Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

Key West Holiday Get Away

I have been remiss in posting, but between holiday social events, family gatherings and rising in the middle of the night to get to the airport for a last hurrah at the Equator Guest house in Key West - starting next month the resort will no longer be all gay - and getting up with Key West friends and neighbors also visiting Key West, things have been a bit crazy.   We will be here until New Year's day and I hope to be better at posting.  The photo above is a house down the street from where we are staying.  I wish all readers Happy Holidays and safety from the coming insanity of Trump 2.0.

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Why Are So Many Christians So Cruel?

Christmas is a few days away and we are supposed to be wrapped in wish for peace on earth and goodwill towards mankind, especially from those who claim to be "Christians" and followers of Christ.  What we see too often instead is outright cruelty towards the less fortunate, those with darker skin color, those of differing faith beliefs, and those who are not heterosexual.  Indeed, the younger generations have been fleeing organized religion that increasingly is seen as focused on money, power, inflicting archaic beliefs on others, and the denigration of anyone who fails to subscribe to right wing "Christian" dogma. The witness, if you will, of too many self-congratulatory "Christians" is the antithesis of what Christ preached.   False piety,  hypocrisy, the demonization of others and pride rather than humility are seen as the hallmarks of far too many claimed followers of Christ. Equally disturbing is the allegiance of evangelicals and "conservative Christians" to Donald Trump, an individual who not only embodies the seven deadly sins, but who relishes in cruelty towards others and who seems incapable of not lying. A column in the New York Times looks at this phenomenon and the betrayal of Christs gospel message by those who claim to be his most devoted followers. Here are excerpts:

Here’s a question I hear everywhere I go, including from fellow Christians: Why are so many Christians so cruel?

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard someone say something like: I’ve experienced blowback in the secular world, but nothing prepared me for church hate. Christian believers can be especially angry and even sometimes vicious.

It’s a simple question with a complicated answer, but that answer often begins with a particularly seductive temptation, one common to people of all faiths: that the faithful, those who possess eternal truth, are entitled to rule. Under this construct, might makes right, and right deserves might.

Most of us have sound enough moral instincts to reject the notion that might makes right. Power alone is not a sufficient marker of righteousness.

The idea that right deserves might is different and may even be more destructive. It appeals to our ambition through our virtue, which is what makes it especially treacherous. It masks its darkness. It begins with the idea that if you believe your ideas are just and right, then it’s a problem for everyone if you’re not in charge. . . . . In that context, your own will to power is sanctified.

The practical objections to this mind-set are legion. How can we be so certain of our own righteousness? Even if we are right or have a superior vision of justice compared with our opponents, the quest for power can override the quest for justice.

The historical examples are too numerous to list. Give a man a sword and tell him he’s defending the cross, and there’s no end to the damage he can do.

There’s also a theological objection to the idea that right deserves might. In Christian theology, Jesus was both God and man, a person without sin. I’m fallen and flawed. He is not.

And how did this singular individual — this eternal being made flesh — approach power? He rejected it . . . . Christ’s words were clear, and they cut against every human instinct of ambition and pride:

“The last will be first.”

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

“If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Those were the words. The deeds were just as clear. He didn’t just experience a humble birth; Jesus was raised in a humble home, far from the corridors of power. As a child, he was a refugee.

And when he began his ministry, he constantly behaved in a way that confounded every modern understanding about how to build a movement, much less how to overthrow an empire.

He withdrew from crowds. When he performed miracles, he frequently told the people he healed not to tell anyone else. When he declared, near the end of his life, that we are to “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” he not only rejected the idea that he was Caesar, he also rejected the idea that Caesar’s domain was limitless.

It’s remarkable how often ambition becomes cruelty. In our self-delusion, we persuade ourselves that we’re not just right but that we’re so clearly right that opposition has to be rooted in arrogance and evil. We lash out. We seek to silence and destroy our enemies.

But it is all for the public good. So we sleep well at night. We become one of the most dangerous kinds of people — a cruel person with a clean conscience.

The way of Christ, by contrast, forecloses cruelty. It requires compassion. It inverts our moral compass, or at least it should. We love rags-to-riches stories, for example, so if many of us were writing Christ’s story, we might begin with a manger, but we’d end with a throne.

But Christ’s life began in a manger, and it ended on a cross. He warned his followers that a cross could come for them as well. An upside-down kingdom began with an upside-down birth. When Jesus himself is humble, how do we justify our pride?

I - and my extended family - have largely walked away from organized religion.  It has taken me years to recover from the damage of my Catholic upbringing. I most certainly do not want my grandchildren to suffer what I endured.  I suspect I am far from alone in this feeling.

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Trump and the GOP Dig Up “Zombie Laws”

Donald Trump may have won the popular vote in 2024, but he did not win a majority of all voters.  Thus, despite claims to the contrary, he and Republicans have no mandate and Project 2025 remains highly unpopular.   Faced with the reality that there are likely not enough votes in Congress to pass the most reactionary aspects of the MAGA/Project 2025 agenda, Trump and his extremist advisors and sycophants realize they will need an alternate route to inflict on a majority of Americans policies they clearly do not want.  Hence, the effort to resurrect so-called "zombie laws" - laws still in the statute books but unenforced in some cases for many years or struck down by U.S. Supreme Court rulings but subject to reactivation if the extremist on the Court reverse past rulings - to achieve what may be impossible legislatively.   At the federal level, the Comstock Act from the 1870's is particularly troubling.  Meanwhile, here in Virginia, a reversal of the ruling in Lawrence v. Texas and/or the Obergefell ruling, would reactivate the state's sodomy law and bans on same sex marriage.  The latter would conflict with federal legislation protecting interracial and same sex marriages, but lengthy litigation might be involved to stop state enforcement by zealots in the Youngkin regime. A piece at Vanity Fair looks at this effort to resuscitate zombie laws:

During Donald Trump’s first term, courts provided a necessary check on his ambitions by blocking many of his deregulation efforts, on issues ranging from the environment to immigration, along with his initial version of a travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries. Even the Supreme Court, which has empowered Trump in a number of ways, prevented him from dismantling DACA.

This time around, to avoid such pesky checks and balances, Trump and his allies have revisited US history and found some truly heinous old laws to advance their right-wing agenda. These “zombie laws,” as they’re called, are provisions that haven’t been enforced or invoked for decades but are somehow still on the books. Yet they could be resurrected in a radical fashion if and when Project 2025 becomes America’s reality.

Arguably the worst among them is the Comstock Act of 1873, a product of the Victorian-era moral panic named after anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock. It was designed to restrict the distribution of “obscenities” at the time, like pornography, contraceptives, and even some medical textbooks. Despite its anachronous nature, the Comstock Act has never been repealed. And earlier this year, during oral arguments for FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—which centered on the agency’s approval of mifepristone, an abortion medication often ordered by mail—justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito mused on the idea of bringing the law back to life.

Of course, the Comstock Act is some “obscure law,” whose enforcement, The American Prospect notes, essentially stopped in the 1930s, after federal courts clarified that it could only be applied when someone was mailing an item or drug specifically intended to be used illegally for an abortion. The law had been largely dormant for decades, until Trump appointed Amarillo, Texas, district judge and anti-choice zealot Matthew Kacsmaryk, who used it to try to take the abortion pill off the market. “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” as Jonathan F. Mitchell, who has worked as a lawyer for Trump, told The New York Times.

[M]ore to Mitchell’s point is the fact that the Comstock Act might allow Trump to circumvent congressional approval. “Abortion opponents are turning to laws like the Comstock Act,” as legal scholar Mary Ziegler told me in an email, “because they doubt that even a Republican Congress would pass a sweeping ban that voters today would never accept.” The GOP could presumably shut down the mailing of abortion pills without incurring the poor optics of a federal ban; it could also claim that it brought the issue “back to the states,” even while using a federal law to negate states’ laws. Still, the larger question remains: Why was Comstock even allowed to stay on the books in the first place? And why didn’t Democrats ever make a concerted effort to repeal it earlier?

Aside from the Comstock Act, the other zombie law in contention is the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The acts, passed by a Congress in the control of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party, tightened restrictions on anti-government speech and gave the government power over immigrants deemed threats to the country. One of them, the Alien Enemies Act—which allows the federal government to relocate foreign nationals from countries deemed hostile to the United States during times of war—has only been invoked on three occasions. It was used by James Madison against the British during the War of 1812; by Woodrow Wilson during World War I to send more than 6,000 people, many of whom were German, to internment camps; and by Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, which led to the internment of Japanese citizens.

But now Republicans are angling to use it again, to create a legal framework for the mass internment and deportation of immigrants—perhaps the biggest promise of Trump’s campaign. The president-elect has repeatedly said that the residence of some 11 million undocumented immigrants in America constitutes a foreign “invasion”—incidentally a precondition for the law’s enforcement. The problem, though, is that Republicans need to prove that America is genuinely at war—which it isn’t, rendering their theory completely faulty. Nevertheless, the end result of Trump’s immigration platform might look a lot like the Dwight Eisenhower administration’s 1954 “Operation Wetback,” in which law enforcement used military-style tactics to forcibly remove hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants from the US.

Zombie laws may just be theoretical legal frameworks on a piece of paper. But they are also products of some of America’s most objectionable policymaking. Remember: America was the home of Jim Crow laws—which were the inspiration for the Nuremberg Laws. The Comstock Act and Alien and Sedition Acts were used during a time when American legislators were motivated by entrenched racism and sexism, writing immoral laws that masqueraded as moral.

The reason Trumpworld needs to use these laws is because its ideas are profoundly antiquated. Sure, Trump narrowly won this election. But no matter how mad Americans may be about inflation, no one is signing up for a return to the Victorian era.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty