The Real Agenda of Critics of "Government Schools"

Another area where Donald Trump is delivering on promises to Christofascists is in the area of public education.  His appointee as Secretary of Education, Betsy De Vos, has a long, long history of working to gut funding for public schools - as well as well documented support for anti-LGBT hate groups - is now striving to divert public education funding to "charter schools" notwithstanding the spotty record of such schools when it comes to actually improving education. If one looks at the history of such schools and especially their largest cheerleaders, one finds that beneath the supposed libertarian is a Christian extremist and/or white supremacist.  In Virginia, the "Massive Resistance" movement was powered by Christian fundamentalists who set up private "Christian academies" rather than have their children attend integrated schools.  Sadly, that mindset is alive and well decades later. In addition, the secular nature of public schools is viewed as a threat by the "godly folk" who view true science and knowledge as a threat to the made up world view.  A piece looks at the agenda of De Vos and those like here who are being abetted by Der Trumpenführer, who wants to divert $9 billion from public schools to charter schools.  Here are excerpts:

When President Trump recently proposed his budget for “school choice,” which would cut more than $9 billion in overall education spending but put more resources into charter schools and voucher programs, he promised to take a sledgehammer to what he has called “failing government schools.”

[I]n certain conservative circles, the phrase “government schools” has become as ubiquitous as it is contemptuous.

What most people probably hear in this is the unmistakable refrain of American libertarianism, for which all government is big and bad. The point of calling public schools “government schools” is to conjure the specter of pathologically inefficient, power-mad bureaucrats.

Accordingly, right-wing think tanks like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Heartland Institute and the Acton Institute have in recent years published screeds denouncing “the command and control mentality” of “government schools” that are “prisons for poor children.” All of these have received major funding from the family of the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, either directly or via a donor group. But the attacks on “government schools” have a much older, darker heritage. They have their roots in American slavery, Jim Crow-era segregation, anti-Catholic sentiment and a particular form of Christian fundamentalism — and those roots are still visible today. Before the Civil War, the South was largely free of public schools. That changed during Reconstruction, and when it did, a former Confederate Army chaplain and a leader of the Southern Presbyterian Church, Robert Lewis Dabney, was not happy about it. An avid defender of the biblical “righteousness” of slavery, Dabney railed against the new public schools. In the 1870s, he inveighed against the unrighteousness of taxing his “oppressed” white brethren to provide “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” For Dabney, the root of the evil in “the Yankee theory of popular state education” was democratic government itself, which interfered with the liberty of the slaver South. One of the first usages of the phrase “government schools” occurs in the work of an avid admirer of Dabney’s, the Presbyterian theologian A. A. Hodge. Less concerned with black paupers than with immigrant papist hordes, Hodge decided that the problem lay with public schools’ secular culture. In 1887, he published an influential essay painting “government schools” as “the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of antisocial nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.” Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony. An admirer, too, of both Hodge and Dabney, Rushdoony began to advocate a return to “biblical” law in America, or “theonomy,” in which power would rest only on a spiritual aristocracy with a direct line to God — and a clear understanding of God’s libertarian economic vision.

Rushdoony took the attack on modern democratic government right to the schoolhouse door. His 1963 book, “The Messianic Character of American Education,” argued that the “government school” represented “primitivism” and “chaos.” Public education, he said, “basically trains women to be men” and “has leveled its guns at God and family.”

The critique of “government schools” passed through a defining moment in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, when orders to desegregate schools in the South encountered heavy resistance from white Americans. Some districts shut down public schools altogether; others promoted private “segregation academies” for whites, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes. Among the supporters of the Trump administration, the rhetoric of “government schools” has less to do with economic libertarianism than with religious fundamentalism. It is about the empowerment of a rearmed Christian right by the election of a man whom the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. calls evangelicals’ “dream president.” We owe the new currency of the phrase to the likes of Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council — also bankrolled in its early years by the DeVos family — who, in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing same-sex marriage, accused “government schools” of indoctrinating students “in immoral sexuality.” When these people talk about “government schools,” they want you to think of an alien force, and not an expression of democratic purpose. And when they say “freedom,” they mean freedom from democracy itself.

As I have noted a number of times, about the only area in which Trump is keeping his promises in the area of forwarding the Christian fundamentalist/white supremacist agenda.  Be very afraid.  

Rural vs. Urban America - A Nation Divided

The Commonwealth of Virginia is a microcosm  of the larger divide in America.  Virginia's urban centers - which can now out vote the rural regions - value diversity, modernity, knowledge and science, and tend to be less religious.  They also are the economic powerhouse that funds the rest of the state and end up supporting the rural regions that are most reliant of welfare and Medicaid payments.  Meanwhile, the rural regions tend to hate the residents of the urban centers and cling to "traditional values" that often equate to embracing ignorance and bigotry.  On a national level, states like California and New York send far more funds to the federal government than they receive back and as a result are forced to support the cretins in the Bible Belt and many red states who survive by virtue of the federal dole. It's little wonder why some in California would like to break away from America.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this growing divide and one has to wonder when the progressive cities and states will say "enough!" to supporting the dead weight.  Here are highlights:

Republican reliance on suburbs and the countryside isn’t new, of course, but in the presidential election, the gulf between urban and nonurban voters was wider than it had been in nearly a century. Hillary Clinton won 88 of the country’s 100 biggest counties, but still went down to defeat.

American cities seem to be cleaving from the rest of the country, and the temptation for liberals is to try to embrace that trend. With Republicans controlling the presidency, both houses of Congress, and most statehouses, Democrats are turning to local ordinances as their best hope on issues ranging from gun control to the minimum wage to transgender rights. Even before Inauguration Day, big-city mayors laid plans to nudge the new administration leftward, especially on immigration—and, should that fail, to join together in resisting its policies.

But if liberal advocates are clinging to the hope that federalism will allow them to create progressive havens, they’re overlooking a big problem: Power may be decentralized in the American system, but it devolves to the state, not the city. Recent events in red states where cities are pockets of liberalism are instructive, and cautionary. Over the past few years, city governments and state legislatures have fought each other in a series of battles involving preemption, the principle that state law trumps local regulation, just as federal law supersedes state law. It hasn’t gone well for the city dwellers.

Close observers of these clashes expect them to proliferate in the years to come, with similar results. “We are about to see a shit storm of state and federal preemption orders, of a magnitude greater than anything in history,” says Mark Pertschuk of Grassroots Change, which tracks such laws through an initiative called Preemption Watch. By the group’s count, at least 36 states introduced laws preempting cities in 2016.

Most of these laws enforce conservative policy preferences. That’s partly because Republicans enjoy unprecedented control in state capitals—they hold 33 governorships and majorities in 32 state legislatures. The trend also reflects a broader shift: Americans are in the midst of what’s been called “the Big Sort,” as they flock together with people who share similar socioeconomic profiles and politics. In general, that means rural areas are becoming more conservative, and cities more liberal. Even the reddest states contain liberal cities: Half of the U.S. metro areas with the biggest recent population gains are in the South, and they are Democratic. Texas alone is home to four such cities; Clinton carried each of them. Increasingly, the most important political and cultural divisions are not between red and blue states but between red states and the blue cities within.

Nowhere has this tension been more dramatic than in North Carolina. . . . . HB2 was different, though—it set off a fierce nationwide backlash, including a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit and boycotts by businesses, sports leagues, and musicians. Since corporate expansions, conventions, and concerts tend to take place in cities, North Carolina’s cities have suffered the most. Within two months of HB2’s passage, Charlotte’s Chamber of Commerce estimated that the city had lost nearly $285 million and 1,300 jobs—and that was before the NBA yanked its 2017 All-Star Game from the city. Asheville, a bohemian tourist magnet in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lost millions from canceled conferences alone.

Today’s clampdowns on cities echo 19th-century anxieties about urban progressivism, demographics, and insolvency. Many of the southern cities that have been targeted for preemption are seen as magnets for out-of-state interlopers. Republican officeholders have blasted nondiscrimination ordinances like Charlotte’s as contravening nature and Christian morality. They’ve argued that a patchwork of wage and sick-leave laws will drive away businesses, and that fracking bans will stifle the economy.

Yet the economic reality that underpinned rural-urban distrust in the 19th century is now inverted: In most states, agriculture is no longer king. Rural areas are struggling, while densely packed areas with highly educated workforces and socially liberal lifestyles flourish. In turn, rural voters harbor growing resentment toward those in cities, from Austin to Atlanta, from Birmingham to Chicago.

In this context of increasing rural-urban division, people on both sides of the political aisle have warmed to positions typically associated with their adversaries. The GOP has long viewed itself as the party of decentralization, criticizing Democrats for trying to dictate to local communities from Capitol Hill, but now Republicans are the ones preempting local government.

An important lesson of last year’s presidential election is that American political norms are much weaker than they had appeared, allowing a scandal-plagued, unpopular candidate to triumph—in part because voters outside of cities objected to the pace of cultural change. Another lesson is that the United States is coming to resemble two separate countries, one rural and one urban.  Only one of them, at present, appears entitled to self-determination.

The situation underscores the urgency in states like Virginia to have their residents turn out in force to elect Democrats to statewide levels so that the ignorant and bigotry based agenda of rural legislators can be vetoed and stopped.  The question is how to convince the non-politically involved that it is urgent that they get to the polls on election day?  

Evangelical Christians and Brexit

In my view, evangelical Christians are a toxic and dangerous element in America's civil society and political realm.  Almost by definition, evangelical Christians in America are at war against modernity and a diverse, knowledge based society.  Anything or anyone that threatens their childish, myth based belief system must be destroyed.  And if they resemble anyone in the New Testament, it is the Pharisees - those that Christ purportedly roundly condemned.  In short, they are a nasty group and a threat to decent and knowledge based society.  Indeed, they celebrate ignorance and idiocy.   In the wake of the disastrous Brexit vote in Britain, it should come as no surprise that evangelical Christians strongly supported leaving the European Union.  A piece in The Economist looks at  and this foul element and it support for a revolt against diversity and modernity.  Here are excerpts:

IN NORTHERN IRELAND, where a majority of citizens voted to remain in the European Union, there is a small but still significant share of the electorate who will be rejoicing over the result on religious grounds. Among some devoutly evangelical Protestants, the referendum has been viewed as a playing out of religious prophecy. The most widely quoted chapter is Revelations 18, in which an angel cries triumphantly that the evil empire of Babylon has fallen after "all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." The verse on which preachers have focused is Revelations 18:4.

And I heard another voice from heaven, saying: "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues."

In April, as campaigning for the referendum got underway, a conspicuous slogan urging people to vote for Brexit in the name of that verse appeared on a gable in Tigers Bay, a loyalist area on the north side of Belfast. In a small market town in the west of Northern Ireland, an evangelical group took over a premises on the main street and covered the front in posters urging people to vote "leave" or risk their souls by opting for a political institution which plainly stood for the Antichrist, an impostor whose appearance is a harbinger of the final battle before all earthly things come to end.

Using the eschatological parts of the Bible to denounce pan-European institutions is a long-standing trope in Ulster Protestant rhetoric. It was a recurring theme in the sermons of Ian Paisley, the preacher-politician who dominated Ulster Protestant politics for decades before striking a peace deal with his declared adversaries. He often alluded to Revelations chapter 17, which describes a depraved woman, the whore of Babylon, sitting upon a horrific, multi-headed, multi-horned scarlet-coloured beast. In Paisley's imagery, the Catholic church was the whore, and the European Union was the beast.

Such language is heard in ultra-Protestant circles elsewhere in the world, but Northern Ireland is probably the only place where it has come anywhere close to the political mainstream. 

Republican Extremists Want to Stop Obama From Replacing Scalia

In his dissent to the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges which upheld a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry, Antonin Scalia made a statement that would make one wonder if the man had been unknowingly been looking in a mirror:  “Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before a fall,” he wrote.Few on the Court exhibit more hubris than did Scalia, who sought to force his anti-modernity, anti-minority, and special rights for right wing Christians on the nation.  The Onion accurately ran the headline "Justice Scalia Dead Following 30-Year Battle With Social Progress."  Indeed, under Scalia's insane "originalist" approach to the U.S. Constitution, slavery should still exist, women should not have the vote - the Constitution would be locked in the rights and knowledge of 1788.  

Now, Republicans who are as much at war with modernity and social progress are threatening to block any Obama replacement to the high court, leaving the Court paralyzed for a year or more.   There goal would be to save the appointment for whichever occupant of the GOP clown car they hope will win the presidential election in November - not exactly the type of conduct that the Founders would have approved of.  They hypocrisy of it all is delicious or sickening depending upon the degree of one's cynicism.  Mother Jones looks at the GOP batshitery.  Here are excerpts:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead on Saturday, leaving a vacancy on the highest court nine months before Election Day. That should leave President Barack Obama plenty of time to find a qualified replacement to succeed Scalia. But within minutes of the announcement that Scalia had died, prominent conservatives began demanding that no new justice be confirmed until after Obama's presidency ends next year. In essence, they want the Republican-controlled Senate to block any nomination that Obama might send it. And leading this charge was Sen. Ted Cruz, a GOP presidential candidate. In a tweet, Cruz declared, "Justice Scalia was an American hero. We owe it to him, & the Nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next President names his replacement." Soon after that, Sen. Marco Rubio, another presidential wannabe, said the same.

This is a quickly spreading right-wing meme.  . . . . conservatives demanding government obstruction to deny Obama the chance to fulfill his constitutional duty . . . . Look forward to this issue—when to fill Scalia's slot and who should appoint his successor—becoming a major fight in the presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, Sen. Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the judiciary committee, issued this statement: "I hope that no one will use this sad news to suggest POTUS should not perform its [sic] constitutional duty." He was a little late with that.

Piling onto the effort to subvert the Constitution and the division of powers, the always foul Mitch McConnell wants to "leave the selection to the American people - the same American people who the Republicans and their failed policies have been screwing over for the last three decades.  This from the Washington Post:

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) fired back in a statement that spending an entire year without considering Obama's nomination to replace Scalia is unprecedented.

"It would be unprecedented in recent history for the Supreme Court to go a year with a vacant seat," he said. "Failing to fill this vacancy would be a shameful abdication of one of the Senate's most essential Constitutional responsibilities."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appeared to say just that in a statement Saturday night. "The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice," his statement read. "Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”

All of this underscores the importance of the Democrats nominating a candidate who can win in November and blunt the Republican effort to drag the nation backward in time and revive the worse abuses of the Gilded Age.

Hollande Blames ISIS for ‘Act of War’ on Paris

With ISIS now claiming responsibility for the horrific attacks in Paris yesterday that so far have taken 127 lives, in my view, it is time to treat the foul members of ISIS for what they are: savage rabid animals that need to be exterminated just like a rabid dog.  It is also time to admit that religion - and I mean ALL religion - is ultimately a great evil and that the "deeply religious" no matter their faith tradition suffer from deep and often dangerous psychological issues.  Nothing else other than psychological illness explains clinging to religious traditions that trace back to ignorant unknown authors or, in the case of "The Prophet" a likely psychotic.  It will be easy for many on the far right to attempt to single out Islam as the problem, yet just last weekend we had GOP presidential nominees, including Ted Cruz, attending a hate fest where the execution of gays was promoted repeatedly.  ISIS is an evil, but so is fundamentalist Christianity and both religious factions are rebelling against modernity itself which threatens their increasingly unsustainable fairy tale belief systems.   The New York Times looks at the horrible events in Paris.  Here are excerpts:

President François Hollande called the terrorist attacks that killed 127 people in Paris on Friday night an “act of war,” and blamed the slaughter on the Islamic State.

“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” Mr. Hollande said from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”

The Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for the attacks, calling them “miracles” in a statement released by one of its publications and distributed on Twitter — a claim that could not be independently verified.

The authorities continued to look for possible accomplices of the eight attackers known so far, all of whom died on Friday: seven by detonating suicide bombs and one in a shootout with the police at a concert hall, the Bataclan, where gunmen methodically killed at least 80 people.

Dozens of others died in apparently coordinated attacks outside the Stade de France, where the French and German soccer teams were playing an exhibition match, and four other restaurants and bars in the city. Nearly 200 others were wounded, at least 80 of them in critical condition, French television reported.

Witnesses on French television said the scene at the concert hall, which can seat as many as 1,500 people, was a massacre, describing how gunmen with automatic weapons shot bursts of bullets into the crowd.  “What you are doing in Syria, you are going to pay for it now,” one of the gunmen shouted, a witness said.

The main shooting broke out at around 9 p.m. at the Bataclan, where the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal was among those playing.  A witness told BFM television that he heard rounds of automatic rifle fire and someone shouting “Allahu akbar!” at the Bataclan.

Unlike the attacks against Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January, terrorism experts said, the attacks on the targets on Friday had no apparent rationale. Instead, assailants appeared to strike at random in hip neighborhoods on a Friday night when many people would be starting to enjoy the weekend.

“It’s a Friday night, and there’s a lot of people out, a lot of tourists out,” said a senior European counterterrorism official. “If you want maximum exposure, you do it like this, in the dark, when it’s scarier and more difficult for police to act.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in my view, summed up what this is really all about:

“Those who we mourn were murdered in front of cafes, in restaurants, in a concert hall or on the open street. They wanted to live the life of free people in a city that celebrates life,” . . . . . “And they met with murderers who hate this life of freedom.”

Contrast Merkel's statement with that in the purported ISIS statement:

“Today brothers from all across the world set foot in Gaul and remind the kaffir (disbelievers) in dur Al Kuffr (the land of disbelievers) that we live beside you,”

Why Paris?   Because it symbolizes everything that fundamentalist Islam (and Christianity) is not and that terrifies the fundamentalist religious extremists of both religions.  Paris is an educated, secular, multi-racial city where logic and enlightenment are respected and the ignorance of religion is increasingly disregarded and headed toward the trash heap of history where it belongs.  It is the antithesis of everything ISIS stands for, including the embrace of Medieval religious fundamentalism.  P.S. I am part French, so this is personal to me for that reason as well.

What Donald Trump's Surge Says About the GOP

As a one time GOP activist more than two decades ago, I am continually appalled by what the Republican Party has become.  It's not only ugly, but dangerous and the driving forces behind the GOP today are greed - individual and corporate - and hatred of others, with the list of those deemed "other" being extensive and encompassing pretty much everyone other than white far right Christians.  A piece in Salon looks at the phenomenon and looks at why Donald Trump is surging in the GOP polls.  The piece also draws apt parallels between today's GOP and fascism of the 1930's .  Here are highlights:

In the political discussion of today, there always comes a risk of being discounted as a crackpot when using a word like “fascist” to describe a political opponent. The word, much like “socialist,” has been so abused since the fall of fascism that it lost its meaning quite some time ago.

In a recent article by Jeffrey Tucker, however, it is argued, quite justly in my opinion, that Donald Trump, whether he knows it or not, is a fascist (or is at least acting like one). Much like Mussolini and Hitler, Trump is a demagogue dedicated to riling up the people (particularly conservatives) with race baiting, traditionalism and strongman tough talk — and, according to polls, it’s working — for now. Tucker writes:

“Trump has tapped into it, absorbing unto his own political ambitions every conceivable resentment (race, class, sex, religion, economic) and promising a new order of things under his mighty hand.”

The thing is, his style — full of race baiting, xenophobia and belligerent nationalism — is not unique to Trump; he is simply the most blatant and vocal about it. There’s a reason he’s leading in the GOP polls: the party’s base likes what he’s saying. The people are angry about illegal immigrants murdering white women (anyone who has followed Bill O’Reilly over the past week knows what I’m talking about), homosexuals destroying the tradition of marriage, and so on. Much like fascism reacted to modernity and social progress in the early 20th century, right-wingers are reacting angrily to social progress of the new century.

So is the GOP becoming the new fascist party? That might be an exaggeration, but it does share many similar features, and Trump, with his demagogic style, is simply exposing how very similar the passions of the GOP base are to the passions of fascism of the early 20th century.

The modern GOP is a party of unwavering and dogmatic patriotism mixed with traditionalism and intolerance. The social progression we have been witnessing over the past decade in America, most clearly with the acceptance of the LGBT community, seems to be triggering a reactionary movement on the right. We see this most recently with the religious freedom controversies and the angry protests of the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling. Fascism of the early 20th century was also largely a negative reaction to modernity . . .

The modern GOP is also somewhat contradictory. Its followers, for example, promote free market ideals and despise welfare for the poor, while exclaiming the worship of Jesus Christ, whose teachings are almost socialistic.

Overall, however, the GOP has a pretty straightforward idea of its platform. Like fascism, tradition is holy — the tradition of marriage, family values, Christian ideals. . . . Another similarity is its belligerence.

Beyond these values, the GOP tends to preach and practice intolerance, xenophobia, nationalism and anti-democratic values (i.e., voter suppression). In many ways, the GOP is anti-enlightenment, and embraces passion over reason. The dangerous denial of climate change and other scientific facts seems to come out of the corrupt alliance of anti-intellectual traditionalism and corporate influence (i.e., oil and gas).

The GOP are obviously not fascists, but they share a family resemblance. As stated above, the base have many similar passions — traditionalism, nationalism, intolerance towards immigrants or minorities. They react with hostility towards the social progress of others and largely believe in a ‘survival of the fittest’ ideology.

Donald Trump is no doubt a wealthy buffoon — but he is a buffoon who understands the underlying passions of the GOP base. Fascist leaders also understood these passions, and knew how to exploit them for political gain. These passions may seem irrational, but they should not be underestimated. 

North Carolina Senate Overrides Governor's Veto Of Anti-Gay "Religious Freedom" Bill

Lately, North Carolina is working hard to make Virginia look like a progressive, modernity embracing state - and that is no easy task.  First North Carolina passed the heinous anti-gay Amendment 1 even as gay acceptance was growing in Virginia, at least outside of rural cousin marrying cousin parts of the sate.  Then in the wake of the 4th Circuit ruling striking down Virginia's Marshall-Newman Amendment and, by extension, Amendment 1, a group of knuckle dragging North Carolina magistrates refused to marry same sex couples.  Rushing to the relief of these individuals who threw their oath to uphold the laws of the United States and the U.S. Constitution was the GOP controlled North Carolina legislature which passed a "license to discriminate bill" that .  In a rare moment of sanity, GOP North Carolina governor Pat McCrory, vetoed the effort to put Christofascists above the law.  Now, the state legislature has voted to override McCrory's veto.  Here are highlights from The New Civil Rights Movement:

It took almost no time at all for Republican Senators in North Carolina to override Thursday's veto from Governor Pat McCrory of a bill that would allow magistrates to refuse to marry same-sex couples for deeply held religious beliefs. SB2 gives special rights to state magistrates, allowing them to opt-out of marrying same-sex couples by opting-out of officiating at all weddings, so as to not appear discriminatory.

The Senate had passed SB2 in February, and the House passed it last week.

Tonight, Senators overrode the veto in a 32-16 vote, the same margin as they had passed the bill, as Q Notes' Matt Comer first reported tonight. He adds that the NC House could take up the bill Tuesday or Wednesday.

In vetoing the legislation last week, Governor McCrory cited the U.S. Constitution, stating "we are a nation and a state of laws. Whether it is the president, governor, mayor, a law enforcement officer, or magistrate, no public official who voluntarily swears to support and defend the Constitution and to discharge all duties of their office should be exempt from upholding that oath; therefore, I will veto Senate Bill 2." 

I hope progressive businesses are watching and realizing that North Carolina is fast becoming a place where business and personal merit and ability are not favored.  Instead, it's a state that is seeking to appease the ugliest elements of society and resist modernity itself.  The Christofascists remain a clear and present danger to constitutional government in America.

GOP Contortions Over Gay Marriage

I continue to believe that long term the Christofascists will be the death of the Republican Party.  Despite surging public support for gay rights and gay marriage, the knuckle dragging Bible thumpers continue to demand that gays be demonized and subjected to discrimination at will all now under the banner of "religious freedom."  As noted in a post yesterday, public support for such license to discriminate laws is dropping and corporate America is decidedly against them.  Yet most Republican elected officials continue to prostitute themselves to the "godly folk" who increasingly are demonstrating just how nasty they are in fact and driving away the younger generations from religion entirely.  A somewhat satirical column in the New York Times looks at the increasing contortions the GOP faces as it tries to remain the party of political whores of the Christofascists while not alienating everyone else.  Here are highlights:

Republicans find ourselves in a bind, caught between the Bible Belt and a need for fresh accessorizing, between Mississippi and modernity, with evangelicals over here and millennials and soccer moms over there. We have a primary process that won’t graduate anyone who loves the gays too much but a general election that could, for the first time, punish anyone who loves the gays too little.

And so we must calibrate. Triangulate. Pink triangulation, let’s call it.

This is our mission, manifest in semantic loop-de-loops and oratorical gobbledygook from candidates like Scott Walker, who recently reminisced about an unnamed relative’s same-sex nuptials. Observe how he handled that: by making clear that he didn’t go to the ceremony, only to the reception. That’s called having your wedding cake (presumably from a baker with no religious objections) and eating it, too. Also note Ted Cruz. Out of one corner of his routinely scowling mouth, he speaks of a “jihad” by the gays to force even stern Christians like him to endorse same-sex marriage. Out of the other, he says that if one of his daughters came out as a lesbian, no worries!

[T]he gay issue poses real peril for the party. And that’s not so much because a recent survey found that as many as 60 percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage. Most of those Americans don’t vote for a candidate based on his or her position on two men or two women tying the knot. Gay marriage isn’t their first priority and possibly not even their fifth.

But Americans have rallied around the gays to a point where beating up on them just looks crotchety and mean, the precise qualities that we are trying to move the party’s image past. When some Americans in their 20s say that they would never vote for us, it is not because they dislike us on the small-government or limited-regulation fronts. It is not because they think Democrats are better stewards of the economy. It is not about abortion.

It is about the gays. These Americans grew up with the gays among their favorite television characters and with the gays in the house across the street (the one painted in the neighborhood’s most tasteful color). They had beloved teachers whom they knew to be lesbian. They hang with openly lesbian and gay relatives and best friends. They simply don’t understand discrimination against the gays. And anyone who condones it seems to them callous and hopelessly out of touch, which is why our Grand Old Party needs a measure of Gay Young Party. Maybe two heaping tablespoons. Perhaps even three-quarters of a cup.

We do not recommend the tint picked by Bobby Jindal, who just tripled down on his opposition to gay marriage while casting big business — corporate America — as a principal enemy of righteousness on this front. Earth to Bobby!?! We are big business. Big business is our cuddling partner. We spoon with it. We do not vilify it. Bobby is a desperate man, trying to find a point of entry into a crowded primary field with no room for him. Tune him out, and do not, under any circumstances, follow his lead.

Better to mimic Chris Christie. He’s been dealing with this issue longer than most, because they love the gays in New Jersey. And he has mastered the roll-over-and-play-dead approach, wanly voicing personal qualms about gay marriage while stating on occasion that such resistance is futile. He does pro-gay stuff around the edges of same-sex marriage, so that his message to the gays is this: no filet mignon for you, but how about some tasty veggie and starch sides? I can offer you a crackdown on bullying. Watch me sign a ban on conversion therapy.

YOU can also learn from Marco Rubio, a portrait of the candidate as contortionist. He has said, defiantly, that “supporting the definition of marriage as one man and one woman is not anti-gay, it is pro-traditional marriage.” But he has also said, more recently, that he’d go to a friend’s gay wedding in a festive heartbeat, and that he sees homosexuality as ingrained in most cases, not a choice. By asserting that states should ultimately decide on gay marriage, he has elevated local control above personal conviction and thus surrendered to gay nuptials — sort of — without actually signing off on them. This particular fudge will become more difficult if the Supreme Court makes same-sex marriage the law of the entire land, but Marco has a better chance of squaring that circle than Rand Paul does.

Jeb Bush’s tack is more comprehensible. He utters much of what religious conservatives want to hear. But he also brings enough gays or Republicans who support same-sex marriage into his campaign to give Americans a signal of where so many of us in the party really are. We have gay children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews, colleagues, bosses, employees. We want the world for them and a world that’s fully open to them.

But we also want to win elections, and our coalition is what it is. So we frequently take stands and mutter sentiments that leave them on the side of the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But for the serious issues involved, it may be almost comical to watch the posturing and sputtering that will follow a Supreme Court ruling striking down all state same sex marriage bans.   I suspect many Republicans will welcome such a ruling because it may begin to push the Christofascists into the political  fringes where they belong. 

Note: the smiling image of Hillary above is appropriate since she's likely thanking God that Democrats have gotten on board with the new reality of same sex marriage. 

Famed Biologist: Religion "Is Dragging Us Down" and Must be Eliminated

If one follows the news - at via outlets other than Fox News, a/k/a Faux News -  a huge percentage of the world's problems tract to religion, being the hate and bigotry fomented by Christofascists in America, the shocking embrace of ignorance in Africa, to the blood baths in the Middle East where different elements of Islam are slaughtering each other and seeking to unleash terror on the West.  And that doesn't even address (i) the fact that religious belief is generally anti-knowledge, (ii) the squandering of resources as religious denominations in America continue to build costly "worship centers" rather than give their money to the poor as the Gospel commanded, or (iii) the reality that religious leaders are most interested in making money, often by seeking tithing from those least able to afford it.  Famed Biologist E. O. Wilson has concluded that the elimination of religion would be in mankind's best interest.  Here are highlights from The Raw Story:

Biologist E. O. Wilson, who is known as the “the father of sociobiology,” said recently that the Earth was suffering “the death of a thousand cuts” because of religion. 

In the most recent issue of New Scientist, Wilson explained that his next book would look at the future of humans and the Earth.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist warned that people had not yet realized that the “tribal structure” had been destroying the planet by “a thousand cuts,” according a partial transcript obtained by the International Business Times.

“All the ideologies and religions have their own answers for the big questions, but these are usually bound as a dogma to some kind of tribe,” he said. “Religions in particular feature supernatural elements that other tribes – other faiths – cannot accept … And every tribe, no matter how generous, benign, loving and charitable, nonetheless looks down on all other tribes. What’s dragging us down is religious faith.”

“So I would say that for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths. But certainly not eliminating the natural yearnings of our species or the asking of these great questions.”

Wilson, who was raised as a Baptist in Alabama, has said that he “drifted” away from Christianity, but he doesn’t refer to himself as an atheist.  “I’m a scientist,” he told the magazine.

The Poison of Fundamentalist Religion

A piece in the Washington Post looks at the one of the suspected killers in the massacre in Paris and the image that emerges is that of a loser who finally succumbed to the influence of a radical Islamic preacher and allowed himself to become radicalized.  Rather than blame himself for his failings, he came to believe western society was the culprit behind his failure in life.  Anything rather than admit he himself and his own bad choices might be responsible for his seemingly dead end life.  The mindset reminds me of the professional "ex-gays" - most of whom in my opinion seem to have been drug users and losers in general - before they "found religion" and latched onto the ex-gay game to find purpose and, most importantly, respectability at least in limited circles.  

I compare Chérif Kouachi with professional ex-gays because in both cases the embrace of fundamentalist religion was their solution to failed lives.  What is most striking to me about Islam is that it once supported a culture that valued knowledge and learning until the fundamentalist strain grew and dragged Islamic culture backwards in time.  Much as Christianity led to the Dark Ages in Europe and the loss of knowledge that had spread across the Greco-Roman world.  Indeed, it was the Muslim societies that preserved knowledge during Europe's descent into ignorance and kept learning alive until Europe began to rise again during the Renaissance.

One has to wonder when and how fundamentalist Islam will be forced to die.  Like fundamentalist Christianity, which in America wants to embrace ignorance and outlaw anything that questions the ignorance and superstition that are its hallmarks, fundamentalist Islam fights against knowledge, learning, tolerance towards others, and is steeped in hate.  With access to knowledge at an unprecedented level, what psychosis and mental instability drives someone to embrace ignorance, hate and violence towards others?  And why is fundamentalist religion seemingly always part of the path to such actions?

Again, I can only believe that a world free of all religion would be a better place for mankind.  If we want to end human rights abuses across the globe, a first step is eliminating fundamentalist religion.

Anti-Gay "Christian" Unniversity May Lose Accreditation

In what the Christofascists and professional Christian crowd will likely describe as more "persecution" of Christians, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges has given anti-gay Gordon College a year to review - and apparently change - its anti-gay policies.  The accreditation board has indicated that Gordon College's policy on homosexuality may be in violation of accreditation standards.  Would that similar accreditation boards would take action against Regent University in Virginia Beach and the always foul Liberty University in Lynchburg.  Obviously, if these "Christian" colleges begin to lose accreditation, students may find themselves hindered in getting scholarships and their graduates could find it difficult to get into graduate schools or find employment.  Personally, I'd love to see that trend.  The Boston Business Journal looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

The regional body that accredits colleges and universities has given Gordon College a year to report back about a campus policy on homosexuality, one that may be in violation of accreditation standards.

The higher education commission of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges met last week and "considered whether Gordon College's traditional inclusion of 'homosexual practice' as a forbidden activity" runs afoul of the commission's standards for accreditation, according to a joint statement from NEASC and Gordon College.

The commission asked Gordon College to submit a report next September. The report should describe the process by which the college has approached its review of the policy “to ensure that the College’s policies and procedures are non-discriminatory,” the statement said.

NEASC placed Gordon College on its September agenda after news broke in July that Lindsay had signed a letter with other religious leaders supporting an exemption from an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating based on sexual orientation.

That led to scrutiny about the now infamous Gordon College policy, which it calls the life and conduct statement, that prohibits a range of activities such as sex outside of marriage, drinking and smoking on campus or at college functions – and homosexual practices.

The members of the working group include trustees, faculty, administrators, staff and students, Sweeney said. At least one of the students is gay, Sweeney said, and some of the faculty members on the working group have been vocally opposed to Gordon College’s life and conduct policy. Asked if the working group will consider eliminating the policy entirely, Sweeney said he believes this will be among the options the working group considers. “There will be a very balanced perspective,” he said.

As I have argued before, far right Christians and their discriminatory - and often racists - beliefs need to become unwelcome in decent society and their schools and colleges that indoctrinate students in hate and bigotry truly should not be counted among accredited institutions that pursue education and knowledge since their basic tenants reject knowledge and intellect and embrace ignorance and bigotry. 

Southern Baptisits - Hemorrhaging Members Due to Extremism?

Among the major denominations in America, few are as backward thinking, anti-modernity, anti-gay and focused on Bible inerrancy that the Southern Baptist Convention ("SBC").  Baptists were not always so extreme and once upon a time the denomination was rather live and let live.  That started to change when what are now Southern Baptist churches broke from the national denomination because they wanted to maintain slavery.  A second extreme lurch to the right when conservative - one might argue Kool-Aid drinking elements - took control of the denomination's leadership and began to expel churches that were sufficiently reactionary (some years back my father-in-law's church left the SBC which it viewed as too extreme).  Rather than strengthening the SBC as far right leaders claimed would be the case, the tilt to backwardness seems to have hasten defections from the denomination.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the denomination's continued shrinkage.  Here are excerpts:

It’s hard to overstate the importance of soul-winning to Southern Baptists. So they’ve been hit hard by the news that the evangelical denomination’s slump in membership and baptisms has continued for the seventh year in a row. “I am grieved we are clearly losing our evangelistic effectiveness,” said Thom Rainer, president of Lifeway Christian Resources and former dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.

The troubles of the Southern Baptist Convention offer an interesting window into the long-term prospects of Christianity in America—partly because the Southern Baptists have been fretting about those prospects louder than almost anyone else. Don’t all Christians think it’s important to redeem sinners? Yes, but the act of conversion is the heart of the Southern Baptist brand.

Last year the denomination summoned a team of pastors and church officials to form the Task Force on SBC Evangelistic Impact and Declining Baptisms.The Task Force’s report confirmed that the denomination’s baptism rates plateaued in the 1950s, stayed constant for the next few decades, and had been inching downward for the past six years. Among the churches that reported statistics in 2012, 25 percent baptized no one at all that year.

So is this decline real? The short answer is yes—the social and intellectual authority of churches is a shadow of what it once was. . . . Effective evangelism has always required careful negotiation with the surrounding culture.. . . . Since the time of the Apostles, Christians have argued over how much compromise is too much: when does cross-cultural translation or embrace of worldly knowledge cross the line into heresy?

[A]s the culture wars hit the South with full force in the 1960s and 1970s, conservative leaders conspired to tighten the reins on their denomination. By the 1990s they had driven most moderates out of the convention and enforced a regime of biblical inerrancy and traditional gender ideology—a worldview that, if Stark and Finke were correct, should have set the SBC on a path for boundless growth. Except it hasn’t.

Stark’s and Finke’s book was panned by historians, largely because they cherry-picked statistics to divide American churches into “winners” and “losers” without nuanced attention to historical context.  If you step back and assess the big picture, few conservative churches are growing anymore . . . 

Evangelicals’ recent strategies—ranging from a hipster makeover to appeal to the Millennial crowd to the mistaken hope that millions of Latinos are leaving Catholicism and becoming conservative Protestants—cannot hold off the world-historical forces of secularization. As the historian David Hollinger has argued, even if liberal churches have lost the battle for butts in the pews, the steady advance of civil rights, the sexual revolution, and gay liberation suggest that they are winning the wider culture.

Traditional religious organizations are losing their grip on the public sphere and their influence in the lives of individuals. “All things considered, I think that religion is slowing down, in decline … everything is clearly going in the decline direction,” said Duke University sociologist Mark Chaves, who has written one of the best synthetic studies of the polling data on contemporary American religion.

Christianity has been around for 2,000 years. Over the centuries, the faith’s center of gravity has shifted many times: from Palestine and Northern Africa to Rome and Byzantium; from Western Europe to America. The Southern Baptist experience is more proof that Americans’ term at the helm of Christ’s ship may be nearing an end, and the sailing is more squally than ever.

Like too many in the GOP, the leaders of the SBC have not figured out that the embrace of ignorance and bigotry are not the way to grow one's organization.