The True Face of Virginia Republicans

Gun carrying Amanda Chase - the true face of the GOP.

Watching political ads for the coming Virginia elections in November, 2019, one thing is striking: most Republicans are running ads that (i) would have one think they were Democrats, (ii) totally misrepresent their actual voting records - e.g., Chris Jones who voted against Medicaid expansion four times - or  (iii) avoid indicating that they are Republicans.  Besides Jones, among other local Republicans who are seeking to appear deceptively moderate is 91st district GOP candidate Colleen Holcomb who, despite her brazenly false campaign web page is a far right Christofascist extremist.  The big question will, of course be how many voters are fooled by the deceptive depictions of what GOP candidates really stand for even as most work strenuously to sell themselves as something that they are not.  An exception to this phenomenon is Republican Virginia state Sen. Amanda F. Chase of Chesterfield County who flat out reveals what the Virginia GOP is really all about: supporting Trump, anti-gay, anti-women's rights, pro-guns, and largely anti-modernity.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Chase and the consternation she is causing among many Virginia Republicans who do not want voters to know their real agenda.  Here are article highlights (take a good look at Chase, because if the GOP retains control of the General Assembly, she embodies the true GOP agenda): 

In a state where Trump’s approval rating is in the basement, Chase is the rare suburban Republican who is embracing [Trump] the president as she seeks a second term in a pivotal election this November.

All 140 seats in the state legislature will be on the ballot and Republicans are defending razor-thin majorities: the GOP has a 51-48 edge in the House and a 20-19 advantage in the Senate, with one vacancy in each chamber. If Democrats flip both chambers, they would have full control of state government for the first time in a generation.

Democrats are banking on ­anti-Trump sentiment to help them in suburban districts. Many Republicans, meanwhile, are trying to avoid talking about the president or divisive issues such as guns and abortion.

Not Chase. . . . “I won’t be quiet. I won’t be silenced,” she declared to about 40 donors at the country club. “I’m going to continue to boldly represent our family values and those values which make Virginia, Virginia. We are not California. We are not New York. And we will not be, as long as I’m serving in the General Assembly.”

The 49-year-old freshman lawmaker says Democrats and ­RINOs — Republicans in name only — are aligned against her because she is a conservative truth-teller. At a time when the GOP can’t afford to lose a single seat, some Senate Republicans fret that the drama swirling around “Senator Annie Oakley Chase,” as some call her, threatens to put her reliably red district in play.

“What she does, we all pay a price for,” said one frustrated GOP senator who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.

Chesterfield County Sheriff Karl Leonard, a Republican who withdrew his support this spring because Chase would not apologize to the police officer, has been in the senator’s sights ever since. She threatened to hurt his fundraising — “I’ll let my Republican donors know,” she texted — and has been campaigning with his challenger, an independent. On Friday, she accused Leonard of making Chesterfield a “sanctuary city.” That was news to the sheriff, who last year backed Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), an immigration hard-liner.

On Monday, the Chesterfield County GOP ousted Chase for attacking Leonard and promoting the independent challenging him.

Senate Minority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax), who saddled Chase with the Annie Oakley nickname, said she also reminds him of the president. “She’s a replica of Trump,” Saslaw said. “His conduct is bizarre, and so is hers.” Chase supporters compare her to Trump, too, but favorably.

During a special legislative session in July, a gun-control group wielding a video camera put Republicans on the spot as they passed through the Capitol’s marble hallways. As the video crew lobbed questions about expanding background checks, a pair of suburban Republicans scattered. Chase didn’t run; she said flatly that she wouldn’t support anything that infringes on gun rights. Chase’s Democratic challenger — another Amanda, Amanda Pohl — has used some of Chase’s headlines to raise money. After the El Paso mass shooting in August, Chase put out a video calling for an end to “gun-free zones that are creating safe havens for criminals who don’t follow the law.” Pohl, a social worker and former hospital chaplain who favors expanded background checks, promoted the video, too — calling Chase’s response “outrageous and dangerous. She is out of touch with our district and with reality.”

Pohl has outraised Chase so far this year, $252,000 to $189,000, and had more cash on hand heading into September.

Emotions were high last year as a handful of Senate Republicans were about to break ranks and vote to expand Medicaid — something the GOP had fiercely opposed for years. House Republicans had done an about-face after an anti-Trump wave in 2017 all but wiped out their 2-to-1 majority. Now Senate Republicans were crumbling.

In a closed caucus meeting ahead of the vote, Chase warned the four defectors that she would see to it that they all got primary challengers, according to wit­nesses.

Do NOT be fooled by Republican candidates' deceptive campaign websites and/or ads that depict them as moderates.  They are not moderates and hope voters fail to understand their true agenda.  Vote Democrat to move Virginia forward.

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Trump DOJ Backs Indianapolis Archdiocese in Firing of Gay Employees

Modern Day Pharisee - Archbishop of Indianapolis.

If one wants a case study in hypocrisy, look no farther than the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and the Trump Justice Department.  In the case of the archdiocese, it wants the right to fire a gay high school faculty who has no direct contract with the archdiocese to protect its "religious liberty" and easily influenced students yet - like virtually all Catholic dioceses around the globe - has covered up sexual abuse of children and youths and has fought tooth and claw to avoid payment of reasonable compensation to the victims of clerical sexual abuse. Then there is the Trump DOJ which has sought to protect an occupant of the White House who is devoid of any shred of morality and decency, much less living a life reflective of the pillars of Catholic dogma who is pretending to back the "religious freedom" of a diocese guilty of sexual abuse of children and minors. The true agenda of both institutions: (i) to pander to the most reactionary elements of their respective bases, and (ii) distract from the ugliness of their science denying, homophobic animus towards LGBT individuals. A piece linked via The Advocate looks at the situation.  Here are excerpts:

The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday issued a Statement of Interest in support of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis in its ongoing dispute with a former Catholic school teacher who alleges he was wrongfully terminated because he was in a same-sex marriage.

Joshua Payne-Elliott is currently suing the archdiocese, alleging it illegally interfered with his contractual and employment relationship with Cathedral High School, causing Cathedral to terminate him. 

In it's statement, the DOJ said that the First Amendment protects the right of the  Archdiocese to interpret and apply Catholic doctrine. 

It's not clear what the DOJ's statement means for Payne-Elliott's suit, if anything. But his lawyer, Kathleen DeLaney, said it was "highly unusual" for the Justice Department to insert itself into a local employment issue.

What I take away from this is that the Trump administration is politicizing a legal dispute about an Indiana business tort." DeLaney said.

Steve Sanders, a constitutional law expert, said it's not that uncommon for presidential administrations of both parties to file statements in “important civil rights cases.”

"I fear that this statement from the Trump administration's Justice Department appears to be more calculated to win favor with the president's base of religious conservatives than it does to seriously assist the court's adjudication of this case,” Sanders said. . . . . He added: “The Archdiocese may or may not prevail in the end, but the issue is not as one-sided, and the outcome is not nearly as clear, as the Justice Department statement portrays them to be." 

DeLaney said the case isn't about religious liberty, but instead centers on an employment dispute. 

"Josh Payne-Elliot was employed by Cathedral High School," she said. "Cathedral High School fired my client because the archdiocese told them to and threatened to take various actions against Cathedral if they refused to fire my client.

"That is textbook intentional interference in an employment relationship. He was not employed by the archdiocese but the archdiocese had him fired."

When Payne-Elliott filed his suit, he said in a news release that he hoped the case would "put a stop to the targeting of LGBTQ employees and their families."

He is one of the three gay, married Catholic school employees fired in the last year at the direction of the archdiocese, who said they were in violation of church doctrine by being in same-sex marriages.

The employees worked at multiple schools under the purview of the Church. Aside from Payne-Elliott, two guidance counselors were fired from Roncalli High School earlier this year.

In addition, Payne-Elliott's husband, Layton Payne-Elliott, is a teacher at Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School. The archdiocese stripped Brebeuf of its Catholic identity after it refused to fire Layton Payne-Elliott. The Vatican recently suspended that ruling, pending an appeal from the school. 

The bottom line is you have a diocese that has covered up sexual abuse teamed up with the Justice Department under an occupant of the White House who is the antithesis of what Christian values should be.  It'a match made in Heaven, or perhaps more appropriately, in Hell.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

What’s Wrong With Republicans?

Having once been a Republican from a family that was once solidly Republican, I like to believe there was a time that the GOP stood for some level of morality and basic decency.  In the age of Trump, those days are gone and I now find myself believing that one cannot be a decent and moral person and be a Republican. Yes, Trump is a cancer that has infected the GOP and caused those who at least pretended to support morality and decency to now defend the indefensible, namely Mr. Trump.  What happened?  How did this moral bankruptcy and tribalism come to pass? In my view, it began with the Christofascist infiltration of the GOP.  The Christofascists while clinging to the "Christian" label, give little regard to the New Testament (and no regard to its social gospel message) and instead revere the Old Testament and the hate and tribalism with which it is filled.  It was, in my view, the introduction of this mindset of exclusion and hate that set the stage for an embrace of Trump.  Now the question is whether the party can ever recover.  Personally, I think not, but if it is to be restored, the first step is jettisoning Trump.  A column in the New York Times looks at the moral decline of the GOP.  Here are highlights:

In a sane world, the reaction of Republicans to the “memorandum of telephone conversation” between President Trump and the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, combined with the whistle-blower complaint filed by an intelligence officer describing a White House cover-up, would be similar to the response of Republicans after the release, on Aug. 5, 1974, of the “smoking gun” tape that finally broke the Nixon presidency. Republicans would begin to abandon Mr. Trump, with senior figures urging him in private and in public to resign.

This may be asking too much of Republicans, who have lost their way in the Trump era. One might hope that some of the party’s elected officials would forcefully condemn the president on the grounds that there is now demonstrable evidence that he had crossed an ethical line and abused his power in ways even beyond what he had done previously, which was problematic enough.

But things are very different today than they were in the summer of ’74. Mr. Trump was on to something when he famously said, during the 2016 campaign, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, O.K.? It’s, like, incredible.” What most people took to be hyperbole turned out to be closer to reality.

[Many Republicans] from Senator Lindsey Graham to Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, are aggressively defending Mr. Trump, going so far as to argue that the notes from his July 25 conversation with Mr. Zelensky are exculpatory.

They are hardly that. Not only did the president ask a foreign government to intervene in a presidential election by digging up dirt on a political opponent, as he did in 2016 when he invited Russia to search for Hillary Clinton’s emails; this time, invested with the enormous power of the presidency, Mr. Trump appears to have used hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance to pressure a foreign leader to act as the head of his opposition-research unit.

How does a quid pro quo play out in Trump world? Something like this: You want Javelin missiles to help protect you from Russia? Great. Then I have a favor to ask of you: Investigate a political rival of mine. For more details, talk to my personal attorney. Oh, and also the attorney general of the United States.

That something like the Trump-Zelensky phone call would occur was entirely predictable given what we know about Donald Trump. He is an extreme narcissist, pathologically dishonest, shameless, a man who delights in flouting norms. He has a mobster’s mentality. Mr. Trump’s behavior isn’t governed by moral standards; he doesn’t seem to believe objective moral standards even exist.

Why, then, are so many Republicans yet again circling the Trump wagon rather than taking this opportunity to denounce what the president did and declare some independence from him by doing so?

The answer to that question is complicated, and it goes well beyond the fact that Mr. Trump is advancing certain policies they believe in. The case for Republicans casting a vote for Mr. Trump in 2016 on those grounds is defensible, though I made a different choice. But here’s what’s also true: Republicans could support Mr. Trump’s agenda while simultaneously condemning his corrupt behavior. Yet the vast majority of them refuse to do so. Something more is going on here.

Understanding the close compact between Mr. Trump and the Republican Party starts with acknowledging the false hope many establishment Republicans placed in the shady real estate mogul as he rose to power. They misdiagnosed the individual they were dealing with, assuming that Mr. Trump would “grow in office” and that they, the “adults in the room,” would be able to control and contain him. . . . But the transformation turned out to be in them, not him.

Nor should one underestimate the role self-interest plays in the Trump-Republican relationship. “All people in elective politics are interested in self-preservation,” a Republican who served in the Senate told me. “Any negative comment by a Republican in Congress about the president would invite trouble in the next election either in the form of opposition in the next primary or lack of support in the general.”

“Until Republicans feel their existence is threatened by Trump’s mendacity and corruption, most will be blind to it,” a former Republican presidential aide told me.

There’s also this to factor in: For many Republican members of Congress, the president is more popular among Republican voters in their districts and states than they are. Even in the districts of moderate Republicans, Trumpist true-believers are the most vocal supporters of the party, the ones who do the essential grass-roots work. So to go crosswise of a sitting president of one’s own party invites political trouble, . . .

“It’s easier to stay with the tribe,” this individual told me. “It’s easier to stay with the team.” Even when the leader of the team is thoroughly corrupt.

All of this is tied to the psychology of accommodation. As a conservative-leaning clinical psychologist I know explained to me, when new experiences don’t fit into an existing schema — Mr. Trump becoming the leader of the party that insisted on the necessity of good character in the Oval Office when Bill Clinton was president, for example — cognitive accommodation occurs.

When the accommodation involves compromising one’s sense of integrity, the tensions are reduced when others join in the effort. This creates a powerful sense of cohesion, harmony and group think. The greater the compromise, the more fierce the justification for it — and the greater the need to denounce those who call them out for their compromise. “In response,” this person said to me, “an ‘us versus them’ mentality emerges, sometimes quite viciously.”

“What used to be a sense of belonging,” I was told, “devolves into primitive tribalism, absolute adherence to the leader over adherence to a code of ethics.”

Month after month, with one outrageous, norm-shattering comment or action giving way to another, Republicans who in the past could never have envisioned being Trump acolytes, have been ground down. Accommodation has kicked in, which is a psychological relief to many of them.

As the psychologist I spoke to put it to me, many Republicans “are nearly unrecognizable versions of themselves pre-Trump. At this stage it’s less about defending Trump; they are defending their own defense of Trump.”

“At this point,” this person went on, “condemnation of Trump is condemnation of themselves. They’ve let too much go by to try and assert moral high ground now. Calling out another is one thing; calling out yourself is quite another.”

As a result, many in Mr. Trump’s party not only refuse to challenge his maliciousness; they have adopted his approach. They have embraced his “will to power” worldview. After dealing with Mr. Trump, “you’re definitely denuded and jaded,” [said] one Republican . . .

Those who once defended traditional values now relish siding with the Great Transgressor. “Owning the libs” turns out to be a lot of fun. But it also comes at a high cost.

A person who was once an aide to a current Republican senator told me that his former boss, who in private will concede that he is quite troubled by Mr. Trump’s unethical conduct, will say “nothing that would cause the president to question his complete loyalty.” This individual went on to tell me, “The sad part about this is that no policy or new law is worth undercutting our norms and checks on power that will cause irreparable damage to our system.”

The Republican Party is the party of Donald Trump, through and through. As such, it has become morally disfigured.

Mr. Trump’s most recent abuse of power — pressuring the Ukrainian president to do his dirty work — is the latest link in a long chain of corruption. If Republicans don’t break with the president now, after all he has done and all he is likely to do, they will pay a fearsome price generationally, demographically and, above all, morally.

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Editorial: President Trump Needs to Resign

The Connecticut Post editorial board has come out and demanded that Donald Trump resign from office based on his efforts to secure interference by a foreign government in the 2020 presidential election with the withholding of military aid as the lever to push the president of Ukraine to aid Trump in his personal re-election effort.  Part of the editorial states "He has repeatedly proven himself unfit for office and appears to view the presidency as a position meant to benefit himself personally, not as one that must represent the interests of an entire nation."  Trump cares about only himself and has the morality of a Mafia crime boss.  The piece makes clear that Trump's own release of a redacted transcript proves his unforgivable transgression. Here are highlights from the editorial:

Even given the incredibly fast pace of news in the Trump era, the speed with which the Ukraine scandal has moved from vague complaint to impeachable offense has been stunning. Though we’re still at the beginning of the process, there is already a mountain of evidence implicating President Donald Trump with conduct far outside the accepted norms of a democratic leader.

The most damning evidence came from [Trump] the president himself. It centers around a phone call with the president of Ukraine in which Trump raises the issue of investigating the son of presidential hopeful Joe Biden, and the implication of Trump’s words is clear as day. He asks for an investigation that would benefit him politically and has nothing to do with legitimate U.S. interests, and he brings it up repeatedly, including immediately upon the Ukrainian president mentioning the need for U.S. security aid.

This is an impeachable offense. Republicans spent Wednesday arguing there was no explicit quid pro quo, but there is seemingly no line the president can cross that would inspire them to put the public good ahead of politics. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, joined by the entirety of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, has called for impeachment proceedings, and that process must now begin in earnest.

The proper next step for the president is clear. He should resign. He has repeatedly proven himself unfit for office and appears to view the presidency as a position meant to benefit himself personally, not as one that must represent the interests of an entire nation.
Because there’s almost no chance he is going to step down, Congress’ work becomes that much more vital.

The truth is that Trump has been breaking laws and norms with impunity from the beginning. For instance, the U.S. Constitution forbids federal officeholders from receiving any gifts or payments from foreign entities, but in the same phone call with the Ukrainian president we see evidence that Trump is in violation. “I stayed at the Trump Tower,” President Volodymyr Zelensky says of his last trip to the U.S. Since Trump never divested himself from his business and continues to profit from it, he’s in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, according to many legal scholars, and it’s just one of countless examples on that score.

It’s not clear how much worse the Ukraine scandal will get. The summary of the phone call was released by the White House without need for a subpoena, but it is apparently abridged and does not represent all the whistleblower complaint that set the issue in motion. It’s easy to imagine that what we don’t know could be much worse than what we do.

But what we know is enough, and because it’s from [Trump] the president himself, there’s no reason to question its veracity. There’s no going back from here. The long, bumpy ride of the Trump era may have turned a corner, but it’s nowhere near over.

William Barr - A Study in Corruption

Attorneys - including those in government positions - are supposed to adhere to ethical norms and recuse themselves from cases where they have a conflict of interest.  As Attorney General Attorney Barr has demonstrated over and over again, ethical conduct means nothing to him.  Instead of upholding the law, his sole focus is on serving as Donald Trump's consigliere and protecting crime boss like behavior from bearing legal consequences.  Efforts to obstruct justice and to protect Trump from by hiding evidence of Trump's impeachable acts on Barr's part is breath taking.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Barr's disturbing and likely unlawful behavior.  Here are excerpts:

[T]he whistle-blower’s stark, straightforward account of stupefying treachery deserves to be repeated as often as possible.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistle-blower wrote. “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the president’s main domestic political rivals. The president’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”

Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well. The whistle-blower’s complaint was deemed credible and urgent by Michael Atkinson, Trump’s own intelligence community inspector general, but Bill Barr’s Justice Department suppressed it. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying that the complaint needn’t be turned over to Congress, as the whistle-blower statute instructs. When Atkinson made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, it reportedly didn’t even open an investigation. And all the time, Barr was named in the complaint that his office was covering up.

Under any conceivable ethical standard, Barr should have recused himself. But ethical standards, perhaps needless to say, mean nothing in this administration. In the Ukraine scandal, evidence of comprehensive corruption goes far beyond Trump. Former prosecutors have said that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, may have been part of a criminal conspiracy when he pressed Ukrainian officials to open an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Vice President Mike Pence is also tied to the shakedown of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, having met with him this month to talk about “corruption” and American financial aid. When this administration complains about Ukrainian “corruption,” it almost inevitably means a failure to corruptly pursue investigations that would bolster conspiracy theories benefiting Trump.

The whistle-blower wrote that White House officials moved a word-for-word transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky from the computer system where such transcripts were typically kept into a separate system for the most highly classified information. “According to White House officials I spoke with, this was ‘not the first time’ under this administration that a presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information,” the whistle-blower said.

[A]ny lawyers involved in hiding these transcripts might have done something illegal. “The rule is it is both unethical and a crime for a lawyer to participate in altering, destroying or concealing a document, and here the allegation is that the word-for-word transcript was moved from the place where people ordinarily would think to look for it, to a place where it would not likely be found,” said Gillers. “That’s concealing.”

Then there’s Barr’s personal involvement in the Ukraine plot. In the reconstruction of Trump’s call with Zelensky that was released by the White House, Trump repeatedly said that he wanted Ukraine’s government to work with Barr on investigating the Bidens.

[S]aid Representative Jamie Raskin, a former constitutional law professor who now sits on the House Judiciary Committee, “the effort to suppress the existence of the phone conversation itself is an obvious obstruction of justice.”

But Barr’s refusal to recuse creates a sort of legal cul-de-sac. It’s only the Justice Department, ultimately, that can prosecute potential federal crimes arising from this scandal. Barr’s ethical nihilism, his utter indifference to ordinary norms of professional behavior, means that he’s retaining the authority to stop investigations into crimes he may have participated in.

“The administration of justice is cornered because the ultimate executive authority for that government role includes the people whose behavior is suspect,” said Gillers.

That makes the impeachment proceedings in the House, where Barr will likely be called as a witness, the last defense against complete administration lawlessness. “Just as the president is not above the law, the attorney general is not above the law,” said Raskin. “The president’s betrayal of his oath of office and the Constitution is the primary offense here, and we need to stay focused on that, but the attorney general’s prostitution of the Department of Justice for the president’s political agenda has been necessary to the president’s schemes and he will face his own reckoning.”

I hope Raskin is right. But until that day comes, people who care about the rule of law in this country should be screaming for Barr’s recusal, even if he won’t listen. He is now wrapped up in one of the gravest scandals in American political history. Can America’s chief law enforcement officer really be allowed to decide whether to criminally investigate misdeeds he might have helped to commit or to conceal? The answer will tell us just how crooked the justice system under Trump has become.

Barr is despicable and embodies the worse characteristics of an unethical lawyer.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Why Evangelicals Love Trump: It's All About Race

I have followed the misnamed "Christian Right" - mainly evangelicals - since the early 1990's when they began to infiltrating the local city committees of the GOP in southeastern Virginia - an infiltration that was facilitated by cynical Republican who foolishly thought they could control these religious extremists and hypocrites. These supposed "Christians" wore their religion on their sleeves, but was limited to opposing abortion and being anti-gay. Christ's social gospel message was absent from their agenda.  So too was any shred of racial acceptance except when hated groups in all but formal designation such as The Family Foundation manipulated black pastors to urge their followers vote against their own best interests. Over this period of time, two things became obvious to me: (i) few groups are more morally bankrupt than evangelicals, and (ii) racism is a primary motivation for evangelical voting patterns.  An op-ed at NBC News looks at the reality of evangelicals' racism and their corresponding adulation of Donald Trump's message of racial division.  Here are excerpts:

Liberals have a tendency to wring their hands at the strong support President Donald Trump — he of the three wives and multiple affairs, and a tendency to engage in exceedingly un-Christian-like behavior at the slightest provocation — continues to receive from the white evangelical community. White evangelical support for Donald Trump is still at 73 percent, and more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for him in 2016.

But focusing on the disconnect between Trump's personal actions and the moral aspects of their faith misses the issue that keeps their support firm: racism. Modern evangelicals' support for [Trump] this president cannot be separated from the history of evangelicals' participation in and support for racist structures in America.

They have a long history in America, and include a number of different groups, including Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists and nondenominational churches. After the schism among the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians in the 1850s over slavery, conservative denominations like the Southern Baptists — who defended slavery through their readings of scripture — came into being.

Evangelical denominations formed from these splits in the South were usually comprised of people who had made money from slavery or supported it. After the Civil War many were more likely to have supported the Ku Klux Klan and approved of (or participated in) lynching. The burning cross of the KKK, for instance, was a symbol of white Christian supremacy, designed both to put fear into the hearts of African Americans and to highlight the supposed Christian righteousness of the terrorist act.

Ronald Reagan, who also counted evangelicals among his most vociferous supporters, started his presidential campaign on the platform of states’ rights from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were murdered by several Klansmen with the participation of local law enforcement in 1964, while attempting to register African Americans to vote. Decades later, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the evangelical leader, opposed sanctions on South Africa's apartheid regime and insulted Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Prize Peace winner, as a "phony."

And when Barack Obama was elected president, they regrouped, bought guns and became Tea Partiers who promoted fiscal responsibility and indulged in birtherism, promoted by no less than the son of Billy Graham, Franklin.

[E]vangelicals have worked to make a good show of repenting for racism. From the racial reconciliation meetings of the 1990s to today, they have dutifully declared racism a sin, and Southern Baptists have apologized again for their role in American slavery — most recently in 2018 via a document outlining their role.

But statements are not enough. Proving how disconnected they are from their statements about atoning for the sin of racism, the 2019 Annual Convention of the Southern Baptists was opened with a gavel owned by John A. Broadus, a slaveholder, white supremacist and the founder of their seminary.

So it's not surprising that white evangelicals supported the Muslim ban, are the least likely to accept refugees into the country (according to the Pew Foundation) and, though a slim majority oppose it, are the denomination most likely to support Trump's child separation policy. White evangelicals certainly are not concerned with white supremacy, because they are often white supremacists.

And Trump appeals to these evangelicals because of his focus on declension, decline and destruction, which fits into evangelical beliefs about the end times. When Trump used the term “American carnage” in his inaugural address, evangelicals listened; they too, believed America is in decline. Their imagined powerlessness, and the need for a strong authoritarian leader to protect them, is at the root of their racial and social animus. Their persecution complex is a heady mix of their fear of “socialists,” Muslims, independent women, LGBT people and immigration. . . . . Rhetoric, not morality, drives their voting habits.

All of this has made a mockery of white evangelical protestations about morality and the family. Moral issues once drove white evangelical votes but, first when Obama was elected and then when the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on same sex marriage in June of 2015, what remained was their fear. Trump promised justices and a return to a time when they felt less fear, and he delivered, at least on the former. White evangelical fealty to [Trump] him is firm. Evangelicals in America are not simply a religious group; they are a political group inexorably linked to the Republican Party.

[P]erhaps we should take evangelicals at their word that they will support Trump come hell or high water, rather than twisting ourselves into knots trying to figure out why.

If one wants to witness moral bankruptcy, look no farther than evangelicals who support Trump.