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.  

Resisting Gay Marriage Is a Losing Battle for the GOP

Despite the fact that polls that show a majority of Americans support the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, many Republicans are pledging to oppose the ruling and GOP governors in Louisiana and Texas are giving cover to Clerk's who refuse to issue licenses to same sex couples, claiming that their "religious freedom" is being trampled upon.  Such arguments are a totally disingenuous twisting of what the First Amendment grants to citizens, but with the Christofascists and their political whores in the GOP that simply doesn't matter.  A column in the Washington Post looks at why this is a losing battle for the GOP and will ultimately marginalize the party.  Here are excerpts:

After the Supreme Court’s historic 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Southern politicians adopted a strategy that became known as “massive resistance.” It doomed the South to a losing battle against not just the court but also a majority of Americans. 

Some GOP conservatives may be on the verge of making a similar mistake in the aftermath of the court’s ruling last week supporting same-sex marriage. At the very time moderate Republicans want to escape positions that isolate them from an increasingly diverse and tolerant country, some hard-right leaders seem ready to double down on a limiting version of “traditional values.”

Poll numbers show why defiance is likely to be a losing strategy. According to the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of Americans support gay marriage. In the aftermath of the court’s decision, this number will probably grow, especially among the younger voters the GOP needs to attract. Among millennials, born after 1980, 73 percent support same-sex marriage.

Denunciations of the ruling came from some right-wing presidential candidates, such as former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. “I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch. We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat,” he thundered.

Some moderate Republicans, such as Jeb Bush, straddled the issue, dissenting from the court but promising to uphold the law. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said the ruling “tramples on states’ rights” and that “no earthly court” can alter God’s will, but added that he would comply with court orders.

Cruz’s language was so extreme that it seemed almost a call to ignore or disobey the court. “There is no obligation on others in government to accept the court as the final arbiter of every constitutional question,” Cruz said. Pressed by Inskeep, he affirmed that state officials “should feel no obligation to agree that the court ruling is right.” 

Such intemperate language may have been encouraged by the sneering tone of Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent.
These conservative ripostes recall the aggrieved language used by Southerners after the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was illegal. Conservatives asserted then the South’s deeply held values and way of life had been attacked. . . . . It took federal troops to eventually impose desegregation.

This is the dark American past toward which some far-right Republicans seem to want to steer their party. The problem is that court-bashing may be good politics for candidates seeking support from older, whiter, more religious voters in the crowded GOP field.

History tells us that intolerance is a losing bet in America, and that those who embrace defiance of the courts regret it later. The Richmond Times-Dispatch apologized to its readers in 2009 for its “editorial enthusiasm for a dreadful doctrine” a half-century before. “The record fills us with regret.” 

As I said, "conservative Christian" = modern day segregationist and racist.

The Kindred Mindset of Marriage Equality Opponents and Segregationists

As lunatics on the right such as hate group American Family Association's Bryan Fischer and political whores to the Christofascist such as Ted Cruz continue to rant and rage - Cruz has even proposed that the U.S. Senate apparently by fiat amend the U.S. Constitution to bat marriage equality - one thing has struck me: the basis of the arguments all come down to "states' rights" and the desire to allow a majority to terrorize and mistreat a minority.   It's a line of argument and mindset that we have seen before and that was widespread in Virginia and the South 150+ years ago when it was utilized to justify slavery (the Bible was also used as a source of justification then as well).  More recently we heard it in reaction to school desegregation - Virginia engaged in "Massive Resistance" and some localities completely closed their public schools - and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  The argument is always used by a majority that seeks to abuse a minority.  And it's usually the self anointed "godly folk" leading the charge.  Oklahoma governor  Mary Fallin (who looks like she is channeling the late Tammy Baker as her makeup consultant) stated this tired and discriminatory mantra again yesterday in a press release as Oklahoma was forced to begin same sex marriages:

“The people of Oklahoma have the right to determine how marriage is defined. In 2004, Oklahomans exercised that right, voting by a margin of 3-1 to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

“The will of the people has now been overridden by unelected federal justices, accountable to no one. That is both undemocratic and a violation of states’ rights. Rather than allowing states to make their own policies that reflect the values and views of their residents, federal judges have inserted themselves into a state issue to pursue their own agendas.

“Today’s decision has been cast by the media as a victory for gay rights. What has been ignored, however, is the right of Oklahomans – and Americans in every state – to write their own laws and govern themselves as they see fit. Those rights have once again been trampled by an arrogant, out-of -control federal government that wants to substitute Oklahoma values with Washington, D.C. values.”

One has to wonder if Fallin slips on her Klan robes when out of the view of the media. 

White/Christian Rage Against Progress.

If one looks at what motivates the increasingly lily white/far right Christian base of the Republican Party, it's really all about hanging on to power and privilege with a good measure of wanting to take the nation back to an imagined time when "things were better."  Of course, that envision time may have been good for white, heterosexual Christians, but it wasn't some glorious period for others, including blacks, gays, non-Christians and many others.  As things have improved for others in terms of civil rights and equality at least in theory under the law, the reaction of the Christofascists and white supremacist types is to feel that they have lost something.  Keeping others downtrodden and disadvantaged is sadly key to their sense of self worth.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this sad phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Mo., during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we’ve actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.

[T]he real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations. 

White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancement, there’s a reaction, a backlash.

The North’s victory in the Civil War did not bring peace. Instead, emancipation brought white resentment that the good ol’ days of black subjugation were over. Legislatures throughout the South scrambled to reinscribe white supremacy and restore the aura of legitimacy that the anti-slavery campaign had tarnished. 

Influential white legislators such as Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pa.) and Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.) tried to make this nation live its creed, but they were no match for the swelling resentment that neutralized the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, and welcomed the Supreme Court’s 1876 United States vs. Cruikshank decision, which undercut a law aimed at stopping the terror of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nearly 80 years later, Brown v. Board of Education seemed like another moment of triumph . . . . But black children, hungry for quality education, ran headlong into more white rage. Bricks and mobs at school doors were only the most obvious signs. In March 1956, 101 members of Congress issued the Southern Manifesto, declaring war on the Brown decision. Governors in Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and elsewhere then launched “massive resistance.”. . . .
They shut down public school systems and used tax dollars to ensure that whites could continue their education at racially exclusive private academies. Black children were left to rot with no viable option.

A rash of voter-suppression legislation, a series of unfathomable Supreme Court decisions, the rise of stand-your-ground laws and continuing police brutality make clear that Obama’s election and reelection have unleashed yet another wave of fear and anger.

It’s more subtle — less overtly racist — than in 1865 or even 1954. It’s a remake of the Southern Strategy, crafted in the wake of the civil rights movement to exploit white resentment against African Americans, and deployed with precision by Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Now, under the guise of protecting the sanctity of the ballot box, conservatives have devised measures — such as photo ID requirements — to block African Americans’ access to the polls.  

Add to this the tea party movement’s assault on so-called Big Government, which despite the sanitized language of fiscal responsibility constitutes an attack on African American jobs. Public-sector employment, where there is less discrimination in hiring and pay, has traditionally been an important venue for creating a black middle class.

So when you think of Ferguson, don’t just think of black resentment at a criminal justice system that allows a white police officer to put six bullets into an unarmed black teen. Consider the economic dislocation of black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted, thus transforming a 17-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights Act.  

Only then does Ferguson make sense. It’s about white rage.

 Here in Virginia it is note worthy that one of the organizations that pushes for voter ID laws, maintaining "law and order" and advocates for "family values" is comprised of the direct descendants of those who supported Massive Resistance and segregation.  It's called The Family Foundation.  Under their world view, only white, heterosexual, conservative Christians should have rights and they exhibit rage towards anyone who in their minds seeks to diminish their special rights and privileges.   These people are the antithesis of the Gospel message.

5 Signs That We Are Not Living in a Post-Racial Society

Despite the claims by some - typically white pundits who love to pontificate and hear their own voices - that America has transformed itself into a post racial society, the truth is that racism remains alive and well.  Indeed, the Republican Party and falsely named "Christian" family values organizations work diligently to keep it alive and to whip up fears among angry aging whites who are terrified of losing their so-called white privilege.  One need look no further than Ferguson, Missouri or sit a a criminal courtroom to see that minorities are not treated the same as their white counterparts.  A piece in Salon lays out additional signs that the pundit class has their heads up their proverbial ass.  Here are highlights:

In the wake of the Ferguson shooting, a recent Pew poll finds that 47 percent of whites believe that “race is getting more attention than it deserves,” with regards to the death of Michael Brown, while only 18 percent of African-Americans feel the same. Meanwhile, a similar Pew study found that whites are far less likely to see discrimination in the treatment blacks receive by the education system, the courts and hospitals. Such views are held by many Americans, who believe that “blacks are mostly responsible for their own condition.” Police killings of unarmed blacks are certainly the most visible manifestation of systemic racism, but data show that racism still manifests itself frequently in everyday life.

In America, race determines not just where someone lives and what school he or she attends, it affects the very air we breathe. Although many whites wish to believe we live in a “post-racial” society, race appears not just in overt discrimination but in subtle structural factors.

[A] cursory examination of major structural racial problems can give us a feeling for how far we still have to go

.

1) Education

Education is an important key to fostering upward mobility and alleviating inequality. However, schools today are becoming more segregated, rather than less segregated. At the peak of integration, 44 percent of black Southern students attended majority white schools. Today, only 23 percent do. This is particularly worrying because recent research by Rucker C. Johnson finds that school desegregation benefited black students, because it “significantly increased both educational and occupational attainments, college quality and adult earnings, reduced the probability of incarceration, and improved adult health status.” . . . At the college level, the situation is little better. 

2) Wealth

There is a large racial wealth gap between blacks and whites in America, partially driven by income but exacerbated by racially biased housing policies (which will be examined below). A recent research brief by the Institution on Assets and Social Policy finds that the wealth gap between white families and African-Americans has tripled between 1984 and 2009. The recession has only exacerbated the gap, with whites losing 11 percent of their wealth between 2007 and 2010, while blacks lost 31 percent and Hispanics 44 percent.

3) Job Markets

Unemployment is particularly high among African-Americans, the result of both explicit discrimination and occupational segregation. . . . Occupational segregation, or the delegation of blacks to jobs with low upward mobility and wages, is rife.. . . . People of color are far more likely to rely on public infrastructure, and therefore suffer from cuts to public transportation. Decades of housing segregation have trapped African-Americans in jobless areas with badly understaffed schools.

4) Upward Mobility

Possibly the defining American attribute is the dream of upward mobility. Sadly, this tends to be more farce that fact — America lags behind other developed countries in measures of upward mobility. But recent research by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez, shows that levels of upward mobility vary across the country — and is strongly predicted by income inequality and racial segregation. . . . . Specifically, they note the importance of segregation, “areas that are more residentially segregated by race and income have lower levels of mobility.”

5) The War on Drugs

The socioeconomic realities discussed above cannot be divorced from the war on drugs: It is a war that is primarily fought against people of color in the country. One in 12 working-age African-American men is incarcerated; and while whites and blacks use and sell drugs at similar rates, African-Americans comprise 74 percent of those imprisoned for drug possession.

The most disturbing fact is that in almost all of these areas, we have actually seen previous progress eroded, even while we proclaim ourselves a post-racial society. It’s time to take an honest look at race in America. We probably won’t enjoy it. But we need it.

What ultimately drives racism is the inability of people - usually white conservative Christians - to see anyone who is different be it in terms of skin color, national origin or sexual orientation, as equally human.

Catholic Majority on Supreme Court Rules Against Women and Sets the Stage for Anti-Gay Discriniation

There are not surprisingly comments across the blogosphere about the ruling by the all male, all Catholic majority on the U.S. Supreme Court perpetuating the ludicrous myth that corporations are "persons" that hold "religious beliefs."  The ruling was a victory for Christofascists who are increasingly demanding special rights and the ability to exempt themselves from any laws they don't like so long as the claim their bigotry and/or ignorance is based on "religious belief."  I suspect the Founding Fathers would be shocked by today's holding.   More importantly, the ruling sets the stage more more attacks on women's rights and, by extension, further demands by the "godly folk" to be able to discriminate against LGBT Americans at will.  The majority opinion was written by Justice Samuel Alito - no mental giant in my view, although a genius compared to the brain dead Clarence Thomas - and the most significant opinion released was the dissent of Justice Ginsburg who ripped the majority a new one although outwardly polite.  Here are highlights from Ginsburg's dissenting opinion that begins on page 60 of the complete ruling found here:

In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs. See ante, at 16–49. Compelling governmental interests in uniform compliance with the law, and disadvantages that religion-based opt-outs impose on others, hold no sway, the Court decides, at least when there is a “less restrictive alternative.” And such an alternative, the Court suggests, there always will be. . . .

The exemption sought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga  would override significant interests of the corporations’ employees and covered dependents. It would deny legions of women who do not hold their employers’ beliefs access to contraceptive coverage that the ACA would otherwise secure.

Lacking a tenable claim under the Free Exercise Clause, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga rely on RFRA, a statute  instructing that “[g]overnment shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden  results from a rule of general applicability” unless the government shows that application of the burden is “the least restrictive means” to further a “compelling governmental interest.”

Until this litigation, no decision of this Court recognized a for-profit corporation’s qualification for a religious exemption from a generally applicable law, whether under the Free Exercise Clause or RFRA.

The absence of such precedent is just what one would expect, for the exercise of religion is characteristic of natural persons, not artificial legal entities. As Chief Justice Marshall observed nearly two centuries ago, a corporation is “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.”

The Court’s determination that RFRA extends to for profit corporations is bound to have untoward effects.  Although the Court attempts to cabin its language to closely held corporations, its logic extends to corporations of any size, public or private.  Little doubt that RFRA claims will proliferate, for the Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood—combined with its other errors in construing RFRA—invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith.

Would the exemption the Court holds RFRA demands for employers with religiously grounded objections to the use of certain contraceptives extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists);  medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations (Christian) Scientists, among others)?

There is an overriding interest, I believe, in keeping the  courts “out of the business of evaluating the relative merits of differing religious claims,” Lee , 455 U. S., at 263, n. 2 (Stevens, J., concurring in judgment), or the sincerity with which an asserted religious belief is held. Indeed, approving some religious claims while deeming others unworthy of accommodation could be “perceived as favoring one religion over another,” the very “risk the Establishment Clause was designed to preclude.”

Lest we forget, many one time segregationists justified segregation on religious belief.  One has to shudder and wonder how this majority on the Court would rule were that argument presented today.  Perhaps I should not admit it, but by some projections Christians - and conservative Christians in particular - will eventually be in a minority in America, and a part of me hopes that when that day comes the courts will allow non-Christians the special right to discriminate against Christians that the Christofascists are currently demanding for themselves.  It would be delicious "divine justice" in my view.  Individuals like the owners of Hobby Lobby are not nice or decent people.  They are selfish, self-centered and do not give damn about the rights of anyone but themselves. 

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal of Break Away Anti-Gay Anglican Parish

It appears that the saga of Falls Church Anglican, a former Episcopal Church parish they split from that denomination over the the ordination of Bishop Gene Robinson and which tried to steal the parish property from the denomination, seems to be finally over.  And the result is that the Episcopal diocese owns the property, not the anti-gay break away parish which all too typically used "sincerely held religious belief" to cloak animus and bigotry.  Six other Northern Virginia parish likewise saw their parish properties revert back to the diocese.  One of the ironies of the saga was that the break away parishes had tried to utilize an 1860's Virginia statute which had been enacted to allow break away Baptist parishes that supported slavery to steal their respective properties from the national church during the Civil War era.  The Washington Post has coverage.  Here are highlights:

Seven years after 15 conservative Virginia congregations made global news by breaking away from the Episcopal Church — and refusing to give up tens of millions of dollars in property — the Supreme Court on Monday ended the complex legal dispute by declining to take up an appeal by the last remaining plaintiff.

The Falls Church Anglican, a 2,000-member breakaway congregation, had asserted that the nearly 300-year-old sprawling property belonged to the Anglican group because the Episcopal Church “left” its umbrella Anglican tradition by becoming more liberal in interpreting scripture and ordaining gay and lesbian clergy.

For the breakaway Anglicans, that means eventually moving their huge congregation from a large high school gym and several other borrowed locations to a property of their own — once they find one. For the Episcopal congregation that remains, it means trying to grow its 200-person community into one worthy of the large and valuable property it now gets to keep.

The splits, which happened in late 2006 and early 2007, in some cases divided families and longtime friends who disagreed in particular about the Episcopal Church ordaining openly gay Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. Both sides at times described the conflict as embarrassing — to see churches spending so much money on lawyers instead of on the needy.

The cases drew global attention for a few reasons. One issue was the size and wealth of some of the breakaway congregations. The multiple properties sit on a 30-acre compound and are valued at about $40 million. The conservatives decided to place themselves instead under the leadership of a controversial anti-gay Nigerian Anglican archbishop.

In 2012, the Virginia Supreme Court ordered the breakaways to turn over the properties, including the money, to the diocese. Eventually, only the large Falls Church remained in court, meeting in alternative spaces as the case continiued.

On Monday, both sides said it was unfortunate to spend so many millions on legal bills but seemed to think it was worth it.

Personally, I would be embarrassed to be walking in the tracks of pro-slavery forces and pro-segregationists, but some of the "godly folk" just cannot feel good about themselves unless they are condemning others.  WWJD??

The Right's "Religious Freedom" Is Hurting Everyone’s Freedom

Faced with demographic and generational changes that are eroding the power and control of the Christofascists and the far right over other people's lives, these toxic individuals are seeking to establish a category of special rights for themselves to the detriment of the civil rights of others.  Sadly, Republicans are only too happy to jump on this band wagon as they continue to stack the GOP's future on the dwindling ranks of angry white far right Christians,  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at how this trend - which is still alive in many states - threatens the rights of the rest of us.  Here are highlights:

It’s not clear that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer looked much beyond the vociferous objections of the business community when she vetoed a law that would have permitted commercial enterprises to scorn gay and lesbian customers on the basis of their owners’ professed religious convictions. It was a prudent veto, endorsed by the state’s Republican establishment—by Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake, and even by several legislators who suddenly urged Brewer to block the very law they had just voted for. Marriott Hotels joined the opposition—and so did a once and again member of its board named Mitt Romney.


In fact, far more was at stake here than whether Apple would continue to build its new sapphire glass plant in Mesa or whether the next Super Bowl would be played as scheduled in Arizona. The dangers were real: The NFL had shifted the 1993 Super Bowl to the Rose Bowl when the state refused to observe the Martin Luther King Holiday. The reaction of the league, major corporations, and the Arizona Chamber of Commerce was commendable as well as understandable: Their position was good for business, and companies like Apple have been in the forefront of equal treatment for gay and lesbian employees.

But the Arizona bill represented something more—the continuation of an overreaching campaign waged in the name of “religious freedom” that has profound implications for the future and fate of a pluralistic America. As E.J. Dionne observed in Commonweal, “the promiscuous resort to conscience objections” threatens “the ongoing effort to balance robust protections for faith groups on the one hand with the need for laws of general application on the other.”

That’s also exactly what’s happened with the Catholic bishops’ misguided assault on Obamacare. . . . “Ninety-eight percent of sexually active American Catholic women practice birth control and 78 percent of Catholics think a ‘good Catholic’ can reject the bishops’ teaching…” Thus the official church—except for those pesky nuns at the Catholic Hospital Association—insists on imposing a doctrine on countless non-Catholic employees that most of its own members disdain, and even though the church-affiliated institutions in question don’t have to finance a scintilla of coverage for birth-control services.

This “promiscuous” invocation of religious freedom would deny equal rights to those with different religious convictions—or none. The Arizona law, and similar statutes proposed in other states, would extend the claim to an extreme that logically could sanction discrimination far beyond the LGBT community.

[S]hould a fundamentalist hotelkeeper be able to refuse a room to an unmarried couple? And what if the couple is mixed-race? A conscience exemption could offer cover for the oldest and most odious form of discrimination in America.

[T]here is the long history of “a religious and biblical case for segregation.” Indeed the trial judge who ruled in favor of Virginia’s antimiscegenation law in 1967 called on God as his validator: The Almighty had put distinct races on different continents because “he did not intend the races to mix.” The Supreme Court reversed the ruling and invalidated the Virginia law—and federal law generally prohibits racial discrimination.

State statutes can’t alter that, even if cloaked in sacerdotal rationalization. But if the Arizona law had been signed, or if its ilk proliferates, there will be predictable calls for the same kind of conscience exemption at the federal level. Wary advocates could settle for just going after gays; but that would run afoul of the Supreme Court’s DOMA decision by singling out a suspect class in the absence of any compelling governmental interest. To have any chance to survive a court challenge, the exemption would have to be general.

Conscience clauses have their place: Ministers, rabbis, and priests should not be required to officiate at a same-sex marriage in violation of their faith. Miscarrying this into the commercial sector is another matter altogether. A commercial transaction does not confer ethical approbation on a customer. And nondiscrimination is, or should be, a seamless garment—and discrimination a seamless evil.

The great question here is whether we can learn to live together as a country in all our increasing diversity. A clear majority of Americans already favor marriage equality—or soon will. Churches don’t have to. They can teach and preach their doctrines without trying to write them into law—as the Catholic Church has by declining, at least in this country, any attempt to turn the “sin” of divorce into an illegal act.

[P]luralism, respect for one another, a will even against the will of many and settled patterns of prejudice to bring down barriers and open up freedom are the only ways America can work and live up to its defining principles.

Religious freedom is not in peril in this country today; the specter that can imperil our future is a misuse of religion that could menace our freedom.

Religion has been and continues to be used for great evil.  The Christofascists are free to worship how they want and to believe what they want, but they do not get to inflict their views on others through the civil laws or special rights granted to them. 

When ‘Religious Liberty’ Was Used To Justify Racism Instead Of Homophobia

KKK members marching into a Baptist church

From following a number of anti-gay "family values" organizations for many years and reading the inflammatory rants and deliberately false information on their websites, I long ago came to recognizes that these organizations are comprised of leaders and members who are either former segregationists and/or their descendants.  Tony Perkins, the head of Family Research Council, has clear ties to white supremacy organizations and has spoken at their gatherings.  And like the segregationists of a half century ago, today's anti-gay forces are trying desperately to use the cloak of "religious freedom" to ennoble and justify their hate and bigotry.  Think Progress has a piece that looks at how the same claims we are hearing today were used decades ago to justify out right racism and anti-black discrimination.  What I continue to find shocking is the way in which black pastors refuse to recognize that they are being used by the same forces who supported "segregation forever."  Here are article excerpts:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

– Judge Leon M. Bazile, January 6, 1959

The most remarkable thing about Arizona’s “License To Discriminate” bill is how quickly it became anathema, even among Republicans. Both 2008 GOP presidential candidate John McCain and 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called upon Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to veto this effort to protect businesses that want to discriminate against gay people. So did Arizona’s other senator, Jeff Flake. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. 

The premise of the bill is that discrimination becomes acceptable so long as it is packaged inside a religious wrapper. As Arizona state Rep. Eddie Farnsworth (R) explained, lawmakers introduced it in response to instances where anti-gay business owners in other states were “punished for their religious beliefs” after they denied service to gay customers in violation of a state anti-discrimination law.

Yet, while LGBT Americans are the current target of this effort to repackage prejudice as “religious liberty,” they are hardly the first. To the contrary, as Wake Forest law Professor Michael Kent Curtis explained in a 2012 law review article, many segregationists justified racial bigotry on the very same grounds that religious conservatives now hope to justify anti-gay animus. In the words of one professor at a prominent Mississippi Baptist institution, “our Southern segregation way is the Christian way . . . . [God] was the original segregationist.”

Theodore Bilbo was one of Mississippi’s great demagogues. After two non-consecutive terms as governor, Bilbo won a U.S. Senate . . .  Bilbo proclaimed during his successful reelection campaign in 1946. He was a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan, telling Meet the Press that same year that “[n]o man can leave the Klan. He takes an oath not to do that. Once a Ku Klux, always a Ku Klux.” During a filibuster of an anti-lynching bill, Bilbo claimed that the bill

will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon White Southern men will not tolerate.

For Senator Bilbo, however, racism was more that just an ideology, it was a sincerely held religious belief. In a book entitled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, Bilbo wrote that “[p]urity of race is a gift of God . . . . And God, in his infinite wisdom, has so ordained it that when man destroys his racial purity, it can never be redeemed.” Allowing “the blood of the races [to] mix,” according to Bilbo, was a direct attack on the “Divine plan of God.” There “is every reason to believe that miscegenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance to the will of God.”

In 1901, Georgia Gov. Allen Candler defended unequal public schooling for African Americans on the grounds that “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.” After the Supreme Court ordered public schools integrated in Brown v. Board of Education, many segregationists cited their own faith as justification for official racism. Ross Barnett won Mississippi’s governorship in a landslide in 1960 after claiming that “the good Lord was the original segregationist.” Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia relied on passages from Genesis, Leviticus and Matthew when he spoke out against the civil rights law banning employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters on the Senate floor.

Although the Supreme Court never considered whether Bilbo, Candler, Barnett or Byrd’s religious beliefs gave them a license to engage in race discrimination, a very similar case did reach the justices in 1983.  Bob Jones University excluded African Americans completely until the early 1970s, when it began permitting black students to attend so long as they were married. . . . As a result, the Internal Revenue Service revoked Bob Jones’ tax-exempt status.

When Bob Jones’ case reached the Supreme Court, the school argued that IRS’ regulations denying tax exemptions to racist institutions “cannot constitutionally be applied to schools that engage in racial discrimination on the basis of sincerely held religious beliefs.” But the justices did not bite. In an 8-1 decision by conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger, the Court explained that “[o]n occasion this Court has found certain governmental interests so compelling as to allow even regulations prohibiting religiously based conduct.” Prohibiting race discrimination is one of these interests.

Ultimately, the question facing anti-gay business owners, even if the bill Brewer vetoed had become law, is why it is acceptable to exclude gay people simply because of who they are, when we do not permit this sort of behavior by racists such as Bilbo or Byrd? And there is another, equally difficult question facing advocates of the kind of sweeping “religious liberty” protected by the Arizona bill — why should we allow people to impose their religious beliefs upon others?

I recommend a read of the full article.  In answer to the last  last question posed above, there is no reason why we should allow one set of people - the Christofascists - to impose their religious beliefs on others.  In fact, for the state to do so is a violation of the United States Constitution which guarantees religious freedom to all citizens, not just Christofascists.

Virginian Pilot: Moving Virginia to the Right Side of History

While Christofascists and their political prostitutes in the Republican Party of Virginia continue to convulse and launch spittle flecked rants over last week's ruling that struck down Virginia's religious and anti-gay animus based Marshall-Newman Amendment, the Virginian Pilot editorial board recognizes the ruling for what it is: as step in moving Virginia to the right side of history.  In an editorial the paper praises the ruling as avoiding the repeated of Virginia on school desegregation, interracial marriage and gender based admission to state higher education institutions, all of which were steadfastly and wrongheadedly defended until abolished by the U.S. Supreme Court. Sadly, too many editorial writers refuse to see this truth.  Here are column excerpts:

Every argument advanced in support of Virginia's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage failed in federal court.

U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen's decision, released late Thursday, reveals the law for what it is: codified discrimination.

"The goal and the result of this legislation is to deprive Virginia's gay and lesbian citizens of the opportunity and right to choose to celebrate, in marriage, a loving, rewarding, monogamous relationship with a partner to whom they are committed for life," Wright Allen wrote. "These results occur without furthering any legitimate state purpose."

Because of that, the ban is unconstitutional, she ruled.

Her ruling - which doesn't take effect pending an appeal - shifts Virginia to the right side of history. The commonwealth became the first state in the Southeast to see its same-sex marriage ban fall.

 

Our nation must eradicate such discriminatory laws from every state. An appeal in Virginia's case could provide the catalyst that the highest court needs.

Arguments that the state's ban on same sex-marriage has protected children failed on two levels.

"Of course the welfare of our children is a legitimate state interest," the judge wrote. "However, limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples fails to further this interest. Instead, needlessly stigmatizing and humiliating children who are being raised by the loving couples targeted by Virginia's Marriage Laws betrays that interest." Those children are "needlessly deprived of the protection, the stability, the recognition and the legitimacy that marriage conveys."

Too often in our history, Virginia has clung to prejudice and discrimination: It defended segregation. It fought to preserve its ban on interracial marriages. It tried to prevent women from attending state-supported Virginia Military Institute.

Wright Allen singled out former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli for perpetuating discrimination when he said state colleges and universities could not offer "protections that had been in place regarding 'sexual orientation,' 'gender identity,' and 'gender expression.' "

Virginia can, finally, now be the force for change.  Marriage must be equal for same-sex couples under the law. With Thursday's ruling, this nation is one step closer to recognizing that truth.

 It is noteworthy that with every one of Virginia's past mistakes, it was the same "godly folk" now shrieking over Thursday's ruling that supported segregation, bans on interracial marriage and gender discrimination.  When is the larger public going to see them for the foul individuals that they are?