This came across my Facebook stream just now, via Heather Cox Richardson’s Book Club page…
And yet…and yet…I have met, online and off, many religious people, Christian and otherwise, who also believe these things. I am an Atheist, but it’s not because I have a grudge against religion. It’s just that belief in an all powerful creator of the universe and all living things God just stopped making sense to me. It may be different for you and I am fine with that. Maybe someday I’ll find myself strolling along Newton’s beach and pick up one of those prettier seashells he spoke of and find God inside of it and think oh…there you were. But I don’t think so. I’ve been like this, entranced by the world as I see it, as science and curiosity has revealed it to me, as long as I can remember. It is an awesomely beautiful universe we live in.
But there are times, like as I’m reading the script on this…what is it, a bench, a monument of some sort…that I wonder if you can be a Christian even if you don’t believe in God. I think you can. I think the carpenter’s son would tell us that it’s better to build a hospital than a church. If you have to pick one or the other, build the hospital. I think the carpenter’s son would say it’s better to work for the good than just to pray for it and wait for God to do something about it. I think carpenter’s son would tell us to be the good the world needs, feed the poor, care for the infirm, treat the stranger with kindness, because they are your neighbor. Make peace, be peace. I don’t need to believe in an almighty god to know these are good things, necessary things, if we are to have civilization, if humanity is to have its tomorrows.
But I know there are those who think tomorrow is much less important than eternity. I think this is why they’re willing to let children, who are our tomorrow, starve to death, die of completely preventable diseases, become war’s collateral damage. It was god’s will. But no, it was indifference. It was the belief that belief alone is all you need to be a good person. Belief excuses indifference, forgives bigotry. But no, it does not.
You hear a lot since the election about being willing to disagree and still be family. But details matter. What are we disagreeing about? Is it about God, or about deeds? There are those that say good deeds won’t get you into heaven. But belief does not make anything happen all by itself. Belief can just be an excuse for not doing what you didn’t want to do in the first place. If you want to help make the American dream of liberty and justice for all real, do the work of civilization, and make all our tomorrows happen, I will walk with you. I will be your neighbor. We can be family. We can disagree about god.
I am not nearly at his level of accomplishments, but this is how I feel, and especially now that I’m getting myself back to doing my political cartoons. And I’m even more focused now on this blog, and the idea of blogs as an alternative to the commercial social media that helped deliver us to this moment. Blue Sky exempted ( @brucegarrett.bsky.social ). Lots of people are decamping Twitter for Blue Sky now, because its user controls allow you to keep the trolls out of your feed, keep them from reposting you to their followers, keep them from seeing anything you post. Unlike Musk’s Twitter which has removed all of that entirely because…Musk. Which brings me to…
I finally deactivated my Twitter account on the eighth. I’d been holding onto it after Musk took over because I’d been an early Early user and had an account name that was actually my name and not my name plus a string of numbers. Maybe that sounds like a strange reason but I like my name. I’ve never been comfortable using a handle, although for a brief time I went by “Coyote”, which was actually a reference to a character in the book of the same name by Peter Gadol, not the Coyote of native myth and legend or the Warner Brother’s one. It didn’t last long but if I ever went back to using a handle it would be Coyote Gato.
Digging in my heels and insisting on going by my own name wherever I happen to be online might also have something to do with how often my bitter maternal grandmother used the fact of my having my dad’s family name against me. Yes, my name is Bruce Garrett. What of it.
Anyway, Twitter became too much Musk (musky…pungent…). I think I knew I was going to drop Twitter back when the hurricane hit inland and all the disinformation came pouring out like an overflowing sewer, where once there was useful and immediate emergency information. The damage Musk had done to the service became sickeningly clear.
So that deed is done but however much I despise Musk and his kind I still felt it as a loss. I was there at the beginning. (I was there when USENET was a thing…) But it was over some time ago.
I didn’t bother getting a zip archive of my time there. I have my own website here and that’s personal history enough.
As I said…I’m getting back into doing my political cartoons. Here’s a work in progress from a few days ago…
This is about one of the few bright spots in the election day aftermath. Larry Hogan, former governor of Maryland, was running for the senate in a state where a democrat seemed certain to win. Our Maryland republicans are batshit crazy, but Hogan stood out for being somewhat moderate-ish and was much respected for standing up to Trump during the worst years of COVID and getting our state the tools we needed to cope. He had the good will of lots of democrats and moderates here and he eventually term limited out of the governor’s house. So standing up to Trump you’d have thought our republicans would not have anything to do with him, but they wanted to turn the Senate badly (and alas they did, but not with him), and that snake McConnell got him to run and Trump even endorsed him.
Of course during his campaign he kept all that on the down low. He made a big deal of his alleged support for abortion rights and how he would stand up to Trump like he did during COVID. But it was all a sham. At a private GOP fundraiser he made a big deal out of getting Trump’s endorsement. But the fear was all that goodwill he got from Marylanders during COVID would get him elected.
Thankfully our voters saw through it. We didn’t give our votes to Trump either, although I am well aware of the subset of my neighbors who most likely did. All you had to do was drive anywhere outside the urban zones to see the Trump/Vance signs. As I said, one bright spot post election.
Lastly (for now…), this from my Blue Sky feed…
Can I get any more stark mad liberal democrat American? I dunno, but I intend to make it fun.
I’m part time at the Institute now, theoretically three days a week up to 40 hours per pay period, which is every two weeks. That actually works out to just five days per pay period. So my weekends are Very long by comparison. Today is the end of my first pay period, but I have been off since last Wednesday at 1 because I hit my limit that soon. So I’m off work until next Tuesday, apart from an hour web tag-up on Monday. I put the final touches on my front yard Halloween display Thursday, and fed the goblins Thursday night. But starting Thursday was also the beginning of a few days I could slow walk myself out of bed, and then take my morning coffee walk around the neighborhood.
I can feel myself starting to stress once again about work and I promised myself I would not let that happen. But I reckon it’s just me. Understand that my workplace is an exceptionally good environment, I just stress over every little thing. I can keep telling myself that whatever happens I can always go back to being retired with enough retirement income I can live comfortably, but it doesn’t work. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of just letting whatever will be…be. Que Sera, Sera…but not right this moment. I’m going to be a mess on election day.
My thoughts this morning as I took my walk weren’t helping.
Nowadays, they call it The Lavender Scare. That McCarthy time in the 1950s when the witch hunts for communists and homosexuals in government and private industry contractors was, shall we say, energetic. The newspapers of the day referred to gays and lesbians obliquely as “security risks” because you don’t actually use Those Words in family newspapers.
Now comes Trump and MAGA and Project 2025 and all the fascist energy to tear down our democracy and rebuild it in their image, and it’s going to make the McCarthy years and all the witch hunts and black lists look positively liberal.
And here I am thinks I as I’m having my morning coffee walk, an open and proud gay man, working for a government contractor.
I remember when I was living in a friend’s basement, dialing around looking for whatever likely work I found in the want ads. At that moment in time I had enough programming skill I could plausibly apply for computer work so long as a degree wasn’t required…which wasn’t often. But one day I saw one and called the number in the ad. A man on the other end asked me about my skill set…what programming languages had I worked in, and did I have any database experience. When he seemed satisfied enough to schedule me for an interview, he asked if I could pass a background check for a security clearance. And I told him honestly, because I have always dug in my heels at moments like this, that my police record was spotless, but that I am an out gay man, so not vulnerable to blackmail but if it’s going to be a problem anyway then no. He assured me that it Would be a problem, and hung up.
Is it going to be a problem again in my lifetime? I hope not. But don’t be telling me it can’t happen here. In my lifetime it Was happening to people like me. It did happen here. Yes it can happen again. You bet it can happen again. A lot of decent god fearing oh so sinless and righteous people who vote are praying for it to happen again.
It isn’t just me. I have a few young gay friends on Facebook that I worry about. I saw the before Stonewall time…
I feel grateful sometimes that I lived to see a better world for us emerging. Now it’s this. And unlike me my young friends have their whole lives in front of them.
I’m gaining a little more data this morning about why I was having to listen to bullshit about FEMA’s hurricane response yesterday while I was trying to eat my Texas Roadhouse dinner. This excerpt from an article in The Atlantic came across my Bluesky feed just now…
“Elon Musk…claimed…FEMA was ‘actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.’ That post has been viewed more than 40 million times. ”
When I tried to view the article I discovered that it was subscriber only. I am already over subscribed to various news sources so I had to pass this one up. Here’s the banner:
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.
By Charlie Warzel
Good thing it’s not so bad you can still hide it behind a paywall.
I did a little digging for that Elon Musk post and could not find it on his Twitter feed. But this is one of the Google results I got for it.
FEMA is actively hindering relief efforts. Moreover, they’re claiming the Starlinks that I’ve personally delivered as ones THEY’VE delivered.
You follow the link and you see that Musk has deleted the text of that tweet and replaced it with an angry emoji.
But then there is this tweet which is still up:
SpaceX engineers are trying to deliver Starlink terminals & supplies to devastated areas in North Carolina right now and @FEMAis both failing to help AND won’t let others help. This is unconscionable!!
They just took this video a few hours ago, where you can see the level of devastation: roads, houses, electricity, water supply and ground Internet connections completely destroyed.
@FEMA wouldn’t let them land to deliver critical supplies … my blood is boiling …
This tweet is still up despite that (according to Politico) Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg talked by phone to Musk and walked him through how flight restrictions in an emergency zone and airport closures work, after which Musk agreed that the Secretary was “on the ball”.
This Politico article gives a pretty good overview of the situation with Musk’s disinformation campaign against FEMA. It ends with this:
In the U.S., some Republican state lawmakers have pleaded for conservative influencers to resist spreading falsehoods.
“PLEASE help stop this junk,” GOP North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin implored his Facebook followers on Oct. 3, citing false stories such as Antarctic weather control, land grabs over lithium and FEMA stealing donations.
A fellow lawmaker had received 15 calls in one day about untrue rumors, he added. “I’m growing a bit weary of intentional distractions,” Corbin said.
The next day, Musk reposted some of those same falsehoods to his 200 million followers, with one word: “Wow.”
What is the cost of lies? Last night I was watching a documentary on the last stages of WWII and the taking of Okinawa. Towards the end of the documentary, as the Japanese military is falling apart, and the ragged, brutalized people of the island are finally emerging from the caves where they’d either been hiding or held in captivity, we learn the people were terrified to seek help from the American soldiers because Japanese propaganda told them the Americans would rape and kill them, and that it was better to commit suicide than be captured by the Americans.
You wonder how many of them did just that, but what you saw in the footage were a lot of trembling, terrified people, including children and the elderly, physically emaciated and desperately needing care that the Americans were always willing to give to them…and also to the enemy, provided they put down their weapons and surrendered.
This morning I’m reading this:
Keith Turi, FEMA’s acting associate administrator for response and recovery, ticked through false rumors — that FEMA was “confiscating supplies” or only providing $750 in total assistance to storm victims — that he said are already harming the agency’s ability to help survivors.
“The misinformation is extremely damaging to the response efforts from Helene and from any disaster,” he said. “It is reducing the likelihood that survivors will come to FEMA in a trusting way to register for assistance.”
…and this:
A man identifying himself only as Anthony called into Sirius XM’s “Dan Abrams Show” this week to share the story of his father-in-law, whose property near Ashville, North Carolina, was badly damaged by Helene. Despite the destruction, Anthony said his father-in-law is unwilling to accept assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“He has refused all FEMA help because he’s a hardcore Trumper,” Anthony told Abrams. “He literally believes that if he accepts anything from FEMA, they’re going to take his house.”
This is a twisted lie about a good FEMA program that will let FEMA buy your flooded out house if it’s been flooded out four years in a row and they and you can agree on a fair market price.
This narrative that they’re going to take your home — what does that do? Well, it makes people very nervous about leaving their home. And so you hear people now saying, “I’m not going to leave, because if I leave my home, the government’s going to take it.” Those are the real-world impacts of all of these lies.
So people are afraid the government is going to take their house and decide to stay instead of evacuate. How many lives were lost because of this lie, we may never know because the dead can’t explain why they chose not to leave.
On VOX I see this snippet of conversation:
Sean Rameswaram: Back during Hurricane Sandy, I distinctly remember social media being useful for people. It was useful for people going through Sandy, it was useful for government agencies to get out information. Is that era of social media being a helpful tool in a disaster over?
You still occasionally hear Musk referred to as a libertarian, but that was never the case. He badly wants Trump to win this coming election because he’s all in on the culture war and what he ridiculously calls the “woke mind virus”. I was a libertarian once. Reagan cured me of it, but I was there. No actual libertarian would ever come near to wanting a man like Trump having the levers of government in his hands. Musk is decidedly Not in favor of small, or even limited government. He is that angry drunk at the end of the bar babbling about socialism and mind viruses but with billions of dollars at his disposal to impose his pink elephants on the rest of us.
So many of us have forgotten since Reagan coined his infamous nine most terrifying words is that helping the American people cope with emergencies is what government does. Democracy, as Lincoln once put it, is government of the people, by the people, for the people. Government is the mechanism by which we, the people, help our neighbors in times of need. Those FEMA workers they are being taught to demonize are their fellow Americans. They want to help. They are risking life and limb to help. And Musk and Trump are spitting in their faces, and also the faces of those they want to help.
It is not FEMA that’s getting between the survivors of Helene and the help they need. It’s Musk. It’s Trump. It’s Fox News. It’s the MAGA noise machine. It’s what they Have to do, regardless of who it hurts, even if it’s their own voters.
Because once people realize that those men and women from the government really are there help, it might lead them into thinking that maybe big government isn’t the problem after all, that the problem is only how to make government work better for everyone.
They openly admit now, that the plan is to use the tools of democracy to destroy our democracy. But here’s the thing: only the tools of democracy can sustain democracy.
Resist. Not just fascism, not merely the tyrant, but also the beast within. When you fight fire with fire, everything burns. Defend democracy.
Representative Ryan Zinke (R) introduced a bill that would revoke the visas and refugee status of a number of Palestinians…
The Safeguarding Americans From Extremism Act would require the Department of Homeland Security to refrain from issuing visas or granting refugee, asylum, or temporary protected status to anyone holding a passport issued by the Palestinian Authority. It would also revoke visas and refugee or asylum status for anyone who was granted it on or after October 1.
The bill also directly orders Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove those who lose their lawful status in the country under the new criteria.
“This is the most anti-Hamas immigration legislation I have seen and it’s well deserved,” Zinke said in a statement that conflated all Palestinians with Hamas…
-The New Republic, November 3 2023
I appreciate that some of my liberal/progressive friends here (and elsewhere) are aghast over what is happening now in Gaza. I’ve been appalled at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians for decades. But if you want to blame somebody for this, I’d suggest Putin because this has his fingerprints all over it. And…more generally…American evangelicals, who are some of the most anti semitic people you will ever meet (but in a very pleasant southern I’ll pray for you way), but need Israel to exist for their end times theology.
Jewish people have a right to exist. They have a right to keep to their faith and live in peace. So do Palestinians. What do you suppose is going to happen to either of these here in the United States when Stephan Miller gets his grimy hands back on the levers of power? When a president beloved of white supremacists gets back into the White House? When the MAGA brownshirts are free, free at last to act out their fantasies on the streets of this country…while chanting You will not replace us?
These last few weeks, it was mostly speculation. There was suspicion that most Americans supported him but I could hope that it was wrong. But now that hope is gone. And I have to feel differently. I have to feel like maybe most Americans don’t want me here. And I feel like no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be part of the community. And even if they’re friendly to me, or if they invite me to Thanksgiving, deep down they believe that America is a country that belongs to white people.
…then remember everything that followed. The attacks on Muslims. The attacks on Jews. The kids yanked from their parents at the border…
Toddlers standing before an immigration judge. ICE agents taking patients from hospitals, workers from the fields, children from their schools… Hispanics who have lived here almost all their lives suddenly deported to Mexico…and then killed by gangs…
News Item:
On June 4, just days after protests began in Wilmington regarding the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, a Sergeant Heflin was conducting monthly video audits — a routine part of her job — when she came across what was labeled as ‘accidental activations’ from Piner’s car….
Here’s what they found being said during those accidental activations…
“We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them fu—– ni—–. I can’t wait. God, I can’t wait.”
-Port City Daily (Wilmington Delware) June 24, 2020
…three extremist supreme court justices and all the Trump judges now in the federal courts. The coup attempt on January 6.
Trump is already talking about weaponizing the Justice department.
Who do you think Trump will put into all those military promotions Tuberville and the republicans are holding open for him? He’s talking about invoking The National Emergencies Act immediately after taking back the White House. With his people firmly in place I don’t think keeping the senate and winning back the house is going to help much. But you can dream.
We are in a knife fight for the existence of our democracy. Results from last Tuesday’s elections are promising, but that all goes out the window if Trump gets his hands back on the levers of power. Find another Nader or Stein if you want, but you will not escape the calamity that follows if Trump wins anymore than the rest of us will, by saying the democrats didn’t give you a good enough reason to vote for them.
I am on two of the Twitter/X alternatives now, Threads (@bruce72garrett) and BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social), and I’m waking up here in Charm City to the news that the republicans got routed in the off year elections last night. This is wonderful news…and amazing since the low turnout off year elections have historically been where they do best.
Of special glee is hearing how badly MAGA/Mom’s For Liberty candidates did in local school board elections, even in historically republican strongholds. Is it too much to hope that a sleeping giant has finally been awakened?
The More Things Stay The Same The More They Stay The Same
This came across my Twitter feed today (Yes, I still lurk there…)…
Yeah…it surprised me too considering it’s from the New York Times. That is, the same New York Times that just a few weeks ago was still carrying water for the TERF battle against transgender people, and threatened staff reporters who signed a letter publically protesting their anti-trans coverage with write-ups in their employee files. What has changed? Who knows? Who cares? It’s the New York Times. Not just the gold, but the bitcoin standard of journalism.
Some of us still remember how for decades the New York Times refused to refer to gay and lesbian people with any other word but “homosexual”, long, long after other media began using “gay” and “lesbian”. They have standards to uphold. What are those standards? That’s not news that’s fit to print.
But this…this speaks perfectly to how cut-and-paste the right wing attacks on transgender people map to their attacks on gay and Lesbian Americans decades ago. This is Ex Gay claptrap repurposed and aimed at transgender rights. Back in the day they threw up “I Questioned Homosexuality” billboards…not in the gayborhoods across America where you might think they’d want to spread the Good News but in the swing states where family and friends of gay and lesbian Americans might need an excuse to put a knife into their neighbor’s hearts. They founded PFOX (Parents and Friends Of eXgays) as a counter to PFLAG, and wherever gay people told their stories in the media, PFOX demanded ex gays be equally represented. They created professional psychological shell organizations that invented diagnoses out of thin air, like Same Sex Attraction Disorder. Get it? Get it? We’re not gay, we’re SSAD!
So it goes. Now hear the same old song and dance with a few transgender verses added. Nothing is new in the human gutter, it only has a new coat of paint.
This came in the mail just now, to add to my collection of banned or censored children’s books. I buy them to support the authors, but also to see for myself what the gutter is yapping about now. In this case I discovered this book via the author’s blog post about her very painfully having to decline an offer from Scholastic to include the book in their catalogue because of a Scholastic editor’s request/demand to remove references to racism in it. You can read her blog post here. This is very sad, mostly because of how unsurprising it is these days. One of my favorite days after the beginning of the school year was when we got the Scholastic catalog. I still have a bunch of those books I got as a schoolboy. All the precious moments I had reading them…I expected better of Scholastic.
(And speaking of blogs…since you’re reading mine now right? Do you use a blog reader like Feedly yet? You should. There’s a whole world of information and fun out there that commercial social media would rather you didn’t bother with. I’ve added Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s blog to my Feedly list.)
This book is the first in my collection that isn’t LGBT themed. It’s a simple, lovely children’s picture book, about two people who find each other in the midst of a horrible event in this country’s history. I searched the pages carefully for the mentions of racism that the Scholastic editor was objecting to and they’re only in the author’s note, which is clearly written for parents as a guide to understanding the book’s themes. The objection was clearly, sickeningly, meant to appease school board MAGA racists. But what, really, was the objection? Teaching about racism? You might think so if you haven’t been in this culture war as long as this gay guy has been, and seen what he has seen.
The central theme of the book is the power of love told in a simple, beautiful, childlike way.
Jacob Bronowski wrote that art does not set out to preach, but to shine a light in which the outlines of right and wrong can be seen with frightful clarity. You can shine that light even in a children’s picture book. Perhaps even best in the spare elegant simplicity of a children’s picture book. The racist injustice visited on the main characters in the book is always in the background of the story, it is a critical part of the story, but it is not the primary focus of the story. It is a love story. Love of family. Falling in love with someone. That moment when you realize it. It is a love story.
And that is exactly the problem. Never doubt it. Shakespeare wrote that love is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken, and bears it out even to the edge of doom. Lao Tzu wrote that being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. The author’s note regarding the racism that built the camps was for adults, the lesson about the power of love was for the children.
That was the unforgivable sin, something the hated Other must never know. Especially when they are young.
Because love is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. Because love bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Because love can give you strength, and courage. Courage enough to move mountains. And the one thing you never want the scapegoat to know, is they can move mountains. Especially when they are young.
The More Racists Change The More They Stay The Same
This from the Washington Post…
Musk defends ‘Dilbert’ creator, says media is ‘racist against whites’
The Tesla and Twitter chief blasted media outlets for dropping Scott Adams’s comic strip after the cartoonist’s rant against Black people
It’s to the point now where all you need to see is the name associated with the news item and you know pretty well what it’s going to be about before you even read it. Musk is is one of those and so is Adams and that still hurts a bit because I used to love Dilbert. But that was back when I saw it as Dilbert being a somewhat naive computer geek like myself, surrounded by assholes the cartoonist was making fun of. It seems that over time Adams began to identify more with the assholes than the geek. I think it was when I saw the cartoon comparing a woman breast feeding a baby in public with a man pissing on flowers to water them that I began tuning him out. It was one of those things that tap you on the shoulder saying look at that…no really look at that… But there was still the occasional cartoon strip I found hilarious. Then he went all in for Trump, who was like the pointy haired boss personified and amplified and I just closed the book on him, wondering how much of what I enjoyed in his cartoons was really there to begin with.
That’s the way it is with artists and creators you come to love and enjoy. What you see in their art is what you experienced seeing it and it’s mostly you. It isn’t necessarily what the artist themselves put into it or intended. But at least Adams was a creator. Musk on the other hand, is just rich.
He bought his way into Tesla and eventually kicked out its founders. SpaceX was born on his money and his need to cut the cost of rocket launches so he could start a garden on Mars. But it was built with the rocket engineering talents of others who came from the industry. Both those companies, so I’m told, had a board of directors and staff whose only job was to manage Musk’s mood swings and nutty ideas and try to keep him focused. In Twitter we’re seeing him totally in control and unfiltered, really for the first time. And it’s really a squalid sight to see.
They say men don’t change, they reveal themselves. But if money is power, then absolute money also corrupts absolutely. This is a man who never really developed any internal brakes, and now all the possible external ones are gone. Maybe that’s what happened to Adams too, but with a lot less money.
Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
I’m sixty-nine years old and knocking on the door to seventy. You have to appreciate how familiar this all feels to someone who actually lived through and remembers the civil rights protests of the 1960s. The white backlash rhetoric has never changed. Every tiny improvement in the status of racial minorities in this country, every miniscule effort to uncover and learn from the history of slavery and race segregation in America, has been met with howling about reverse racism from the usual suspects. None of it sounds any different than it did back then.
I did not expect my golden years to look so much like my childhood…
Twitter, perhaps in its dying breaths, still provides interesting rabbit holes to dive down. Today it’s this post from Samuel Perry, who lists himself in his profile as: Sociologist | Studying Religion & Power | Author: Growing God’s Family; Addicted to Lust; Taking America Back for God; The Flag & The Cross. But it would be a mistake I suspect, given his other posts to assume he’s completely on board with the white evangelical power grab. And especially not this post:
Little something to remind Christian Right Twitter as they trash French for this post. White evangelicals went from 60% saying privately immoral officials couldn’t be ethical in office to 17% & the only thing that changed was opportunity. Your moral compass points toward power.
To which he adds this graphic…
He also put up this a few hours later…
Following Jan 6, White evangelicals were the only group where a huge majority said banning Trump was wrong. But they’re also the only group where a majority says social media cos. shouldn’t remove aggressive content from elected officials even if it may provoke violence.
It’s easy to shrug your shoulders and say so what, we always knew where they were. But this needs, especially these days, to be thrown back in their faces whenever they start bellyaching about things like religious freedom and same sex marriage. It isn’t their freedom they are fighting for, it’s their total dominance. And if anything that’s been made even more explicit with the publication and widespread evangelical approval of The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe.
The magic of our republic is that it creates space for people who possess different world views to live together *and* stay true to different faiths and moral convictions. How the Respect for America Act furthers this vital national goal:
The Respect for Marriage Act, and the harmony between religious liberty and LGBTQ rights.
It begins thusly:
It’s been called the “oral argument that cost the Democrats the presidency.” On April 28, 2015, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. stood up in the Supreme Court and argued that the Court should recognize a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. During that argument, Justice Samuel Alito asked him a question that voiced the concern of millions of people of faith. Here was the key exchange:
Justice Samuel Alito: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax-exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same-sex marriage?
Solicitor General Verrilli: You know, I—I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is—it is going to be an issue.
With that response, General Verrilli confirmed a growing sense of alarm in theologically conservative Christian circles. If they continued to maintain that marriage is a union between a man and woman, would they be treated as bigots? As the equivalent of white supremacists?
Let us say, after all the years that have passed between then and now, with that subset of the American population growing less and less inclined to maintain pretenses, that whatever alarm they may have felt wasn’t they would be treated for being what they so plainly are and have no trouble whatever being, but that their scapegoats, their hated Other would be granted equality in the eyes of the law. Yes, that had implications for being able to make their stepping stones to heaven out of our lives, out of our hopes and dreams. It simply could not be allowed to stand.
So then, the stacking of the US Supreme court with more Alitos.
To really appreciate what is going on in that David French thread it helps to know a wee bit about the man…
In August 2017, French was one of several co-authors of the so-called Nashville Statement, which affirmed “that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.” [Wikipedia]
The Nashville Statement:
Affirms that God designed marriage as a lifelong union between male and female, and that marriage “is meant to signify the covenant love between Christ and his bride the church”
Denies that differences between men and women render the sexes “unequal in dignity or worth”
Denies “that adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception is consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption.”
Denies “that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.”
Affirms that “Christ Jesus has come into the world to save sinners and that through Christ’s death and resurrection forgiveness of sins and eternal life are available to every person who repents of sin and trusts in Christ alone as Savior, Lord, and supreme treasure”
And yet, Trump was a bridge too far for him. And that of course, meant his immediate exile from the fellowship of Sauron’s ring. A lot of the pushback goes something like this…
Pluralism is your idol, sir.
You would have been a ‘faithful servant’ of Julian the Apostate, David. Don’t spend your 30 pieces of silver all at once, Judas.
Are we sure 2015 David French wasn’t just as much a simp to secular pluralism and just didn’t have the opportunity to approve of such evils?
Repent and seek Christ.
This commenter almost gets it…
My goodness. 2015 David French Eviscerates 2022 David French. Makes me sad, Trump did break him.
What Trump did was give him, and others like him, a choice: take the remaining shred of humanity within you around behind the barn and shoot it, or take a step back from the abyss.
Pluralism cannot coexist with Christian Nationalism and they know it. They have always known it. They have always despised the concept, and along with that, democracy. They may love the America of their totalitarian fever dreams, but they will fight democracy to their dying breath, and especially The Compromise: that everyone has the right to practice their religious beliefs in their churches, and in their homes, but in the public square, and in the marketplace, we are all Americans.
My money is as good as yours. I have the same right to speak my mind as you do. In the public square and in the marketplace, the government takes no sides apart from the democratic necessity of Equality, Liberty and Justice. For all. This, it must enforce. So we can all be Americans. Having to bake that cake for a same sex couple is the price you pay for government not stomping into your church and burning your holy texts.
But there are those who think that price is too much to pay for an America where we all live together in peace. Because God is on their side and the holy text that will burn are not theirs, but yours. They are the chosen ones. They have the only true religion. And God wants them to grind the heretic underfoot. Because God hates the Other as much as they do. And they are on the march.
So I let myself get dragged into a Twitter thread about same sex marriage. It started with a friendly post by a religious guy who said “Imagine thinking that allowing gay people to get married somehow diminishes heterosexual marriage.”
He gets instantly swarmed by right wing religious nutcases telling him he’s leading people to hell and so on and so forth. Okay…so much so as usual. But the yapping takes a turn I’m familiar with from the USENET days: that marriage is and can only be about procreation and children. I wait for the obvious rebuttal to that from the other gay friendly posters and it never comes. Instead the arguments swirl around secular society versus theocracy and how same sex couples have families and can raise children too, with one poster in particular doggedly sticking to the premise that only procreation matters to marriage, not any of that love stuff, because that’s how god ordained it.
And…unable to sit on my hands anymore, I jump in like it’s 1995.
But there’s a couple things I think the rest of you need to know about all this.
It took me a while to see it, but the head nutcase in the right wing infotainment cocoon, Matt Walsh, had just post election pivoted from demonizing transgender folk to demonizing same sex marriage. So that’s the topic de jour in the howling monkey tree now. But there is also this…
A new book making the case for “Christian Nationalism” has hit the streets, and it isn’t saying the quiet parts out loud, it’s writing them in neon lights. I guess they’re all done with that finally.
It’s “The Case for Christian Nationalism” by Stephen Wolfe, and it is not exactly fringe material, having been in the top 2000 books on Amazon for weeks, and charting in the top 500 ever since it’s November 1 publication. It argues for ethnic purity as a necessary condition for our, or any other nation’s survival. It argues that imprisoning, and perhaps even executing heretics, is a good and necessary thing. The book presents itself as a theological justification for White ethnonationalism. Or in other words, white supremacy…at least here in the United States.
But more fundamentally than that, Wolfe argues that even if Adam and Eve had not sinned and been cast out of Eden, humans would have congregated in separate communities on the planet and developed their distinct ways of life. This he says, is why there are nations. And so following that, Christians have the right to do everything in their power to institutionalize Christianity, make government structured according to God’s vision for human life, creating a national government in which civil authorities direct the citizens to the “true religion” to the “fullest extent of their power.”
Including executing heretics. But only if that becomes necessary. If you don’t know where that leaves sexual minorities message me, I’ll fill you in.
I Repeat…This Is Not Some Odd Little Fringe Tract. It is now a best seller and it has energized the howling monkey tree. The usual response to criticism of it is oh you just hate Christians.
I hate every moment of having to fight this fight. But I’m a gay man and I remember the first time I fell in love, and for the honor and the dignity of that moment, and every moment of love I ever felt for another man, I will not remain silent. Furthermore…I am an American. The flag waving doesn’t run very deep in me, but the belief in that American dream of liberty and justice for all does and I will not remain silent.
We are living in very dangerous times, and as was once said, and is still true today, Silence = Death.
This from a gay history group I follow on Facebook…
Tom Doerr and Marty Robinson during a Gay Activists Alliance sit-in
at the New York State Republican headquarters, New York City.
Photo by Diana Davies, 1970.
I would have been 15 or 16 depending on exactly when this happened, and all I knew about the fight for gay equality then was basically nothing apart from the occasional snide jokes on late night TV, but they made those same jokes about hippies. But look at this photo. This is a couple. They are people not stereotypes. And they are taking a stand when that was still extremely risky, to get us all to a place when we could have what they were lucky enough to find in each other, and not be afraid or ashamed.
How often do you hear them say they don’t care what we do in the privacy of our homes, but we should not be allowed to “flaunt it” in public. But what is “it”?
This is. This is what the fight has always been about. The haters reduce us to the sex we have, but this is what they don’t want anyone to see, especially us. We are not to know that this is possible to us. We must be scapegoats, never neighbors, never to have a place in the American dream. And so, to that end, we must see ourselves as sexual deviants, pathetic faggots, or dangerous sexual predators. What we must never be are lovers.
Because love is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken…
Because love alters not with his brief hours and weeks but bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Because being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
Because love can give you the courage, and the strength, to move mountains. And the one thing you never want the scapegoat to know is they can move mountains.
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