Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Pompeo Plans to Push Trump Directed Anti-LGBT Commission at the UN

In addition to being openly racist the Trump/Pence regime has been openly hostile to LGBT rights which it terms as rights created by “politicians and bureaucrats" as opposed to natural human rights.  In contrast religion - a totally man made construct - is called an inalienable natural right and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - a right wing "Christian"is poised now pushing his (and Trump's) anti-LGBT commission agenda at the United Nations. The situation again underscores the reality that gays who vote Republican are the useful idiots of the Christofascists and sadly are motivated by one of three things, in my view: stupidity, greed, or racism, any one or all of which causes them to sell out others in the LGBT community and, ultimately themselves even though the affluent white male gays cannot grasp that they will be targets as well. A piece in Mother Jones looks at this dangerous agenda that seeks to undermine human rights worldwide.  Trump will, of course, be at the hate and ignorance motivated presentation at the UN.  Here are article excerpts: 

Two months after a controversial State Department commission elevated religious freedom at the expense of LGBTQ equality and reproductive rights, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is planning to promote its findings at the United Nations, Mother Jones has learned. 

During the UN General Assembly, which begins on September 15 in New York, Pompeo is expected to lead an event centered on human rights and, specifically, the report from the Commission on Unalienable Rights, which he formed last year.

Since its formation, the commission has been a Pompeo project through and through, stacked with anti-LGBTQ scholars and headed by his former boss. Its ostensible purpose, which Pompeo outlined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, was to distinguish between unalienable rights, which “are by nature universal,” and ad hoc rights created by “politicians and bureaucrats.” That argument—and the extremely public, anti-LGBTQ views held by its members—led the human rights advocacy community to disavow the commission and its report, which unsurprisingly turned out to prioritize religious freedom while labeling abortion and same-sex marriage as “divisive social and political controversies.” 

“It just shows this is Pompeo’s pet project and he’s not going to let it go,” Mark Bromley, chair of the Council on Global Equality, told me. In an effort to blunt Pompeo’s broad promotion of the report, Bromley’s group and several other advocacy organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Equity Forward, and Human Rights First, have been emailing foreign diplomats urging them to reject the report and not support Pompeo’s UN event. 

“We are aware that Secretary Pompeo plans to host a high-level meeting on the Commission during the opening week of this year’s UN General Assembly,” reads one email obtained by Mother Jones that was sent to several European Union officials. “We are therefore calling on you not to support this event to make clear to the US government and the public that you reject the Commission’s dangerous view of selective, nationalized human rights.”

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment for this story, but a different department official confirmed that the event in New York is being planned with Pompeo’s participation. Many world leaders are not traveling in-person for the meeting, but President Trump has said he feels an “obligation” to appear in person.

In addition to fears that the commission could be used to undermine LGBTQ equality and reproductive rights, human rights advocates are also concerned about the way dictators might use the report as a way to devalue universal rights. Pompeo’s endorsement of it at the UN does nothing to allay those fears. “Helpfully, we’ve provided the Chinese a translation so they can quote it back to us in defense of their actions in Hong Kong,” Bromley said. 

More Monday Male Beauty

 

Are White Evangelicals and Catholics Finally Opening Their Eyes?

As noted over the weekend, Donald Trump has a problem with Mormon voters.  True, a majority of Mormons may still vote for Trump, but a significant exodus from the top of the GOP ticket could spell trouble for Trump in some western states.  Now, a column in the Washington Post by a former Republican who was raised in the evangelical tradition looks at some growing evidence that some portion of white evangelicals and Catholics may be opening their eyes and ears and realizing that Trump is the antithesis of the values they claim to support and seek to uphold.  As with Mormon voters, a majority of white evangelicals and Catholics may still vote for racism and hatred of others that Trump symbolizes - proving yet again they are today's version of the biblical Pharisees - but a significant defection could tip the election outcome in critical some swing states.  Personally, I hope this signs prove accurate and a larger percentage of these voters abandon Trump and demonstrate that not all Christians are morally bankrupt.  Here are column highlights:

Jeremiah was as good as it gets in the prophet business, but he could be a bit of a downer. In this respect, the opinion columnist is his natural successor. But it is worth trying now and again to look on the bright side of our political cataclysm. And there are hints — tentative hints — that White evangelicals and Catholics are beginning to open their ears.

An August Fox News poll found support for Joe Biden among White evangelicals at 28 percent — significantly higher than the 16 percent who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 exit polls. A recent Vote Common Good survey indicated an 11 percentage point shift toward Biden among evangelicals and Catholics who supported Donald Trump in 2016. These surveys are not evidence of collapsing approval for Trump among these groups, but they may signal an erosion of support. And Trump can’t afford to lose any ground among the base of his base.

I suspect that some of this shift is coming not because these are religious voters, but because they are voters. Like everyone else, they see the disastrous incompetence of an administration that never gained its footing in the fight against covid-19. They see the economic suffering caused by Trump’s delay, denial and tenacious stupidity. They see the packed Trump rallies that amount to negligent homicide. They see the heartless claims of success while the ill and elderly continue to die.

It is also true that Biden simply does not provoke the same level of partisan fear and loathing that Hillary Clinton did in 2016. The Republican charge of radicalism against Biden did not stick. And the charge that he will be manipulated by radicals lacks both credibility and political urgency. Whatever his limits and faults, Biden exudes decency and normality.

Biden has the opportunity to do some outreach. Even minimal assurances about how his administration would respect institutional religious liberty might go a long way toward confirming the comfort of some evangelicals with the Democratic ticket.

I would like to think that White evangelical and Catholic support for Trump might also be cooling because of the divisive and disturbing moral choices being made by the Trump campaign. In the 2018 midterm election, Republicans lost control of the House largely because they got blasted in the suburbs. A similar performance in 2020 would dramatically weaken Trump’s reelection chances. Any of the pre-Trump, Republican presidential candidates would have responded to this challenge by talking more about education, health care or transportation. For Trump, it is an opportunity to warn against Black people invading suburban neighborhoods.

Trump is conflating protests against racial injustice with criminal activity and warning that angry faces are coming to suburbia if Biden wins.

Elsewhere, Trump has warned that “low income housing and projects” will undermine the “American Dream.” Note Trump’s consistent use of the word “projects,” which evokes images of decaying and dangerous apartment buildings filled with minorities. Trump’s twisted definition of the American Dream is White flight from urban poverty and decay.

Cultivating fear of the coming melanin invasion is now the defining theme of the Trump campaign. It is also the rawest recourse to bigotry on the national stage since Alabama Gov. George Wallace in the 1960s and ’70s.

And it puts White evangelicals and Catholics in a bind. The protection of nascent life remains a deep commitment of most moral conservatives, and Trump has been an antiabortion president. Yet supporting Trump involves the affirmation that blatant racial prejudice is not disqualifying in an American president. Publicly identifying with the Trump campaign scandalously associates the Christian faith itself with brazen bigotry.

This creates soul-rending ethical complexities (which I fully intend to address). But if a racist campaign does not shake Christian support, what possible difference is that faith making?

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

Trump's "MAGA" And the Defense of White Male Supremacy

I continue to be disturbed - sickened might be a better description - by those I know who continue to support Donald Trump, a thoroughly immoral individual, while refusing to be honest and admit what motivates them: a desperate urge to support white supremacy and white privilege.  I cannot grasp the mindset - something I am thankful for - where non-whites are so terrifying to one's sense of self-worth.  True, for those my southern belle grandmother viewed as "white trash" who refused to better themselves, skin color may be all they have to make themselves feel superior. But that dose not explain the educated and successful whites I know who seemingly are just as desperate to maintain a white supremacy society. Perhaps being gay and having suffered discrimination and job loss for simply who I am my eyes are more open to the evils of a while male, heterosexual ruled society. I just do not comprehend the fear and, let's be honest, hatred, that motivates these Trump supporters.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

The summer began on May 25, when the police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in Minneapolis, Minnesota, suffocating his pleas for life. Largely peaceful demonstrations followed, and Trump tweeted: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen.” He added, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

The summer ended on August 25, when Kyle Rittenhouse borrowed an AR-15-style assault rifle from a friend and allegedly fatally shot Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony M. Huber and injured Gaige Grosskreutz. These three people had been demonstrating in Kenosha, Wisconsin, against the police shooting of Jacob Blake two days earlier. Trump suggested that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.

The violence of Chauvin and Rittenhouse bookended the summer of Trumpism. The three long, hot months from May 25 to August 25 compressed 413 years of American history into a cellphone video in which anyone could easily see the history for what it has always been: the violent “self-defense” of white male supremacy. Colonialism, capitalism, slavery and slave trading, Indian removal, manifest destiny, colonization, the Ku Klux Klan, Chinese exclusion, disenfranchisement, Jim Crow, eugenics, massive resistance, “law and order,” Islamophobia, family separation—all were done in the name of defending life or civilization or freedom.

Trumpism is the latest—or last—chapter in the story of this America. Like its antecedents, Trumpism is the violent defense of white male supremacy. Adherents of Trumpism think they are facing a choice between white male supremacy and “anarchy.” And right now, Trump’s federal agents, Trump-supporting paramilitary domestic terrorists, and Trump-supporting police officers from Kenosha to Austin believe they are fighting against anarchy. Which is to say, they are fighting to maintain white male supremacy. . . . . Defending their America—where white men can rule and brutalize without consequence.

Trump’s supporters have been defending their America against this summer of anti-racism. From May 25 to August 25, there were at least 7,750 anti-racist demonstrations in 2,400 locations across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. By Independence Day, when as many as 26 million people had participated in the demonstrations, the anti-racist movement had already been recognized as the largest movement of any kind in American history.

About 93 percent of these demonstrations remained peaceful, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. Only 7 percent of the demonstrations turned violent through clashes with counterprotesters or police—too often sparked by officers—or through property damage on “specific blocks,” the report stated.

But these renegade women, men of color, and white men defying the law and order of inequality and injustice look like “anarchists” to Trump.

All those officers and militiamen protecting the law and order of inequality and injustice are “patriots” to Trump. They are at war. In Trump’s alternative reality, the grand battle is at hand between anarchists who want to destroy America and patriots who want to defend America.

Kyle Rittenhouse lived 20 miles away from Kenosha in Antioch, Illinois, where he was arrested and charged with murder the next day. During his visit to Kenosha on September 1, Trump did not condemn Rittenhouse. But he did condemn anti-racist demonstrators.

White male supremacy has granted the president the power to accost women and “grab ’em by the pussy”; the power to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters; the power to call the first female major-party nominee for president “such a nasty woman” on live television and still win more white women’s votes than she did; the power to say the first Black president was not born in the United States and still have Black men say at his convention that he is “not racist.” White male supremacy has allowed the president to have a foreign power intercede in a presidential election on his behalf, to call neo-Nazis “very fine people,” to urge his supporters to vote twice, to build a monument of lies, to obstruct justice while freeing friends and punishing foes, to describe Americans who died at war as “suckers” and “losers,” and to look away as hundreds of thousands of American COVID-19 victims’ bodies pile up at cemeteries—and not face any consequences.

And Trump does not want his white male supporters facing any consequences either. Like him, they are always innocent. They are always the victims. Even violent strongmen like Vladimir Putin get a pass.

So do heavily armed groups of white male supremacists in the United States. According to a Politico report, the first draft of a recent Department of Homeland Security “State of the Homeland Threat Assessment 2020” named “White supremacist extremists” as “the most persistent and lethal [terrorist] threat” to the American people. But Trump refuses to acknowledge, let alone protect Americans from, the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time. Instead he incites carnage, and the victims include people of color demonstrating their humanity, and white people demonstrating against racism, like Heather Heyer.

The presumption of innocence is largely reserved for wealthy cisgender heterosexual white men like Trump, and it remains until disproven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The presumption of guilt is for all practical purposes attached to femininity, to Blackness, to queerness, to Indigenousness, to poverty. To be a poor queer woman of color is to embody guilt. The closer one is to whiteness and masculinity and wealth, the closer one is to innocence.

This is about Trump, but it is not only about Trump. White male supremacy is a governing force as old as America, as new as Trumpism. And it is wholly threatened by anti-racism, by feminism.

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Evil Reigns When Good People Do Nothing

As a student of history I have often wonder at how horrors were allowed to happen basically because good people did nothing. Perhaps one of the most horrific was the rise of Hitler and the resulting Holocaust and World War II. Millions died and many millions more suffered. How an educated advanced nation descended into a nightmare regime has left many baffled, yet the answer is actually quite simple:  Good people failed to act and these supporting evil triumphed. Frighteningly, we are seeing a similar trend in America at this moment in time as the Trump/Pence regime fans the flames of racial hatred and attacks the educated who reject his agenda or who provide facts that counter his lies. Nazi Germany did not have to happen nor does where Trump and his morally bankrupt followers want to take this nation.  Good people need to act.  The tired excuses of "I hate politics" or "I don't want to get involved" or "I don't want to lose friends over politics" - I'd say losing friends over moral issues should be a badge of honor - or other forms of cowardice and/or mindless tunnel vision cannot be allowed if this nation is to avert disaster.  A column in the New York Times looks at what happens  when good people fail to oppose evil. Here are highlights:

I have often wondered how major world tragedies and horrors were allowed to unfold. Where were all the good people, those who objected or should have? How did life simply go on with a horror in their midst?

How did the trans-Atlantic slave trade play out over hundreds of years? How did slavery thrive in this country? How was the Holocaust allowed to happen? How did the genocides in Rwanda or Darfur come to be?

There is, of course, nearly always an explanation. Often it is official policy; often it is driven by propaganda. But I’m more concerned with how people in the society considered these events at the time, and how any semblance of normalcy could be maintained while events unfolded.

It turns out that our current era is providing the unsettling answer: It was easy.

As I write this, nearly two hundred thousand Americans have died — many of them needlessly — from Covid-19, in large part because the Trump administration has refused to sufficiently address the crisis, be honest with the American people and urge caution. Instead, Trump has lied about the virus, downplayed it, resisted scientists’ warnings and continues to hold rallies with no social distancing and no mask requirements.

Models now predict that the number of Americans killed by the virus could double between now and Jan. 1. According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington:

“We expect the daily death rate in the U.S., because of seasonality and declining public vigilance, to reach nearly 3,000 a day in December. Cumulative deaths expected by Jan. 1 are 415,090; this is 222,522 deaths from now until the end of the year.”

And yet, Americans still flock to Trump rallies, Republicans continue to defend his pandemic response and it is not clear that he will be defeated in November.

We have a climate crisis that continues to worsen. Storms are getting stronger. Droughts are severe. Rivers are flooding. The sea level is rising. And yet, we don’t do nearly enough to stop it and may not do enough before it’s too late to do anything.

Right now much of the West Coast is ablaze with hellish scenes of orange skies, and yet too many of us entertain climate change deniers, or, perhaps worse, know well the gravity and precariousness of the situation and still haven’t changed our habits or voted for the candidates with the boldest visions to save the planet.

Right now, China has detained as many as one million mostly Muslim citizens, in indoctrination camps, hoping to remold many into what The New York Times called “loyal blue-collar workers to supply Chinese factories with cheap labor.”

And yet, the world does little. Many look away. Life goes on.

This is how these catastrophes happen — in full sight — and people with full knowledge don’t revolt. People sometimes think that the issue is far away, or if it’s not, that it’s too big and they are too powerless.

They think provincially, or even parochially, concerned with their own house, their own street, their own community.

“It’s too bad that those children are in cages, but I can’t worry about that now, the clothes in the dryer need folding.”

“It’s too bad that an unarmed Black man just got shot by the police, but I can’t worry about that now, the yard needs mowing.”

[T]he result is that evil — as a person or system — rampages, unchecked, taking your personal laissez-faire as public license.

If you don’t complain, you condone.

But this mustn’t be. Stop thinking of yourself as weak or helpless. Stop thinking that things will simply work themselves out. Stop thinking that evil will stop at the gate and not trample your own garden.

Fight, vote, email, post. Do all you can to stand up for the vulnerable, for the oppressed, for the planet itself. Don’t let history record this moment as it has recorded too many others: a time when good people did too little to confront wickedness and disaster.

As Edmund Burke wrote in his 1770 “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents”: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

But you may be more familiar with another of Burke’s quotes: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

Will Mormons Reject a Thoroughly Immoral Trump?

Like white evangelicals members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints ("Mormons") face a test in 2020 that will reveal whether they truly adhere to the values the claim to support or instead are little better than the biblical Pharisees.  If they are the moral people they claim to be, they should find it impossible to vote for the thoroughly immoral Donald Trump.  If they vote for Trump, it is safe to assume they are complete hypocrites, perhaps racists, and have jettisoned any claim for moral authority. In short, 2020 represents a time where one either votes for morality or votes against immorality personified by Trump.  If you support children in cages you vote for Trump.  If you find that abhorrent, you vote for Biden.  If you turn a blind eye to the sexual assault of women, you vote for Trump. If you oppose it, you vote against Trump. It's a black and white choice and blather about lower taxes and other excuses simply do not excuse a vote for immorality.  A piece in Politico looks at the contest for Mormon votes.  Here are article excerpts: 

In 2016, Mormons rejected Donald Trump in numbers unheard of for a Republican nominee — viewing the thrice-married, immigrant-bashing Republican as an affront to their values.

In 2020, [Trump] the president is going all-out to change their minds — a little-noticed effort that could make or break him in Arizona and Nevada, home to more than a half-million Latter-day Saints combined. Joe Biden's campaign, sensing an unlikely opening for a Democrat, is also targeting Mormons in the pair of Western swing states.

Before Trump became the party standard bearer, Mormons had been among the most loyal GOP voters in the country. A 2010 Gallup survey found that “Mormons are both the most Republican and the most conservative of any of the major religious groups in the U.S. today.” But many Mormons found Trump blasphemous, and the Church itself made thinly veiled statements condemning the candidate’s rhetoric on immigration and religious freedom.

Mormon support for the Republican ticket dropped from 80 percent in 2004 and 78 percent in 2012, to 61 percent in 2016, even as most other Christians moved further to the right, according to Pew.

Mindful of the community's sway, the Trump and Biden campaigns are vying for the Mormon vote to an extent neither party has done in a generation.

Trump dispatched Vice President Mike Pence to Mesa, Ariz. last month for the kickoff of “Latter-day Saints for Trump.” The president’s campaign is planning more events in the coming weeks with prominent Mormons, including former Heisman Trophy winner Ty Detmer, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, and McDaniel. The campaign and Republican National Committee have scheduled trips to Arizona for out-of-state Mormons to canvass fellow church members for votes. On Saturday, Trump traveled to Nevada — a state that Democrats had been confident was in their column — and he will be in Arizona this week.

Biden’s campaign has rolled out its own prominent Mormon supporters, led by former Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, a longtime Trump critic who said he believes Biden will “approach the constitutional role [of president] with the reverence and dignity it deserves.” The campaign is also prepping LDS volunteers to make calls to Mormon-heavy areas seeking support for Biden.

Some Mormons in Arizona have formed their own political action committee, earnestly named: “Arizona Republicans Who Believe In Treating Others With Respect.” The most prominent Mormon politician in the country, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), has said he will not vote for Trump, though he has not endorsed Biden.

Biden’s advisers argue that his message of restoring civility will appeal to LDS members who, like Romney and Flake, are offended by Trump’s conduct over the past four years.

“I don't understand how a member of the LDS Church could support somebody that is amoral and has shown his amorality from the time he came into our view,” former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada and member of the church, said in an interview.

McMullin, who still opposes Trump, said he thinks some of his supporters will vote for the president but that “most people who voted third party in 2016 will be supporting Biden in this election.” He argued that some Republicans voted for Trump “out of habit” but have since soured on him.

A Biden official conceded that Trump will likely improve on his 2016 performance among Mormons, but that the Democrat's goal is to significantly limit those gains. Some longtime LDS Democratic organizers said Biden has already improved on Hillary Clinton’s efforts, which they said were too focused on Utah.

"It’s not going to be shocking that Trump wins the Mormon vote but if it’s 10-15 points off of the norm in Nevada and Arizona, that’s a big deal," said Quin Monson, a partner at the Utah-based polling firm Y2 Analytics and a political science professor at the Church-funded Brigham Young University. "It’s the equivalent of Republicans suddenly getting a quarter of the African-American vote, and I do think it’s within the realm of possibility. They've not come around completely on Donald Trump."

Trump is trailing Biden by about 5 points in Arizona, according to polling averages, and LDS voters could be decisive if the race tightens. In 2018, Kyrsten Sinema won massive Maricopa County — which includes the historically Mormon suburb of Mesa — becoming the first Democrat to win an Arizona Senate seat since the 1980s.

The public embrace of Trump by some LDS members has created fissures in a community that was once largely monolithic in its politics. Former Arizona state senator Bob Worsley, a Republican and the founder of SkyMall, recently began publicly organizing for Biden after he felt the Trump-aligned LDS group that hosted Pence last month implied that Church leadership supported the president.

“I’ve never voted for a Democrat in my life but we think this man is an abomination,” Worsley said. He thinks more Mormons will vote for Biden than in 2016 because “some found Hillary’s husband Bill a similar lack of an example of a good moral person.”

The Church’s leadership, which members watch closely for political signals, has strained to stay neutral in the race even as it continues to push back against Trump on immigration. In 2018, the church protested the administration’s policies that resulted in the separation of families at the border.

“At the end of the day, President Trump more reflects the policy values of most Mormons than Joe Biden,” said Mike Noble, partner and chief of research for Phoenix-based OH Predictive Insights polling firm. But Trump would be "mistaken" to think he has a lock on LDS voters, he added.

“Whether they can stomach his erratic behavior," Noble said, "will likely be the deciding factor for many Mormons.”