Evangelicals Feign Dismay at Trump's Gathering of "Religious" Supporters

One of the big ironies of the 2016 election cycle - unless one has followed the self-styled "godly folk" and fundamentalist Christian organizations over the years - is how evangelical Christians are now whining over the fact that so many of their brethren are now supporting Donald Trump.  One need not search the websites of many "Christian" and "family values" groups to see that Trump's message of contempt for others who are different, open racism and nativism are all threads of what these groups have been preaching for many years.  Seemingly, up until now few in the mainstream media have ever bothered to look at what these groups have always been all about even as they gave a platform to hate merchants like Tony Perkins and other leaders of "Christian" groups.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the crocodile tears of evangelicals who in Trump have largely found the leader they have always wanted.  Trump's only disappointment is that he doesn't call for a formal theocracy.  Here are article highlights:

Fuller and other conservatives whose voting decisions are guided by their Christian faith find themselves dismayed and adrift now that Trump has wrested control of the Republican Party. It is a sentiment that reaches from the small, aluminum-sided church with a large white cross on its front that Fuller and his wife built on the Nebraska plains to the highest levels of American religious life. Even progressive Christians — evangelicals and Catholics, among others — who don’t necessarily vote Republican are alarmed that Trump is attracting many voters who call themselves religious. A coalition of nearly 60 Christian leaders — many progressive and some conservative — published an open letter last week asking voters of faith to reject Trump and his “vulgar racial and religious demagoguery,” warning that the nation faces a “moral threat” from the candidate.

There is consternation about the hard line Trump takes on immigrants and about the morality of a thrice-married man who has long bragged about his sexual conquests. But another factor is at work as well: The traditional social and cultural positions that drive many religious conservative voters, including same-sex marriage and abortion, have been cast aside by a candidate who seems to have little interest in fighting the culture wars.

In the past, Trump has espoused social views to the left of his party, including a longtime acceptance of gay rights, although he has since moved right on many of them.  . . . . And while he says he is against same-sex marriage, he has attended a same-sex wedding and is opposed to a North Carolina law — aimed at transgender people — that requires people to use bathrooms that correspond with the gender on their birth certificate. He said transgender activist Caitlyn Jenner could use the women’s room at his properties.

“This year the Republican Party has not just surrendered on the culture wars, they’ve joined the other side. And that’s a unique situation,” said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“Trying to use social issues as primary issues to define a campaign has not borne out as effective for those candidates who embraced it,” said Gregory T. Angelo, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, which advocates for conservative gays and lesbians.

But there are voters like Fuller for whom “it’s always about social issues.” He cast ballots for John McCain and Mitt Romney despite not loving their platforms, but he felt they were men of character who would do right by the country. Many at a Baptist conference he attended last week were shaking their heads, he said, unsure about how to handle the upcoming election; supporting Hillary Clinton and her liberal positions seems contrary to everything many of them stand for.

Moore said many evangelicals are “horrified” to have to choose between Trump and Clinton. More conservative evangelicals like Moore are concerned about moral and social issues. Gushee said that progressive ones such as himself and the other letter-signers are worried about the “bigotry, xenophobia and misogyny” they see from Trump.

Despite this, many self-described evangelicals have cast ballots for the brash New Yorker. Trump has captured about a third of the vote of white born-again or evangelical Christians and tends to do well among evangelicals who don’t frequent church. He has also won the endorsement of leaders such as Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, where Trump spoke this year and where Cruz announced his candidacy in March 2015.

 

The debate over whether evangelical Christians can support Trump’s candidacy while keeping true to their beliefs “may be shaping the very nature of evangelicalism,” Mark Galli, editor of Christianity Today, wrote in March.

Heather Dreesman said thinking about the election in November makes her feel sick to her stomach. She said she now carries a sense of grief that the country is forsaking its values and feels anguish about what will happen. She would like to see a third-party candidate but doesn’t think it’s a real possibility — meaning she probably won’t vote.

“I hate to make this comparison,” she said. “I really do feel like in the future I would hate to look back and say, ‘I voted for Hitler.’ I feel like that may be what is happening if I vote for Trump.”

Will SCOTUS Throw Out the Right's Immigration Case?

Other than bashing and stigmatizing gays few things bring the far right closer to orgasm that mistreating and demonizing immigrants - correction, non-white immigrants.  The two activities, of course are related in that the far right, especially the "godly Christian" crowd cannot stand anything or anyone who does not conform to their cult and racial niche.  This hatred of the "other" is what is really fueling the challengers to Barack Obama's immigration rules in United States v. Texas regardless of what the anti-immigration forces may claim.  With the United States Supreme Court scheduled to he oral arguments in the case, some now wonder if the court will punt and find that Texas has no standing to bring the challenge.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the possibility.  Here are article highlights:

The great immigration showdown is finally here. Today, the Supreme Court hears ninety minutes’ worth of oral arguments in United States v. Texas, conservatives’ challenge to President Obama’s executive orders on immigration policy.

The Court may decide to dodge the bullet rather than bite it, though.

They have that choice because there are, at heart, two major issues at stake in the case: first, whether Obama exceeded his executive authority, and second, whether states can sue him if so.

Normally, that second question—whether a party has standing—is the kind of thing that only lawyers care about. Standing is a requirement for any lawsuit, and it is at issue in many of them. But standing rarely makes the headlines, because it’s boring to ask whether we should even be asking the question the case is asking. Most non-lawyers would say, Get to the substance, already.

In this case, though, standing is substance. Anyone who watches a Republican debate, knows that immigration policy is a hot issue, and a huge mess. In theory, according to the Immigration & Nationality Act (INA), all eleven million “undocumented immigrants”/ “illegal aliens” (you can usually tell what someone thinks based on which term they use) should be immediately deported from the United States.

In practice, however, only Donald Trump thinks that should really happen, and Trump, of course, is nuts. It would be enormously expensive, disruptive, and cruel to deport so many people at once. Families would be torn apart, and a massive system akin to a police state (internment camps included) would have to be set up, at a direct cost of an estimated $166 billion and an indirect cost of billions more in economic disruption.

As a result, for decades, the federal government has prioritized whom to deport and when. But who gets caught and who doesn’t is often arbitrary, with the government acting like a fisherman with a tiny net, grabbing a few fish at random but letting more slip away. Indeed, progressives have complained that deportations have actually increased under Obama, who is compelled to uphold the existing law.

Comprehensive immigration reform has stalled again and again, most recently in 2013, when a bill with support among conservatives and liberals died in the House due to Tea Party nativist fears.

That is why in 2012, and again in 2014, Obama put into place two administrative policies to attempt to rationalize and prioritize deportations actions. Those policies, DACA and DAPA, would effectively de-prioritize (“defer action” in their terms) about 1.2 million and 4 million people, respectively. For three years, they’d effectively be off the deportation list.

Republicans hate this. As evidenced by Trump’s rise, a significant portion of the Republican base really does want to deport 11 million people.

Here’s where standing comes in. Texas, joined by 24 other states, has said that it will suffer monetary harm if these policies are enacted—specifically, the cost of issuing driver’s licenses to all those now-quasi-legal illegal immigrants.

Of course, that monetary harm isn’t the real reason they’re suing. They’re suing because they’re Republican-led states (15 Democrat-led ones have filed an amicus brief on the other side) and they detest these policies. But this is how standing works all the time.

If Texas succeeds, then theoretically any state could sue the federal government to oppose a policy it doesn’t like: an environmental policy, a trade policy. All federal actions impose some costs on the states; is there anything that they couldn’t challenge?

Perhaps that’s why the district court’s opinion took 50 pages to grant standing to Texas, providing three separate bases for it in an opinion built out of right-wing talking points. But it’s easy to see the Supreme Court going the other way. Immigration is a political question, yet here it is at the Supreme Court, which is supposed to decide the law.

So the Supreme Court may well say “we don’t decide cases like these” both for reasons of Roberts Court judicial conservatism, and because if the Court does get to the merits of this case, we may end up with yet another 4-4 deadlock, and nothing resolved whatsoever.

On Obama’s side, the government has argued that DACA and DAPA are within the executive branch’s discretion. The government has to prioritize somehow, and this is no different from how previous administrations have prioritized for decades. 

If the Court reaches those questions, there will be ample law to guide it. But if the two sides are actually arguing politics while pretending to argue law, that’s a good sign that this is a political question after all, and not an actual case or controversy between parties with standing to sue. Maybe this debate belongs more on the courthouse steps than in the courtroom itself.

I hope Chief Justice John Roberts hands a defeat to the right wing hate merchants.