Christian Privilege Is Spreading Like a Virus

With the Covid-19 pandemic and the exemption of churches from bans on large gatherings in some states, we have seen something underscored that has been part of the Trump/GOP agenda all along and which played a key role in Trump's election: granting right wing Christians special rights and attacking Obama administration policies which protected the Christofascists' favorite targets: Gays, women seeking abortions, and non-Christians.  Combined with this, Trump has pandered to the charlatans who comprise leading figures in the so-called It's the reason evangelicals continue to support Trump, the living embodiment of the seven deadly sins.  What is equally disturbing is the effort to grant large amounts of taxpayer funds given to "Christian" organizations who them discriminate against the recipients of their allegedly charitable operations be they adoption/foster care services to or healthcare services.  All of these things make a mockery of the First Amendment's ban on an established religion.  Like it or not, America now has a de facto established religion: fundamentalist Christianity.  A piece in The Advocate looks at this dangerous trend.  Here are excerpts:

At the end of March, President Trump attempted to reassure Americans who are feeling the stress of the coronavirus pandemic by inviting Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, to speak at his daily press briefing.

Calling America a “nation [that] had turned his back on God,” Mr. Lindell encouraged people to “use this time at home to get back in the Word, read our Bibles, and spend time with our families.”

Meanwhile, in New York City, a Christian organization called Samaritan's Purse, led by notoriously anti-LGBTQ Christian supremacist Franklin Graham, has set up a field hospital in Central Park to treat overflow patients in cooperation with Mt. Sinai Hospital from nearby hospitals. Even during this pandemic, this organization requires volunteers and health care workers to sign a statement of faith, proclaiming that marriage is defined as "exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female" and that unbelievers are sentenced to "everlasting punishment in hell.” The group is well known for using its social services to proselytize. Last year, the organization received $39 million in government support. 

“Christian privilege” is the term atheists and nonreligious people frequently use to describe how Christian viewpoints, particularly conservative evangelical ones like those expressed by Lindell and Graham, are favored over nonreligious viewpoints in our law and culture. If you ask most Americans, they believe that the separation of church and state enshrined in the U.S. Constitution should apply to everyone and prevent the government from giving taxpayer dollars or special favoritism to churches. Sadly, this is less and less true.

Using their nearly unlimited wealth, access to powerful politicians like Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and increasing control over the court system, a tiny minority of Christian supremacists have done everything they can to establish special rights for religious organizations. These extremist groups are indeed achieving their goal: guaranteed government funding, free of oversight and exempt from nondiscrimination rules, to allow them to advance their religious mission as they see fit.

And there is evidence that this failure to live up to our constitutional precepts is having a significantly negative impact on those groups most reviled by Christian supremacists: LGBTQ people, religious minorities, and yes, atheists and nonreligious people.

Here is a bit of a preview: when it comes to health care, the tens of thousands of nonreligious people surveyed painted a bleak picture. One in ten (10.7 percent) faced discrimination in health care because of their nonreligious beliefs within the past three years, and in areas of specialized health such as mental health (17.7 percent) and substance abuse services (15.2 percent), the numbers were even higher.

I don’t trust Graham’s organization to offer unbiased services, and I don’t know why any nonreligious or LGBTQ person would. Perhaps more importantly, like many people, I would never choose to receive services from such a discriminatory organization, and it violates my right to religious freedom for the government to force me to do so by providing essential social services through these organizations.

If our constitutional protections are to mean anything, they must apply equally to everyone, even during emergencies. It is incumbent on all of us to not allow Christian privilege to overcome the rule of law.

Virginia's History of Stonewalling Against Gay Rights

This weekend as many in New York City - and many other parts of the USA - recognize the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, an openly gay man is in the upper tiers of the Democrat presidential primary contest, Ralph Northam, the most gay friendly governor in Virginia's history occupies the Executive mansion in Richmond, and numerous LGBT individuals hold local and state elected office, Virginia still lacks any non-discrimination protections for LGBT employees or even those merely seeking housing. Why?  The answer can be summed up in one word: "Republicans." If a second word is needed, then I suggest "Christofascists."  These two groups have worked hand in glove for decades to thwart any advances in LGBT rights in Virginia and have stonewalled against any progress.  Thanks to them, same sex relationships carried the potential of a felony conviction until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Texas' and Virginia's (and eleven other states') sodomy statutes in 2003. In 1975, a statute was enacted barring same sex marriage.  Not content with that message of hate, in 2006 the Republicans and Christofascists rammed through the so-called Marshall-Newman Amendment to the state constitution in a very disingenuous campaign only to have that struck down by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and then the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014, and 2015, respectively. Despite the latter rulings, thanks to Republicans, the 1975 statute and the Marshall-Newman Amendment remain of the books even though unenforceable. A piece in the Roanoke Times looks at Virginia's discriminatory history which can only be ended by voting control of the Virginia General Assembly to Democrats  in Virginia's November, 2019, elections.  Here are highlights:

You may hear the word “Stonewall” a lot today. It will not refer to the Stonewall we’re most familiar with.

The Stonewall in this case is not the Confederate general but the 50th anniversary of the so-called “Stonewall riots” in New York in 1969.

If you don’t know what those are, then consider this more of the history we never learned, perhaps because this history concerns what one 19th century poet delicately called “the love that dare not speak its name.”

The Stonewall Inn was a famous gay bar in New York City. On June 28, 1969, police raided the establishment, and violence broke out. The details are complicated . . . What matters is what happens next: The two days of street violence marked the beginning of a gay rights movement.

Some context for the times: Even the city’s most liberal newspaper, the legendary counter-cultural Village Voice, refused to print the word “gay” in advertisements. Within six months of the Stonewall riots, no fewer than three gay-related publications sprang up in New York. Within two years there were gay rights organizations in every major city in the western world.

Of course, the Stonewall riots weren’t really the starting point of the gay rights movement, just the modern one. France was the first country to legalize homosexuality — in 1791. . . . .However, the Stonewall riots served as an ignition spark that galvanized a movement, in much the same way that Rosa Parks getting arrested served to ignite a civil rights movement for African-American equality that had been going on for a long time.

Social movements do not always move in straight lines, and Virginia provides a good example. In the years following Stonewall, Virginia took one step after another to crack down on anything that resembled gay rights. Meanwhile, gay Virginians — who, of course, had been there all along — were becoming more and more visible.

In 1975, Virginia decided to ban same-sex marriages. The idea of such a thing had not crossed the public mind before then, but now it had and Virginia wanted to make sure such a thing didn’t happen here. That same year, Roanoke had at least three establishments catering to a gay clientele. The first had been quietly operating since 1953 — the Trade Winds, on what is now Elm Avenue and Franklin Road. Others opened in 1973 and 1975. By the time The Park opened in 1978, Roanoke counted six gay bars, although many people were unaware any of them existed. Such was the nature of Roanoke, and the nature of the times. Roanoke’s gay community first gathered for a “Pride in the Park” event in 1990; the organizers also made sure it attracted no media attention. They later described the event as “real scary” because the 300 to 400 attendees weren’t sure how the event would go.

Subsequent “Pride in the Park” events were publicized, but many in Roanoke were still unaware there was any gay community here at all until one tragic night in 2000. That September, a Florida drifter targeting the gay community walked into the Backstreet Café on Salem Avenue and opened fire — killing one man and wounding six others. Even in those pre-social media days, Roanoke was national news. And Roanoke’s response? Nearly 1,000 people marched through the streets to decry the shooting. The Roanoke Times reported the reaction to the shooting this way:

It has led untold numbers of gays to reveal their orientation publicly for the first time, produced Roanoke’s first gay political action committee in years, persuaded two lawmakers to reconsider their opposition to adding sexual orientation to hate crime laws, and brought international attention to Roanoke’s heretofore barely visible gay citizenry. Until now, average straight Roanokers probably didn’t think they knew any gay people, said the Rev. Catherine Houchins, a lesbian minister. “Now they’re finding out we’re their neighbors, their customers ... their employers, their employees.”

In some ways, the Backstreet Café shooting was Roanoke’s Stonewall riot — except that no one died in New York. Someone here did. Yet six years later, Roanoke still voted against one major goal of the gay rights movement — the right to marry.

A mere statue against same-sex marriage wasn’t considered strong enough. In 2006, the General Assembly passed and sent to voters a proposed constitutional amendment than would write the ban into the state’s fundamental law. Called the Marshall-Newman Amendment after its sponsors — Del. Bob Marshall, R-Manassas, and state Sen. Steve Newman, R-Lynchburg — the amendment passed by 57% to 43%.

In 2014, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring declined to defend the amendment in federal court, calling it unconstitutional. The courts later agreed, striking down that provision of the state Constitution — a year before the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for same-sex marriage everywhere.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, though, the Marshall-Newman Amendment remains part of the state’s Constitution — unenforceable but still on the books in case some future U.S. Supreme Court changes its mind.

Today, there are openly-gay elected officials in Blacksburg, Roanoke and the General Assembly, something unthinkable at the time of the Stonewall riots. One of the top-tier candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination is gay and that’s not even the most interesting thing about Pete Buttigieg’s background. Yet in Virginia (and lots of other states), someone can still be fired simply for being gay. In some ways, Virginia still stands like a stone wall.

How "Red America" is Becoming Queer Friendly

At times it is easy to get despondent in the face of the Trump/Pence regime war on LGBT rights and the continued alliance of Republicans with animus filled Christofascists. Yet, at the same time, progress is being made across the county in mid-sized and larger cities where LGBT non-discrimination protections are being enacted and LGBT acceptance is growing.  Sometimes the progress is in the most unlikely places: Jackson, Mississippi has more LGBT protections than Norfolk, Virginia.  A column in in the New York Times looks at the pleasant surprises happening in many parts of red America.  Here are some highlights:

In July 2017 — the same month that President Trump announced on Twitter that he would ban transgender troops — I left on a six-week-long road trip across the red states. I wanted to understand what motivated L.G.B.T. people to stay in the heartland at a time when some progressives were still pondering escaping to Canada.

What I learned on the way from Utah to Georgia only reaffirmed what I have come to believe over the past decade: Attitudes toward L.G.B.T. people are changing rapidly in conservative states, and no one inside the Beltway can stop it. This country’s bright queer future is already here, hiding where too few of us care to travel.

From a bird’s-eye perspective, it may not seem that life has changed for L.G.B.T. Americans in so-called flyover country. State laws prohibiting discrimination against them remain elusive in red states — although Utah notably passed one in 2015. But in their absence, midsize cities have become pockets of L.G.B.T. acceptance.

In the West, cities including Boise, Idaho; Salt Lake City; Bozeman, Mont.; and Laramie, Wyo., have passed L.G.B.T.-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinances in the past decade. Below the Mason-Dixon line, the list of cities with such laws includes Atlanta and New Orleans; Birmingham, Ala.; and Jackson, Miss. L.G.B.T. Texans have had to fend off all manner of horrific state-level bills, but if they live in Austin, Dallas, Plano or Fort Worth, they have solid local laws on their side. And Midwestern hubs like St. Louis and Omaha likewise offer L.G.B.T. protections.

A majority of Americans — in all but six states — now support same-sex marriage. Most support transgender military service. Most oppose businesses’ turning away L.G.B.T. customers in the name of religion. Public opinion on L.G.B.T. people is finally turning a corner, not just on the coasts but between them as well.

That shift is thanks in large part to the increasing proportion of Americans who identify as L.G.B.T. themselves. According to Gallup polling data, 4.5 percent of American adults now identify as L.G.B.T., which is a full percentage point higher than in 2012. Millennials may not be more likely to be L.G.B.T., but their increased willingness to come out of the closet is driving the community’s numbers up.

Queer people, simply put, are everywhere. . . . . As more millennials move to the South and West — and as more Americans all over the country come out as L.G.B.T. — cities like Louisville, Ky.; Norfolk, Va.; New Orleans; and Salt Lake City are all seeing huge spikes in the percentage of their residents who identify as L.G.B.T., as data from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, shows. At the same time, between 1990 and 2014, that same statistic stayed relatively static for longstanding hubs of gay culture like San Francisco and Los Angeles — and it even fell in New York City.

America’s queer center of gravity is moving toward the middle. Before we know it, this country will have become L.G.B.T.-friendly not from the outside in but from the inside out.

There are plenty of reasons for L.G.B.T. Americans to feel despondent right now. But hope is just down the road.

Beware of the Far Right's Push For Bible Literacy Courses

Perhaps the only group that Donald Trump has consistently kept campaign promises to is the Christofascists with whom he first conspired back in June, 2016, when he promised them the moon if they would rally evangelicals to support him. Since taking office he and the religiously extreme Mike Pence have rolled back policies that protect gays and religious minorities and appointed right wing judges and justices who are disposed to grant special rights to Christian extremists.  But as a piece in The Daily Beast explores, these Christian extremists are also striving to push slanted "Bible literacy" courses into the nation's public schools. It is all part of an effort to make right wing Christianity the de facto established religion in the United States.  Here are article excerpts:

America is, quite famously, a nation founded on the principle of freedom of religion. As a result it is easy to understand why many people would be uncomfortable with certain kinds of religious practices (mostly notably prayer) and education in public schools. A little over a week ago President Trump tweeted his support for the introduction of Biblical literacy classes in schools, drawing attention to efforts by a variety of Christian groups to put the Bible back on the high school agenda.

There is a strategy here: Project Blitz, an initiative sponsored by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, the National Legal Foundation and the WallBuilders ProFamily Legislative Network, has been orchestrating the push to create these bills.

[S]ometimes a bill is clearly about more than just biblical literacy, and that's definitely the case with Project Blitz bills.”  Other measures that Project Blitz has called for includes the promotion of the motto “In God We Trust,” the introduction of a “year of the Bible” and the limiting of the rights of same-sex couples and transgender people. Chancey told me, “Project Blitz is weaponizing Biblical Literacy for the cultural wars.”

The problems with Biblical literacy courses are twofold. First, the focus on Judeo-Christian traditions to the exclusion of other religious traditions promotes the idea that Christianity is a privileged religion in the United States and misses an opportunity to educate children in the wide range of religious beliefs held by Americans. Second, it’s difficult to teach the Bible in a way that does not prejudice one particular denomination of Christianity.

To give just one truly obvious example, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants do not use the same Bible. Catholics and Protestants don’t even agree on which books the Bible should contain, much less how we should understand the content of those books. Add to this the fact that some denominations read certain passages metaphorically while others are more invested in literalist interpretations, and it’s very difficult to teach a Biblical literacy class in a non-sectarian manner. . . . . Christians should worry as much about denominational indoctrination as much as members of other religious groups and atheists should.

[A]nother problem: the way that Christian organizations weaponize archaeology in the presentation of Biblical texts. The presence of smallish rocks in the region where David fought Goliath isn’t proof of the Biblical story any more than the existence of the Sea of Galilee proves that Jesus walked on water. And even if the textbooks don’t explicitly offer this as proof or evidence of belief, it selectively employs archaeology as a support system for the accuracy of the Bible’s message.

The thing to worry about with Biblical literacy classes is not that they exist, but rather that politicians are introducing bills supporting them in an attempt to “get back” to a fictive point in time in which everyone was ‘Biblically literate.’ The problem with that is not just the distortive presentation of American history, or even the fact that these are efforts to privilege Christianity, but rather that it is impossible to present the Bible in an impartial way. Claiming to do so presents the interpretive tradition of a particular group as the collective beliefs of all Christians.

The solution is simple: keep Bible literacy classes out of the public schools. Period, end of discussion.

The Slippery Slope of Republican Complicity

Once upon a time Republicans seemed to actually put nation above party.  They also respected education and knowledge and science.  In addition, the rejected religious extremism and overt racism.  Those days are long gone thanks to the rise of Christofascists in both the GOP base and party city and county committees and are why I left the GOP years ago.  Since I left the GOP, the degradation has only increased with Trump's election in 2016 symbolizing just how morally bankrupt the GOP had become.  Yet, since January, 2017, we have seen Republicans sink even lower.  Misogyny is is embraced as is racial hatred and the most toxic aspects of right wing Christian extremism. My maternal grandparents, long time Republicans, would not recognize today's GOP and I suspect would view it as abhorrent.  A column in the New York Times looks at this ongoing embrace of the reprehensible.  Here are excerpts:

At this point, you have to be a truly fanatical practitioner of bothsidesism not to see that Trump is every bit as terrible a human being, and every bit as much a menace to the republic, as some of us warned when all the cool kids were busy snarking about Clinton’s emails.

The real news of the past few weeks isn’t that Trump is a wannabe Mussolini who can’t even make the trains run on time. It’s the absence of any meaningful pushback from Congressional Republicans. Indeed, not only are they acquiescing in Trump’s corruption, his incitements to violence, and his abuse of power, up to and including using the power of office to punish critics, they’re increasingly vocal in cheering him on.

Make no mistake: if Republicans hold both houses of Congress this November, Trump will go full authoritarian, abusing institutions like the I.R.S., trying to jail opponents and journalists on, er, trumped-up charges, and more — and he’ll do it with full support from his party.

But why? Is Trumpocracy what Republicans always wanted?  Well, it’s probably what some of them always wanted. And some of them are making a coldblooded calculation that the demise of democracy is worth it if it means lower taxes on the rich and freedom to pollute.

But my guess is that most Republican politicians are spineless rather than sinister — or, more accurately, sinister in their spinelessness. They’re not really ideologues so much as careerists, whose instinct is always to go along with the party line. And this instinct has drawn them ever deeper into complicity.

The point is that once you’ve made excuses for and come to the aid of a bad leader, it gets ever harder to say no to the next outrage. Republicans who defended Trump over the Muslim ban, his early attacks on the press, the initial evidence of collusion with Russia, have in effect burned their bridges. It would be deeply embarrassing to admit that the elitist liberals they mocked were right when they were wrong; also, nobody who doesn’t support Trump will ever trust their judgment or patriotism again.

So the path of least resistance is always to sign on for the next stage of degradation. “No evidence of collusion” becomes “collusion is no big deal” becomes “collusion is awesome — and let’s send John Brennan to jail.”

The party has long been in the habit of rejecting awkward facts and attributing them to conspiracies: it’s not a big jump from claiming that climate change is a giant hoax perpetrated by the entire scientific community to asserting that Trump is the blameless target of a vast deep state conspiracy.

And modern Republican politicians are, with few exceptions, apparatchiks: they are creatures of a monolithic movement that doesn’t allow dissent but protects the loyal from risk. Even if they should happen to lose a race in their gerrymandered districts, as long as they toed the line they can count on “wing nut welfare” — commentator slots on Fox News, appointments at think tanks, and so on.

Even now, I don’t think most political commentators have grasped how deep the rot goes. I don’t think they understand, or at any rate admit to themselves, that democracy really could die just a few months from now.

And if it doesn’t, if Republicans lose Congress and Trump leaves office on or before January 2021, the same people who kept declaring that Trump just became president will try to go back to pretending that Republican politicians are serious, honorable people who care about policy. But they aren’t.

So remember this moment. We’re seeing, in real time, what the GOP is really made of.

White Extinction Anxiety is Killing the GOP

The exodus of sane, rational - and I would argue, decent and moral - people from the Republican Party is accelerating as the party base becomes more racist and religiously extreme.  While Donald Trump (with Mike Pence quietly cheering in the background) intensifies his calls to racial hatred and ramps up his pandering to Christofascists, moderates are fleeing the party in droves. The fear - or perhaps psychosis that is fueling the GOP's lurch further and further toward something akin to a mix of fascism and fear mongering straight out of the KKK playbook is described in one column in the New York Times as "white extinction anxiety."  Sadly, the term aptly describes I suspect the bulk of Trump's supporters - including some of our "friends" who, in my view, threw aside morality and voted for the man - who simply cannot see the common humanity in others if they do not have the same skin color (or same sexual orientation).  Personally, as someone living in a white minority city, I simply do not comprehend the fear.  The only thing that springs to mind is what my former New Orleans belle grand mother: some whites simply must have others to look down on and discriminate against to feel good about themselves.  Superior if you will.  My grandmother held such whites in the lowest regard imaginable - white trash was the term she used.  Some may be offended, but the term increasingly describes the GOP base that now revolves around evangelical extremists and white supremacist.  Here are column highlights: 

Strip all the other rationales away from this  draconian immigration policy [Trump's family separation policy]. This is at the core: White extinction anxiety, white displacement anxiety, white minority anxiety. This is the fear and anxiety Trump is playing to. Politico Magazine dubbed Trump “Pat Buchanan With Better Timing.”

[T]he new numbers show that for the first time there are more children who are minorities than who are white, at every age from zero to nine. This means we are on the cusp of seeing the first minority white generation, born in 2007 and later, which perhaps we can dub Generation ‘Z-Plus.’”

America will soon be a majority-minority country. White America is growing older, there are fewer white women of childbearing age, and the white fertility rate is lower than that of Hispanics and blacks. 

All manner of current policy grows out of this panic over loss of privilege and power: immigration policy, voter suppression, Trump economic isolationist impulses, his contempt for people from Haiti and Africa, the Muslim ban, his rage over Black Lives Matter and social justice protests. Everything.

Trump is president and is beloved by his base in part because he is unapologetically defending whiteness from anything that threatens it, or at least that’s the image he wants to project. It is no more complicated than that. These immigrant children crying out for their mothers and fathers are collateral damage, pawns in a political battle to wring strict legislation out of Congress — medieval torture displays meant to serve as deterrents. These immigration policies are for people who conflated America with whiteness, and therefore a loss of white primacy becomes a loss of American identity.

But as noted above, for every new deplorable that Trump recruits to the GOP, more are leaving.  If the racism doesn't drive them away, the conflating of GOP policy with right wing Christian extremism does so.  Of course, it's no coincidence that many - likely a majority - the leaders of the "Christian" "family values" groups rallying to Trump are also all about white extinction anxiety also embrace white supremacy.  A second column in the New York Times looks at the exodus this entwining of the Christofascists' agenda is engendering.  Here are highlights: 

When the obituary for the Republican Party is written, the year 1980 will be cited as the beginning of the end. Reaganism was in full flower, but the big tent was already folding. Republican leaders endorsed a constitutional ban on abortion at the convention that summer, ending the party’s historic commitment to women’s rights and personal freedom.

As pro-choice Republicans, we refuse to support a party that has rightly earned the labels anti-woman and anti-common sense. . . .  As Republicans, we spent four decades working inside the party to produce effective policies helping women and families. Despite growing malice from an anti-choice faction, we kept our disagreements within the family. We redoubled our efforts to find common ground, rather than simply walk away.

But these successes were dismissed by party leaders who became increasingly beholden to the social extremists who were winning primaries in our broken, gerrymandered electoral system.

Our argument was simple: True fiscal conservatives should embrace family planning because it reduces poverty, increases educational attainment and work force competitiveness, improves health and provides people the opportunity to make educated moral choices. We incorrectly assumed that our fellow fiscal conservatives would join us in applauding the reduction in the number of unintended pregnancies, which saved taxpayers billions of dollars spent on the welfare state.

Instead, the policies and programs that led to these outcomes came under constant fire. The far right was more interested in conflating abortion and birth control for political purposes. It is fiscally disingenuous to deny birth control coverage and then bemoan unintended pregnancies and abortion.

The nastiness escalated to personal attacks on men and women who had dedicated countless hours and dollars to the party.

We don’t have the space to outline President Trump’s transgressions, but it is important to understand that his rise is an inevitable result of the hostility to women within the Republican culture. Women’s reproductive freedom has shifted with the wind: Remember that Ronald Reagan once supported abortion rights, as did George H. W. Bush, Mitt Romney and Mr. Trump himself.

We can no longer support a Republican Party that is shutting down low-cost health care clinics offering cancer screenings, basic health services and much-needed family planning services. It has become a party that wants to punish pregnant women by limiting their economic choices, that wants to reduce access to sex education programs that prevent unintended pregnancy and disease.

It is no wonder that women are voting with their feet. According to a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center, 56 percent of women identify as or lean toward Democrats. The gap is even wider among college graduates and minority voters.

It has become taboo within the party to even say “pro-choice.” Most of our supporters gave up on the party as it moved to the extremes not just on abortion but also on other social and fiscal issues.

This Republican Party is no family of ours. And so we say goodbye.

The Great Unmasking: the Falsity of Today's "Conservatives"

I left the Republican Party and the so-called conservative moment nearly two decades ago as it became increasingly homophobic, racist, and dishonest - a trend that, in my view, directly correlates with the rise of evangelicals within the Party. Over the intervening years, things have only gotten worse with Donald Trump exemplifying the conservative movements descent into indecency and moral bankruptcy.  Since Trump occupied the White House, pretty much everything conservatives have claimed to stand for over the years has been shown to be a lie as deficits have ballooned, free trade is under attack, and we witness a meddling in the market to benefit specific industries, and the environment is trashed. Meanwhile, white Christian religious extremists and white supremacists are ascendant.  A column in the New York Times looks at this unmasking of today's false conservatives.  Here are column excerpts:

If there is any lasting benefit from the Trump era — which is by no means a sure thing, since democracy may not survive the experience — it will lie in the Great Unmasking: the revelation of just how much bad faith pervades modern conservatism.

Some of us, of course, knew this all along, and are not surprised. Conversely, many centrists and much of the news media simply refuse to face up to the asymmetry of our politics and will persist with bothsidesism even as one side drives us into the abyss. But one can at least hope that the constant revelations of past hypocrisy will have some impact.

These revelations come on many fronts. Flag-waving super-patriots who called Democrats unpatriotic are perfectly OK when Republicans actively collude with foreign dictators. Pious invokers of fiscal responsibility and hysterical debt alarmists are perfectly OK with tax cuts that explode the deficit. Professors who denounce campus political correctness as the greatest threat we face to free speech collude with right-wing activists to conduct opposition research on left-wing students.

Rather oddly, some of the few people on the right who really seem to believe what they were saying are foreign policy neoconservatives. They misled us into a disastrous war; but they appear to have been sincere about their national security concerns, and are among the few Republicans who remain steadfast in their Never Trumpism.

Over the past 40 years or so conservatives have become ever more strident in their attacks on environmental protection. They questioned the science; they insisted that any attempt to limit emissions would greatly damage economic growth; they denounced government intervention and declared the sanctity of free markets.

But none of it was sincere. Climate skeptics have repeatedly given the game away, for example by touting new studies that they insisted would refute global warming, then rejecting those studies when they confirmed it. Economists who tout the limitless ability of markets to cope with change suddenly proclaim them utterly incapable of adapting to a carbon tax.

And now all that talk about free markets is revealed as the sham it always was.

Ten years ago the big debate was whether we should adopt a comprehensive strategy to limit greenhouse gas emissions. For a while it seemed possible that we’d adopt a cap-and-trade system that would in effect place a price on carbon. That effort failed . . . however, technology has been coming to our rescue. The single biggest source of greenhouse emissions, the thing we really need to stop, is coal-fired electricity generation (which has lots of other public health costs too.) And a funny thing happened: coal-fired power became uneconomical. Instead of building new plants, we’re retiring old ones.

Partly this was the result of cheap natural gas thanks to fracking. Increasingly, however, we’re looking at the effects of the technological revolution in renewables, which has produced spectacular declines in the cost of wind and solar power.

So is the Trump administration accepting this market verdict? Of course not: as with trade, it’s abusing powers granted to defend national security on behalf of destructive policies that have nothing to do with security. In this case, it’s planning to force clean energy to subsidize dirty energy.

Why? Probably the main reason is sheer corruption: coal moguls are key Trump backers, and he’s trying to reward them. But there’s also, I suspect, the sheer mean spiritedness that characterizes modern conservatism: “Liberals want clean energy? Hah! We’ll show them!”

[I]t’s yet another demonstration of the pervasive bad faith of the conservative movement. Nothing they said about their reasons for opposing climate policy were sincere, and now they’re perfectly willing to ditch all their supposed principles to keep the coal fires burning.

What Happened to Responsible Conservatives

Once upon a time conservatives and Republicans put country first and were advocates for science, knowledge and education.   They even believed in the social safety net.  Those days are gone and today's hideous version of the Republican Party and the foul occupant of the White House now seem hell bent to turn America into something resembling a banana republic from the 1950's.  One cannot help but wonder what the hell happened.  In my view, two things: (i) the Christofascist take over of the GOP base, and (ii) the GOP's embrace of white supremacy.  To the Christofascists, science, knowledge and good education are a threat since they run the risk of enlightening would be adherence to a toxic dogma that the entire Christofascist worldview is based on fantasy.  As for the embrace of racism, the party is now obsessed with an us versus them mindset where "winning" requires that others lose, both in terms of civil rights and whose is viewed as a"real American."  As a column in the Washington Post reminds us, things were not always like this:

The past several days underscore why not only political progressives but genuine moderates are at their wit’s end with the Republican Party and what passes for contemporary American conservatism.

If conservatism in the United States has claimed to stand for anything, it is the idea that government authority should be limited. Conservatives regularly argue (especially when Democrats are in the White House) that the executive’s clout should be checked and that legitimate law enforcement authorities deserve our respect, particularly when they are investigating abuses of power.

The behavior of House Republicans in demanding former FBI director James B. Comey’s memos about his conversations with President Trump, which were subsequently leaked to the media, shows a GOP that has abandoned all principle. It is willing to do whatever it takes to protect a president who has no regard for the truth, the law or established norms.

Any doubts that Republicanism and conservatism have given themselves over to one man, his whims and his survival were dispelled by the GOP’s use of the congressional oversight process to undermine a legitimate probe into a hostile power’s interference in our elections.

As it happens, the actual memos are embarrassing to Trump and support Comey’s veracity. And if the Republicans’ obstructionist triumvirate of Reps. Devin Nunes of California, Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Trey Gowdy of South Carolina had hoped to prove that Comey leaked classified information, the memos reveal exactly the opposite.

It should be stunning that the chairs of the Intelligence, Judiciary and Oversight committees are more interested in doing Trump’s bidding than in figuring out how Vladimir Putin may have helped to elect our current president. It’s possible to imagine that, somewhere, Ronald Reagan is weeping.

The ongoing frustration of many of us who really did respect conservatism once upon a time is not just about the movement’s capitulation to Trump. It is also triggered by the supposedly substantive side of the news: The only thing Republicans in Congress know how to do now that their corporate tax cut has proved to be unpopular is — to propose more tax cuts. There is an emptiness where problem-solving conservatism used to be.

In the period when democracy planted deep roots in Western Europe and was thriving in the United States, conservative parties were led by figures such as Dwight Eisenhower in the United States, Harold Macmillan in Britain, Konrad Adenauerin West Germany and Charles de Gaulle in France.

Applying the insights of this more responsible version of conservatism to our time would lead us to seek the best approaches to the very discontents that helped put Trump in the White House in the first place — for example, growing inequality. A 2016 Congressional Research Service report found that income inequality has been increasing since 1970. And between 2000 and 2015, incomes actually went down for the bottom 60 percent of earners. There are many causes of division and resentment in our country, and this is surely one of them.

We need a politics where the democratic left and right compete over who can most effectively and efficiently excise this social cancer from our body politic. Such a debate could be both instructive and productive.

Alas, except for a small, honorable cadre of writers and think-tankers, the American right has taken itself out of the game. Our politics will remain broken as long as conservatism confines its energies to cutting taxes and defending a reckless president at all costs.

"Religious Right" Overjoyed by New License to Discriminate

Trump with Christofascists

The most dedicated core of Donald Trump's base is made up of evangelical Christians lead by leaders of hate groups, many of which have strong white supremacist overtones (e.g., Family Research Council, The Family Foundation, etc.), who shed any veneer of decency and morality when they rallied to Trump's support.  While Trump has largely failed to keep any of his major campaign promises, he has continued to deliver for these false Christians whom I refer to as the Christofascist.  One of his ways of delivering has been to wage a relentless war against LGBT citizens as most recently embodied in Jeff Sessions release of a directive which gives Christofascists an almost unlimited license to discriminate against gays, but also many others if they mere allege that the targets of their bigotry somehow offend their claimed religious beliefs.  As a piece in The  Advocate notes, the Christofascists are celebrating.  Here are excerpts from the piece:

The Trump administration’s Friday issuance of “religious freedom” guidance and rollback of the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage mandate appalled progressives and many other Americans — but members of the religious right are over the moon. The “religious freedom” guidance, issued by the Department of Justice, assures federal grantees and contractors, and employees of federal agencies, that they don’t have to serve clients who pose a conflict with their religious beliefs — for instance, by being LGBT, a single parent, or a believer in a different religion. It also allows faith-based organizations to discriminate in employment without losing federal contracts or grants, and shapes the stance the federal government will take in court cases regarding discrimination.

A sampling of religious right reactions to Friday’s actions:

“This morning … another concrete step was taken toward undoing the anti-faith policies of the Obama administration. While the Obama administration quarantined religious beliefs as if they are a plague — the Trump administration is restoring our First Freedom to where it’s belonged since the founding of our country.” — Tony Perkins, president, Family Research Council [a hate group whose leader has documented ties to white supremacy organizations] 

“We commend President Trump for instructing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to send a strong message to the rest of America that religious freedom must be protected. The President has reversed the Obama-era policies and committed to protecting and promoting the religious freedom upon which this nation was founded. The Department of Justice must now vigorously enforce all Americans’ civil right of free exercise of religious liberty. This is an extremely positive step in the right direction.” — Mat Staver, founder and chairman, Liberty Counsel [a certified hate group]

“The American Family Association is heartened to see strong action taken on two issues that have long troubled those with closely held religious beliefs. No one should be forced to either pay for a service or perform a service that violates their faith. . . . . Tim Wildmon, president, American Family Association [a certified hate group]

“The story should be that this is a president who is truly committed to liberty. He is committed to America, and he is working to keep his word to the American people. That is incredibly honorable and noble.” — Penny Nance, president and CEO, Concerned Women for America [a certified hate group]

The guidance that the Trump administration issued today helps protect that First Amendment freedom. As CEO of the largest religious freedom legal organization in the world, I commend the president for taking another step to honor his campaign promise to make religious liberty his ‘first priority’ by directing the Department of Justice to issue this guidance, which simply directs the federal government to adhere to its legal and constitutional obligation to respect existing religious freedom protections.” — Michael Farris, president, CEO, and general counsel, Alliance Defending Freedom [a certified hate group] 

When these hate groups and Christian dominionists are celebrating, decent Americans should be truly fearful.  These groups and their leaders want nothing less than a white Christian theocracy.  Be very afraid.

Why I and Others Continue to Resisit

Two of the things that madden me about numerous "friends" who voted for Trump/Pence are (i) statements that I need to "move on" and/or "get over it," and (ii) their refusal to see the damage their foolish and/or bigotry inspired vote is doing to others and the country as a whole. Others focus on the unimportant much like proverbial soccer moms who obsess over children's sports and PTA squabbles as things around them turn ominous.   The mindset - beside being one of "we won" - is that if evils, corruption and bigotry are ignored, somehow they cease to exist and things will be OK.  As the previous post demonstrates, ignoring the toxicity of the Trump/Pence regime is not something LGBT citizens can do when we so clearly have a bull's eye on our backs. Trump and the Christofascists in his base have every intention of lessening our rights and making us less than full citizens. Individuals who would be outraged if they themselves were turned away by businesses or faced housing discrimination have no problem looking the other way when it happens to others.  Simply put, bad things happen when good people do nothing or worse yet allow themselves to ignore wrongs being done to others.  Nazi Germany shows where such indifference can lead.  A column in the New York Times makes the case for why resistance is essential.  Here are excerpts: 

When Congress has to pass a joint resolution condemning white supremacy and plunk it on the desk of the “president” — in an effort to force him to sign it and daring him not to — you know that we as a country are beyond the pale.

When Donald Trump’s fraudulent voter-fraud commission openly entertains the loony and unworkable idea of further winnowing the voter rolls by forcing potential voters to undergo the federal background check used for gun buyers, you know that this administration is trying every way it can to ax voter access and re-establish Jim Crow poll tests.

When Robert Mueller is circling this White House like a hawk preparing to descend on a chicken coop, you know that the stench of corruption emanating from this administration reaches to the heavens.

Indeed, on Tuesday, Axios reported this intriguing line:

“Republicans close to the White House say every sign by Mueller — from his hiring of Mafia and money-laundering experts to his aggressive pursuit of witnesses and evidence — is that he’s going for the kill.”

I often hear from Trump enthusiasts and accommodators that at some point resistance must submit, that the time for outrage is term-limited, that at a point, complete opposition registers as unfair and unpatriotic.

This always settles on me in a most unsettling way. How is it, precisely, that right becomes less right and wrong less wrong simply by the passage of time and the weariness of repetition?  How is it that morality wavers and weakens, accommodates and acquiesces?

It seems to me the oddest of asks: Surrender what you know to be a principled position because “moving on” and “moderation” are the instruments that polite society uses to browbeat the radical insisting on righteous restoration.  I see no value or honor in this retreat.

[E]very day that I wake and recall that a bigoted, sexist, intolerant, transphobic scoundrel is president, my stomach turns and my skin crawls.

We are now talking about an administration that is attempting to dramatically reshape the demographics of the eligible electorate, in particular striking at groups who overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates and overwhelmingly voted against Trump.

We are talking about the basic concept of whether our government, and by extension our country, advances unity or division, love or hate.

We are talking about an assault on our democracy by a hostile foreign power, the contours and scope of that assault coming into greater clarity every passing day.

It is crystal clear what Russia’s motive was: to get Trump elected. As CNN reported this week, Vyacheslav Nikonov, a member of the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, said on a Sunday political show that to achieve world dominance, “the U.S. overextended themselves.” He went on to say that the intelligence services slept “while Russia elected a new U.S. president.”

How can any of us, if we are true patriots, be expected to simply calm down and suck it up when the Russians are bragging that the “president” of this country isn’t ours but theirs?

None of this is normal or right, and Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, in my opinion, has become one of the most dangerous men in America because he is endeavoring to make the abominable look acceptable. No, thanks, sir, I prefer my disasters not to wear a disguise.

Good people of good conscience are seeking to do what Trump only gave lip service to, and in his way bastardized. We, patriots, will not stop resisting this destruction. It is we who will Make America Great Again by trying to limit the damage Trump can do to us until he feels the reckoning of the damage he has done to himself.

To me, one of the ironies is that those who proudly wear their white Christian nationalism on their sleeves see nothing wrong with any of these horrors.  Indeed they voted for it and remain Trump/Pence loyalists.  Meanwhile, I left Catholicism years ago and, given what the Christofascists have done to Christianity, generally don't even consider myself a Christian anymore.  Yet, I still know the difference between right and wrong and will not close my eyes to hatred and evil.  Which model would Christ endorse?  I suspect that it would not be the one pushed by Trump's evangelical Christian supporters. 

Will the Politicization of Churches Backfire?

Trump and Christofascists/hate merchants James Dobson and Tony Perkins

As noted, Donald Trump's "religious liberty" executive order has left the anti-gay forces among the Christofascist hugely disappointed.  The longed for exemption of Christofascists from non-discrimination laws and ordinances did not materialize.  What the hate merchants did receive was purported cover for right wing churches to openly engage in political activities - not that many weren't already doing so on a de facto basis anyways.  Here in Virginia, The Family Foundation, perhaps the leading hate group in Virginia, has for years operated a network with conservative churches and pastors and pushed these churches to vigorously work for TFF's regressive and theocratic agenda.   Thus, the executive order may not result in any change in the reality on the ground that much.   More importantly, it may accelerate the exodus from Christianity and religion in general that is sweeping the country.  I have long thought that despite a uptick in aggressiveness and stridency, long term the Christofascists may be one of the most powerful elements in the death of Christianity.  A piece in Salon looks at this possibility.  Here are highlights:

Thursday, on the National Day of Prayer, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty.” . . . . The final draft of the order, however, was a drastic rewriting. All the LGBT-specific attacks were taken out and abortion was not mentioned, though the new order does direct federal officials to consider changing health care regulations in order to stop insurance coverage of contraception for huge swaths of women. Instead, in a somewhat surprising move, the executive order largely focuses on undermining a law meant to discourage religious authorities from using their powers to influence elections.

This move is obviously meant as a giveaway to leaders of the religious right, who did so much to help elect Trump, and also as a way for Republicans to consolidate power by allowing conservative Christian pastors even more leeway to pressure their congregants to vote Republican. But this power grab could well backfire on the Christian right. Instead of drumming up more votes for Republicans, breaking down barriers between church and state may end up driving even more people out of the churches entirely.

Trump’s executive order doesn’t change the law — that would take an act of Congress. But it officially discourages the IRS from auditing or fining religious organizations and churches that may be in violation of it. . . . . it’s a solution looking for a problem. There’s no evidence that churches are being treated especially harshly by the IRS.

Still, the release of this executive order and all the publicity around it could encourage ministers, especially those of the fundamentalist variety, to get even bolder when it comes to campaigning from the pulpit. That’s where there’s a good chance this whole effort could backfire. There’s a fair amount of evidence to suggest that churches that become more political and conservative aren’t recruiting more people to the right-wing cause, and in fact may be driving people away.

One of the biggest social trends of the past decade is the rapid growth of the “nones” — people with no affiliation to organized religion — which is particularly pronounced with younger Americans. Both Pew Research and the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) have found that up to a quarter of Americans don’t identity with any religious tradition at all, up from 6 percent in 1991. Four out of 10 Americans under the age of 30 are unchurched.

But where it gets really interesting is when one starts looking at the reasons why. Most nonreligious people — 78 percent, according to Pew Research — were raised in a religion and abandoned it in adulthood. While most simply say they no longer believe, there is some evidence that distaste for the religious right has had a significant impact.
According to PRRI, nearly 30 percent of those who have left a church cite their disapproval of religious homophobia as a reason. Sixteen percent say their churches became too political and 19 percent cite the clergy sex abuse scandal.

Sixty-six percent of nonbelievers in the PRRI survey agreed with the statement that “religion causes more problems in society than it solves.”

Encouraging ministers and priests to become more belligerent and more repressive in their politics, in the face of these rapid changes in religious affiliation and religious attitudes, is not likely to gain converts to the conservative cause. It’s probably just going to make more people who were already feeling uneasy with the conservative bent of much of Christianity to choose to leave their churches, and quite possibly to abandon religion altogether.

[P]olling data shows that most Americans think it’s a good idea to keep churches away from direct political campaigning. Pew Research polling shows that 66 percent of American respondents support the Johnson amendment.

Perhaps, then, atheists should be the ones celebrating this executive order. Legally, Trump’s latest order is largely toothless, but culturally, it’s only likely to accentuate the aspects of religion Americans like the least, namely the controlling and reactionary aspects of it. That, in turn, will encourage more Americans to use their Sunday mornings for sleeping and shopping, rather than enduring political lectures from conservative religious pastors.

Let's hope that by giving them a portion of what they want, Trump will have unwittingly accelerated their long term demise.