Friday Reads: Radical Religious Fundamentalists are at it again!

Good Day Sky Dancers!

Consider what the Taliban are doing to Afghanistan as they try to re-establish a radical view of Islam again in Afghanistan.  President Biden mentioned how few there were of these folks when compared to the hundreds of thousands of well-armed Afghan Soldiers.  However, the Taliban say they control most of Afghanistan now.  That’s what a minority of white US Christians want here and they continue to press legislature forward.  It’s a different kind of invasion since it’s the rights of everyone else including mainstream Christians and there’s no guns involved yet.

Now just as the Taliban of Afghanistan are not the Whirling Dervishes of Damascus, what we face here in this country are not mainstream or a majority in the USA. They are not your nice sweet Episcopalian Grandmother. Never, ever estimate a radical, fundamentalist wing of any religion.  They eventually wind up practicing persecution and women are always on the top of the list as well as the GLBT community. The US brand of White Christian Nationalism is ferocious as ever even as their numbers have shrunk.

This is from WAPO: “The rapid decline of White evangelical America? New data suggests a bigger decrease than previously understood — including in the GOP.  We discussed this a bit yesterday down the thread.  It’s worth the read because they’re sure not going quietly.

If there was an epitome of Donald Trump’s hostile and often puzzling takeover of the Republican Party, it might have been his alliance with evangelical Christians. The thrice-married playboy who until relatively recently supported abortion rights became their champion. He did so despite demonstrating remarkably little familiarity with the Bible. The uneasy alliance culminated in Trump flashing the Good Book as a political prop in Lafayette Square last summer.

But new data suggests that whatever pull evangelicals have in American politics, it’s declining pretty significantly.

The Public Religion Research Institute released a detailed study Thursday on Americans’ religious affiliations. Perhaps the most striking finding is on White evangelical Christians.

While this group made up 23 percent of the population in 2006 — shortly after “values voters” were analyzed to have delivered George W. Bush his reelection — that number is now down to 14.5 percent, according to the data.

Most Southern and rural states still have a large number of very vocal White Christian Nationalists. Take Texas, please!

We’ve all been aware of their fear of minorities voting.  The focus yesterday was how the voting rights law–slowly being dismantled by the Robert’s Court–has created more openings for laws suppression access to the ballot. This is a basic constitutional right. Even more basic and constitutional is the right to not be oppressed by someone else’s view of a religion and not to have it enacted in law at the expense of women and the GLBT community.

First, I woke up to this outrage by JJ from No More Mister Nice Blog:  “HOW ABOUT DON’T KNOCK ON MY DOOR?”.  Republican plague rats/Variant Manufactories are screaming this and “My Body. My Choice” about the vaccine. Yet, look what’s cooking in Texas besides new variants and ways to kill your neighbor?  Texas Congress Plague Rat Crenshaw is the pseudo- libertarian with the hypocritical stance on things he feels all patriarchal about.

This is truly shocking.  Yes, JJ!  How did we miss this?  After all, it was in the New York Times. Here’s the headline “Citizens, Not the State, Will Enforce New Abortion Law in Texas. The measure bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. And it effectively deputizes ordinary citizens to sue people involved in the process.”

People across the country may soon be able to sue abortion clinics, doctors and anyone helping a woman get an abortion in Texas, under a new state law that contains a legal innovation with broad implications for the American court system.

The provision passed the Texas State Legislature this spring as part of a bill that bans abortion after a doctor detects a fetal heartbeat, usually at about six weeks of pregnancy. Many states have passed such bans, but the law in Texas is different.

Ordinarily, enforcement would be up to government officials, and if clinics wanted to challenge the law’s constitutionality, they would sue those officials in making their case. But the law in Texas prohibits officials from enforcing it. Instead, it takes the opposite approach, effectively deputizing ordinary citizens — including from outside Texas — to sue clinics and others who violate the law. It awards them at least $10,000 per illegal abortion if they are successful.

“It’s completely inverting the legal system,” said Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “It says the state is not going to be the one to enforce this law. Your neighbors are.”

Back to the snark of No More Mister Nice Blog and this thread by Amanda Marcotte.

https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/1413458320560517123

https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/1413459192921292815

And, I missed this ad on the 4th of July by the now infamous christofascist crusaders Hobby Lobby.  Here’s a bit on that from Scott Horton’s Facebook page.  I caught it today just as JJ’s email had me on high alert.

A Christianist denunciation of democracy and democratic institutions: Hobby Lobby’s full-page ads argue that only Christians, as defined by Hobby Lobby (that is to say, white Evangelicals) are worthy to serve as political leaders of America, though the existence of others may be tolerated for the time being. The Hobby Lobby political agenda matched that of the Trump-led GOP, and is remarkably like the Republic of Gilead described in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The key point to keep in mind, however, is this: Hobby Lobby absolutely repudiates the notion that the people of the United States, speaking at the ballot box, are free to choose their leaders according to their own criteria.

None of this is the stuff I remember as someone raised a Presbyterian and spent a good amount of her adult life as a social justice-loving Methodist Sunday School Teacher.  This is from Newsweek: “Hobby Lobby Faces Backlash Over Newspaper Ad Calling for Christian-Run Government.”

Arts and crafts giant Hobby Lobby faced a backlash after it ran a full-page advertisement on July 4 in several newspapers across the U.S. that appeared to call for a Christian-run government.

The advert, which Hobby Lobby ran in newspapers on Independence Day, was titled “One Nation Under God,” and included the Bible verse “Blessed is the Nation whose God is the lord,” as the company also posted about its campaign on its social media pages.

Hobby Lobby quoted former presidents who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 in its campaign, including George Washington, but the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) reported that the company had altered the quotes without providing the full context.

Included in the advert, Hobby Lobby claimed to quote former President John Adams saying: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.

“Our Constitution was made only for religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Frightened yet?   This sums it up for me now that I’m a religious minority.

https://twitter.com/davidmweissman/status/1411827883895627777

Let’s go back to the Anti-Vaxxer freedom screed and read something by Charlies Sykes from The Bulwark.  “A Depraved Indifference To Human Life. The right’s performative anti-vax demagoguery”.

I admit that I’m struggling to come up with an analogy that would shed some light on the sheer insanity of this moment.

Try to imagine, for example, a campaign to mock attempts to improve airline safety in the wake of a crash that killed hundreds. Or try to envision a political class that would ridicule and undermine engineers who were trying to shore up the foundations of condominiums in Florida in the days after a horrific building collapse there.

None of that, however, even comes close to the genuine depravity of the current burst of performative anti-vax demagoguery we are seeing right now.

Four million people worldwide have died from COVID-19. That includes more than 600,000 Americans.

The delta variant is exploding and the infection rates are rising — and nearly all of the new hospitalizations and deaths are among the unvaccinated.

In Missouri, where vaccination rates have lagged, “the Springfield area has been hit so hard that one hospital had to borrow ventilators over the Fourth of July weekend and begged on social media for help from respiratory therapists.”

I feel like going all Spock on you by saying “Logic dictates that the good of the many outweighs the needs of the one.”  But hey, let’s watch these same people scream I’m very much a communist or some such nonsense.  Isn’t that basically what the biblical Jesus did at the end of his life or did my Presbyterian Ministers fail me?  This dangerous political performance art has, is, and will continue to kill people including small children and babies that are not yet approved for the vaccine. BB’s covered this so well that we all know better.

Anyway, we have a lot to keep our eyes on.   Look at the special agenda for the Texas lege.  It’s a right-wing tribute to conspiracy theories and anti-democratic/republic governance.  They’re after RU45 again saying it’s abortion-inducing which it’s not.

There are 11 items on the agenda that lawmakers can discuss. They include:

• Bail overhaul
• Elections
• Border security
• Social media censorship
• Legislative branch funding
• Family violence prevention
• Limiting access to school sports teams for transgender students
• Abortion-inducing drugs
• An additional payment for retired Texas teachers
• Critical race theory
• Other budgetary issues

See the full list from the governor’s office here.

So, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. I’m just enjoying the falling rain and silence here where I can ask myself what’s so funny about peace, love. and understanding?  Can’t we all just live and let live?

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?