No Wonder There’s An Exodus from Religion

I often believe that if Christianity ends up largely dying in America as has happened in parts of Europe and some other developed nations, one of the leading causes will be the hypocrisy and general unloving behavior of Christ's purported most outspoken adherents.  What is an interesting correlation is that between the increased involvement of the so-called Christian Right - I call them Christofascists - in the Republican Party and the acceleration of the numbers of Americans identifying themselves as "None" - those who have forsworn religious affiliation.  With the Trump/Pence regime, the hypocrisy has gone off the charts as a column in the Washington Post notes.  Meanwhile, the exodus from religion continues.  Here are column excerpts:

Do you wonder why the proportion of Americans declaring themselves unaffiliated with organized religion has skyrocketed in recent decades?

This trend is especially pronounced among adults under 30, roughly 40 percent of whom claim no connection to a religious congregation or tradition and have joined the ranks of those the pollsters call the “nones.”

To understand how so many now prefer nothing to something when it comes to religion, ponder the news over the past few days.

The same newspapers and broadcasts that were reporting on how President Trump finally admitted that he had indirectly paid a porn star to keep quiet about an alleged affair also offered accounts of what we’ll call Jesuitgate, the controversy over who should be the chaplain of the House of Representatives.

 

Ryan had said he asked the cleric to quit because he had provided inadequate “pastoral services,” but denied that Conroy was ousted because of a mild prayer for justice he delivered during the debate over the GOP tax cut.

That phrase “pastoral services” must inspire a chuckle from your typical millennial agnostic. . . . Conroy also quoted Ryan’s chief of staff, Jonathan Burks, as telling him “something like ‘maybe it’s time we had a chaplain that wasn’t a Catholic.’ ” Ryan’s office vehemently denied this (the Catholic vote is substantial), but the speaker announced he didn’t want to have a “protracted fight” and that Conroy could stay.

But think about it: The House Republican leadership was more inclined to push out a chaplain than to impose accountability on a president who is a proven liar and trashes the rule of law for his own selfish purposes day after day.

This degree of partisan irresponsibility only aggravates the already powerful skepticism among the young about what it means to be religious. In their landmark 2010 book, “American Grace,” the scholars Robert Putnam and David Campbell found that the rise of the nones was driven by the increasing association of organized religion with conservative politics and a lean toward the right in the culture wars.

Revealingly, Putnam and Campbell found that millennials with tolerant and open views on homosexuality were more than twice as likely to be religious nones as their statistically similar peers with conservative or traditionalist views on homosexuality. Many young people came to regard religion, in Putnam and Campbell’s words, as “judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical and too political.”

If you want a particularly exquisite hypocritical moment, consider that on Thursday, the very day when Trump had to admit his lies on the Stormy Daniels payoff, the president held a White House commemoration of the National Day of Prayer. 

Conroy was getting at this in the most uncontroversial way possible when he spoke in his now-contested prayer of how “our great nation” has created “opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle.” If a chaplain could be rebuked for voicing that simple and undeniable truth, what’s the point of the “religious liberty” that Trump and his GOP allies celebrate?

And when will those who advertise themselves as religion’s friends realize they can do far more damage to faith than all the atheists and agnostics put together?

Yes, the image above was just too good to pass up.

The Right Cannot Stop the Future

If one looks at the agenda of the Republican Party and its current base of white supremacists, Christian extremists, and other misogynists it ultimately resolves down to an effort to oppose modernity and social and demographic change.  Basically, it's a fight against the future. Hence the denial of evolution, the denial of climate change, desperate efforts to maintain the white privilege of the 1950's, and denial about modern knowledge about sexual orientation and gender identity.  The list of what is rejected and/or denied is lengthy.  Under this mindset, anything that challenges archaic and bigoted beliefs - especially those that challenge the false claim that the Bible id inerrant - must be resisted.  The problem is that even if short term rear guard battles are won, in the age of the Internet and easy access to accurate information, the long term war will be lost.  A day of reckoning will come despite the most hate-filled and discriminatory efforts and the embrace of ignorance by the core of the GOP base and evangelical Christians.  A long piece in The Daily Beast looks at this ultimate exercise in futility that is no different than when the Catholic Church attacked those who said the earth wasn't flat and wasn't the center of the universe.  Here are highlights:

It seems axiomatic that the past and the future cannot exist at the same time. Thanks to the space-time continuum, people from different centuries cannot live simultaneously. The same goes for a nation, which cannot survive pulling toward the future and toward the past at once.

The United States is at a fulcrum. We are two countries—one lurching for the future, one yearning for the past—that cannot live together, because we can’t be both things. Donald Trump may have brought on the breaking point, but he didn’t create the schism. It was already there for him to exploit.

Today, Trump is speeding us toward decline—the very decline his supporters so feared. His imperious leadership; his family’s grubby pretense at royalty and the apparent mad dash among members of his cabinet and White House team to hawk their positions for cash and luxuries have the feel of a decrepit regime looting the palace in its final days; stuffing the silver in their coats as they flee into exile.

Trump’s announcement of anachronistic trade tariffs this week was portrayed as out of the blue, but it was no such thing. Trump ran on ending multilateral trade agreements and recreating an America of the distant past that culls every human and material resource from within. Republicans who are now in full blown freakout over a potential trade war voted for exactly what they’re getting.

In every way, Donald Trump is a president built for the past; a benighted, late 19th Century figure who spun his supporters a tale that he could restore a bygone era when coal fires burned, factories hummed, steel mills belched out soot and opportunity and a (white) man with a sturdy back, a high school diploma and a song in his heart could buy a little house, marry a little wife and have 3 cherry-cheeked kids he didn’t ever have to cook or clean for, plus if he can afford it, a hot mistress on the side. Trump is the slovenly but brash, gold-plated emblem of a time when in the imagination of his followers, black women hummed a tune while they cleaned your house or did the washing, black men tipped their hat on the street but didn’t dare look you in the eye, and neither would dream of moving in next door. A time when women asked their husbands for an allowance, not their boss for a promotion, men were “allowed to be men” complete with ribald jokes and a slap on the fanny for the pretty secretary at work, and there were no gays, no trans people, no birth control …
 Going backward, to a world without ambiguity on race, gender and work is a powerfully attractive idea, particularly for those who fear losing their cultural and social hegemony as the nation browns, and their economic ascendancy as technology creates new industries they scarcely understand.

But here’s the thing: the past really is past. Coal is still a dying industry and America will never again have an industrial revolution. It’s other countries’ turn to do that now. Black and brown people aren’t giving up our dignity, including the right to protest and to survive mundane encounters with police. Immigrants aren’t going away (and in fact we need them to keep the economy and the safety net flush). LGBT people aren’t going back into the closet.

There is indeed a sizable minority of Americans who want to go back to the old times. But we aren’t going back.  Neither is the world.
 While we regress, the rest of the planet will go right on trading without us. Tariffs on other countries will invite tariffs on us (Europe is already considering levying them on everything from Levi’s to Kentucky bourbon to Harley Davidson motorcycles). And protectionism will protect zero American jobs, while hiking the prices of everything we buy that’s made with aluminum and steel, from cars to washing machines to pots and pans.
 [Trump] only cares about the show. And he always gives his people a good show. But the economy does care. And America will pay a price for their P.T. Barnum president and his temper tantrums.

Meanwhile, there is another America, which is busy concerning itself with the future. It’s the America that produces two-thirds of this country’s economic output, though it represents just hundreds of counties versus Trump’s thousands. It’s the America that objects to Russian interference in our elections, that welcomes immigrants and their economic contributions, that recognizes that even ancient institutions like marriage can modernize, that views women’s full equality as a boon not a threat to civilization, that doesn’t want to be ruled from Biblical texts or by a savage gun lobby, and that wants America to be a part of the world, not it’s creaky, cranky, lonely adversary.

In particular, young Americans—Millennials and post-Millennials, have had enough of our tired wrangling. They’re sick of the Baby Boomers’ social agonies and the clenched grip of the World War II generation on American social and political life. They want an end to throwback rigidity on guns, gays, and religion. And they neither respect nor revere the current president of the United States.

Far from becoming more conservative with time, young Americans are staying right where they were when Barack Obama was first elected—on the left of center—if not growing more progressive. It’s why Republicans are so keen to suppress their votes. . . . They are the most racially diverse generation in modern American history. And by next year, Millennials will be the single largest generational group in America, with their ranks swelled by immigrants (which explains the urgent right wing push for mass deportation.)
 Does anyone really believe they will somehow morph en-masse into NRA-obedient, Fox News-zombie, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, maniacal healthcare destroyers who’ll vote for serial sexual predators?
 With its broad and seemingly absolute power over the country, the Republican Party may not feel like it is dying, but it is dying nonetheless, at the hands of youth and multiracial population growth. The GOP can rush to install voter suppression traps and other restraints on change to try and keep the tide from coming in. But it will come anyway.
 Perhaps the biggest challenge future-facing America faces is that past-craving America has a dogmatic and consistent voting base and a determined and persistent ally: Russia, which alongside its embedded mercenaries from the so-called “alt right” are harnessing maturing modern tools like social media to keep the futurists at bay. But we won’t have a president who cuddles up to Russia and neo-fascists forever. Eventually, the fight against them and their propaganda will be joined in earnest and won.

The future is coming. It cannot live alongside the past. And in the end, it cannot be stopped. 

The Republican Party of today and Trump has no long term plan for the future.  Indeed, it is guaranteeing that sooner or later it will be obliterated at the polls.  The more it tries to stop the future, the more hash the reckoning will be.  It cannot happen soon enough to suit me.  Millennials need to understand that they can kill the GOP.  All they need to do is register and vote against Republicans in every election cycle at every level.  The monster that the GOP and its base has become can be killed.  Let's kill it.

Anti-Semitism in the Time of Trump

Much has been made of the open racism towards non-whites that energizes many Donald Trump supporters, but the bigotry that defines Trump and his movement, if you will, also extends to other groups.  Muslims needless to say are hated by Trump's base.  But so too are those of Jewish descent and, of course, LGBT Americans, particularly among the Christofascists who have flocked to Trump's message of hate.  Having just attended an amazing wedding whee the bride is half Chinese and half Italian and the groom is Jewish, I could not help but think about Trump supporters who hold anyone who is not a white, conservative Christian in open contempt.  A lengthy piece in Politico Magazine looks at the reality check being experienced by Jewish members of the Millennial generation faced with Trump and all he stands for.  Here are excerpts:

Like many Jewish families in America, the Reizes household has been deliberating in recent months what Donald Trump really thinks of them. As they celebrate the Jewish New Year this weekend in their suburban Cleveland home, the topic of discussion will once again be anti-Semitism, and whether it’s surging in the United States thanks to the Trump campaign. Like others representing America’s aging Jewish Gen-X’ers and boomers, Joelle Reizes, 48, remembers experiencing some anti-Semitism as a girl—occasional sideways glances and untoward comments. But millennial Jews and their juniors are another matter. Joelle’s children—ages 19, 14, and 12—have grown up during an unprecedented era of prosperity and assimilation for Jews in America, one in which the struggles endured by an earlier generation is understood as something closer to historical lore than present fact. For younger Jews in the United States, that era has suddenly passed. The early months of 2016 brought in a strange tide of online hate speech aimed largely at Jewish journalists who had published articles critical of Trump or his campaign, with all the old ugly epithets on display. Then in July Trump’s Twitter account posted an image of a six-pointed star next to a picture of Hillary Clinton, with a pile of money in the background. Though he deleted the tweet, afterward Trump walked up to a brightly lit podium and defended the image, bellowing that the Jewish star was not a Jewish star. A dim reality descended on American Jews. Yes: Trump had broadcast the message of a neo-Nazi without apology. Then: Weeks of quiet, lasting into August. But the issue roared back into view in September, when the ex-wife of Trump’s campaign manager, Steve Bannon, said that Bannon had kept his daughters out of a school because he there were too many “whiny” Jewish brats there; the candidate’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., retweeted someone described as the neo-Nazis’ “favorite academic”; and a Trump advisor was accused of discriminating against Jewish employees (and denying the Holocaust).

[T]he Reizes family of Cleveland has been deliberating how to process such events—and the return of an age-old enmity that the Trump campaign has somehow reawakened. How soon is too soon to brush the cobwebs away from an ancient alarm bell? 

[W]hile his parents deliberate, it’s 19-year-old Zach Reizes who is most firm in his views. “What Trump has brought to the surface is, in many ways, the first blatant anti-Semitic experience for the vast majority of American millennials,” says Zach, an angular and handsome sophomore at Ohio University. 

Trump’s success—and a white nationalist subculture blooming like algae in the Internet’s unlighted depths—has turned millennial Jews into the new expositors of anti-Semitism at the dinner table: Quietly explaining Pepe the Frog, opaque Twitter memes and dyspeptic forums like Stormfront to frozen audiences of parents and grandparents. It’s thrust young Jews into long-buried questions of assimilation and political position, whiteness and privilege. And it’s heightened a divide between young and old, left and right: Progressive young Jews learning to form the words “anti-Semitism,” often for the first time—even while they take umbrage at their right-leaning scolds who, now into October, have kept up a deafening silence on the topic of Trump. This year, Reizes and his peers have watched the situation deteriorate: Headshots of journalists superimposed in concentration camps; calls to Jewish reporters in the middle of the night playing Hitler’s voice; white supremacists who appended parentheses around the names of Jews online.

To some young Jews, this election season has felt like a cold shower. “Whether you experienced no anti-Semitism growing up, or a watered-down version of it, I think most young people felt like anti-Semitism was dying,” says Debbie Rabbinovich, 19, a sophomore and Hillel member at the University of Pennsylvania. Other young activists were reconsidering what they had heard for years from an older generation. “For a long time we were told that anti-Semitism was everywhere, and we rolled our eyes at that,” says Morriah Kaplan, 24, a leader in the left-leaning activist group If Not Now. But, she acknowledged, “This feels like the closest thing to the type of anti-Semitism that my grandparents talk about experiencing in Poland.”

It’s impossible, as American Jewish families go, to gauge how widespread these dinner table conversations are—but the scope and scale was hinted at when the discord touched the family of Haman himself. When Donald Trump’s star tweet sufficiently embarrassed Jared Kushner, Trump’s Orthodox son-in-law, Kushner published an op-ed in his paper, the New York Observer, defending Trump and invoking the plight of his ancestors in the Holocaust. Immediately, Kushner’s extended family fired back, launching an internecine war of words: “Please don't invoke our grandparents in vain just so you can sleep better at night,” seethed one Kushner cousin. “It is self-serving and disgusting.”

Kushner was also blasted by a young member of his staff at the New York Observer, 23-year-old writer Dana Schwartz, who is Jewish. Her provocation was an open letter, and like Zach’s, it was scathing. “When you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law,” she wrote to her boss, “you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval.”

10 Ways Right-Wing Christians Are Destroying Christianity

I have basically come to the conclusion that a world free of religion might be a far batter place.  When looks at many of the horrors taking place in the world today, many - especially in the Middle East - track directly to religion.  And even when they don't directly stem from religion, cynical politicians and dictators - think Vladamir Putin, any number of African leaders, some in Southeast Asia, and of course America's GOP - use religion to inflame bigotry and to encourage discrimination and sometimes even violence.  Religion is a key component in making individuals and races "other" and, therefore, subhuman and the enemy.  Religion is also a key element in pushing for the embrace of ignorance. Thankfully, in America and much of Europe the younger generations are simply walking away form religion.  Hopefully, the trend will accelerate in the USA.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at how the "godly Christians" are killing Christianity in this country and elsewhere.  Here are excerpts:

I've written about how millennials are leaving organized religion and its associated anti-LGBT animus in droves. As a result, the only religions holding on to membership (barely) are ones with super-high birth rates and very conservative views. In the process, conservative faiths are becoming increasingly insular and preaching to an echo chamber. This is creating a downward spiral of church membership overall as less and less millennials want to be a part of a brand that is increasingly unpalatable. And make no mistake, it is millennials who are leaving conservative denominations the fastest.

[T]his seems like a good thing. The faster conservative religion is overwhelmingly seen as mean, crazy, violent, hateful, misogynistic and anti-science, the faster we as a society can move on. I'd rather America looked more like somewhere people want to live, than someplace that generates political and religious refugees.

[H]ere are the things . . . hastening conservative Christianity's descent into nearly complete cultural irrelevance.

1. Fighting battles you've already lost.  Marriage equality is basically over, and most Americans have moved on, aside from the Kim Davis' circus. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and the debate around it are as dead as the dodo too, but America's most powerful anti-LGBT group is still railing against lesbian and gay troops. Even the Cato institute and Heritage Foundation have moved on.

2. Deciding who's Christian based on how much they hate gays.  Here's the problem: Most Americans aren't this exclusionary, but the people with the biggest podium for their beliefs are the ones who do feel this way. If rejecting LGBT people socially, religiously and legally is your litmus test for who gets into heaven, most Americans will be glad they're not spending eternity with you, either.

3. Treating women like cattle.  Scott Walker answered a question about abortion in the first Presidential debate of 2015 by confirming his belief that women should not have access to an abortion, even if continuing the pregnancy will kill them. Beyond that, we have we have pregnancies due to rape are "a gift from God", "legitimate rape," announcing that rape can't happen inside of (heterosexual) marriage. 

4. Rejecting science.  . . .  It doesn't matter if it is climate change, evolution, the big bang, reparative therapy on LGBT people, sexual orientation, gender identity or reproductive health ("Women's bodies have a way of shutting these things down,") these folks reject the overwhelming consensus of the entire scientific community.   They're cool with treating bronze-age anecdotes as immutable laws of science though.

5. Condemning everyone else's sex lives but their own.  The religious right takes controlling the sex lives of others to ridiculous extremes. Whether it is advocating we outlaw homosexuality again, keeping oral sex illegal, abstinence only sex education, making it easier to buy a gun than a dildo in Texas, trying to enforce unconstitutional laws on sodomy, slut shaming or banning birth control, they're all for making sure that the only sex other people have is married, heterosexual, with the express intent of procreation. . . . .The problem is, they suck at following their own rules. . . .
No wonder millennials aren't taking any of this seriously.

6. Telling people freedom of religion is only for Christians.  Many conservative leaders have also pushed the narrative that freedom of religion only applies to Christian denominations, and definitely doesn't apply to atheists or Muslims. So, while making the argument that religious freedom is the ultimate right we enjoy as Americans, it's only for the right sort of Americans. Which are those who believe exactly the same way they do about gays, women, Muslims, atheists, immigrants, etc...

7. Telling us all the awful things they'd do if they didn't believe in God.   For some reason, every time a conservative Christian like Phil Robertson or Mike Huckabee imagines what it would be like if they were LGBT or an atheist, what comes out sounds like a PCP induced crime spree. Voyeurism, rape, bestiality, murder and any other atrocity can imagine.

8. Taking out their phobias on children.  Nothing says more about a persons' character than how they would treat innocent children. So when refuse to treat children with lesbian parents, it sort of shows your true colors. When adults are showing up to stage hate-fueled rallies and screaming at transgender children trying to go to school, there's pretty much no way to make your actions look warm and fuzzy.

9. Equating religious freedom with a special right to discriminate.   Christian conservatives are working hard to create the narrative that most important religious freedom they possess is the right to discriminate against LGBT people. . . . Anti-LGBT religious conservatives, who are predominately based in the deep-south, keep worrying they'll be viewed in the future the same way racist people are today. Well duh. What do you expect to happen? It's the same people doing the same things they did 60 years ago expecting a different result.

10. Showing how much you love people by harassing them.   The idea of "witnessing" to LGBT people and their allies is basically a form of pestering LGBT people about how much they are going to hell if they don't stop being gay. . . . Evangelicals and even Mormons have complained that they're not allowed to do this sort of thing at work, to co-workers, employees and kids at school. When they are prevented from doing this, it rapidly devolves into a Monty Python sketch about being repressed. . . . This is clearly horrendous behavior, but when they sprinkle some religious pixie dust on it, we are suddenly expected to see it as a noble expression of First Amendment rights.

I'm not buying it, and neither are millennials.

BRITAIN: Half Of 18-24 Year-Olds Say They’re Not 100% Heterosexual

Click image to enlarge

A new survey in Great Britain has yielded results that will no doubt have the Christofascists foaming at the mouth and hysterically claiming that the "gay agenda" is turning youth gay.  The study found that 49% among 18-24 year olds classified them selves as not 100% heterosexual.  Interestingly, only 72% of the adults surveyed said they were 100% heterosexuals.  Tony Perkins, Victoria Cobb, Albert Mohler and Maggie Gallagher will be having the vapors!  Here are some of the findings from the YouGov survey:

Invented by Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s, the Kinsey scale plots individuals on a range of sexual dispositions from exclusively heterosexual at 0 through to exclusively homosexual at 6. Where the original study had a large number of methods for placing people, YouGov simply asked people to place themselves on the sexuality scale.

Taken as a whole, 72% of the British public place themselves at the completely heterosexual end of the scale, while 4% put themselves at the completely homosexual end and 19% say they are somewhere in between . . .

With each generation, people see their sexuality as less fixed in stone. The results for 18-24 year-olds are particularly striking, as 43% place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5 and 52% place themselves at one end or the other. Of these, only 46% say they are completely heterosexual and 6% as completely homosexual.

More than anything, it indicates an increasingly open minded approach to sexuality. In a further set of questions asking if respondents could conceivably be attracted to, have sex with or have a relationship with someone of the same sex (if the right person came along at the right time), level 1s were at least 35% more likely to say they could than level 0s.

Given the Millennials seeming growing indifference toward religion and more open acceptance of gays, one has to wonder if similar findings would occur in America. 

The Future of the Catholic Church After Ireland's Vote

Ireland's vote to approve same sex marriage is reverberating far from Ireland's shores and already there is a renewed energy in Italy to pass civil union legislation if not outright gay marriage.  The forces that transformed Ireland from a nation controlled by the theocratic power of the Catholic Church to a secular nation where the young in particular reject main Church teachings are taking place in modern nations across the globe.  Whether or not the Church faces this new reality will likely determine whether the Church is reduced to a church of the elderly in the western world with new growth only in backward, uneducated areas such as Africa.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Ireland and what the Church must come to terms with.  Modern society is washing its hands of what the Church is peddling, especially on matters of sexuality.  Given the bitter old men in dresses in Roman who live in a Fox News like bubble, I don't see the Church reforming itself anytime soon.  Here are article highlights:

After the votes were counted, the carefully planned and executed campaign by activist groups seemed as much about putting behind a past entrenched in theocracy and tradition as it was about marriage for gays and lesbians. And it underscored how different Ireland is today for the young, who turned out in droves to vote. In a little more than a generation, Ireland has both distanced itself from the church and sharpened its secular identity.

“The church needs to take a reality check,” Archbishop Martin said after the Mass, repeating a comment he had made Saturday. “It’s very clear there’s a growing gap between Irish young people and the church, and there’s a growing gap between the culture of Ireland that’s developing and the church.”

The country’s cultural evolution reflects a blend of disaffection with the church, and Ireland’s willingness to embrace a wider vision of itself in the world. As the church lost many people in its scandals and its unwillingness to yield to sexual freedoms, the European Union found itself with a willing and eager member.

Tony Flannery, a priest who was suspended in 2012 because of his criticism of the church’s views on women and homosexuality, said contraception was a seminal issue for a generation that became the parents of today’s youngest voters.

And it “was the first time that Irish Catholics first questioned church teaching,” Mr. Flannery said. “That opened the door, and after that they increasingly began to question a whole raft of Catholic sexual teaching, and then the child sexual abuse scandal came along which destroyed church credibility in the whole area of sexuality.”

“The people have changed their relationship with the Catholic Church because they’ve been disappointed and let down,” said Christina Breen, 54, who visited Dublin Castle on Saturday to see the results of the vote, a show of support because one of her sons is gay.

Or, as Mr. Flannery put it, “The day when the church had the power to influence social debate in Ireland, or to swing it, is gone.”

“The biggest change I see is the young people,” said Annie Dillon, 58, who works for a community-based health organization.

“I’m thinking of my 20-year-old nephew; it was like a no-brainer for him,” she said. “He was like, ‘Of course, why wouldn’t we want to be including everybody?’ That seems to be the prevailing attitude.”

“For many, and I’ve said this before, inside the church becomes almost alien territory to them in today’s society,” he [Diarmuid Martin, the archbishop of Dublin] said. “If the leadership of the Irish Catholic church don’t recognize that, then they’re in severe denial. Have I got a magic formula? Certainly not.”

With over a third of America's Millennials having walked away from organized religion, the Catholic Church and other anti-gay, fundamentalist denominations  are moving quickly to the sort of rejection that just happened in Ireland.  Preaching hate and division and psychological obsession with all things sexual simply isn't selling anymore. 

GOP Voter ID Laws Seek to Disenfranchise Millenials

It is not just blacks and other racial minorities that Republican law makers seek to bar from voting.  Another targeted group?  Millennials who are far less likely to support failed and bigoted GOP policies.  Particularly, GOP platforms on voodoo economics and homophobia.  It's a sad indication of how low the GOP has sunk when one of its main plans for winning elections is to bar as many citizens as possible from voting.  The Washington Post looks at how Millenials are being targeted by the party of ignorance and bigotry.  Here are highlights:

First they came for blacks, and we said nothing. Then they came for Latinos, poor people and married women, and we again ignored the warning signs.

Now, after our years of apathy, they’re coming for us: the nation’s millennials.

Across the country, Republican state policymakers have hoisted barriers to voting by passing voter-ID laws and curtailing electoral accommodations such as same-day registration and early voting. These policy changes are allegedly intended to eradicate the imagined scourge of voter fraud, but the real point seems to be voter suppression.

For a time, the targeted populations were primarily racial, ethnic and income groups that traditionally vote Democratic. Now they happen to include Gen-Y’ers, more specifically my college-age brethren. We millennials may be fickle in our loyalties, generally distrustful of government institutions and unaligned with any political party, but our generation’s motley, liberal-to-libertarian-leaning ideological preferences still threaten red-state leadership. 

In response, Republicans have set out to erect creative, if potentially unconstitutional, Tough-Mudder-style obstacle courses along our path to the polls. 

Last year in Ohio, for example, Republican legislators proposed a measure that would effectively strip hundreds of millions of dollars from state schools if they continued to provide students paying out-of-state tuition with the paperwork necessary to register to vote in the state (as courts have said college students are legally allowed to do). 

In Maine, the secretary of state investigated 200 university students for voter fraud; he found no evidence of wrongdoing but then sent a threatening letter telling them that they must either obtain a Maine driver’s license and register their vehicles or cancel their state voter registrations. In Texas, photo identification is required to vote and, while concealed handgun licenses count, state-school-issued student IDs don’t.

North Carolina’s efforts have been particularly aggressive, perhaps because young people represent an especially threatening voting bloc to the Republicans in control there. Without the strong turnout of young voters in 2008, after all, Barack Obama would not have become the first Democratic presidential candidate in more than two decades to carry the Tar Heel state.

Like other states, North Carolina has eliminated many accommodations disproportionately used by young people and other first-time voters, such as same-day registration, and instituted voter-ID requirements that don’t recognize student IDs. 

If Paris Hilton, 50 Cent and Madonna can’t convince young people to vote, maybe a bunch of old white men trying to bar their path will do the job. 

Are Evangelicals Changing Their Minds on Gay Marriage?

Amy Tincher with Vines

While far right Christian denominations are confronted with the exodus of the Millennials, they also have another perhaps growing problem.  What some of the bitter, control obsessed leadership would not doubt call heresy: evangelicals who are beginning to support gay rights and worse yet in the eyes hate-filled leaders, gay marriage.  It is a phenomenon that seemingly is lost on the Republican Party which continues to prostitute itself to the ugliest elements of the Christofascists.  A piece in Politico Magazine looks at this new and growing threat to the theocrats and their tawdry whores in the GOP.  Here are some excerpts:

Amy Tincher is an evangelical Christian who plays bass in the band at her suburban Ohio church, where she and her fellow congregants firmly believe the “words we adhere to” are those in the Bible. But last summer, without telling her husband and two kids exactly what she was doing, she boarded a plane for a conference in Kansas whose purpose many evangelicals would plainly consider heretical.

Tincher was one of 50 people flown from around the country and the world—Canada, China, Nigeria and South Korea—to a four-day Bible boot camp dedicated to discussing, and embracing, gay relationships. The gathering was organized by Matthew Vines, who by then was enjoying modest fame for a 2012 YouTube video in which Vines, looking even younger than his 21 years, delivers an hour-long lecture arguing that the Bible does not, in fact, condemn all same-sex relationships. The video has gone viral, racking up more than 730,000 views to date, landing Vines on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Styles section and helping him raise $100,000 for the conference, where he launched The Reformation Project, a nationwide network of pro-gay evangelicals committed to ending their church’s longstanding hostility toward gay people.

Tincher told me she had once “tried on” an anti-gay attitude to fit in with her conservative community in Liberty Township, outside Cincinnati, but like many evangelicals, she struggled to see how homophobia could accord with an all-loving Christian God. 

It’s no secret that attitudes toward same-sex relations have changed in this country: Gay marriage is legal in 19 states plus the District of Columbia, and all major public opinion surveys now show a majority of Americans are in favor of it. But Matthew Vines and Amy Tincher are no longer outliers either: Increasingly, even evangelical Christians, long known for doctrinally condemning homosexuality, are embracing gay people, too.

The shift is especially visible among young evangelicals under age 35, a near majority of whom now support same-sex marriage. And gay student organizations have recently formed at Christian colleges across the country, including flagship evangelical campuses such as Wheaton College in Illinois and Baylor in Texas.

The change has taken conservative political leaders by surprise, fractured the coalition against gay marriage and begun to dry up funding for some of the traditional-marriage movement’s most prominent organizations.

Christian political groups, including Focus on the Family and the National Association of Evangelicals, have virtually stopped campaigning on the issue, shifting their focus to legal efforts to shield religious business owners from having to cater to gay weddings. Republican politicians, who historically have relied on evangelical support, are backing away, too. In Ohio, where in 2004 evangelical activists were among the first in the nation to campaign for a successful ballot measure outlawing gay unions, both Rob Portman, the state’s Republican senator, and Jim Petro, former Republican attorney general, now support overturning the ban.

Such views will only become more common in the years ahead, says Jeremy Thomas, an Idaho State University sociologist who has studied conservative Christians’ changing attitudes toward homosexuality. “Evangelicals will more or less come to embrace homosexuality in the next 20 to 30 years,” Thomas predicts. “I would put all my money on that statement.”

“While influenced by God, [the Bible] is not dictated by God,” Adam Hamilton, the pastor of an influential Methodist megachurch near Kansas City, Missouri, said in a recent interview. “It is possible to be a faithful Christian who loves God and loves the scriptures and at the same time to believe that the handful of verses on same-sex intimacy are like the hundreds of passages accepting and regulating slavery or other practices we today believe do not express the heart and character of God.

But leading anti-gay marriage organizations are already feeling the financial effects of the evangelical population’s widespread moderation.   The National Organization for Marriage, which has funded nationwide efforts to prohibit gay unions for the past seven years and last month sponsored its annual March for Marriage in Washington, D.C., reported a roughly $2 million deficit on its 2012 tax return, the most recent publicly available. And just three donors contributed nearly two-thirds of the organization’s $9.3 million in donations that year.

In evangelical communities like Amy Tincher’s, the transformation is still a work in progress. She says her husband, Adam, once “mildly” homophobic, is “listening to me and hearing me.” In May, the couple decided to leave their Liberty Township church, New Vienna United Methodist, and join a United Church of Christ congregation closer to their home, where Tincher was “blown away by the acceptance and the welcoming” at Sunday services. Tincher had started a pro-gay Bible study group at New Vienna and informally counseled gay teens, but some of her peers were turned off; two of them left the roughly 75-person congregation for a few weeks when they learned of her activism, the pastor, Sarah Chapman, told me. “I felt a tug like it was time to move on [to] a congregation that is hungry, thirsty for the knowledge that I have,” Tincher says.

Kudos to Tincher.  One can only hope that many more follow in her path and leave the bitter, psychologically damaged who need to hate others to accept themselves to watch their toxic parishes dwindle away toward extinction.  

Quote of the Day: Why Millennials Are Abandoning Institutional Christianity

This blog has noted numerous times the phenomenon of members of the Millennial generation leaving organized religion in droves.  I personally credit - as surveys have confirmed - the foulness of today's "godly Christian" crowd with making the case that decent people should not want to be in anyway identified as "Christian."  But there is a larger phenomenon that Andrew Sullivan describes well: Christianity's increasing reject of the truth as revealed by science and modern knowledge as it desperately tries to prop up its antiquated myth based dogma.  Here is the money quote:

I’d go further and argue that it is precisely because of a concern with the truth that so many [Millennials] have abandoned institutional religion. When a church teaches scripture in a way that simply ignores the huge amount of historical evidence about the sources of those scriptures, it is not interested in truth, but in its authority. When a church advances a version of “natural law” that is based in the science of the 13th Century, rather than of the 21st, it is showing contempt for the kind of truth-seeking Aquinas was engaged in, not respect. When it maintains utterly specious distinctions between men and women in which women are always somehow second-class, truth-seekers will go elsewhere. When its understanding of sexuality is concocted by failed celibates with profound sexual dysfunction and with histories of sexual crime and abuse, who can blame truth-seekers for looking elsewhere? It seems to me that it is because the churches have shown such profound contempt for truth that they appear crippled by modernity, and therefore have less appeal and traction. And their suppression of debate about these areas is ipso facto a flight from truth.

While some denominations are striving to modernize - the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America  is one such example, although every month in The Lutheran, knuckle dragging Neanderthal elements bemoan the effort, especially the acceptance of gays - they have one insurmountable obstacle: a storyline based on Genesis and the claim that Adam and Eve were historic individuals when they were not.  The whole house of cards thus begins to collapse.  Education and knowledge have become the principal enemies of fundamentalist religion around the globe.  It's little wonder that Christianity's main growth currently is in the ignorant and backward regions of the globe. 

America Ignores Its Future and Spends on the Past

The saying goes that our children are our future.  If that's true, current American policies are trashing the nation's future as disproportionate amounts are spent on aging seniors while far too little is done for the generations that are out future.  I'm not sure what the answer is but one thing is certain: more of the same and trying to maintain the status quo - and ignore the changing world and climate is not the answer.  One of the biggest obstacles to addressing the future is today's GOP which not only resists modernity tooth and claw, but wants to return the country to the Gilded Age of over a century ago when only the truly wealth had financial security and everyone else was an accident or serious illness away from financial ruin.  Add to that the GOP's refusal to even admit that something ominous is going with climate change and its a recipe for disaster.  One take away is that if younger generations want to protect their own best interests, they need to become a reliable voting block so as to offset the greed of the oldest generations.  A column in the New York Times looks at the damaged nation that is being left for the Millenials.  Here are excerpts:

Among Americans age 40 and older, there’s a pastime more popular than football, Candy Crush or HBO.  It’s bashing millennials.

We have a hell of a lot of nerve, considering the havoc we’ve wrought on theirs.

For decades they’ll be saddled with our effluvium: a monstrous debt, an epidemic of obesity, Adam Sandler movies. In their lifetimes the Atlantic will possibly swallow Miami Beach (I foresee a “Golden Girls” sequel with dinghies and life preservers) and the footwear for Anchorage in February may be flip-flops. At least everyone will be saving on heating bills.

The Obama administration did unveil a bold climate-change measure last week. Or, rather, it signaled its intent to act: We’ll have to wait and see whether Congress figures out a way to foil the president or the courts gum things up. The plan as it stands would cut carbon pollution from American power plants 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.   But that may be too little, too late

The country’s slowness to deal with swelling seas and melting glaciers is just one manifestation of our myopia, just one metaphor for our failure to reckon with the future that we’re visiting upon today’s children, who get more lip service than legislation from us.

“If you’re going along with the status quo, it should be a crime to say that you care about our children and grandchildren, because you’re not putting your money where your mouth is,” Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who governed Nebraska for four years and represented that state in the Senate for another 12, told me recently.

This subject haunts him more and more. “If we’re trying to figure out how to advance the next generation’s future, we need to be spending more on the next generation, and we’re spending it on yesterday’s generation,” said Kerrey, 70. “I am not the future. My 12-year-old son is. But if you look at the spending, you’d think I’m the future.”

Kerrey is referring mostly to Social Security and Medicare, which, along with Medicaid, are the so-called entitlements that claim a larger and larger share of the federal budget.

He’s fixated on those sorts of numbers: According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid totaled 6.7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in 1990. By 2010, they were 10 percent. And by 2038, such spending may represent 14.3 percent. It’s hard to see how that leaves much money for discretionary spending on infrastructure, on education, on research, on a range of investments that safeguard or improve the America that today’s young people will inherit.

The Urban Institute released a report in 2012 that looked at figures from 2008 for the combined local, state and federal spending that directly benefited Americans 65 and older versus spending that went to Americans under 19; the per capita discrepancy was $26,355 versus $11,822.

“I’m glad that my parents are living longer,” she added. “But it’s creating this budgetary math problem that we’re unwilling to look at.”

That unwillingness includes the predictable pushback from many members of Congress, from voters and from various advocacy groups when proposals are made to limit the growth of Social Security by, say, fiddling with cost-of-living adjustments. Older Americans, who would be instantly affected by such a change, turn out more reliably on Election Day than any other age group. Lawmakers are loath to cross them.

Younger voters need to assert themselves. Perhaps they’re poised to do just that. A recent poll by ABC News and The Washington Post showed a significant rise — to 66 percent now from 53 percent two months ago — of voters between the ages of 18 and 39 who said they definitely planned to vote in November.

[Older Americans] conveniently overlook how much more they’ve [Millennials] had to pay for college than we did, the loans they’ve racked up and the fact that nothing explains their employment difficulties better than a generally crummy economy, which certainly isn’t their fault.

 I truly fear for my grand children's future.  Right now their best financial hope is that the husband and I don't live too long so their inheritance can offset the disaster with which angry whites in particular will have left them.