Franklin Graham: Working to Spread the Christofascist Cancer

Other than Donald Trump, one of the most hideous and malignant forces in American politics is the Christofascist theocratic movement and the parasitic "professional Christians" who preach a message of hate while lining their own pockets and living lavishly.  Few represent this cancer on American society more than Franklin Graham, a steadfast supporter of Trump all too willing to overlook Trump's moral bankruptcy if  it aids his insatiable thirst for power (and, of course, more money in his own pocket in the process -  in 2014, Graham pocketed $622,252.00 from his "charity", Samaritan's Purse, alone).  Now Graham with his right wing extremist allies are focused on stirring up evangelical haters in California to rescue threatened Republican Congressional seats.  Among the bogeymen that Graham will peddle is the "threat" of same sex marriage and the myths of Christian persecution.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Graham's toxic mission.  Here are excerpts:

Franklin Graham stood in a packed locker room at the Rose Bowl, surrounded by fellow evangelists, pastors, and his top Los Angeles donors. It was two weeks before the California primary, and Mr. Graham was urging them to take a stand against their state’s “blue wall.”

The blue wall of California, Mr. Graham told the gathering, represents secular values that have taken root on the country’s west coast.

“Progressive?” he went on, “That’s just another word for godless.” Now is the time for churches to “suck it up” and vote.

Mr. Graham is leading a three-bus caravan up the middle of the state, one of the biggest political battlegrounds this year, to urge evangelicals to vote and to win California for Jesus. The two week tour ends on the day of the primary, June 5. . . . the parallel political message is just as resounding: Support candidates who will advance the socially conservative causes dear to many evangelicals — especially opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage — and get to the polls and vote for them. Three of his stops are in or bordering critical House districts in the Central Valley, and others hug the line between red and blue up the state.

Don’t be afraid to preach about it, Mr. Graham told the pastors. “Lose your tax exempt status; the progressives want to take it away anyway,” he said.

Though the state has one of the highest percentages of religiously unaffiliated adults, the fast growing religious group in the country, that largely blue sea is dotted with evangelical islands that are largely red. One in five adults in the state are evangelical Christians, according to the Pew Research Center, and there are more megachurches in California than in any other state.

And while 26 percent of national voters in 2016 were white born-again Christians, according to exit polls, just 13 percent of California voters were . . .

Finances play a role, too. After Mr. Graham’s home state of North Carolina, California is the second largest donor base for Samaritan’s Purse and his other organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Last Sunday, the day Mr. Graham began his bus trip, a large Los Angeles church on the border of an open House seat ended its services early and directed its 3,000 congregants to write letters protesting a state assembly bill that would prohibit conversion therapy, intended to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, as a form of consumer fraud. In 2012, California passed a law restricting the practice on minors.

Even Republican political strategists and party officials doubt that Republicans could win top statewide offices like governor or senator in California this fall. . . . . As the Republican base in California shrinks, religious conservatives become an even more important part of the party’s coalition, said Dan Schnur, a longtime Republican consultant in California who is now an independent. . . . “It is going to be impossible for them to save those House seats without significant religious conservative turnout,” he said.

In 2016, Mr. Graham held rallies in all 50 state capitals to urge Christians to vote. Donald J. Trump won the White House that year, defying all predictions, in large part thanks to a groundswell of white evangelical turnout.

In California, one clear goal is to change the makeup of school boards. “Can you imagine if your school boards were controlled by evangelical Christians?” he asked the pastors in Pasadena, a not so subtle reference to conservative religious protests of California’s new sex education curriculum, which includes lessons on LGBTQ sexuality.

But other evangelicals are not comfortable with the political direction Mr. Graham is taking their faith. When a Graham organizer asked Daniel Balcombe, the pastor of Living Way Church near Escondido, to promote Mr. Graham’s rally, he said no. “He’s too politically toxic,” Mr. Balcombe, a registered Republican, said in an interview. “I told the organizer this, and he made excuses and insisted that he would not be political in his crusade. Still, I told him no thanks.”

It is a reminder that evangelicalism, and the culture that goes with it, is changing. Sergio De La Mora, pastor of a large Latino-led church with five main campuses, called Cornerstone Church of San Diego, says the future of California Christianity is neither red nor blue, especially because of the growing Hispanic church whose political priorities do not fit an expected mold.

While Mr. De La Mora voted for Mr. Trump, citing his family work ethic, he says he is most passionate about issues like green energy, women’s rights and immigration. “Don’t look at us as this lost, liberal state,” he said. “Look at us as this emerging new America that says, we can coexist.” 

 Graham's toxic agenda needs to be defeated and Christofascists need to be cast into the political wilderness as if they were radioactive.  They are all about hate and division despite disingenuous bleats about Jesus and "faith."  

Memorial Day Male Beauty

John McCain's No Holds Barred Book

While I have often disagreed with his positions, I have always had respect for the man and still wish that he, rather than George W. Bush, had been the 2000 Republican presidential nominee. So much tragedy and needless deaths might have been avoided in Iraq and elsewhere.  And compared to the current occupant of the White House - who I never give the title of "president" - McCain has always tried to maintain a level of moral decency and "American values" if you will.  Now, leaving Congress and with likely not much time left on this side of life, McCain's new book, Restless Wave, seems written with a view of how McCain will be viewed by history and he confronts not only some of his own biggest mistakes but also the moral cesspool the Republican Party has become as best symbolized by Der  Trumpenführer.  A review of the book in the Washington Post gives a brief summary of points in the book.  Here are highlights: 

Unlike the previous six books McCain and Salter have composed together, this one wasn’t written for voters. It was written for history. In an era of all-caps tweets and angry denunciations of supposed “witch hunts,” the Arizona Republican’s final book, published Tuesday, casts him as a profile in courage. McCain highlights his advocacy for the Iraq troop “surge” when it was toxically unpopular in 2007 and his decisive vote against repealing Obamacare in 2017. He finally tells his side of his 2008 Sarah Palin partnership. With what time he has left, the “maverick” — an appellation he has worn throughout his career, at some times more comfortably than at others — is going to put country first and tell the truth.

He expresses regret that he did not pick Joe Lieberman to be his running mate 10 years ago. His best friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), “enthusiastically endorsed the idea” of bringing their colleague, who had been the 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, onto “a national unity ticket.” But everyone else in McCain’s circle told him it would fatally divide the GOP.

McCain attributes the insufficient vetting of Palin, 44 and two years into her first term as Alaska’s governor, to his sulking about not being able to tap Lieberman. Taking the blame for her stumbles, he writes, “She was a skilled amateur performer asked to appear on Broadway twice a day.” I wish he had grappled more fully with the mayhem Palin’s selection created inside the GOP. It laid the groundwork for the ascent of Donald Trump a few years later.

Trump emerges as a bete noire in the book. When McCain after the 2016 elections received a copy of the “dossier,” detailing unverified allegations about the president compiled by an opposition researcher, he immediately turned it over to James Comey so the FBI could explore whether Trump was compromised by the Russians. “Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell,” writes McCain.

But he also portrays [Trump] the president as an outgrowth of tectonic shifts in a party for which, just 10 years ago, he was the standard-bearer. Now he sometimes struggles to recognize it. “Trump seems to vary from refusing to believe what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is doing to just not caring about it,” he frets. “And some House Republicans investigating Russian interference seem more preoccupied with their own conspiracy theories than with a real conspiracy by a foreign enemy to defraud the United States.”

McCain repeatedly criticizes conservative “talk radio blowhards.” He calls the House Freedom Caucus “the say-no-to-everything crowd.” He says nativists “need to be confronted, not ignored or winked at or quietly dismissed as kooks.” He mocks his 2016 primary challenger, Kelli Ward, for attacking him as “a champion of compromise.” “You’re damn right,” he responds. Former Trump aides Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka are “self-proclaimed nationalist radicals.” “Bigger misfits haven’t been seen inside a White House since William Taft got stuck in his bathtub,” he writes.

All politicians self-mythologize. This book is an effort to codify McCain’s maverick brand. He puts extra emphasis on his work across the aisle, including a 38-page chapter about working with Sen. Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion from Massachusetts, on health care and immigration. He has kind words for other leading Democrats, too, including Hillary Clinton.

McCain says he’s a proud Reagan Republican. “Not a Tea Party Republican,” he writes. “Not a Breitbart Republican. Not a talk radio or Fox News Republican. Not an isolationist, protectionist, immigrant-bashing, scapegoating, get-nothing-useful-done Republican. Not, as I am often dismissed by self-declared ‘real’ conservatives, a RINO, Republican in Name Only.”

McCain’s maverick-iness has ebbed and flowed. He’s mostly been a reliable party-line vote since getting elected to Congress in 1982, but he’s broken with Republicans on a few key issues. He earned the enmity of appropriators in both parties by battling earmarks before that was in vogue, and he clashed with his own party leaders by agitating for campaign finance reform. 

He admits to some big mistakes: “The principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam [Hussein] had WMD, was wrong,” McCain writes. “The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”

But the senator’s critique of [Trump] the current president is more sustained than any other. “For all our disagreements I never doubted President Obama shared the seventy-five-year bipartisan consensus that American leadership of the free world was a moral obligation and a practical necessity,” he writes. “I’m not sure what to make of President Trump’s convictions.” . . . . “He seems uninterested in the moral character of world leaders and their regimes,” McCain writes. “The appearance of toughness or a reality show facsimile of toughness seems to matter more than any of our values. Flattery secures his friendship, criticism his enmity.”

McCain does not want to be defined by opposition to Trump, . . . . He would, however, like to be remembered for his long crusade against torture. He devotes a meaty chapter to the topic and recounts apologizing personally to someone who suffered at the hands of his American captors while in Libya, over the objection of the CIA station chief. 

McCain wants to hold that moral high ground, and he’s peeved by any suggestion that he’s not worthy of claiming it. The senator tried to run an honorable campaign in 2008. He forbade his staff from mentioning Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial former pastor. In many ways, this gesture seems much more impressive now — after Trump spent years insisting that Obama was born in Kenya and demanding to see his birth certificate.

“I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last 10 years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door to the era of the American-led world order,” McCain writes. “I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded.”

McCain is one of the few remnants of the GOP I was proud to be a part of.  Sadly, those days appear to be gone forever as the GOP sinks deeper and deeper into a complete moral cesspool.  From my own experience in the GOP, it is no surprise that the Christofascist have lead the way towards the GOP's moral bankruptcy. 

Giuliani: "Spygate" Is Fraudulent "PR" in Anticipation of Impeachment

Only in Trump world do outright lies equate to "PR spin".  What's frightening is than so many Republicans believe the lies - which is part and parcel with the dumbing down of Republican voters and explains why the GOP is having increasing difficulty retaining college educated voters from key suburban districts.  At some point, those who recognize the unending parade of lies just can't continue to hold their noses and vote Republican.  The lying has gone on for years now, but Der Trumpenfurher has taken lying to height heretofore unimaginable in American politics and reminiscent of the lies one saw in Nazi German, China under Mao, or during the darkest days of the former Soviet Union.  Amazingly, Trump consigliere, Rudi Giuliani - who was booted by his law firm due to his outrageous and untrue statements - admitted on national TV that Trump's "spygate" myth is all a lie and is "PR" aimed at anticipated moves to impeach Trump as the Mueller investigation exposes the behavior of Trump and his minions - and hopefully Mike Pence - during the 2016 presidential campaign and since.  New York Magazine looks at Giuliani's more or less admission that Trump's defenders are knowingly lying:  

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani confirmed on Sunday that the president and his allies’ attempts to discredit the Mueller investigation — including the most recent so-called ‘Spygate’ controversy — are part of a public relations campaign aimed at staving off impeachment. “It is for public opinion,” the former New York mayor admitted during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union. And while trying to shape public opinion is the rarely acknowledged goal of any presidential administration, what Giuliani said next was unique to Trump’s: “Because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach or not impeach.”

Giuliani’s comment came amid pressure from host Dana Bash to acknowledge that he and Trump were using a “very specific, very political strategy to undermine [the Mueller] investigation,” highlighting how a recent poll revealed a 15 percent drop in the number of Republicans who wanted Trump to testify in the probe. Bash and Giuliani had already talked about the unfounded “Spygate” allegation by Trump and his allies that the FBI had installed a spy in the Trump campaign to set up for collusion charges. (The FBI had actually warned Trump that Russia was trying to infiltrate his campaign.)

Asked to confirm that these efforts to discredit the Mueller probe were just a political tactic, Giuliani first demurred, . . . . Then Bash specifically cited the ‘Spygate’ claims and how no evidence had been offered to support them, and noted to Giuliani that he was both an experienced politician and a lawyer who clearly understood that the Trump team could feel free to attack the Russia investigation, since Mueller and his team would not be able to publicly defend themselves.

The whole interview was a ranging, befuddled affair, as most of Giuliani’s media appearances now tend to be regardless of how much oversharing he does.

Before acknowledging the PR angle, Giuliani clearly tried to reference ‘Spygate’ as much as possible, using the word six times, and acting as though he was astonished by the allegations. He also tried to repeat Trump’s lie that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has admitted the FBI placed a spy in the Trump campaign — which Bash corrected him on.

He also suggested the Justice Department’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals for meddling in the 2016 presidential election was “phony” and was only meant to impress the media.

I'm sorry, but anyone with half a brain who isn't merely motivated by Trump's open racism and /or pandering to Christofascists ought to denounce this campaign of lies.  And if they failed to do so, it speaks volumes about them, none of it good.  That Giuliani's law firm - which has a impeccable reputation - threw him out ought to speak volumes to anyone with a brain.

More Sunday Male Beauty

Insurance Companies Say "No" to Arming Teachers

In the wake of school mass shootings, the NRA - a front organization for gun manufacturers - and its political prostitutes within the Republican Party insanely say the solution is more guns.  Indeed, they propose arming teachers and school staff embers, most of whom want nothing to do with the idiotic proposal. Nonetheless, Republicans in a number of states have passed laws allowing the arming of teachers; however, they are hitting a roadblock: insurance carriers who are refusing to offer insurance coverage -  something we need to see start happening to gun owners in the home insurance realm as intimated in a prior post.  As is their norm insurance carriers typically eagerly accept premium payments, but want to minimize as much as possible the risk that they might actually have to pay out on claims.  The analysis of these companies is that more guns in schools is a very bad idea.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at insurance carrier's refusal in most cases to issue policies to school districts arming teachers and staff.  Here are highlights:

Kansas has a problem: It has a law allowing teachers to carry guns in the classroom, but almost no schools are using it because insurance companies refuse to provide coverage if they do. As EMC Insurance, the largest insurer of schools in Kansas, explained in a letter to its agents, the company “has concluded that concealed handguns on school premises poses a heightened liability risk.”

Then came the Parkland, Fla., school shooting in February, leading frustrated Republican legislators in Kansas to try forcing the issue with a bill banning “unfair, discriminatory” rates for schools that arm staff. The insurance industry held firm. Last month, the bill failed.

As proposals to arm teachers sweep across the nation, insurance companies are being forced to weigh the risks of these controversial plans. Some insurers are balking. Some are agreeing to provide policies but lamenting the lack of evidence about whether it makes schools safer — or increases the chances of people getting shot. Others are raising rates.  The reaction of insurance companies is notable because they are supposed to evaluate dangers through the dry eye of actuarial science, largely avoiding the heated emotions of the nation’s gun debate, in which one side condemns guns and the other side claims, as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) did last week, that the best way to stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun.  Insurance companies are not so certain, worried more guns in schools might not only fail to stop mass shootings but lead to more accidents. The epidemic of mass shootings in schools and other public venues has put new pressure on the insurance industry to take a stand. They face huge potential liabilities from these tragedies. The 2017 Las Vegas shooting, where a gunman fatally shot 58 people, could cost insurers more than $1 billion, including potential lawsuits and covering lost business income from the incident and its fallout, according to the International Risk Management Institute. Adding trained police officers to schools is generally viewed favorably, industry officials say. But giving guns to school janitors or history teachers — even with some training — raises concerns. More guns make insurers nervous in other situations, too, said Scott Kennedy, president of CCIG, an insurance company in Colorado. He pointed to the common preference among insurers that nightclub bouncers remain unarmed, while off-duty police officers working security are usually allowed to carry firearms. Joe Carter, a vice president of United Educators, which specializes in insuring schools, said he frequently hears from insurance executives at industry events worried about whether they will be asked to cover armed teachers and school staff.  “I don’t know anyone out there who is ready to offer liability coverage for schools when they’re arming their teachers,” Carter said.

Kansas passed its law arming teachers in 2013, after the mass shooting the previous year in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. That immediately led EMC Insurance to announce it would rather exit the school insurance market than cover armed teachers and staff. Republican lawmakers were upset but couldn’t find another insurer willing to take on the policies.

Let's hope this common sense spreads to the residential insurance market and to homeowners having to discard their guns or lose insurance mandated by their mortgage companies.  With luck, it could also lead to landlords to ban guns in their rental properties. 

School Shooting Victim Family Sues Attacker’s Parents

In what ought to become standard practice, the parents of one of the victims of the Santa Fe, Texas, school shooting has filed suit against the parents of the shooter who used weapons belonging to his parents.  Weapons that obviously were not property secured and should not have been where a minor could access them.  If politicians lack the balls to buck the NRA, then civil lawsuits may be the means to force change.  If there are enough such lawsuits, just as insurance companies will refuse to issue policies to owners of certain dog breeds, so too insurance carriers might in time refuse to issue insurance policies to gun owning homeowners.  Suits against gun shops that sell weapons to shooters might accomplish a similar effect.  Of course, repealing immunity laws for gun manufacturers could likewise cause a major change in the availability of guns in American homes.  Here are highlights from CBS 21 in Dallas:

The family of one of the students killed in a Texas high school shooting filed a lawsuit against the alleged gunman’s parents, claiming the shooter’s father didn’t properly secure the weapons and were negligent in entrusting him with firearms.

Investigators said Pagourtzis used a shotgun and pistol belonging to his father that had been kept in a closet.

Texas law states that guns can’t be made accessible to children under 17, with exceptions such as hunting or when under parent supervision. Parents can be charged with a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail and $4,000 in fines if the child fires the weapon and causes serious injury or death.

Christopher Stone and Rosie Yanas, whose son Chris Stone, 17, was killed, filed a lawsuit in Galveston County on Thursday. Stone’s funeral was Friday.

The lawsuit also argued that Pagourtzis’ parents didn’t obtain mental health counseling for their son and didn’t warn the public about his “dangerous propensities.” Dimitrios Pagourtzis posted a photo of a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Born to Kill” on social media, and Gov. Greg Abbott has said the teenager had journals with writings indicating he planned the attack.

Pagourtzis family attorney Nicholas Poehl said he only represents them in the criminal case against the son and declined comment on the civil lawsuit. He did not know when the family would have attorney in the civil matter.

The lawsuit is not the first of its kind following a mass shooting.

Most recently, the family of one of the four people killed in a shooting at a Waffle House restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee, sued the suspected gunman’s father, accusing the Illinois man of negligence. In that case, police said the gunman had displayed signs of mental illness before his Illinois gun card was revoked in 2017. His guns were transferred to his father, but police said the father returned them to his son at some point.

Texas law requires gun owners to “take steps that a reasonable person would take to prevent the access to a readily dischargeable firearm by a child, including but not limited to placing a firearm in a locked container or temporarily rendering the firearm inoperable by a trigger lock or other means.”

[Texas Governor] Abbott, a staunch supporter of gun rights, said this week he’s open to strengthening laws on gun storage and reporting lost or stolen weapons. But that suggestion is already drawing resistance from some gun rights lawmakers who said they would resist efforts for more government control of what happens inside the home.

Are Evangelicals Now Dwindling?

I

n follow up to the previous post on the vote in Ireland where I suggested American evangelicals should take heed of the potential coming backlash, one of my Google search agents found an article that suggests that the arrogant and hubris filled evangelical Christian crowd may already be in trouble although it has not yet translated into declining political clout within the GOP.  A new study suggests that  between 2003 and 2017, the percentage of evangelicals in the U.S. dropped from 21% to 13%, even as the percentage of “Nones” rose from 12% to 21%. If the results are accurate, it suggests than "Nones" and religious progressives need to do more to assert themselves in the realm of political activism.  Here are highlights from a piece in Patheos:

According to a new study, the number of white evangelicals is dropping precipitously, to the point that there are now more Americans who profess “no religion” (21%) than there are who claim to be “evangelicals” (13%).

So finds the study sponsored by ABC News and the Washington Post.  Between 2003 and 2017, the percentage of evangelicals in the U.S. dropped from 21% to 13%.  While the percentage of “Nones” rose from 12% to 21%.

[I]f these new numbers are correct, the percentage of evangelicals has dropped by nearly half in three years, from being one in four Americans to just over one in ten.  Can that be right?

First of all, these are percentages of the total population, not raw numbers.  The white population as a percentage of the whole has declined, as the study points out, though the drop in the evangelical numbers is even greater.  Also, the ABC/Post study focuses on white evangelicals. 

Here are some more findings from the ABC/Post study:

(1)  The percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has declined from 83% in 2003 to 72% in 2017.

(2)  The percentage of Protestants has declined from 50% in 2003 to 36% in 2017.

(3)  Catholics have held steady at 22%. [Thanks to the influx of Hispanic immigrants]

(4)  Other Christian groups that are neither Protestant nor Catholic–such as the Orthodox, Jehovah’s Witnesses (sic), and Mormons (sic)–have risen from 11% to 14%.  [So a bigger percentage belongs to these groups, not all of whom would be considered Christian by the terms of historical orthodoxy, than to white evangelicalism (13%)?  That doesn’t sound right, but maybe it is.]

(5)  Despite the rise in “nones,” the percentage of atheists has not risen from 2003 to 2017, holding steady at 3%.  [As we blogged about, 72% of “nones” believe in some sort of deity, with 17% believing in the God of the Bible.]

Although we might question some of the figures, let’s assume that the overall findings are correct.  Conservative Christians have long lorded it over the mainline liberal denominations, whose numbers have been in decline for decades.  Now it may be conservative Christians’ turn to decline in numbers.

An article by Ed Kilgore in New York Magazine, written in a rather gloating tone, raises another issue.  If white evangelicals make up only 13% of the population, how come they have so much political clout?  Their numbers are actually quite negligible. . . . . “If the irreligious ever get serious about flexing their muscles politically, a lot could change in this country, particularly on church-state separation issues.”

I for one hope the figures are accurate.  Evangelicals are one of the most toxic elements in American society today.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

It's Official: Ireland's Stinging Rebuke to Catholic Church

To me, Ireland should be a case study for Republicans and their Christofascist base of what eventually happens when a minority tries to force its antiquated and hypocrisy soaked religious beliefs on all of society.  With the vote in Ireland official, two-thirds of the citizenry voted to end a near total ban on abortions spearheaded by the Catholic Church in 1983.  The Trump/Pence regime would do well to realize that their agenda of appeasing Christofascists will not end well in the long run despite the presence of right wingers like Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.  Here in America, the sex abuse scandal of priestly sexual predators continues with almost daily stories somewhere in the country (In Australia a high cleric was recently criminally convicted for his role in covering up abuse).  Meanwhile, we see an almost daily stream of evangelical pastors caught up in sexual scandals as evangelicals show themselves to be the most hate-filled and hypocrisy drenched individuals in society as them support an occupant of the White House devoid of any shred of morality or decency.  The New York Times looks at the stunning rebuke in Ireland:

DUBLIN — Ireland voted decisively to repeal one of the world’s more restrictive abortion bans, sweeping aside generations of conservative patriarchy and dealing the latest in a series of stinging rebukes to the Roman Catholic Church.

The surprising landslide, reflected in the results announced on Saturday, cemented the nation’s liberal shift at a time when right-wing populism is on the rise in Europe and the Trump administration is imposing curbs on abortion rights in the United States. In the past three years alone, Ireland has installed a gay man as prime minister and has voted in another referendum to allow same-sex marriage.

The “yes” camp took more than 66 percent of the vote, according to the official tally, and turnout was about 64 percent.

The outcome signaled the end of an era in which thousands of women each year had been forced either to travel abroad or to buy pills illegally online to terminate their pregnancies, risking a 14-year jail sentence. The government has said that general practitioners — doctors who are the first port of call for patients — will be asked to provide abortions, although they will still be allowed to conscientiously object to termination at their clinics.

The vote followed months of soul-searching in a country where the legacy of the Catholic Church remains powerful. It was the latest, and harshest, in a string of rejections of the church’s authority in recent years.

The church lost much of its credibility in the wake of scandals involving pedophile priests and thousands of unwed mothers who were placed into servitude in so-called Magdalene laundries or mental asylums as recently as the mid-1990s.

“This is devastating for the Roman Catholic hierarchy,” said Gail McElroy, professor of politics at Trinity College Dublin. “It is the final nail in the coffin for them. They’re no longer the pillar of society, and their hopes of re-establishing themselves are gone.”

That shift in attitude was driven in part by prominent cases, such as the 2012 death of Savita Halappanavar, who had asked for a termination of her pregnancy but later died of complications from a septic miscarriage. Ms. Halappanavar’s face was printed on placards supporting abortion, and on Saturday morning people placed flowers in front of a mural of her face in Dublin.

Ireland “is taking the proper steps to separate church and state and to move forward as a more progressive country,” said Conor Flynn, a 22-year-old student.

Church and state need to be totally separate and in America, progressives and truly moral people must continue to strive to destroy the power of the Christofascists and their political whores.