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. 

With Luck, the Supreme Court’s Bostock Ruling May Destroy the GOP Coalition

With luck evangelicals will come to the realization that the current Republican Party has never cared for them or embraced their causes beyond lip service and the pandering of Donald Trump.  The GOP's real interest has always been focused on corporate America and what benefits corporate America.  In the amicus briefs filed in the combined cases under Bostock v. Clayton County, corporate America sought a ruling in support of LGBT Americans that would curb legalized religious based discrimination that interfered with both corporate America's recruiting/hiring efforts and  the sensibilities of wealthy, educated CEO's.  Justice Neil Gorsuch delivered for gays and for corporate America in his majority opinion and left evangelicals and the scamvangelists who routinely fleece them reeling and engaging in spittle flecked rants.  Gorsuch's ruling was right under the wording of Title VII, right under moral standards - no one is more immoral than evangelicals - and on the right side of history.  As we move into the 2020 elections, with luck evangelicals will defect from the GOP which has always viewed them as useful idiot. A piece in the Washington Post looks at this possibliity.  Here are highlights:

President Trump won the presidency in part because he rallied religious voters with his promise to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death with someone who would protect their values. It is thus ironic that the opinion of Scalia’s replacement, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, in Monday’s decision holding that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employment discrimination against LGBTQ Americans, may start the unraveling of the coalition behind Trump — and the Republican Party.

Strongly religious voters have gravitated toward the Republican Party for some time now, but it wasn’t always this way. . . . . Clinton won the white Catholic vote, and Reagan won it in his two races by roughly the same margins that he won overall. Catholics did not tilt Republican in the 1980s or 1990s, and the evangelical GOP tilt was significantly less than it is today.

Data from the Pew Research Center shows this started to change in 2000, as the culture war led religious voters to increasingly back Republicans. In 2000, Bush won white Catholics by seven points while losing the national vote by about half a point. That difference between the white Catholic vote and the national vote grew with each succeeding election, rising to 11 points in 2004, 12 points in 2008, and 23 points in 2012. Evangelical voters made a similar shift. . . . The inference is clear: The more that secular elements within the Democratic Party successfully pushed their cultural agenda, the more religious voters moved to Republicans.

Trump moved these figures to new, astronomical heights. He won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote and 60 percent of the white Catholic vote even while losing the national popular vote by 2 percentage points. White evangelicals voted 67 points more Republican than the nation as a whole, while white Catholics voted 25 points more Republican than the nation.

Concern about the Supreme Court’s role in the culture wars clearly impacted this dramatic shift. The 2016 exit poll found that 21 percent of all voters said Supreme Court appointments were the most important factor in their vote; Trump carried them by a 56 to 41 percent margin. It’s clear that fear of a culturally liberal court drove a crucial number of normally Democratic-supporting white voters to back Trump.

Gorsuch’s decision Monday could throw all of this into the political dustbin. Regardless of the decision’s legal merits, religious voters clearly expected Gorsuch and his fellow Trump appointee, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, to oppose progressive attempts to advance their cultural agenda through the courts. “But Gorsuch” was a common phrase used to justify continued support for Trump among religiously motivated voters throughout 2017 and 2018. Now that Gorsuch has proved himself untrustworthy in their eyes, they would be right to question whether Republican assurances meant anything at all. Indeed, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), has already said as much on the Senate floor.

Even a small reduction in the Republican margin among the devout will destroy any hope Trump will be reelected. Evangelical voters made up between 21 and 38 percent of the vote in the key Southern states of Florida, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina in 2016.

If his margins among this demographic fell by only 10 points this year, he would lose Florida and North Carolina based on his 2016 result and would even lose Georgia and Texas if the 2018 election returns are a better measure of those states’ current partisan breakdowns.

Trump’s hold on the Midwestern “blue wall” is also imperiled by erosion in religious voters’ support.

Republicans and Trump will need to confront this challenge sooner rather than later. Trump will need to spend more time shoring up his support among religious voters than he might like, likely stressing religious liberty and pro-life measures. Congressional Republicans would also be well advised to demonstrate their support for measures important to these voters. None of this, however, can fully replace what these voters’ faith in Republicans ability to appoint the right people to the Supreme Court provided. For these voters, Trump and the GOP were tested and found wanting.

Let's hope evangelicals belatedly wake up to the fact that congressional Republicans never really cared about  evangelicals' litmus test issues.

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.

Epidemic of Denial About Sexual Abuse in Evangelical Churches

Even as the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has agreed to pay a $210 million in settlement of to victims of clergy sex abuse, one of the largest payments in a never ending saga, there is another sex abuse epidemic that continues to go under reported: sex abuse in the evangelical churches (the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts out a monthly report of clerical crimes that takes up two newspaper sized pages).  Part of the explanation is the lack of a tight hierarchical structure in such denominations unlike in the Catholic Church, which makes tracking crimes more difficult.  The other phenomenon, is the tendency of parishioners to blame the victims and rally to the support of the abusers.  The victim, rather than the abuser often is the one who becomes the outcast - or at least until the abuse becomes too widespread. The result is that victims all too often blame themselves and/or remain silent.  The ultimate irony, of course, is that it seems to be denominations most obsessed with and repressive towards sex are the very ones that have the most wide spread abuse problems.  A long piece in the Washington Post looks at the denial that still remains the norm in the evangelical church.  The takeaway, to me, is that until evangelicals clean up their own churches, they have no moral authority to lecture others on issues of sexuality.  Here are excerpts:

Moxon was furious that her church community hadn’t listened. But she never told anyone what had happened to Rachael. “We had already tried once and weren’t believed,” Moxon says. “What was the point?”

Today, Denhollander can see how her church, which has since shut down, failed to protect her. But as a child, all she knew from her parents was that her abuse had made their church mad and that she wasn’t able to play with some of her friends. She blamed herself — and resolved that, if anyone else ever abused her, she wouldn’t mention it.

And so when Larry Nassar used his prestige as a doctor for the USA Gymnastics program to sexually assault Denhollander, she held to her vow. She wouldn’t put her family through something like that again. Her church had made it clear: No one believes victims. 

Across the United States, evangelical churches are failing to protect victims of sexual abuse among their members. As the #MeToo movement has swept into communities of faith, several high-profile leaders have fallen: Paige Patterson, the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, was forced into early retirement this month after reports that he’d told a rape victim to forgive her assailant rather than call the police. Illinois megachurch pastor Bill Hybels similarly retired early after several women said he’d dispensed lewd comments, unwanted kisses and invitations to hotel rooms. 

[I]n any community of faith, there is also sin — often silenced, ignored and denied — and it is much more common than many want to believe. It has often led to failures by evangelicals to report sexual abuse, respond appropriately to victims and change the institutional cultures that enabled the abuse in the first place. 

Without a centralized theological body, evangelical policies and cultures vary radically, and while some church leaders have worked to prevent abuse and harassment, many have not. The causes are manifold: authoritarian leadership, twisted theology, institutional protection, obliviousness about the problem and, perhaps most shocking, a diminishment of the trauma sexual abuse creates — especially surprising in a church culture that believes strongly in the sanctity of sex. “Sexual abuse is the most underreported thing — both in and outside the church — that exists,” says Boz Tchividjian, a grandson of Billy Graham and a former Florida assistant state attorney.

As a prosecutor, Tchividjian saw dozens of sexual abuse victims harmed by a church’s response to them. (In one case, a pastor did not report a sexual offender in his church because the man had repented. The offender was arrested only after he had abused five more children.)  

[T]he three largest insurers of churches and Christian nonprofits said they received about 260 claims of sexual abuse against a minor each year. Those figures, though, exclude groups covered by other insurers, victims older than 18, people whose cases weren’t disclosed to insurance companies and the many who, like Denhollander, never came forward. In other words, the research doesn’t include what is certainly the vast majority of sexual abuse. The sex advice columnist and LGBT rights advocate Dan Savage, tired of what he called the hypocrisy of conservatives who believe that gays molest children, compiled his own list that documents more than 100 instances of youth pastors around the country who, between 2008 and 2016, were accused of, arrested for or convicted of sexually abusing minors in a religious setting. 

The problem in collecting data stems, in part, from the loose or nonexistent hierarchy in evangelicalism. Catholic Church abusers benefited from an institutional cover-up, but that same bureaucracy enabled reporters to document a systemic scandal. In contrast, most evangelical groups prize the autonomy of local congregations, with major institutions like the Southern Baptist Convention having no authority to enforce a standard operating procedure among member churches.

This means researchers attempting to study this issue have to comb through publicly available documents. That’s what Wade Mullen, the director of the M.Div. program at Capital Seminary & Graduate School, did as a part of his PhD dissertation. . . . . Over 2016 and 2017, Mullen found 192 instances of a leader from an influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and child pornography. (This data did not include sexual crimes against an adult or crimes committed by someone other than a leader.) 

Of the 166 people who said they had been victims of sexual abuse before or during their time at BJU [Bob Jones University], half said school officials had actively discouraged them from going to the police. . . . BJU officials declined to comment for this article. 

Sovereign Grace Churches (SGC), an influential chain of congregations, many located on the East Coast, allegedly failed to report sexual abuse claims during the ’80s and ’90s to the authorities and caused secondary trauma to victims through pastoral counseling, according to an extensive investigation by Washingtonian magazine. In one instance, an SGC pastor allegedly told a wife whose husband sexually abused their daughter to remain with him. When she asked how she could possibly stay married to a man attracted to children, she was told that her husband “was not attracted to his 11-year-old daughter but rather to the ‘woman’ she ‘was becoming.’ ” Two years into the husband’s prison sentence, SGC pastor Gary Ricucci wrote in support of his parole using church letterhead, and the church welcomed him back to the community after his release. . . . The wife no longer attends.  

The evangelical defense of God-fearing offenders extends to the political realm. Franklin Graham, CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said President Trump’s “grab them by the p—y” comments and other crude language didn’t matter because “all of us are sinners.”  Roger Canaff, a former New York state prosecutor who specialized in child sexual abuse, tells me that many worshipers he encountered felt persecuted by the secular culture around them — and disinclined to reach out to their persecutors for help in solving problems. This is the same dynamic that drove a cover-up culture among ultra-Orthodox communities in New York, where rabbis insisted on dealing with child abusers internally, according to several analysts. 

But among evangelicals, there is an added eschatological component: According to a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Americans believe that the end times will occur before 2050. In some evangelical teachings, a severe moral decay among unbelievers precedes the rapture of the faithful. 

This attitude could explain the 2017 case of an assistant pastor at Agape Bible Church in Thornton, Colo., who was convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison for repeatedly sexually assaulting an adolescent girl. The police investigation revealed that church leaders and the girl’s father agreed not to contact the police because the “biblical counseling” received within the church was sufficient to handle the case. According to an officer who interviewed the father, “His interest was in protecting the church and its reputation more than protecting his daughter.” 

Partly, church leaders tend to circle the wagons out of arrogance. “I’ve worked with churches across the theological spectrum, from fundamentalist to progressive,” Tchividjian says. “They say: ‘I’m the man God’s placed in charge. I have the Bible. I know how to handle this.’ ” But another, less visible problem is the overall attitude toward sex. Sexual sin is talked about constantly, and extramarital sex is considered a heinous moral lapse. (A student at Patterson’s seminary who told him she’d been date-raped was disciplined for being in the man’s room) It stands to reason that churches don’t want to air an epidemic of wickedness among their flocks. 

At an untold number of Christian churches and institutions, the silence on sexual abuse is deafening. Statistically, evangelical pastors rarely mention the issue from the pulpit. According to research from the evangelical publishing company LifeWay, 64 percent of pastors said they talk about sexual violence once a year, or even less than that. Pastors drastically underestimate the number of victims in their congregations; a majority of them guessed in the survey that 10 percent or less might be victims. But in 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 1 in 4 women (women make up approximately 55 percent of evangelicals) and 1 in 9 men have been sexually abused. There is no evidence suggesting those numbers are lower inside the church.

Immanuel Baptist Church faced a choice, the same one before many American churches today: Face the sin in their midst and make the church a place that follows the biblical command to care for the powerless and victimized — or avoid the disruption and churn out another generation of silenced victims who learn, like Denhollander did, that the church isn’t safe.

The Teacher Revolt Spreads to Arizona

Photo credit: Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press.

Slashing funding for public education has long been a favored tactic of Republican politicians who realize that their wealthy supporters could care less about public schools as their place their little darlings in private - and often  segregated - schools.  The other pillar of the Republican base, the Christofascists and evangelicals in turn hold hatred for public schools since they teach inconvenient things like science, especially the theory of evolution, and  fact based sex education.  Hence all the GOP efforts to provide vouchers and/or charter schools to the cheers of Christian extremist groups.   

For most Americans, however, public schools are an essential part of what the government is supposed to provide.  Good public schools maintain property values, make an area attractive for business investment, and provide their students with a path for upward social mobility.   Belatedly, more and more of the public and school teachers are waking to the damage that GOP attacks on funding for public schools is causing.  Soccer moms may be brain dead politically on most issues, but trash their child's school and even they can grasp the fact that things need to change.  As a column in the New York Times notes, the revolt against GOP efforts to defund public education has spread to Arizona.  Here are excerpts:

On Thursday, a historic walkout by teachers and the support staff closed more than 1,000 public schools in Arizona. The state became the latest and the largest to be swept by a labor insurgency among underpaid educators that started in February in West Virginia, then spread to Oklahoma, Kentucky and, also on Thursday, Colorado.

The wildfire spread of the teachers’ movement — in parts of the country that are singularly hostile to organized labor — is one of the more surprising and exciting developments of this otherwise bleak political moment. Conservatives are right to worry: We’re seeing a citizens’ revolt against their policies.

There are several interrelated factors behind the teachers’ movement’s explosive growth. Most significant, of course, is that teachers in some red states feel backed into a corner after a decade or more of disinvestment by Republican governments. Because of a series of tax cuts, particularly over the last 10 years, Arizona teachers are among the worst paid in the nation, and they have some of the country’s largest class sizes — up to 40 students to a single teacher, according to Joe Thomas, president of the Arizona Education Association teachers’ union.

This week, I visited a K-8 school in the scrublands of South Phoenix, a flat, dusty, wide-open area that’s only a 15-minute drive from downtown but feels much farther. (The principal asked me not to identify it, or him, for fear that his school would suffer administrative reprisals for letting a journalist in.) The science teacher told me her classes have 30 to 36 students each. Aside from desks, she’d either bought most of what was in her classroom, or had it donated — not just books, but also chairs and even a water dispenser, which the class needed during the seven months when the school’s drinking fountains were broken. The teachers’ strike in West Virginia made Arizona educators think that something could happen. Teachers told me they were also inspired by other bursts of activism nationwide, from the Women’s March to the Never Again movement for gun control. In Phoenix this week, I went to an organizing meeting in the suburban backyard of an elementary school teacher named Lisa Wyatt, where teachers and parents made plans to knock on their neighbors’ doors to build support for the walkout. “To see these kids organizing marches across the country, it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, we can do that!’” she told me. The impetus for the walkout in Arizona, like those in other states, . . . began with a Facebook group, Arizona Educators United, and a hashtag, #RedforEd, which an elementary school music teacher, Noah Karvelis, had created to encourage school employees to wear red in solidarity with their brethren in West Virginia.

It’s not a coincidence that the teacher walkouts have happened in states where unions are weak. . . . . because of its abysmal salaries, Arizona has such an acute teacher shortage that many schools are already hiring teachers without formal education training, some with only high school diplomas. Small-government conservatives have pushed teachers to the point where many feel they have nothing to lose.

Still, it’s not clear how long the educators can hold out. This month, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, scored a public relations victory by offering teachers a 20 percent raise. Many educators didn’t trust him to deliver, saying that his plan had no dedicated revenue source. Nor did it address the teachers’ demand to restore education funding to 2008 levels.

But as we’ve seen all over the country since Donald Trump’s election, protest is contagious, and builds on itself. Ducey, meanwhile, is up for re-election this year in a state that’s trending blue. “Maybe I’m foolishly confident, but we have a ton of power,” Karvelis told me. “We have the truth on our side. We have the people on our side. And we have people who are not afraid to take a risk.”

Kudos to these teachers.  Let's hope the revolt expands further.

Donald Trump Meets With Hate Group Leaders

As I have noted previously, members of the LGBT community who may be contemplating voting for Donald Trump, are in my opinion, out of their minds.  As Exhibit A to support my analysis, today Trump met with a veritable who's who of LGBT hating Christofascists in an effort to win their support.  True to form, Trump made many promises today, including that he would (i) strike down IRS bans on tax-exempt religious entities from engaging in political activities and (ii) appoint ultra conservative justices to the U. S. Supreme Court.  Numerous news outlets look at Trump's self-prostitution to the haters.  First, these excerpts from The New Civil Rights Movement:

Facing a group of some 1000 anti-abortion activists, pastors, anti-LGBT activists, hate group heads, and other evangelical leaders, Donald Trump on Tuesday attempted to quell fears among the religious right that he might not be an authentic social conservative, and may not fully adhere to their values.

Trump made two promises to the evangelical leaders at Tuesday's New York City meeting. He will appoint Supreme Court justices who oppose abortion, The Washington Post reports, hinting he would want to overturn Roe v. Wade. And Trump promised the evangelicals, many of whom run religious non-profits, he will get rid of the Johnson Amendment, a six-decade old law that bans non-profits with a tax-exempt status, including churches, from directly engaging in partisan politics, such as endorsing or opposing political candidates. 

Tony Perkins, President of anti-gay hate group Family Research Council, appeared supportive. "He gained a lot by coming here," he said. Possibly referring to Trump's history of philandering and divorce, Perkins added, "We’re all sinners. We all have messed up. We did not have a theological discussion today about the eternal security of one’s soul. We were talking about the present threat to America."

But there is more.  As the Washington Blade reports,  Trump has also set up anti-LGBT evangelical advisory board who has as it co-chair Michele Bachmann who runs a bogus "ex-gay" cure center with her closeted husband.  Here are highlights from the Washington Blade:

The 26 members of the board are a who’s who of individuals who’ve sought to undermine LGBT rights. Members were announced on the same day Trump was set to meet with evangelical leaders at Trump Tower in New York City. Bachmman is the first name on the list of members, which is in alphabetical order.

Joining Bachmann on Trump’s board are others with anti-LGBT views, including Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition and James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family. Also on the list is Harry Jackson, pastor of the Maryland-based Hope Christian Church who sought to block the legalization of same-sex marriage in D.C.

Another member is Robert Jeffries, senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, who has a history of virulently anti-LGBT comments. Among them is making the dubious claim that “70 percent of the gay population” has HIV/AIDS and therefore gay people should be barred from the armed forces.

Trump announces the anti-LGBT advisory board less than a week after saying he’d be a better friend to the LGBT people as president than his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. The Washington Blade has placed a request to comment in with the Trump campaign seeking for explanation on why affiliating with these anti-LGBT figures doesn’t undermine the pledge.

 The prospects of Trump and evangelicals determining our future is nothing less than terrifying.

Hispanic Evangelicals Support Obamacare

In the category of more bad news for the GOP which already has a horrendous problem with Hispanic voters who rightly see the GOP as their enemy, now Hispanic evangelicals are supporting  the Affordable Health Care Act, a/k/a, Obamacare.  Pastors rightly see that Obamacare can mean health care coverage as opposed to nothing and, unlike the white supremacists in the Tea Party/Christofascist base of the GOP, are not hoping their parishioners will simply vanish or die off. Politico has details:

Under the big evangelical tent where tens of millions of Americans worship, Hispanic churches are embracing Obamacare despite the concerns about religious freedom that have tarnished the law for many of their fellow believers.

Pastors have encouraged support since enrollment for health coverage began in October. Their take is that the law’s positives outweigh its negatives, especially for the one in three Hispanics without insurance, the highest uninsured rate of any racial or ethnic group. Many of the uninsured are eligible for major new health benefits plus subsidies to help them afford coverage.

On the eve of the first sign-up deadline Monday, church leaders are still working hard to get out the word about how much the Hispanic community will gain. Some draw parallels between the suffering the law is intended to ameliorate and the church’s core mission.

Jesus was a healer,” noted Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition. “The health care law can be improved, but I think in its present form it does more good than harm to Latinos around the country.”

[The]embrace of the health law puts Hispanic evangelicals at odds with other evangelicals as well as religious conservatives across denominations. They have opposed Obamacare primarily because of its provision requiring businesses to cover contraceptives in employee health plans, including the morning-after pill.

Although the contraceptive requirement may cause many evangelical Hispanics discomfort, they seem to have made their peace. “Our commitment has always been to strike a balance between religious liberty and individual liberty,” Salguero said.  In doing so, they’ve aligned with the mainline congregations that have been at the center of most of the Obama administration’s faith outreach.

The law is “a start,” said Abraham Hernandez, northeast vice president for the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. He believes Obamacare’s expanded benefits will advance a key conference principle. “If Hispanics in the nation can have access to health care, it indeed preserves life. We believe that access to health care is very critical,” he said.

The divergence from other evangelicals is stark.  But then again, it is important to remember that many far right evangelicals are self-centered, seek to inflict their religious beliefs on all Americans and frankly do not give a damn about blacks, Hispanics or other minorities who they see as interlopers who do not belong in America,  

Why Whites Will Abandon the GOP

The Christofascists and inhabitants of Teabagistan believe that all the Republican Party needs to do to win future national elections is to win more white votes.  But other than fanning the flames of racism and religious extremism, the GOP has no plan for moving the nation forward and the hate and bigotry exhibited by the GOP base is seen as increasingly repulsive.  My entire extended family of white former Republicans is but one example that underscores the reality that the victory through winning more white votes is insanity.  A column in The Daily Beast expands upon why the GOP quest for more white votes is not going to save the party from demographic reality.  Here are excerpts:

As you are certainly aware, the new consensus among most Republicans and conservatives is that they don’t need no stinking Latinos . . . . But what’s interesting is this. There’s an assumption embedded in the argument that no one disputes: namely, that whites will always be as conservative as they are now and will always vote Republican in the same numbers they do now. This assumption is wrong. White people—yep, even working-class white people—are going to get less conservative in coming years, so the Republicans’ hopes of building a white-nationalist party will likely be dashed in the future even by white people themselves.

We already know all about the creative-class white voters, the well-educated and higher-income people who have shifted dramatically to the Democratic column over the past generation. Those voters are increasingly lost to the GOP. 

Back in March, the Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute released a big poll on immigration. Those findings are interesting as far as they go, but the questions and results went beyond that. It’s the first poll I’ve seen that breaks the white working class into four distinct age groups (65-plus, 50 to 64, 30 to 49, 18 to 29) and asks respondents attitudes about a broad range of social issues. And guess what? White working-class millennials are fairly liberal!

White working-class young people back gay marriage to the tune of about 74 percent. Another 60 percent say immigrants strengthen the United States (the totals for all three other age groups are below 40 percent). About 56 percent agree that changes immigrants have brought to their communities are a good thing. Nearly 40 percent agree that gays and lesbians are changing America for the better (more than double the percentages in the other three age groups).

They have different views because they’re different people: only 22 percent of white working-class millennials are evangelical, compared with 32 percent as a whole and 42 percent of seniors. And an amazing 38 percent of the group call themselves religiously unaffiliated.

But the striking differences between their views and those of the three older groups are consistent, they are uniform, and they are pretty vast. 

So let’s hand it to the Republicans. They make the strategic decision to go all 1980s South Africa on us at a time when a sizable and sure-to-be-growing chunk of one of the most Republican-friendly segments of the white vote isn’t going to want that anymore. So, far from the GOP share of the white vote sailing up toward 70 percent as Sean Trende so giddily predicts, it seems just as likely to decrease as we enter the 2020s and see the sprouting of a more liberal (or less conservative) white working class. Finally, the Republican Party will be the party of true equality, having equally alienated every racial and ethnic group in America.

Based on my children and their friends, I believe that the premise of the column is on target.  Not that the Christofascist?Tea Party base of the GOP gives a damn about reality.
 

Frothy Mix Projected to Win Missouri and Minnesota

One has to wonder what toxic elements are in the water in Missouri and Minnesota where Rick "Frothy Mix" is projected to win the GOP non-binding nomination contest. With Santorum looking to garner 46% of the vote in Minnesota and 55% in Missouri, you have to wonder when witch trials and the emblazoning of scarlet letters on adulterers - Gingrich best be careful - will begin in earnest. The good news, of course, is that these wins likely mean that the demolition derby of the GOP presidential clown car crowd will continue and that the candidates will pander even more to the lunatic far right of the GOP base and ultimately make it more difficult for the eventual nominee to court moderate voters who are turned off by Christofascist extremism. CNN looks at the projected results:

Rick Santorum won the Missouri primary and will win the Minnesota caucuses, CNN projected Tuesday in results that reshaped the Republican presidential race by raising questions about frontrunner Mitt Romney's ability to attract broad conservative support.

Santorum led in Minnesota with 46% support to 26% for Texas Rep. Ron Paul, 16% for Romney and 11% for Newt Gingrich, with 28% of the total counted.

The victory in a state Romney won in his unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid was a strong statement by Santorum that he represents a major conservative challenge to the former Massachusetts governor and Gingrich, the former House speaker.

With 73% of the Missouri vote counted, Santorum had 55% to 25% for Romney and 12% for Paul. Gingrich didn't make the ballot in Missouri.

The non-binding Missouri primary had no delegates at stake, but the dominating victory by the conservative Santorum showed his appeal to Republicans in a state with large blocs of evangelical and tea party supporters.

In Missouri, a state official told CNN that the turnout would be "significantly lower than predicted." The secretary of state's office had estimated turnout would be 23%.

Evangelical Proselytizing in The Military

Lost in the current coverage of the fray between LGBT Americans and the DNC/Obama is a serious story in Newsweek that in some ways may explain some of the opposition to repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell ("DADT") within the military: the growing influence of far right evangelical Christians within the armed forces. I have written about this problem before because (a) it threatens the right to freedom of religion for our service members and (ii) it has the potential to seriously alienate citizens of countries with non-Christian populations. Now, Newsweek looks more in depth at this growing problem which is intensifying as evangelical chaplains increasing infiltrate the military. Combined with the far right lunacy of some of the senior officer corps and it is a recipe for trouble. Here are some story highlights:

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The growing controversy over military chaplains using the armed forces to spread the Word. . . Ever since former president George W. Bushreferred to the war on terror as a “crusade” in the days after the September 11 attacks, many have charged that the United States was conducting a holy war, pitting a Christian America against the Muslim world. That perception grew as prominent military leaders such as Lt. Gen. William Boykin described the wars in evangelical terms, casting the U.S. military as the "army of God."

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A May article in Harper’s by Jeff Sharlet illustrated a military engaged in an internal battle over religious practice. Then came news about former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Scripture-themed briefings to President Bush that paired war scenes with Bible verses. . . . Later in May, Al-Jazeera broadcast clips filmed in 2008 showing stacks of Bibles translated into Pashto and Dari at the U.S. air base in Bagram and featuring the chief of U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, telling soldiers to “hunt people for Jesus.”

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In the aftermath of that report, the Pentagon responded that it had confiscated and destroyed the Bibles and said there was no effort to convert Afghans. But while the military dismissed the Bagram Bibles as an isolated incident, a civil-rights watchdog group, Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), says this is not the case.

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According to the group's president, Mikey Weinstein, a cadre of 40 U.S. chaplains took part in a 2003 project to distribute 2.4 million Arabic-language Bibles in Iraq. This would be a serious violation of U.S. military Central Command's General Order Number One forbidding active-duty troops from trying to convert people to any religion.

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The effort is an example of what critics call a growing culture of militarized Christianity in the armed forces. It is influenced in part by changes in outlook among the various branches' 2,900 chaplains, who are sworn to serve all soldiers, regardless of religion, with a respectful, religiously pluralistic approach. However, with an estimated two thirds of all current chaplains affiliated with evangelical and Pentecostal denominations, which often prioritize conversion and evangelizing, . . . This imbalance was exacerbated by regulation revisions in the 1980s that helped create hundreds of new "endorsing agencies" that brought a flood of evangelical chaplains into the military

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Among the "endorsing agencies" is CFGC, which represents a conglomeration of independent Pentecostal churches outside established denominations. The group was accepted as a chaplain-endorsing agency by the Department of Defense in 1984, two years after it first applied. Since 1984, MRFF charges, Ammerman's agency has violated numerous codes that govern chaplaincies, including a constant denigration of other religions, particularly Islam, Judaism, mainline Protestantism and Catholicism, but also non-Pentecostal evangelical churches.

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Weinstein, an Air Force veteran who founded MRFF in 2005 after both he and his sons say they encountered anti-Semitic harassment and proselytizing in the service, has waged legal battles against what he sees as an improper mingling of church and state in the military, including a current lawsuit against the Department of Defense alleging service members' compulsory attendance at military functions that include sectarian Christian prayers and a broader "pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense and the United States Army."

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MRFF is calling, in a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, to strip the CFGC of its endorsing authority and to investigate its chaplains for various code violations. But they fear the Obama administration will not press this issue given the announced replacement of Army Secretary Pete Geren with Rep. John McHugh, a New York Republican with a conservative record on church-state separation issues.

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I believe that this is a very serious issue and I have little faith in the Obama administration's ability to reign in the out of control evangelical and pentecostal chaplains.

Red States Have Highest Teen Pregnancy Rates

It looks to me that the heavily evangelical Deep South states need to spend less time gay bashing, obsessing over gay marriage, trying to inflict their theocratic agenda on the rest of us and worrying about what law abiding LGBT citizens do in the privacy of their own bedrooms and pay more attention to the fact that delusional abstinence only sex educations do NOT work. Here are a few highlights from Yahoo News:

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Mississippi now has the nation's highest teen birth rate, displacing Texas and New Mexico for that lamentable title, a new federal report says. Mississippi's rate was more than 60 percent higher than the national average in 2006, according to new state statistics released Wednesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The teen birth rate for that year in Texas and New Mexico was more than 50 percent higher.

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The lowest teen birth rates continue to be in New England, where three states have rates at roughly half the national average, which is 42 births per 1,000 teen women.

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Some experts have blamed the national increase on increased federal funding for abstinence-only health education that does not teach teens how to use condoms and other contraception. They said that would explain why teen birth rate increases have been detected across much of the country and not just in a few spots.

The Real Rick Warren Exposed

As the tempest over Barack Obama's selection of Christianist homophobe Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation continues, there is one positive aspect that is perhaps being overlooked. Namely, that the real, nasty, gay hating, non-Christian hating Rick Warren is finally being exposed to the light of day. Too often the lazy, afraid to criticize Christianists main stream media simply gives people like Warren a pass and the true vileness of their agenda does not come out. Not any more - or at least not for Warren who is having all of his nastiness exposed. Whether or not Obama ultimately uninvites this bigot, he will not be able to continue to get the free pass that he has enjoyed to date. Democracy Now has an interview with Max Blumenthal that highlights this development. Here are some highlights:

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Prior to this controversy, Rick Warren was, you know, proffered by the media as the voice of the new evangelical movement, which embraces environmentalism and fights poverty and is going to move beyond the old hobgoblins of the Christian right and the old, you know, draconian figures of the Christian right, like James Dobson and Pat Robertson. Rick Warren was supposed to be the pioneer of this new movement.

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[B]ecause, you know, the media has expected evangelicals, especially conservative evangelicals, to be draconian and retrograde, you know, they’ve made a hero out of Rick Warren without looking at who he really is and what he really believes. . . . So, the real Rick Warren is someone who fights the culture war with a velvet glove. He even—he freely admitted to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal that the principal difference, the only difference, between him and James Dobson is a matter of tone.

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And he’s [Warren]backed every anti-gay proposition that’s come down the pike in California in the last ten years, including Proposition 22, which laid the groundwork for Proposition 8. He joined up with James Dobson and Charles Colson and Tony Perkins and these people to do this. Beyond that, he compares pro-choice advocates to Holocaust deniers.

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Rick Warren has a doctrine of women’s submission, which he preaches to his church, and he tells the female members of his church that they have to support their husbands’ decisions, even if they make bad financial decisions, because women have to submit in a biblical manner to their husbands. So this goes way beyond being anti-gay. He’s, you know, patriarchal. He’s supported assassinating Iran’s president.

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[T]he question is, where does Barack Obama draw the line when someone demonizes a segment of Americans? Is this person really fit to address the nation and confer God’s blessing on the entire United States of America, when Rick Warren freely admits that he only believes that a small segment of Americans are going to heaven and that the rest of us are going to burn in an everlasting lake of fire? That’s the question.

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Personally, I believe that Obama's selection of Warren is an abomination - to use a term the gay-haters love - and I have discarded all of my Obama signs and campaign materials (as have other gays that I know, some of whom donated plenty of money to his campaign). Should Obama fail to uninvite Warren, I suspect the failure will ultimate haunt him. In the meantime, I hope more and more Americans come to know what a douche bag Warren is in reality. I am going to do my best to disseminate the truth as widely as possible.