Religious Services Shouldn’t be Exempted From State Pandemic Regulations

Since June of 2016 when he met with a who's who of the extreme "Christian Right" - folks who, in my view are neither Christian nor right - he has promised to give Christofascists special rights to discriminate and establish their perverse form of Christianity as a de facto established religion. The rights and even safety of all others must give way to the "godly folks'" bigotry and fantasy world view.  With lock downs across the country to protect the health of the public at large, large social gatherings of all types, including church services, have been banned.  In the minds of the Christofascists, this amounts to "persecution of Christians."  The lives and safety of other members of the public simply do not matter.  To pastors and scamvangelists, the real issue I suspect is all about money: no church service equals a drop in cash-flow and less luxurious living for those who fleece their gullible flocks. As a piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican lays out, Trump has been only too happy to fan the flames of the always aggrieved Christofascists.  Here are article highlights:

The antiviral lockdowns have banned most large gatherings: baseball games, sales conferences, college graduations, and religious services.

Religious services are governed by the same rule as other large gatherings. They are neither specially targeted nor specially exempted. Justice Antonin Scalia explained the justification for applying general rules to religious groups in a 1990 Supreme Court decision:

We have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate.

But over the past three weeks, some conservatives have argued louder and louder that the failure to exempt religious services from the general rules during the coronavirus pandemic constitutes an anti-constitutional attack on religion.

On April 8, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson lamented: “It’s possible that in five days we will see something that we never imagined in this country: Easter celebrations broken up by the police. Of course, you can still go to the grocery store and the pharmacy; you could still have Communion in the produce aisle at Safeway. But churches? We’ll find out if that’s allowed.”

The Fox News host Jeanine Pirro on April 15 praised Michigan protesters who resisted an unnamed “them” who “want to keep us away from churches and synagogues.”

On April 18, Donald Trump retweeted this complaint about Easter restrictions:
Let’s see if authorities enforce the social-distancing orders for mosques during Ramadan (April 23–May 23) like they did churches during Easter. . . . . He added: “They go after Christian churches, but they don’t tend to go after mosques.”

All of this might seem performative victimhood as usual, but on April 27, Attorney General William Barr issued a directive to the 93 U.S. attorneys and the civil-rights division of the Department of Justice to be “on the lookout” for state regulations that discriminate against religious institutions and religious believers.

The sense of persecution that pervades conservative talk has jumped to sway federal law enforcement.

It needs to be stressed at the outset that almost all faith groups in the United States have voluntarily and responsibly complied with public-health restrictions. Two dozen Muslim groups signed a statement on the eve of Ramadan urging Muslims to celebrate the holy month in rituals at home, not in mosques or Islamic centers. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints suspended all services worldwide on March 12. Catholic churches likewise suspended public Mass. Cellphone records confirm that the large majority of Christian worshippers marked Easter at home.

It’s not discrimination when the same health and safety rules are applied equally to all. When states enforce rules against such gatherings, they are not singling out “religious observance.” They are including religious observance on a list defined by the most neutral of possible terms: risk of infection. Churches are bound by fire codes, just like other institutions, and the same principle articulated in Scalia’s 1990 opinion in Employment Division v. Smith applies here.

It’s especially not discrimination to apply universal health and safety rules to religious assemblies when there is ample evidence that religious assemblies—much more than beaches or parks—have proved capable of spreading the virus. An outbreak in Georgia traces to a church funeral in Dougherty County, one in Louisiana to a megachurch that ignored social distancing.

It’s striking that nearly a month after conservative media began complaining, the Justice Department still cannot identify any instances of unfair treatment of worshippers beyond the wish of some megachurches to keep operating as usual in a time of pandemic.

But the purpose of the Trump administration and Barr’s Justice Department is not to defend genuine religious liberties from real-world threats. It is to stoke cultural resentment for political purposes. They are out to get you because they care more about alien Muslims than about authentically American Christians.

As MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has aptly said, you cannot fight a culture war against a virus. The virus will always win.

But the Trump administration is not fighting the virus, not primarily anyway. Its priority is to fight an election—and to incite fights against governors who are making Trump look bad in comparison as a tactic in that election.

Inviting people of faith, and especially evangelical Protestants, to imagine themselves as victims is today’s incitement. Tomorrow there will be other incitements. And at every turn, public health will be sacrificed—and the people Trump supposedly champions will end up as the victims of the plague that Trump did not start, but that Trump is making so much worse than it had to be.

Is Trump's Appeal Fueled by Resentment?

Those rallying to Donald Trump's standard seem to be divided into two camps.  One is motivated by hate and racism and a desire to go backward in time both in terms of restoring white privilege and unchallenged supremacy and to when progress had not shaken what was viewed as the status quo. The other camp, perhaps in a wild gamble seems to believe that Trump will usher in a new Gilded Age - long a goal of many in the GOP establishment, in my view.   Both camps want to under value progress and the benefits that modernity has brought.  This is especially true of Christofascists and blue collar workers who feel they have lost the deference and respect they believe they once enjoyed. A column in the Washington Post looks at this possible motivation - and the danger it poses for the nation.  1930's German's wanted to Germany restored to past power and prosperity and what they got was ultimately a nightmare.   Here are column highlights:

Some theories of Trumpism — or of Austria’s Hoferism or Britain’s Brexitism — emphasize voters’ misfortunes: conventionally measured, middle-class incomes are stagnant. But this theory of populism’s rise is not fully convincing. Standard measures of incomes leave out the eye-popping array of stuff we don’t actually pay for — the technocopia of free Internet searching, messaging services, selfie apps, exercise programs, YouTube videos and so on. What’s more, populism afflicts countries where even conventional measurement shows progress. Poland and Hungary have both seen gross domestic product per person roughly triple since 2000. But both countries are in the grip of populist strongmen.

A more convincing theory of populism is that it can sometimes be the product not of stagnation but of progress — particularly the sort of progress generated by the disrupters of techland. Like migration or globalization, fast technological change is both positive and disorienting; it clutters life with minor stresses, like bewildering TV remotes and dual-key passwords, but also with existential ones, like the specter of intelligent robots stealing all the jobs. Of course, the grumbling about these costs may be illogical, given technology’s huge benefits. But people aren’t logical. 

[T]he biases identified by behavioral economists tell you plenty about Trump. Why are his backers so resentful of a world in which incomes, properly measured, have probably done respectably? Well, a classic behavioral game involves offering a player $1 on the condition that another player gets $9. Even though a “rational” actor would accept the $1 gain in income, most real people resent others doing better, and they feel that resentment passionately enough to reject an offer that would make them better off.

Then there is the strange matter of people’s attitude to loss. Behavioral economics finds that people suffer “loss aversion” — they fear losing $10 more than they celebrate a gain of the same size. This helps to explain why Trump’s supporters fear threats more than they welcome opportunities — whether these arise from migration, globalization or technology. At the same time, however, “prospect theory” suggests that, once people have suffered losses, they will gamble recklessly to recoup them. This insight is usually wheeled out to explain why investors hang on to stocks that have lost value, or why losing football teams attempt “Hail Mary” passes.

There could be no greater Hail Mary gamble than voting for Trump. given the populist crisis, the world needs a response of an equivalent size. Policies that promote growth and efficiency must be balanced with policies promoting fairness and security. Just as banks now hold more capital, even at the expense of their return on equity, so society must be prepared to tax more progressively, curb runaway executive pay and fix the gaps in social safety nets. Schemes such as wage insurance, which pay subsidies to displaced workers when they move into lower-paying occupations, may seem dauntingly expensive. They are a lot less expensive than electing populist firebrands.