Buttigieg's Rise Exposes a Deepening Rift in the "Christian Right"

Buttigieg and Christofascist extraordinaire, Mike Pence.

I have long argued that the Republican Party has no long term plan for survival short of a coup that would overthrow the U.S. Constitution and end popular elections with independent political parties.  For years now, the GOP has based its future on aging white voters - who are literally dying off - and far right Christians extremists (I call them the Christofascists), groups that basically hate everyone who is not just like them. Meanwhile, the rest of the population is becoming increasingly diverse and whites are headed towards a minority status within a few decades.  Now, compounding the numerical decline of aging white bigots is a growing rift in the so-called Christian Right (it is neither Christian nor right on the issues) that centers on LGBT rights and acceptance that is best personified by the rise of Pete Buttigieg.  Younger generations even among evangelicals are supportive of gay rights and same-sex marriage while their elders are not. The growing rifts within evangelicals in many ways mirror the fissures developing in the United Methodist Church over LGBT rights which many view as on the cusp of a major schism. Younger evangelicals increasingly reject the anti-gay vitriol of their denominations and demand that 12th century understandings of sexuality be abandoned.  A piece in The Week looks at the growing rift over LGBT rights which ultimately could endanger the GOP as it remains committed to anti-gym extremism. Here are excerpts:

Pete Buttigieg is having a moment in the national spotlight. Buttigieg, as most of America now knows, is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential nomination. He's also gay, married to a man, and a regular churchgoer. And his meteoric rise has brought the debate over faith and sexual ethics clearly into focus.

This debate over same-sex relationships has been tearing apart American churches for years. Sometimes it presents itself as a dividing line between denominations. For example, Episcopalians, of which Buttigieg counts himself, have largely embraced gay rights. Evangelicals mostly have not. Last month, conservative commentator Erick Erickson said that "if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity. But then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially."

The debate is also alive and well within denominations themselves. For example, the United Methodist Church — the largest in U.S. mainline Protestantism — recently strengthened its prohibitions of same-sex wedding ceremonies and gay clergy, even while many similar churches have been liberalizing their teachings on homosexuality.

This aligns the United Methodists with the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and a growing number of Christians in the Global South. Indeed, it was African delegates, working with U.S. evangelicals, who supplied the margin of victory for the Methodist Church's recent interpretation of Scripture and tradition.

But no doubt many in the church were outraged by the decision. Methodist pastors in the Washington, D.C., area took out an ad in The Washington Post decrying the vote and calling for a more inclusive church. The chaplain at the Methodist college I attended, a longtime ordained minister within the denomination, has even signed on to work for Buttigieg's presidential campaign. Another nearby school ended its affiliation with the Methodist Church over the LGBT vote.

The people on both sides of the religious debate over homosexuality aren't merely talking past each other. Their views on the issue are fundamentally very different from one another.

Buttigieg summed up his view well when addressing his ongoing dispute with Vice President Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian with traditional views on sexual mores. He said that "the Mike Pences of the world" should understand "that if you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me — your quarrel, sir, is with my creator."Buttigieg would shift the focus toward gay rights, where social conservatives are losing ground as more people support gay marriage.

A Buttigieg nomination would also put evangelicals on the defensive over their support for President Trump. After all, how can you say you stand for the sanctity of marriage but still vote for the twice-divorced, thrice-married, locker room-talking, frequently incendiary president?

This debate is no longer just between Episcopalians and evangelicals. It's raging between Christians on the left and the right side of the political spectrum. Conservatives have long struggled to grapple with committed same-sex relationships, as well as the increasing number of otherwise theologically orthodox people who disagree with them about sexual ethics.

Such weighty theological questions aren't likely to be solved in the rough and tumble of a presidential campaign. But the right 2020 developments could get voters — and people in the pews — talking about them.

As conservative denominations - including the Catholic Church - hemorrhage  members and younger individuals are eschewing religion entirely, the rift over gays and gay rights and Christian hypocrisy will likely intensify.  Among the big losers will likely be the GOP which has placed all of its eggs in one basket. Frankly, the demise of the GOP cannot come soon enough in my opinion.

Trump's Narrative vs. Pelosi's Subpoenas: The Ground is Shifting Beneath Republicans

With the Democrat takeover of control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the days of Republicans killing investigations in to Donald Trump's likely criminality and perhaps worse are over.   While sadly re-elected, Devin Nunes' agenda of cover ups and conspiring with Trump are over.  Longer term the results in urban and suburban districts ought to send warning flags to Republicans.  As the cities and suburbs grow and rural populations shrink - and aging whites die off -  the day may be fast approaching where the GOP agenda of racism, bigotry, and reverse Robin Hood no longer wins in many statewide races outside of backward rural/red states which are the federal equivalent of welfare recipients that they so strongly condemn.  The big unanswered question also remains of what House and Mueller investigations of Trump may reveal .  A piece in Politico looks at the new political reality:

Democrats wanted a base of power in Donald Trump’s Washington and they got it.

They also wanted to wake up Wednesday morning to a radically changed country. They wanted permission to dismiss the past two years as a fluke of history, a hallucination now fading. And they wanted something more: to rub the president’s nose in the dirt of defeat and repudiation so badly that it would be hard to see him doing more than limp through the balance of his first term, much less with a credible path to a second.

Those things Democrats did not get. To the contrary, the GOP defeat was not nearly as severe as the Democratic one in 2010 . . . . This leaves 2018 as the “Yes, but” election—not fully satisfying but by no means fully deflating for partisans of either side.

Yes: the Democratic march into once-unfavorable suburban terrain across the country was impressive. No amount of prattle about the “expectations game” or historical averages can diminish the reality that Nancy Pelosi is poised to retake the speaker’s gavel and the vast appropriations and investigatory power this gives the opposition party to check a hostile executive.

But: There is scant evidence of a mandate for a scorched-earth pursuit of Trump, and Tuesday’s gains in the Senate for Republicans (as well as the recent Brett Kavanaugh nomination battle that likely contributed to this outcome) underline the risks of this approach. . . . the electoral path Trump navigated to the presidency in 2016 remains plausible in 2020.

But: The midterms offered redundant evidence (some GOP strategists have been warning of this for a generation) that the party’s base is predominately rural in a country growing more urban and suburban, predominately white and culturally conservative in a country growing more diverse and culturally tolerant. Do Republicans really think that losing a majority of people who voted – as they did in 2016 and did again Tuesday night – but clinging to power through institutions designed to buffer democracy like the Senate and Electoral College is a wise strategy long-term?

The suburbs, which formed the bedrock of the Republican Party for half a century, are increasingly Democratic ground. The slow suburban exodus from the GOP has accelerated and even expanded beyond the Midwest and Northeast to the South and across the Sunbelt. Name the big metro – Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia – and chances are there’s a Republican incumbent who lost Tuesday night or barely escaped.

By accident or design, however, divided government of the sort Trump will now preside over is the historical norm. In the 38 years since Ronald Reagan’s victory, presidents have faced having at least one chamber of Congress controlled by the opposition party in 28 years.

In general, however, those presidents had a degree of modesty about their new circumstances that would be unusual, so far, for Trump. . . . No one is expecting Trump to come forward in coming days with a message of self-critique or self-correction that by all evidence he believes is wholly unnecessary. In fact, [Trump] the president is likely to cherry-pick the results, pointing to the red-state Senate romp as evidence of the popularity of his agenda while dismissing the suburban losses as minimal, a culling of losers and malcontents that will ultimately strengthen the GOP herd.

Trump’s response was typical of the night’s mixed outcome: Yes, he kept the Senate, but was happy to avert his gaze from whatever traps House Democrats have in store for him.

One can hope that judicious House investigations and the Mueller investigation will ultimately expose Trump - and hopefully Pence as well - and help even red states to lurch back to objective reality.