other Republicans have cheered . . . . A party that behaves this way is not functioning as a democratic actor.

The second unforgivable sin is Trump’s encouragement of a foreign adversary’s interference in U.S. electoral processes. Leave aside the question of whether Trump’s cooperation with the Russians violated the law. He at least tacitly collaborated with a foreign-intelligence operation against his country—sometimes in full public view.  . . . . the broader response to Trump’s behavior has been tolerant and, often, enabling.

The reason is that Trump and his forces have taken command of the party. Anti-Trump Republicans can muster only rearguard actions, which we doubt can hold the line against a multiyear, multifront assault from Trump and his allies.

[W]e should not count on the past year to provide the template for the next three. Under the pressure of persistent attacks, many of them seemingly minor, democratic institutions can erode gradually until they suddenly fail. That the structures hold up for a while does not mean they will hold up indefinitely—and if they do, they may not hold up well.

Even now, erosion is visible. Republican partisans and policy makers routinely accept insults to constitutional norms that, under Barack Obama, they would have condemned as outrageous. When Trump tweeted about taking “NBC and the Networks” off the air (“Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked”), congressional Republicans were quick to repudiate … left-wing media bias. In a poll by the Cato Institute, almost two-thirds of Republican respondents agreed with the president that journalists are “an enemy of the American people.” How much damage can Trump do in the next three years? We don’t know, but we see no grounds to be complacent.

It’s Trump’s party now; or, perhaps more to the point, it’s Trumpism’s party, because a portion of the base seems eager to out-Trump Trump. In last year’s special election to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, Republican primary voters defied the president himself by nominating a candidate who was openly contemptuous of the rule of law—and many stuck with him when he was credibly alleged to have been a child molester. After initially balking, the Republican Party threw its institutional support behind him too. In Virginia, pressure from the base drove a previously sensible Republican gubernatorial candidate into the fever swamps. Faced with the choice between soul-killing accommodation and futile resistance, many Republican politicians who renounce Trumpism are fleeing the party or exiting politics altogether.

So we arrive at a syllogism:

(1) The GOP has become the party of Trumpism.

(2) Trumpism is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.

(3) The Republican Party is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.

If the syllogism holds, then the most-important tasks in U.S. politics right now are to change the Republicans’ trajectory and to deprive them of power in the meantime. . . . The goal is to make the Republican Party answerable at every level, exacting a political price so stinging as to force the party back into the democratic fold.

The off-year elections in November showed that this is possible. Democrats flooded polling places, desperate to “resist.” Independents added their voice. Even some Republicans abandoned their party. One Virginia Republican, explaining why he had just voted for Democrats in every race, told The Washington Post, “I’ve been with the Republicans my whole life, but what the party has been doing is appalling.” . . . A few more spankings like that will give anti-Trump Republicans a fighting chance to regain influence within their party.

We understand, too, the many imperfections of the Democratic Party. Its left is extreme, its center is confused, and it has its share of bad apples. But the Democratic Party is not a threat to our democratic order. That is why we are rising above our independent predilections and behaving like dumb-ass partisans. It’s why we hope many smart people will do the same.

Many Americans Exited the GOP in 2017

When I left the Republican Party a good many years ago - my extended family followed me soon there after - there were two motivations: (i) that I could not in good conscience remain in a party that ignored the separation of church and state and that was rapidly becoming the captive of right wing religious extremists and racists, and (ii) there was basically zero chance of reforming the GOP from within given the manner in which the party grassroots was being hijacked by  right wing religious extremists and racists.  The only plausible way, therefore, to "save the GOP" was to work to see it defeated in as many electoral contests as possible.  Ironically, now that the GOP holds the White House and both houses of Congress, more and more Republicans are coming to the realization that I came to a good 15 or more years before them: the only way to retain one's moral integrity and basic decency is to leave the party. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the exodus from the Republican Party in no small part thanks to Der  Trumpenführer (a post yesterday looked at the reasoning behind one evangelical Republican's decision to disassociate from both groups).  Here are article excerpts:

For much of 2017, President Trump’s poll numbers have been pretty consistent. In its most recent weekly average, Gallup has Trump at 36 percent approval . . . . Trump is where he is because, although Democrats hate him and independents generally view him negatively, he continues to enjoy high approval ratings from Republicans. Eighty-two percent of those in his own party approve of Trump, as of last week. That’s pretty good, but not good enough to keep Trump’s overall approval from being historically low for a modern president.

The problem for Trump may not just be that only Republicans like him, but that there are fewer Republicans than there were a year ago.

Last week, Gallup reported that the gap in partisan identity between Republicans and Democrats was 7 points — narrower than during the summer but still wider than it was at this point last year. In other words, the percentage of Americans who say that they are Democrats, or independents who tend to vote Democratic, is 7 percentage points higher than the percentage who identify as Republican or Republican-leaning.
 “Democrats’ edge has expanded this year mainly because of a decline in Republican affiliation,” Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones wrote. “A year ago, 44% of Americans identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, the same percentage as now. However, Republican identification and leaning is five points lower than it was a year ago.” . . .  Women are 5 points less likely to identify as Republicans relative to last November. White women are 7 points less likely to.

This raises the question of why Americans were giving up on the party. Was it a function of the president?

Gallup found slips in Trump’s approval across the board since his inauguration, but polling from Marist conducted last December and in November of this year seems to reinforce the idea that some Republicans soured on Trump specifically. Asked whether they view Trump favorably — a different metric than approval — Trump’s numbers have dropped six percentage points over that 11-month period. 

You’ll notice that the Democrats have fairly consistently had an advantage in terms of party identification. Republicans are more reliable voters, generally speaking, since voting propensity correlates to age and income, which both also correlate to Republican Party membership.

If partisan identification shows a wide advantage for the Democrats in November of 2018, that suggests that the party could see an advantage in the polls.

If Republican leaders think Trump is to blame for that shift, deservedly or not, Washington politics could get very interesting very quickly.

Trump is hardly the only reason to exit the GOP, but he is a malignancy that shows no sign of going away voluntarily and albeit belatedly more and more Republicans seem to be realizing that the man is a liar, sexual predator, and possible traitor.  And that doesn't even begin to look at the GOP's  war on average Americans as embodied by the versions of the GOP tax bill or the growing effort to grant special rights to Christofascists to discriminate against others at will. 

The Federal Courts are Moving America Forward on LGBT Issues

Last week we saw Neil Gorsuch raised to a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.  The swearing in of Gorsuch left me and many others in the LGBT community feeling both fearful and increasingly concerned about the tilt of the Court should another justice die or retire thereby allowing Der Trumpenführer in a position to appoint a justice that could tilt the Court to the extreme right for a generation.  Much of my fear stems from Gorsuch's court of appeals opinion in Hobby Lobby which make it clear that he believes "religious belief" trumps the physical and civil rights of those disliked by the "godly Christian" crowd.  This concern is intensified by the reality that, while Trump has increasingly back tracked from campaign promises, he has kept his pledged to Christofascists that he would wage war on the LGBT community. A piece in The Daily Beast argues that despite all of these concerns, the federal courts are overall moving the nation forward on LGBT rights issues.  Read the piece and let me know you thoughts.  Here are article highlights:

Is the U.S. court system the last hope for LGBT equality the next four years? Following an avalanche of groundbreaking rulings extending existing civil rights legislation to cover sexual orientation and gender identity, it certainly seems so.

The past week has been a groundbreaking one in cementing the rights of LGBT individuals to equal protection under the law. On April 4, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Kim Hively, a part-time professor at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana, who claimed that the university administration declined to offer her a full-time position because of her sexual orientation. Hively, who is a lesbian, was chastised by a fellow staff member for “inappropriate behavior” in 2009, claiming that the lecturer was spotted “sucking face” with her girlfriend in the school’s parking lot. After that incident, court documents allege that Hively was not allowed the opportunity for advancement. She was let go in 2014.

The appeals court declined to say whether Hively had indeed experienced job-based discrimination. Instead the decision ruled as to whether such a claim could be made under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prevents bias on the basis of sex but, until now, has never explicitly provided protections for LGBT individuals.

“It would require considerable calisthenics to remove the ‘sex’ from ‘sexual orientation,’” the court decided in an 8-3 decision.

That decision was surprising given that the ruling reversed the 7th Circuit Court’s own decision. After a trial court dismissed Hively’s claim in 2015, she appealed to the 7th Circuit in September of the same year. A three-judge panel ruled against her, citing a lack of precedent in siding with the rights of LGBT workers. The Hoosier State is one of 28 that doesn’t recognize sexual orientation or gender identity as protected classes in state civil rights codes. But last October, the court decided to rehear the case en banc, meaning that all eight court judges would hear it, not just a selected panel.

A particularly compelling aspect of the Hively v. Ivy Tech decision is that five of the judges in the majority are conservative. These include Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner, the latter of whom penned an eloquent concurring opinion on the need to reinterpret the Civil Rights Act.

“We understand the words of Title VII differently,” Posner said, “not because we’re smarter than the statute’s framers and ratifiers but because we live in a different era, a different culture.”

This groundbreaking ruling, which followed four months of legal arguments, was the first time a federal court argued that civil rights laws should be extended to include LGBT protections. But it wouldn’t be the last. Just a day later, a Denver court sided with a transgender woman, Rachel Smith, and her partner, who claim that their application for an apartment was turned down after the landlord said he didn’t want to attract scrutiny due to the couple’s “unique relationship.” U.S. District Judge Raymond Moore argued that the Smiths’ right to be treated just like any other couple was covered under the Federal Fair Housing Act.

A SCOTUS showdown is a concern for LGBT activists given the recent appointment of far-right jurist Neil Gorsuch to the bench. In his 2004 Oxford University dissertation, Gorsuch argued that the U.S. Constitution didn’t protect the marriage rights of same-sex couples. Referring to marriage equality as part of the liberal social agenda, he later accused progressives of being “addicted to the courtroom.”

Gorsuch’s nomination, which was opposed by 18 LGBT groups, is viewed as yet another component in the Trump’s quiet campaign to erase LGBT people from public policy. Last month, questions about LGBT seniors were removed from two annual surveys conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services, and the White House has rolled back federal oversight on workplace protections for LGBT people passed under the Obama administration.

Although the U.S. court system wasn’t always favorable to LGBT rights, that began to shift with the Supreme Court’s 1996 ruling in Romer v. Evans, which declared that Colorado could not explicitly ban protections for its LGBT residents. In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that the Equal Protection Clause under the 11th Amendment, which states that all citizens are entitled to “the equal protection of the laws,” prevented the state from singling out LGBT people. That ruling, the first of its kind in the U.S., would pave the way for the Court’s 2003 decision to strike down anti-gay sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas.

Conservatives like to malign “activist judges” legislating from the bench, but the truth is that case law has increasingly laid the groundwork for LGBT protections being upheld by courts around the U.S., even in the face of an unprecedented wave of anti-LGBT hate. The trend is both striking and unmistakable.

After Mississippi signed a bill into law that allowed businesses to discriminate against LGBT people, Judge Carlton Reeves issued an injunction against House Bill 1523. “The title, text, and history of HB 1523 indicate that the bill was the State’s attempt to put LGBT citizens back in their place after [Obergefell v. Hodges],” Reeves said, referencing the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing marriage equality. And a federal court in Pennsylvania ruled that Juliet Evancho, the transgender sister of inauguration singer Jackie Evancho, had the right to use the girls’ bathroom at her Pennsylvania high school.

Even a major setback in Gavin Grimm’s impending U.S. Supreme Court case offered unexpected hope for the transgender student’s fight to be treated with dignity and respect.

After the Supreme Court, which was set to hear arguments in G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board this term, turned the case back to the lower courts, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to hear the 17-year-old’s case on an expedited basis. As Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union noted in a post for Medium, it would be customary for the federal court to offer a “short, one-line update” on the case to its docket. Instead, Senior Judge Henry Floyd penned a stirring ode to Grimm’s years-long struggle — which will now be decided after the Virginia student graduates.

Justice for Gavin Grimm will be delayed, but if the recent direction of the courts on LGBT rights is any indication, it’s coming sooner rather than later. The LGBT community may no longer have a friend in the Oval Office, but justice is on our side.

 I hope that the author is correct.  I also hope that Gorsuch will be hesitant to go against the clear trend of lower court rulings.

The Trump/Pence Assault On LGBTQ Equality Is Already Underway

Most voters - including those who voted for Der Fuhrer and Mike Pence - know little about Pence's anti-LGBT extremism.  In some ways he is more frightening than Trump himself other than the fact that he may be less likely to start a world war. And given Der Fuhrer's promises to the Christofascists, Pence now is seemingly being given free rein to launch a major assault on LGBT rights in ways that range from Trump cabinet nominees, almost all of whom have a documented anti-LGBT history, to the likely passage of the disingenuously named "First Amendment Defense Act" that will legalize anti-LGBT discrimination across the board.   How bad things will get is hard to know, but I have numerous friends quickly working on their dual citizenship as a fall back safe guard.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at the assault that has already begun.  Here are highlights:

I’m not going to sugarcoat this at all. We are in for a full-blown assault on LGBTQ rights the likes of which many, particularly younger LGBTQ people, have not seen. Progress will most certainly be halted completely, likely rolled back. And it’s already underway.

First, forget any of your thinking that Donald Trump is from New York City, probably has gay friends, sent Elton John a congratulatory note on his civil union in 2005, used the term “LGBTQ” (in pitting gays against Muslims at the Republican National Convention, when he vowed only to protect us from a “hateful foreign ideology”) or any other superficial things you may have read or heard.

Ronald Reagan was from Hollywood, and he, too, had many gay friends, including legendary actor Rock Hudson. Reagan even came out against an anti-gay state initiative while he was governor of California. But once Reagan made his pact with the religious right leaders in his 1980 successful run for the presidency ― for him, among them was Jerry Falwell, Sr., for Trump it’s Jerry Falwell Jr.― he had to bow to them if he wanted to get re-elected in 1984.

Earlier in the year, before Mike Pence was chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, using Trump’s analogy of running a business to explain how he’d run the country, told HuffPost’s Howard Fineman that the vice president of the Trump administration would really be the “CEO” or “COO” ― or, the president of the company ― while Trump would be more like the “chairman of the board”. . . . 

Mike Pence is perhaps one of the most anti-LGBTQ evangelical Christian political crusaders to serve in Congress and as governor of a state. Long before he signed the draconian anti-LGBTQ “religious liberty” law in Indiana last year, he supported “conversion therapy” as a member of Congress, and later, as a columnist and radio host, he gave a speech in which he said that marriage equality would lead to “societal collapse,” and called homosexuality “a choice.” Stopping gays from marrying wasn’t biased, he said, but was rather about compelling “God’s idea.”

As I‘ve written over and over again throughout the election campaign ― as the media had bizarrely and irresponsibly portrayed Trump as “more accepting on gay issues” ― Trump met with religious extremists, and made promises to them. He promised he would put justices on the Supreme Court who would overturn marriage equality (and the list of 20 candidates he has offered, certainly fit the bill), which he’s consistently opposed himself since 2000. He promised that he would sign the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), which would allow for discrimination against LGBT people by government employees and others.

Trump has said he would overturn what he saw as President Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders, and those could include Obama’s orders on LGBTQ rights, such as banning employment discrimination among federal contractors.

Mike Pence, as Dominic Holden at Buzzfeed points out, has already said that he and Trump plan to withdraw federal guidance to the states issued by the Obama administration protecting transgender students

If Trump treats the presidency the same way he treated the GOP convention in Cleveland, he’ll make gestures ― like giving Thiel a role in his administration or using the initialism “LGBTQ”― that will feed the media notion that he is somewhat pro-LGBTQ, while giving the nuts and bolts of halting or rolling back progress on LGBTQ rights to others. 

If Trump is thus as hands-off on LGBTQ issues as president as he was at the RNC, letting people like Pence ― again, possibly the most powerful vice president ever ― get his way, along with people like Carson, Blackwell, Gingrich and likely many others, you can bet that the assault on LGBTQ rights is already underway. It’s only a matter of time before we know the full magnitude. And that’s why we must pull ourselves out of grief, get fired up, and begin the fight right now.

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Save the GOP: Vote for Hillary Clinton

In an op-ed in today's New York Times another Republican makes the case for why Republicans should vote for Hillary Clinton notwithstanding whatever reservations they may have about her. The case boils down to the reality that Donald Trump is an existential threat to both the GOP and the nation at large.  The responsible thing to do is to make sure he is defeated - and with his defeat perhaps open an opportunity to seize the Republican Party back from the Christofascists, white supremacists and nativists who have hijacked the party and turned it into something hideous.  Here are op-ed highlights:

Every day, I run into Republican friends who can’t stomach a vote for Donald J. Trump but don’t know what to do. Vote for Hillary Clinton, who has trouble with the truth, wants to raise taxes and opposes free trade with Asia? Vote for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, an outlier who once ran a marijuana business and embraces isolationism? Or not vote at all, maintaining a certain purity but allowing others to decide the next president?

I faced exactly these choices myself. I have voted for every Republican nominee for president since 1980, but I will not this time. Mr. Trump’s appalling temperament renders him unfit to be president, and his grotesque policy formulations mock the principles of liberty and respect for the individual that have been the foundation of the Republican Party since Abraham Lincoln.

Even before Mr. Trump entered the race, I saw this coming. I worked to open a pathway for an independent — a solid third candidate who would attract the votes of the roughly two-thirds of Americans in the center. A serious contender would force the two major-party candidates to compete for votes in the middle, rather than appealing to the wings. I spent a year and a half on the project, but a month ago threw in the towel.

[W]hether we like it or not, an election between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton, period. And that means that if you want to stop Mr. Trump, you have no choice but to vote for Mrs. Clinton. There’s no sitting this one out.

It’s a matter of simple math. Consider a swing state like Ohio. Assume, for argument’s sake, that there are 3.1 million Trump voters, 3 million Clinton voters and 200,000 voters like me who will never vote for Mr. Trump but have reservations about Mrs. Clinton. If this last group doesn’t vote — or votes for Mr. Johnson, or another third-party candidate — then Mr. Trump wins the state. If the group votes for Mrs. Clinton, then Mr. Trump loses. A vote for Mrs. Clinton neutralizes a vote for Mr. Trump; an abstention allows that Trump vote to stand.

For this reason, I strongly disagree with my fellow Republicans — many of whom I served with in the George W. Bush administration — who say that they won’t vote for Mr. Trump because he’s a threat to the republic, but won’t vote for Mrs. Clinton either because she’ll raise taxes. Neither is appealing, but one is clearly a worse choice than the other.  . . . . only a few of these Republicans have so far said they will vote for Mrs. Clinton.

I have some sympathy with this position, but it is a cop-out. If you think Mr. Trump is so lacking in experience and judgment that he shouldn’t have his finger on the nuclear trigger, then you are saying he is not just a bad candidate; you are saying he is a threat to the nation. You have an obligation to defeat him, no matter what you think of Mrs. Clinton.

I’m voting for Mrs. Clinton because, despite her deficiencies, she will make a better president. But I have another reason. Defeating Mr. Trump soundly will help save the Republican Party. If he wins, a party built on freedom and internationalism will become entrenched as a party of authoritarianism and isolation, which means that within a few years it will atrophy and die.

Unfortunately, the Trump campaign has already cost the Republican Party its credibility. Out of some twisted notion of loyalty, party leaders previously seen as devoted to conservative ideals and policy are now viewed widely as unprincipled cynics. And they deserve to be. How do you recover from that?

[I]f you really think that Mr. Trump is a threat to your country, the right thing to do is to take the next step. Don’t just say you won’t vote for him. Vote against him.