I recently saw the trailer for “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin.” It reminded me of another film with similar historical accuracy, 2012’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

As you might imagine, this is a film that has nothing to do with the actual, historical Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

As soon as it was released concerns arose that “Bonhoeffer” was primarily a vehicle for Christian Nationalism. The Bonhoeffer Society itself has condemned it. Even the cast of the movie has had misgivings:

STATEMENT: Lead Actors in “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin” Speak Out Together Against the Misuse of Bonhoeffer’s Legacy

In Germany, Die Zeit published a scathing review, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: How Trump’s radical supporters weaponized Dietrich Bonhoeffer”):

https://www.zeit.de/2024/44/dietrich-bonhoeffer-theologe-donald-trump-unterstuetzer-gewalt

And an article in German Broadcast Culture read: “Fake News about a Nazi resistance fighter”:

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/film-bonhoeffer-radikale-christen-usa-100.html

The film was produced by Utah-based Christian Nationalist media company Angel Studios and was adapted from a “biography” (in quotes for good reason) by Eric Metaxas, a right-wing talk show host and rabid supporter of the Orange Führer himself.

https://www.ywampublishing.com/p-1554-bonhoeffer-pastor-martyr-prophet-spy.aspx

The Baptist News didn’t like the film:

New Bonhoeffer film offers a mixed bag of emotions

And the Jewish online magazine The Forward had concerns about modern day Nazis falsifying history:

https://forward.com/culture/film-tv/677167/dietrich-bonhoeffer-todd-komarnicki-biopic-review/

So don’t bother with this garbage. In any case it won’t be long before you’re drowning in a flood of Christian Nationalist propaganda.

Shortly after the 2016 election, Democrats started telling voters — particularly racial and sexual minorities – that they were idiots for dabbling in “identity politics.” By this they meant that the values these voters held were too controversial, and too “divisive.” Instead, Democrats rolled out an election strategy based on economics, launching it from the one Virginia county where HIllary Clinton had won a majority of votes. Fast forward to 2024 and the Dems are again flogging “Bidenomics, Bidenomics, Bidenomics” – as if it were the only issue over which American voters ought to worry their pretty pointy little heads.

Even though Biden’s numbers have long been stuck at levels absolutely guaranteed to sink his campaign, a vast gaslighting project has emerged to explain why voters aren’t buying the whole economics shtik and to tell voters that they’re idiots for not buying it.

Everybody from James Carville to Robert Reich has offered a contribution to the oevre. The Washington Post thinks that, while personal finances are generally OK, voters are actually more worried about the national economy. Bloomberg takes the completely opposite view. Zachary D. Carter’s recent article in Slate offers the online lede, “I think I can explain Joe Biden’s Bad Approval Ratings” and then proceeds to roll out his own incoherent theory of “new beginnings.”

In other words, Democrats have completely written off what Richard Hofstadter called “interest politics” – or what today we would call the concerns of “value voters” – in his groundbreaking book on the American Far Right, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

So, having read Hofstadter and in contrast to Zachary Carter, I think I can actually explain why Biden’s approval ratings are in the toilet. And it has nothing to do with the economy.

Though he studied American politics in the first part of the 20th Century, in Part I of “The Paranoid Style” Hofstadter offers us a solid clue about much of what is happening today. In fact, Hofstadter’s formulation below explains voter disinterest in Bidenomics, the Christian Nationalist Supreme Court, the phenomenon of people “voting against their own interests,” and also explains why the moral furor over Gaza has taken Democrats by surprise and will likely tank Biden’s Presidency:

The wealth of the country and the absence of sharp class-consciousness have released much political energy for expression on issues not directly connected with economic conflict; and our unusually complex ethnic and religious mixture has introduced a number of complicating factors of great emotional urgency.

Significantly, the periods in which status politics has been most strikingly apparent have been the relatively prosperous 1920’s and the 1960’s. In periods of prosperity, when economic conflicts are blunted or subordinated, the other issues become particularly acute. We have noticed that whereas in depressions or during great bursts of economic reform people vote for what they think are their economic interests, in times of prosperity they feel free to vote their prejudices. In good times, with their most severe economic difficulties behind them, many people feel that they can afford the luxury of addressing themselves to larger moral questions, and they are easily convinced that the kind of politics that results is much superior to the crass materialism of interest politics. They have fewer inhibitions about pressing hard for their moral concerns, no matter how demanding and ill-formulated, as an object of public policy, than they have in pressing for their interests, no matter how reasonable and realistically conceived.

In the following essay, I will try to show that Barry Goldwater was one campaigner who saw with considerable clarity the distinction between interest politics and status politics, and went out of his way in his campaign to condemn the immorality of the first and to call for an intensification of the second.

Today, Americans from both political extremes feel America is morally on the wrong track and the two ethically-compromised antediluvian candidates for President are no answer to their concerns. The only question is: given this focus, which candidate will have the edge in November?

Well, that’s easy. Trump, with his coterie of “prophets” and preachers and a side-line as a bonafide Bible-thumping Bible salesman – as transparently fraudulent as this vaudeville act is – still comes closest to what Hofstader recognized in Barry Goldwater and the successful Far Right revolution he launched sixty years ago.

Biden, though he hasn’t been convicted of any felonies or bribed a porn star lately, has a crackhead son and has enthusiastically coupled his fate to that of an accused war criminal (who like Biden can’t survive politically) in carrying out a well-documented genocide.

Bidenomics isn’t going to save Joe any more than it can save America.

The Supreme Court, as an increasingly illegitimate institution, has robbed the majority of its civil liberties while granting Christian Nationalists a wish list long denied by the Constitutional separation of church and state. In a perversion of judicial interpretation, discrimination no longer exists — unless it’s us pushing back on the “rights” of Christian Nationalists to discriminate for “religious” reasons.

The Court’s rulings have emboldened the Christian right to attack every secular institution — including schools, libraries, school boards — and the Court grants them permission to suppress Black history, demonize LGBTQ+ people, and censor ideas and science that conflict with their own narrow religious views.

This new era of Christian fundamentalism could last 30 years, or will hopefully be of shorter duration. But a sharp and angry reaction to religious repression will likely follow. Around 2016 Ireland began repealing repressive laws based on its long troubled relationship with the Church. France, once overrun by saints and cathedrals, is now hostile to religion and is among the top ten countries with the largest percentage of atheists. Germany, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire and the birthplace of Protestantism, is now one of the least religious nations in Europe. While familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt, it often leads to a realization that religion is toxic to democracy. It’s even beginning to dawn on Israelis that their tolerance of religious extremism – in a religious state! – is about to cost them their democracy – at least the one on their side of the Green Line.

Of the articles I read this morning, two couldn’t have been more different.

One was from Massachusetts Informed Parents, a project of the Christian Nationalist Massachusetts Family Institute, which tries to force their “Christian” values down everybody’s throats, particularly in matters of education. MFI was incensed that the Lexington schools talk to kids about the diversity found in their own district, about skin color, understanding that some parents are not mom and dad but mom and mom, or that sometimes people suffer silently from disabilities. That some boys and some girls don’t like to play with toys traditionally associated with their sex. Or that we have to be respectful of how people think of themselves, that some people are white, some black, some bi- and multi-racial. Or ask: what is empathy? All this is simply too much for the “Christians” at MFI, who think that any discussion of empathy and acceptance “makes it easier to turn kids into good little activists.”

The other was a wonderful essay by Suzanne Stillinger, a queer early childhood educator who does the work that MFI despises so much, and who took the opportunity in Commonwealth Magazine to thank her community for embracing her and the work she does in Northampton. Stillinger addresses the Christian Right’s objection to her work: “The epithet ‘groomer,’ a new slur based on a tired and very old stereotype, is being tossed at any adult who supports LGBTQ+ rights, but is especially damaging when directed at those of us who work with children. There are those who insist that talking about LGBTQ+ identities radicalizes children, when all of the data tells us that the true risk lies in denying children access to information and support that validates their full sense of self and belonging.”

So, what we see here are two ways of living in and seeing the world. One seeks to preserve hate and ill-judgement while marginalizing certain people, and to keep children’s eyes closed to both injustice and a changing world. The other is to open children’s eyes to social realities, and to celebrate the differences and the beauty of diversity in their communities, schools, and classrooms – to foster acceptance and solidarity, not hate.

There was a time when Americans wanted to say, “we’re all in this together.” I think we still want to. The work the Lexington and Northampton schools are doing affirms this way of moving within the world. In contrast, the toxic efforts of hate groups like MFI and MIP only undermine social cohesion.

The choice really is this stark – we have to choose the kind of world we want to live in.

Today’s culture wars are being fought by supposed followers of Jesus. But the version of Jesus they revere is not the man of miracles and multitudes who showed compassion for a woman about to be stoned to death. For Christian Nationalists the canonical Jesus is a lamentable “woke” sissy who would turn the other cheek, look for the best in people, oppose exploitation, and feed the hungry. As for that adulterous woman he pitied, they’d stone her to death in a second if the hangman’s rope were not the preferred tool of their vigilantism.

Instead, the version of Jesus that Christian Nationalists prefer is the vengeful killer from Revelations 19:13, riding in on a war horse, robe dripping with blood, eyes blazing with fury, sword slashing, bronze boots stomping to death anyone who ever got in his way.

Anthea Butler, theologian, professor, and author of “White Evangelical Racism,” described in an interview with Political Research Associates how Evangelicals became politicized by religious crusades starting in the Forties:

“As early as the 1940s, Billy Graham had fused Christianity with patriotism and White supremacy. His goal was to make believers–including Black and Brown folks who had started to listen to him–conform to White, male, Western Christian ideals. He demonized Communists, Catholics, and immigrants. Interestingly, he got support from William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, which gave these ideas added prominence. […] American exceptionalism–the idea that the U.S. is blessed by God–as well as Christian patriotism were used by Billy Graham, the Rev. Bob Jones, and other White male religious leaders of the mid-20th Century to put parameters around what it meant to be an American and a Christian. It does lead directly to MAGA.”

In a 2021 the centrist Christian magazine Christianity Today (CT) published Christian Nationalism is Worse than You Think. Written one week after the MAGA coup attempt, CT interviewed Paul D. Miller, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, who contrasted Christian Nationalism with Christianity:

“It’s easiest to define Christian nationalism by contrasting it with Christianity. Christianity is a religion. It’s a set of beliefs about ultimate things: most importantly, about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s drawn from the Bible, from the Nicene Creed, and the Apostles’ Creed. [] Christian nationalism is a political ideology about American identity. It is a set of policy prescriptions for what the nationalists believe the American government should do. It’s not drawn from the Bible. It draws political theory from secular philosophy and their own version of history as well.”

And the “Worse than you think” part Miller discussed happens to be fascism.

Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead are co-authors of the book, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. In the run-up to the 2020 election, writing in Religion in Public, the two observed that “Christian Nationalism Talks Religion, But Walks Fascism.”

Perry and Whitehead frequently, and correctly, place “Christian” and “Christianity” in quotes because Christian Nationalism “represents more of an ethno-cultural and political identity that denotes a specific constellation of religious affiliation (evangelical Protestant), cultural values (conservative), race (white), and nationality (American-born citizen)” than religious orthodoxy.

Working from the definition of fascism in Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, there are obvious similarities:

“an ideology built on reference to a mythic past; populist support for strongman demagogues; a culture of anti-intellectualism, including anti-education and anti-science beliefs; an ideology that views social hierarchies as normal and necessary; idealization of patriarchal families; peace maintained by authoritarian “law & order” tactics; strongly pro-nativist/anti-pluralism; foments cultural anxiety about sexual deviance; and pervasive victim mentality.”

In a piece titled Beware of Authoritarian Christians New England United Methodist minister Rev. William Alberts highlights the authoritarian dynamics within Christian Nationalism. Much of the racism, sexism, and homophobia in authoritarian “Christianity” indeed have roots in scripture, both Old and New Testament. While churches have always been free to highlight the good and ignore the bad in their own traditions and scripture, sometimes they just pivot from bad to bad. But this is done for political purpose.

Albert quotes Civil Rights leader Gilbert Caldwell, who explains how Christian Nationalists pivoted from racism to homophobia: “White traditionalists in 1972 realized they could no longer use the Bible to justify the segregation of blacks in the ‘new’ UMC. Thus same-gender loving persons and their ‘practice of homosexuality’ provided them the opportunity to continue to discriminate, not because of race but because of sexual orientation.”

In all of this, love and Jesus are missing, Alberts says, replaced by Christian Nationalists’ insistence on authority, doctrine, discipline, obedience, and literal interpretation. In contrast, Alberts cites the loving Jesus in John 13:35 who expresses the essence of normative Christianity: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Russell Moore, former evangelical and editor in chief of Christianity Today, told NPR that a number of evangelical pastors have told him that when they’ve quoted Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, with its reference to “turning the other cheek,” congregants would come up to them and ask, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” When the pastor replied, “I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response was, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.”

What those “followers of Jesus” prefer is the vengeful warrior from Revelations. The one who promises, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you.” The one who promises to “start slitting throats” the day he’s inaugurated. Romans 12:19 says, “avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”

Trump the Redeemer

While normative Christianity teaches that vengeance is the Lord’s, Christian Nationalists had no problem hearing Trump telling his Believers, “In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” It’s no surprise that many Trump supporters actually believe Trump is the messiah (see this and this and this and this and this).

In 2019 Christianity Today published an editorial entitled “Trump Should be Removed from Office.” It argued that Trump’s actions were illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral; that his Twitter feed was a “near perfect example” of a human being “morally lost and confused.”

Greater Boston interviewed Evangelicals to get their take on the editorial. Andrew Beckwith of the Christian Nationalist Massachusetts Family Institute was unconcerned about Trump’s crimes or immorality. Beckwith’s view was that as long as Trump delivered to the 200 Evangelicals he mentioned, it was all for the greater good. His criterion was abortion, saying evangelicals had to weigh Trump’s three ex-wives against 60 million “murdered children.” Beckwith ended his Trump apologetics by quipping that MFI was above partisan politics, even democracy, saying that “Jesus was a monarchist” who was the “King of Kings, Lord of Lords.” As if authoritarianism were Jesus-approved.

But Beckwith isn’t the only proto-fascist to be less interested in the “Prince of Peace” than the “Lord of Lords.”

In the Thirties it occurred to Germany’s National Socialist regime that, besides Jews, Jewish books needed to be destroyed. You can find countless archive photos of book burnings that show the scope of the Nazi destruction. Poetry, art, philosophy, history, and literature books were all consigned to the flames if they had a Jewish author.

But then it occurred to the National Socialists that the book most “Jewish” of all was The Bible. In 1939 the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben) was founded, with symbolic purpose, in Eisenach, where Luther (that other notorious anti-semite) translated the Bible into Hochdeutsch.

The goal of the Institute was to produce a Bible that no longer contained the Old Testament or any of the “Jewish” elements in the New Testament. Susannah Heschel, a Jewish scholar at Dartmouth College, wrote a fascinating account of this in “Reading Jesus as a Nazi” and expanded her research into a book, The Aryan Jesus. The Nazi Institute with the ambitious goal of de-Judaizing the Bible produced two documents: one was a replacement for the New Testament, Die Botschaft Gottes (The Message of God). The other was a catechism called Deutsche mit Gott (Germans with God) which was distributed widely to soldiers during the war.

This presented the dilemma of what to do about the very popular Ten Commandments, which had been given to a Jewish guy on a mountain top and which had a whole dramatic backstory involving the arc of poorly-behaved Jews becoming worthy of receiving the Law.

The Nazi “Twelve Commandments”

A replacement would just have to do. Where the Torah offered butter, Deutsche mit Gott offered margarine. Because Moses and his tablets were streng verboten, the revisionist catechism offered its own set of replacement commandments – twelve in number: (1) Honour God and believe in him wholeheartedly; (2) Seek out the peace of God; (3) Avoid all hypocrisy; (4) Holy is your health and life; (5) Holy is your wellbeing and honour; (6) Holy is your truth and fidelity; (7) Honour your father and mother – your children are your aid and your example; (8) Keep the blood pure and your honour holy; (9) Maintain and multiply the heritage of your forefathers; (10) Be ready to help and forgive; (11) Honour your Führer and master; (12) Joyously serve the people with work and sacrifice.

Like its American cousin, German Christian Nationalism polluted religious teachings with virulent nationalism. Section 7 of Deutsche mit Gott is called Gottes Vorsehung in der Geschichte der Völker (God’s Providence in the History of Nations) and is so cringeworthy that a translation is in order (mine): “According to the eternal plan, God directs the history of the races, nations and man in their rise and fall. He decrees tasks and awakens strength through leaders and masters. God has given us Germans the Reich as a sacred mission. In the course of history, base thoughts, wild passions and destructive powers oppose divine rule. Through all these threats, God leads us to his goals and creates his eternal Reich.”

Religion in the service of nationalist ideology

This may very well be National Socialism speaking, but similar verbiage and sentiment is found in the “sacred mission” of American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, the Puritans’ “City on a Hill,” Zionism, Hindutva, Chinese Han nationalism, and in every colonial empire throughout history that sought to bring its “god-given” values to weaker, “inferior” “shithole” nations, which would elevate humanity through conquest and genocide.

The Botschaft was of course stripped of the Old Testament, but Christian scholars have noticed how, particularly, the Sermon on the Mount was rewritten to make Jesus less an effeminate woke wimp and more the bloody warrior. A review of Heschel’s book The Aryan Jesus by John Connelly in the Catholic Commonweal magazine summarizes the revisions to Jesus 2.0:

By contrast, when the “German Christians” got to work de-Judaizing Christianity, they found Scripture so full of positive references to Judaism that they had to rewrite it. In 1940 Grundmann and his associates published their own, bowdlerized version of the Bible, called The Message of God (Die Botschaft Gottes). Missing from it were the Old Testament, John’s Gospel, and all references to Jesus as servant or lamb of God. The institute argued that supposedly original understandings of Christ as warrior had predominated “in a lost original Gospel whose message had been distorted.” Thus the Sermon on the Mount appeared, but with no blessing for the merciful. In the hands of Grundmann and his colleagues, Christian teaching was warped to fit Nazi obsessions: the need to meet hatred with hatred; the virtues of manliness; and above all, the dark powers of the Jews to subvert the German people. Where Paul was a solution for anti-Nazis, as a Jew he was a problem for Christian racists, who argued that he “distorted” an originally Hellenic Christianity. In 1942 Grundmann proclaimed that “a German faith cannot be based upon Paul, because it would be deformed by his Jewish system of coordinates.” Two years later a Thuringian pastor called for removing Paul altogether in order to focus faith upon Jesus, who had gone to death “in battle against Judaism.” The hierarchy rejected these calls–fearing that such radical revisions would bolster the arguments of those who said that German Christians were not really Christian–and postponed them until some future time after the war had been won.

This emphasis on “Christian soldiers” is reflected in the Botschaft. One page is particularly illustrative.

Section 5 is titled Sein Kampf (his fight, which you would not be wrong to assume invokes Mein Kampf). The first lines are taken from Mark 2:21-23, widely interpreted as Christianity replacing Judaism. The reader summary in the right column (“new and old are incompatible”) makes that plain. The text reads (my translation): “Jesus spoke: No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old garment. Otherwise the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise the wine will burst the skins and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins.” The Nazi censors omitted the last verse: “But new wine is for fresh wineskins.” Understandable, since against their own advice they were putting new wine in old wineskins.

This is followed by a verse from Matthew 10:34-36, where Jesus has gathered his disciples to say goodbye. This Jesus is not the Prince of Peace but the Lord of vengeance (my translation): “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? I have not come to bring peace, rather the sword. I have come to call man to account, even against his father. And even members of his own household will become enemies to man.” Here the Nazi editors censored Jesus: “For I am come to raise up man against his own father and the daughter against her mother and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” This might have been too much for the Third Reich’s family values.

If you think American Christian Nationalism would never go to such extreme lengths – rewriting scripture to distort the message of a religion of love – think again. Long before the Nazis did it, as Anthea Butler shows us, Southern Christianity transformed Christianity from a religion of peace into a religion of master, slave, punishment and obedience. Slavery’s leading apologists were predominantly clergymen.

Today a vast army of self-appointed “prophets,” “intercessors,” preachers, influencers, talking heads, “patriots,” and megachurch pastors reshape, distort, censor, edit, and transform Christianity into an unrecognizable goulash of hate and authoritarianism. Political power is their god, and “sincere religious belief” is a convenient Constitutional shield for systematically creating a theocracy from the corpse of Jeffersonian democracy.

For the moment this extremist minority has the wind in their sails and the Supreme Court in their pocket. I hope what’s left of our democracy will survive their assaults.

In Massachusetts a major player in the well-financed assault on secular institutions, public health, diversity, and science is the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI), a Christian Dominionist organization that, together with its daughter project Massachusetts Informed Parents (MIP), is involved in various skirmishes in the Culture War.

In a 2022 interview on Red Pill Politics, MFI’s Director of Community Alliances Michael King, described MFI as a local affiliate of Focus on the Family (FOF), a fundamentalist Christian organization created by James Dobson. FOF has affiliates like MFI in 32 states and in 2018 declared itself a church. MFI is a member of the Family Policy Alliance, Focus on the Family’s national network of conservative Christian-right state groups.

MFI’s astroturf group Massachusetts Informed Parents was originally a Facebook group but now functions as a separate entity with its own Substack blog. MIP offers Christian conservatives a checklist for attacking schools and libraries and maintains a book banning list. MIP/MFI is categorically opposed to sex education in schools and advocates not education but counsels abstinence. When MFI is not counseling parents to homeschool their children, they are laser-focused on turning public schools into mirrors of the private Christian academies they send their children to.

MFI, working closely with the right-wing legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom, First Liberty Institute, and the New Civil Liberties Alliance, has won some well-fought victories by intimidating municipal government officials. However, when it throws its considerable weight behind ballot initiatives it has not always had the same success in convincing Massachusetts voters that they need more religion in their schools, bedrooms or legal system.

This disparity in success may explain the far-right’s, and in particular the GOP’s, focus on municipal elections. It’s much easier to make political gains when town governments, who are barely able to pay the bills thanks to tax limits like Proposition 2 ½, often have to make the tough call that fighting religious bigotry is just too expensive.

Organizational Structure

MFI, Inc. was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) with EIN 04-3113783 in 1990 as the Pilgrim Family Institute, changing its name to the Massachusetts Family Institute in 1994. A related organization, MFI Action Inc., was incorporated in 2008 as a 501(c)(4) non-profit with EIN 00-0974938 and was dissolved in 2014. MFI’s 2019 Form 990 filing, the most recent on the IRS website, shows donations of $623,050. ProPublica’s nonprofit search tool shows donations in 2021 of $904,875. Despite MFI’s support of anti-vaxxers and it defense of the Christian “right” to let unvaccinated children infect others, MFI applied for and received $59,514 in COVID Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds from the federal government.

Leadership and Staff

MFI’s president Andrew Beckwith serves as an attorney with the “Christian liberties” law group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). MFI staff members include: Michael King, Director of Community Alliances, who who has a degree in “Christian Leadership” from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, believes democracy must be based on the Bible, and developed MFI’s program to inspire Christians to engage with their local government leaders and inspire Biblical decisions to be made”; Sam Whiting, who also works for the ADF: Mary Ellen Siegler, who runs the MFI-directed astroturf group Massachusetts Informed Parents, and together with her husband Bill runs Chosen People Ministries, a Messianic sect that tries to convert Jews to Christianity – despite MFI’s stated mission of “affirming Judeo-Christian values”; Mariah Newell, Communications and Social Media Specialist and former intern with the Family Research Council; Marci Anthony, Education Research Assistant and Christian home-schooler; and several others who are co-pastors churches with their husbands.

Related Organizations

While MFI’s pro-life and far-right connections are extremely broad, MFI’s National Allies page lists only its links to Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, and the First Liberty Institute. Still, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designates the first three of these as anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups.

MFI’s president Andrew Beckwith is an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), whose vice chair is Robert H. Bradley of the Bradley Family Foundation. Beckwith is also associated with the Renew Massachusetts Coalition, a 501(c)(4) corporation that targets legislators, as well as the anti-abortion Legal Defense Fund. Other MFI board members include Ray Ruddy, who is affiliated with the Renew Massachusetts Coalition, Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action, both in Fredericksburg, VA, and whose fellow board members include Scott Walker and Leonard Leo. During the Obama administration Ruddy funded a series of hoax videos attacking Planned Parenthood and accusing Obama of “infanticide.”

Besides Beckwith, MFI’s staff attorney Sam Whiting also works for ADF. Whiting attended George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, later becoming an Alliance Defending Freedom Blackstone Fellow, a program created by ADF to put Christian lawyers into “positions of influence, thereby impacting the legal culture and keeping the door open for the Gospel.” Other Fellows include Josh Hawley and Amy Coney Barrett.

ADF was incorporated in 1993 by Christian Dominionist Bill Bright, who also founded Campus Crusade for Christ; Larry Burkett, an evangelical financial advisor; James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries; Marlin Maddoux, a Christian radio personality; and Alan Sears, former director of the Meese Commission.

ADF attorneys have argued a number of cases before the Supreme Court, including cases about religion in public schools, the Affordable Care Act, the legalization of same-sex marriage, business owners’ right to not provide services for same-sex marriages, and prayers before town meetings. ADF lawyers wrote the model for Mississippi’s anti-abortion legislation involved in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that overruled the fifty-year-old precedent case Roe v. Wade establishing the right to abortion. ADF was also responsible for the recent 303 Creative v. Elenis case, which legalized religious bigotry against LGBTQ+ citizens. ADF was also involved in a scheme with the discredited American College of Pediatricians to use anti-LGBTQ+ “junk science” to “substantiate” many of ADF’s anti-LGBTQ+ talking points and provide “medical” justification for interpreting Title IX to exclude gender-identity protections for trans students in several states.

Besides ADF, MFI frequently works with First Liberty Institute, a group that works to insert Christianity into government. The First Liberty Institute argued the Kennedy v Bremerton case before a friendly Supreme Court, a case in which a football coach coerced his teenage players to pray with him at the 50 yard line. MFI also works with the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a group which opposes student debt forgiveness, the existence of the CFPB, protections for renters, and regulation of bump-stocks. MFI supports the interests of and is supported by deep pocket right-wing foundations like the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, the Bradley Foundation, and dozens more. MFI has also partnered with Child and Parent Rights, another legal attack group that “defends parents’ right to secure their children against the social contagion and harms caused by gender identity ideology, providing legal representation before administrative agencies and state and federal courts.”

Opposing abortion

Though the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, which once made abortion legal throughout the U.S., the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution still provides that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Following the Dobbs ruling states rushed to pass laws to protect abortion, and Massachusetts has a bunch of them. In 2020 when a budget amendment with an abortion amendment in it came up for a vote, MFI labelled it the “Infanticide Act.”

And though the Christian right has had to accept the laws of the Commonwealth, it has still found creative ways to subvert them. Besides calling for bans of books that mention abortion, curriculum mentioning it, creating fake abortion clinics that prevent women from receiving actual medical care, or cheering the ban on the interstate shipment of mifepristone, the MFI is also trying to reframe their own opposition to abortion as “feminism.”

In 2022 MFI’s Andrew Beckwith joined with others from the Christian right to “modernize” the “pro-life” movement. CNN’s Elle Reeve visited MFI and spoke with MFI supporters trying pass off anti-abortion as “feminism.” According to this narrative, “consequence-free sex” places the burden of pregnancy on women and “we’ve really let men off the hook.” Therefore, regardless of what the pregnant woman herself wants, the man involved in the pregnancy must be forced to accept its consequences by banning abortion. Even as MFI supports a MAGA Republican agenda committed to slashing the social safety net, its faux feminists argue for a system where women give up individual liberties in exchange for expanding the social safety net, for example by bolstering programs and laws like parental leave.

Men are the real victims here, characterized by Beckwith as devalued by society. But MFI believes there is nothing more ennobling to men than marriage. Unmarried yet sexually active men ought to be forced into marriage by abortion bans, Beckwith says, “We believe men should be responsible and be fathers and not use abortion as a kind of after-the-fact contraception or get-out-of-jail-free card.” He says that banning abortion will make men more responsible as fathers and will “restore the culture to where fatherhood is valued and [will] give them something better than just video games and Netflix.” Reeve then asks Beckwith to clarify his ideological goulash: “I just don’t see why I have to give something up so that men can be better people. […] What if you made policy to address the man problem that [actually] addressed the man problem directly?” To this Beckwith had no answer, so it was up to the Christian ladies interviewed to try to explain.

Defending Fake Abortion Clinics

Fake Abortion Clinics, sometimes called “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs), operate in more than 30 locations in the Commonwealth. They mislead patients about abortion and are not held to patient confidentiality standards because they are not actually medical clinics. One in New Bedford is literally on Catholic church property. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 71% of crisis pregnancy centers “use deceptive means such as spreading thoroughly debunked misinformation” and 38% fail to disclose on their websites that they do not provide abortion care.

In 2021 Connecticut passed a law regulating CPCs. The state was then sued by lawyers from the ADF, MFI’s sister organization. In January ADF and the state attorney general agreed to Connecticut’s stipulation it would not enforce the law, thus dismissing the suit. MFI is now attempting the same in Massachusetts.

In July 2022 Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey warned patients to be careful when seeking reproductive health care. “While crisis pregnancy centers claim to offer reproductive healthcare services, their goal is to prevent people from accessing abortion and contraception,” Healey wrote. “In Massachusetts, you have the right to a safe and legal abortion. We want to ensure that patients can protect themselves from deceptive and coercive tactics when seeking the care they need.” Healey had also warned Abundant Hope Pregnancy Resource Center in Attleboro that the center could be held accountable for violating people’s civil rights by “interfering, or attempting to interfere, with the exercise of the constitutionally protected right to access abortion care in Massachusetts.” The fake clinics were incensed.

MFI’s Beckwith, partnering with the First Liberty Institute, a hardball Christian legal outfit, wrote to Healey, warning her that “Your office’s hostility against our clients’ religious beliefs raises serious concerns that you intend to take legal action against our clients in violation of their constitutional rights…”

In 2023 the legislature held hearings on “An Act to protect patient privacy and prevent unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services.” This legislation protects patient privacy and prevents unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services. It also allocates $1 million to informing the public about the risks of fake clinics. Predictably, MFI has ratcheted up its rhetoric on the legislation, calling legislators’ efforts to protect women from medical misinformation and proselytizing a “gag order.”

On July 5th in Easthampton, the City Council approved an addition to town ordinances that would have explicitly prohibited city employees from assisting another municipality in the prosecution of a person seeking an abortion in Easthampton. The ordinance would also have protected women from being preyed upon by fake clinics.

As recognized in M.G.L. c. 12 § 11I ½ access to reproductive health care services and gender-affirming health care services is a right secured by the constitution and laws of the commonwealth. Interference with this right, whether or not under the color of law, is against the public policy of the commonwealth and of the City. [¶] This ordinance is promulgated pursuant to the City’s power to ensure the health, safety and welfare of the citizens and is intended to provide more stringent protections than those afforded by the Laws of the Commonwealth or the United States of America.

But, for the first time since being elected in 2017, Easthampton Mayor Nicole LaChapelle vetoed the ordinance, clearly intimidated by organizations like MFI and the ADF: “Even with our City Solicitor assuring the ordinance’s legal merit, we know it will face legal challenges by well-funded organizations intent on limiting the rights of women and the LGBTQIA+ community.” An override attempt failed when one City Councillor changed his vote, another abstained from voting, and a third was absent. MFI took a victory lap. The mayor had caved to extremists who didn’t even need to lift a finger to get her to do it.

Opposing same-sex marriage

The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), Public Law 104-199, was a federal law that explicitly denied same-sex couples the right to marry by creating an arbitrary definition of marriage. The law was signed by President Bill Clinton and remained in force from 1996 to 2013. As it became obvious that DOMA was highly discriminatory and increasingly likely to be ruled unconstitutional, the Christian right began furiously cranking out amicus briefs in support of DOMA. In Massachusetts, same-sex marriage has been legal since May 17, 2004 because of the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling in Goodridge v Department of Public Health that denying same-sex couples the right to marry violates equal protection of the laws and due process, thereby violating the Massachusetts Constitution.

In 2005, fundamentalist preacher Roberto S. Mirando, then- MFI President Kris Mine, and Robert H. Bradley of the Bradley Family Foundation and vice-chair of MFI, attempted to create their own Massachusetts version of DOMA legislation. They filed papers with the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) to create a ballot initiative, votonmarriage.org, to promote a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. MFI as an organization also contributed over $82,000 to the campaign.

VoteOnMarriage was accused of forgery and bait-and-switch tactics to obtain fraudulent signatures. There were numerous complaints of improper actions by paid signature gatherers. According to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, “Angela McElroy of Florida, who until recently was a paid signature gatherer, is expected to testify on what she encountered during her 2-1/2 weeks working in Massachusetts. She said in an interview with the Telegram & Gazette that she saw one co-worker forge signatures from the petition to allow beer and wine sales in grocery stories to the petition that would put the same-sex marriage issue on the ballot. She said she also observed some gatherers induce voters to sign one petition and then slipped the second petition underneath and asked them to sign that paper without telling them what they were signing.” Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly launched a criminal investigation of the forgeries. VoteOnMarriage pushed back, describing the allegations as the work of “homosexual activists” who simply didn’t want to see the petition succeed.

In 2011, writing that “MFI is concerned with the untold consequences same-sex ‘marriages’ will have on American society, moral principles, and the family,” MFI filed an amicus brief, arguing that the Supreme Court failed to consider Minnesota’s Baker v Nelson case, which ruled that there is no fundamental right to same-sex marriage under the Ninth Amendment or the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Christian Right continued losing state after state on same-sex marriage. With Obergefell v Hodges in 2015 a very different Supreme Court from ours today ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to license same-sex marriages and to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.

Promoting Gay Conversion

Gay Conversion “Therapy” is – in the words of the American Psychological Association – NOT therapy. It is a harmful and ultimately ineffective attempt to apply ideological and religious pressure on a person to change their sexual or gender orientation and expression. Experts with the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration say it is “coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment.”

Conversion “therapy” is opposed by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, American Association of School Administrators, American College of Physicians, American Counseling Association, American Federation of Teachers, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychoanalytic Association, American Psychological Association, American School Counselor Association, American School Health Association, Interfaith Alliance Foundation, National Association of School Psychologists, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Association of Social Workers, National Education Association, Pan American Health Organization, and School Social Work Association of America.

But what do they know?

In 2019 Massachusetts became the 16th state to ban Conversion “therapy.” House bill H.140, An Act relative to abusive practices to change sexual orientation and gender identity in minors, passed both houses of the legislature and was signed into law by the then-Republican governor, but not before MFI mobilized the Christian Right to testify against it. MFI President and General Counsel Andrew Beckwith told the press with a straight face, “Some legislators don’t understand that the focus is on eliminating any counseling options that don’t affirm a LGBT-centric view of human sexuality.”

Defending discrimination of school children

In Middleboro, Massachusetts middle schooler Liam Morrison came to school one day with a t-shirt that read “there are only two genders.” While it might have been slightly more accurate to say “there are only two sexes,” even that is not quite true, as there are intersex people, those with chromosomal differences, people whose external sex characteristics don’t match their genetics, and so on. But where “gender” is concerned, Christian fundamentalists absolutely reject modern definitions of gender as vehemently as they reject the Theory of Evolution.

But here’s what Merriam-Webster has to say about gender:

“Among those who study gender and sexuality, a clear delineation between sex and gender is typically prescribed, with sex as the preferred term for biological forms, and gender limited to its meanings involving behavioral, cultural, and psychological traits. In this dichotomy, the terms male and female relate only to biological forms (sex), while the terms masculine/masculinity, feminine/femininity, woman/girl, and man/boy relate only to psychological and sociocultural traits (gender). This delineation also tends to be observed in technical and medical contexts, with the term sex referring to biological forms in such phrases as sex hormones, sex organs, and biological sex. But in nonmedical and nontechnical contexts, there is no clear delineation, and the status of the words remains complicated.”

So when Liam Morrison marched into school with his obnoxious t-shirt, he was presenting his “sincere religious belief” that gender only means sex. Morrison’s case is currently being appealed by MFI and ADF, and it is likely he will eventually prevail because he most certainly has a First Amendment right to his parents’ and pastor’s opinion.

To his school’s credit, it recognized that Morrison’s t-shirt was, besides being a limited interpretation of gender, mainly intended to offend, marginalize, and harm fellow non-binary students who do not rigidly identify with their biological sex. A study by UCLA’s Williams Institute estimates that in the United States alone there are 1.2 million non-binary people, the majority of whom are under 29 years of age. According to the UCLA study, life for teens who identify as non-binary is not easy. Thus the care Morrison’s school took to ban the t-shirt was intended to reduce injury to other students:

“Tables A.4 – A.10 provide information about stress experiences of nonbinary LGBTQ people. These data show that a majority of nonbinary people were hit, beaten, physically attacked, or sexually assaulted (55%) at some points since they were 18 years old (Figure 5). Also, most felt that they were less respected (54%) than other people over the year prior to being interviewed. Many suffered chronic stressors, including not having enough money to make ends meet (68%), feeling mentally and physically tired because of their job (68%), being alone too much (56%), and having strained or conflicted relationships with their parents (60%). Nonbinary LGBTQ adults also experienced stress in childhood (before age 18, Figure 6), including emotional (82%), physical (40%), and sexual (41%) abuse. More than one in ten nonbinary people (11%) had gone through conversion therapy to change their sexual orientation (cis LGBQ respondents) or gender identity (transgender respondents).”

One can only hope that, following Morrison’s likely First Amendment victory, other students in his school will be permitted to wear t-shirts bearing their First Amendment-protected opinion of Morrison, just as he did of them.

Sponsoring Anti-Trans Legislation

In 2016 the Renew MA Coalition, a right-wing lobbying group, created an anti-trans “Bathroom bill” campaign, Keep Massachusetts Safe, whose goals were “protecting the privacy rights and right to safety of all Massachusetts citizens, particularly women and children by preserving lawfully sex-segregated facilities based on biological and anatomical sex.” The ballot initiative was intended to repeal Chapter 134 of the Acts of 2016, which protects transgender rights. Over three years MFI donated over $104,000 to Renew MA’s unsuccessful “Bathroom bill” and was neck-deep in both ballot and legal efforts to deny civil rights to trans people.

In 2018 Question 3 asked Massachusetts voters to reject a law signed by Governor Charlie Baker in 2016 that expanded the state’s existing nondiscrimination protections for transgender people to include public accommodations such as bathrooms and locker rooms. Existing law already protected transgender residents from discrimination in housing and the workplace. Christian groups came out in force to oppose Question 3, but despite MFI’s misinformation and scare tactics, Question 3 affirmed trans rights in Massachusetts by a 67% majority. Not one county in the Commonwealth wanted to turn back the clock and strike a civil right. Once again, when put to the voters, MFI’s bigotry was rejected.

In 2022 MFI partnered with Child and Parental Rights, a legal attack group, to sue the Ludlow School Committee and Superintendent, as well as the Principal, guidance counselor, and librarian of the Baird Middle School for failing to disclose to two sets of parents of 11 year-old middle schoolers that their non-binary children were using both pronouns and sex-segregated bathrooms not matching the sex on their birth certificates. The school attempted to follow DESE guidance on non-discrimination on the basis of gender. One of the students was quite clear with their friends and teachers about their identity:

“Hello everyone, If you are reading this you are either my teacher or guidance counselor. I have an announcement to make and I trust you guys with this information. I am genderqueer. Basically, it means I use any pronouns (other than it/its). This also means I have a name change. My new name will be R. Please call me by that name. If you deadname me or use any pronouns I am not comfortable with I will politely tell you. I am telling you this because I feel like I can trust you. A list of pronouns you can use are: she/her he/him they/them fae/faerae/aer ve/ver xe/xem ze/zir. I have added a link so you can look at how to say them. Please only use the ones I have listed and not the other ones. I do not like them. Thank you. R.”

DESE guidance suggests that transgender and gender-nonconforming students may not be open about their gender identities at home because of safety concerns or lack of acceptance. For those reasons, teachers in the state should speak with the students prior to discussing their gender identity with their parents. But state law (603 CMR 23) referenced in the lawsuit also gives parents of children under 14 complete control over school records and communications with guidance counselors and teachers. The legal distinctions here are that, while information was not explicitly denied to the parents, it was withheld out of concern for the safety of the children. Only when one teacher sent an email to parents – actually a legal violation in itself – did the parents discover their children’s non-binary identities.

Both sets of parents regard their children’s identities as a mental illness and their complaint is framed as the school’s neglect in informing them of a mental problem. The MFI suit references this in the complaint that the defendants “In reckless disregard of Plaintiffs Foote’s and Silvestri’s parental rights to make mental health decisions for their children […] Said Baird Middle School staff did not notify Plaintiffs Foote and Silvestri of these conversations, but instead followed the Protocol to conceal this information from B.F.’s parents” MFI’s Beckwith told The Boston Globe, “By deliberately circumventing the authority of parents over the mental health and religious beliefs of their children, activists at the Ludlow schools are violating time-honored rights guaranteed under the US Constitution and the Massachusetts Constitution.”

And how was all this framed in the right-wing media’s headlines? “Parents Allege a Massachusetts Middle School Carried Out Secret Gender Transitions on Children.”

But as one summary of the complaint shows, the lawsuit’s prime objective was to completely hobble any support for non-binary and LGBTQ+ children in the schools:

“The complaint seeks a declaration that teachers and staff may not facilitate a child’s social transition to a different gender identity without parental notification. A declaration is also sought that the related school protocol and associated policies and procedures are to be publicly rescinded. [..] The complaint seeks a preliminary and permanent injunction that stops school officials from using the protocol and related rules as guidance for Ludlow Public Schools. The proposed injunctions would stop any training of staff to exclude parents in discussions related to their children’s gender identify, and require notification of parents should that topic arise in the school setting. The proposed injunctions would stop school officials from ignoring parental instructions about gender identify, and stop any meeting with children to discuss gender identify unless parents are notified.”

Opposing Sex Education

Although there are over 20 million LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. alone, and though a 2020 Pew Research poll shows that 72% of Americans believe that “homosexual relationships should be accepted by society,” the Massachusetts Family Institute believes otherwise and its bigotry is reflected as well in its views on sex education.

To MFI any sort of secular sex education amounts to “indoctrination and sexualization,” particularly if it concerns non-heterosexual relationships, gender, or sexuality. MFI supports abstinence education or “sexual risk avoidance,” an ineffective form of indoctrination the Guttmacher Institute recommends that the Federal government stop funding.

As part of Focus on the Family, MFI recommends a “biblically holistic approach” to sex ed, which insists on heterosexuality, rigid sex roles, and instead of science relies on scripture. If MFI is appalled by secular sex ed, secular parents will be left scratching their heads by this: “We want our children to understand that the Bible begins in Genesis with the marriage of a man and a woman and ends in Revelation with the marriage of Christ and the Church (Revelations 19:7).” How does such “curriculum” deal with teenage sexual feelings? It teaches about “David who looked lustfully at Bathsheba and sinned, and Joseph who ran from Potiphar’s wife when tempted.”

In 2019 MFI’s Director of Community Alliances, Michael King, joined with predominantly Hispanic church leaders in Worcester to oppose a local implementation of state educational frameworks with Planned Parenthood materials, the Proud Choices curriculum. Members of King’s church alliance outnumbered secular supporters and wanted their children to be taught abstinence and marriage, objecting particularly to the Proud Choices curriculum, which is intended for older students likely to engage in risky sexual behavior and includes references to contraception, pregnancy, abortion, and STDs. A 2022 study of the Proud Choices curriculum funded by the U.S. Department of Health found a couple of things MFI might actually appreciate: students who used the curriculum were more confident refusing sex and overall they had less sex. However, students had been given facts rather than bible stories.

MFI’s biblical orientation holds no sympathy for teens discovering they are gay, trans or non-binary, or for the needs of their parents. In 2013 MFI’s president Andrew Beckwith authored a piece in Public Discourse, a journal of the Witherspoon Institute which funded a discredited study on LGBTQ+ parenting which pronounced gay parents unfit. Beckwith sputtered that in 2011 Massachusetts prohibited discrimination in public schools on the basis of gender identity. He went on to attack non-discrimination by appealing neither to logic nor to law – rather to personal bigotry: “As lawyers, we perceive the logic of this latest regulatory innovation. But as fathers, we think that those who are dismayed by MDOE’s regulations are the only Massachusetts residents who can plausibly claim to be in their right minds.”

In 2023 newly-elected (and quite “out”) Governor Maura Healey observed that the state’s sex ed standards had not been updated since 1999, did not even require the subject to be taught, and were deficient in a number of areas. Healey proposed a series of updates that were realized in both legislation and a new Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) Health and Physical Education Framework. The legislation has broad support in both the House and Senate as well as from the Healthy Youth Coalition, and the DESE draft is a vast improvement over the quarter-century old non-standard. Among the DESE framework components guaranteed to upset MFI are sexuality, gender, consent, and contraception. Even though the accompanying legislation gives parents an opt-out and communities freedom to tailor the curriculum, MFI has launched a vicious attack on the standards.

Adoption of the legislation will not be easy. It has been filed repeatedly for over a decade and has died several times in the legislature, usually because of pressure from MFI and its sister organizations.

Defending questionable educational and counseling standards

In 2021 Vida Real Church in Somerville applied to open a private school, the Real Life Learning Center (RLLC), submitting an application to Somerville’s Subcommittee for Educational Programs. According to the director, Pastor Luis Morales, “The mission of Real Life Learning Center is to lead the student into a deep, personal, and growing relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. Everything else is secondary.”

With “everything else secondary” the Somerville subcommittee had good reason to inquire more deeply into what, besides Lord Jesus, students would be learning. After sending a list of 35 questions to the school, the school forwarded them to Andrew Beckwith at the MFI instead of replying to the Board. Initially, then, the school’s approval was denied.

One subcommittee member, Sara Dion, had specific unanswered concerns: the school’s policy of admitting only Christian students; teaching creationism instead of science; the school’s position on homosexuality and its implications for health education; the school’s approach to student services and counseling based on a belief that mental illness is caused by sin and demons; and its methods of discipline being “Biblically” based (Rods? Stoning?)

Dion was apparently the only subcommittee member asking about the implications of such mis-education and her questions were perceived as hostile by MFI and the First Liberty Institute, who served notice on the Somerville Public School Committee. In the end all but Dion voted to approve the school’s application. A combination of cowardice combined with state laws that give priority to religion over sound educational principles had doomed Somerville’s ability to say no to a school that believes “everything else is secondary” to religious indoctrination.

Opposing COVID restrictions

During the height of the COVID pandemic, the Commonwealth issued a number of emergency public health directives. Different classes of organizations and enterprises were required to adhere to different restrictions, As the pandemic waned in severity, newer directives began relaxing those restrictions, though not always in the order or at a pace the public liked. Order 66 rescinded Order 45 but did not phase out limitations altogether, a decision based on the typical number of people, and density, in a given enterprise. This irked New Bedford’s New Life Church, which also objected to the way the New Bedford Health Department calculated occupant density. In 2021, at the request of New Life’s pastor Marco DeBarros, MFI and the First Liberty Institute sued both Governor Charlie Baker and New Bedford mayor Jon Mitchell, claiming that “where less onerous COVID-19-related regulations suffice for comparable secular activities, those same regulations [ought to] suffice for religious activities. Massachusetts’ regulations fail this standard. The regulations make it easier to meet at Applebee’s or an AMC theater than at New Life. This cannot stand.” Ultimately MFI prevailed.

Opposing common-sense infectious disease measures

And of course MFI opposes COVID vaccinations. For years Massachusetts has irresponsibly granted religious exemptions to vaccination against diseases like diptheria, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, smallpox, and chickenpox, The religious right has never believed your child’s health was just as important as their “sincere religious beliefs.” Now a bill in the legislature, An Act promoting community immunity (S.1458), will strengthen and modernize tracking of both immunizations for infectious disease and exemptions to the vaccinations. Contrary to MFI’s misinformation, parents can still pursue exemptions; however they will be processed by the Department of Public Health and not a school nurse. And more importantly the legislation drops religious exemptions for these potentially fatal diseases – some of which have returned with a vengeance. Parents will now have to show a valid medical reason for not immunizing their children if they want to place them in a congregational public setting (like a classroom) with other children. MFI is suing.

Spreading conspiracy theories about COVID tracking

In 2022 the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a right-wing legal advocacy group, filed a class action lawsuit against the Massachusetts Department of Health, claiming that it had conspired with Google to covertly install a COVID tracking app on one million Android phones. During the pandemic there were many downloadable apps that used bluetooth to gather proximity data from other devices with similar software. The idea was, if you developed COVID you could alert a health authority and those who had come into contact with you would be alerted to a potential risk. The concept relied on widespread user downloads and installation.

The Massachusetts Department of Health, together with Apple and Google, offered such an app called MassNotify, which was used by 3.2 million users, of whom 1.8 million were notified of potential exposure to COVID. New Civil Liberties Alliance charged that the Massachusetts DOH was pushing the app onto Android devices, as opposed to via user-initiated downloads. An article in the online tech journal Ars Technica showed that the state had no role in the rollout but that Google had indeed used push installs to add a tracking code stub (not a full-featured app) to Android’s alert mechanism. Users of Google Android had discovered one more problem with their insecure mobile operating system. Ignoring facts and nuance, MFI’s Andrew Beckwith huffed that this was “yet another example of government bureaucrats using the COVID hysteria to run roughshod over clear Constitution rights.”

Defending Crime, Autocracy, and Insurrection

In 2019 Christianity Today published an editorial entitled “Trump Should be Removed from Office.” The centrist magazine argued that Trump’s temporal actions were illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral; that his Twitter feed was a “near perfect example” of a human being “morally lost and confused.” The editorial acknowledged the political opportunism behind evangelical support of Trump, but the “impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.”

Greater Boston interviewed Evangelicals to get their view on the influential magazine’s charges. MFI’s Andrew Beckwith didn’t mind if Trump was an immoral criminal. His take was that Evangelicals had no choice but to choose an immoral criminal who was likely to destroy American democracy – as long as Trump delivered to the 200 Evangelicals he cited. Beckwith then reduced it all to abortion, saying evangelicals had to weigh Trump’s three ex-wives against 60 million “murdered children” since the beginning of Roe v Wade. Beckwith ended his Trump apologetics by fully embracing authoritarianism when he replied that MFI was above partisan politics, even democracy, smiling and pointing out that Jesus was a monarchist who was the “King of Kings, Lord of Lords.” Which is just what a Christian Dominionist would say.

And now you know who MFI is.

As many are aware, anti-abortion organizations have begun setting up fake abortion clinics, such as the Crossroads Pregnancy Center in Georgia, a state with over 90 such “clinics,” in an attempt to prevent women from receiving actual health care.

These “crisis centers” or “fake clinics,” as reproductive rights advocates call them, deceptively advertise medical services but offer none, use strong-arm tactics including releasing or threatening to release personal information to third parties, and frequently engage clients in counseling and religious proselytization well into late stage pregnancy in order to make the abortion impossible. National organizations like SPARK, ReproAction, and Abortion Access Front have exposed these clinics for what they are and Massachusetts bills S.174 and H.377 thankfully put legal protections for women into law.

The Massachusetts Joint Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure will hold hearings tomorrow that will include testimony on Senate Bill S.174 (also filed as House Bill H.377), An Act to protect patient privacy and prevent unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services. The legislation is accompanied by an appropriations component found in House Bill H.57, An Act making appropriations for the Fiscal Year 2023 to provide for supplementing certain existing appropriations and for certain other activities and projects.

Besides legal protections for women, the appropriations bill specifies that “not less than $1,000,000 shall be expended for a public awareness campaign to educate providers and the public about so-called crisis pregnancy centers and pregnancy resource centers and their lack of medical services; provided further, that said campaign shall include information on the availability of providers across the commonwealth that provide legitimate medical and family planning services.”

Naturally, right-wing groups are up in arms. The Massachusetts Family Institute is rallying supporters to show up at tomorrow’s hearings. MFI takes great offense at the appropriations bill and has framed the legislation as an attack on Christian Nationalists’ First Amendment rights [to deceive women], calling it a “gag order.”

But this is first and foremost a health and consumer protection issue. These fake abortion clinics are as much a menace to public health as the guy who does liposuctions in his garage.

Please write to your legislator and to the Joint Committee to express your support for An Act to protect patient privacy and prevent unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services.

Last night’s Presidential campaign announcement by Ron DeSantis on Elon Musk’s “Twitter Spaces” was a hot mess. DeSantis, generations younger than Trump, no doubt thought social media was a cooler platform than descending a golden staircase.

But neither Musk nor DeSantis have much of what anyone could call a personality. And that was the campaign announcement’s first problem.

Musk also didn’t do Twitter any favors by showcasing his fragile, audio-only streaming platform, which crashed after only moderate demand. The “failure to launch” soon acquired its own hashtag: #DeSaster. Nevertheless, DeSantis supporters turned the technical disaster into a talking point – it crashed, they explained, because so many people love Ron and wanted to hear him that he just broke the Internet.

Like DeSantis, Musk too seems impervious to his own disasters. Not content to injure employees, kill people with his Tesla auto-pilot feature, or blow up his own spaceships, Musk acquired Twitter only to become the new Julius Streicher of social media and begin running the platform into the ground.

Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has re-platformed most of the Nazis and white supremacists who had previously run afoul of Twitter’s common decency standards, banned developers of the third party apps that made Twitter so popular and useful, abused his employees, tried gouging users with “verification” fees, caused half his advertisers to abandon the platform, and turned general incivility on Twitter into a riotous cesspool of hate.

So much so that Twitter is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from Parler, Gab, Telegram, or Truth Social. Whether out of disgust or principle, organizations, celebrities, politicians and ordinary people have started moving their Twitter accounts to Mastodon, BlueSky, Post.News, and elsewhere.

By now everyone is familiar with the political stunts of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, as well as the many pieces of authoritarian and White Christian-nationalist themed legislation he has signed. Needless to say, a Mussolini wannabe like DeSantis and a Nazi admirer like Musk are birds of a feather. And so were the few speakers permitted to join DeSantis’s campaign event.

DeSantis and Musk were joined by: Christopher Rufo, an evolution denier and enemy of critical race theory (which he claims is being taught to kindergartners); Jay Bhattacharya, signatory to the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated letting COVID run rampant to kill a certain percent of the population; Steve Deace, a Born-Again Blaze Media talk show host and election denier; Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican whose 2021 Christmas card depicted his whole family pointing assault rifles at the camera; Laura Ingraham, recently fired FOX hostess and white supremacist; Nate Silver, a well-known pollster who will soon be signing off fivethirtyeight.com and should have known better; Caitlyn Jenner, former Olympian, FOX News correspondent, and weirdly a MAGA trans woman who hates trans people; and Megyn Kelly, a former FOX News anchor.

So in case Twitter users hadn’t noticed before, Twitter is now another far-right platform. Last night’s campaign event, hosted by Musk himself, ought to dispel the last doubt. Progressive organizations still maintaining a Twitter account really need to do some soul-searching. Get out, get off, find something else.

Storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021 – Tyler Merbler (1/6/2021)

Past, Present, Future

Efforts to redress old wrongs and make the country a welcoming place for people of color, indigenous, gay, trans, and religious minorities are increasingly met with rage and violence by the American far-right. The very mention of minorities being denied a share of the American Dream immediately provokes Republicans to invoke so-called “divisive concepts.” Social justice has become such a dirty word for the GOP that they denigrate any effort to address racial and sexual injustices, whining instead that white people are the real victims of racism.

In the last century and a half, new history and new analyses have posed uncomfortable questions about our national origins, the nation’s many wars against black, brown and yellow people, and the dismal truth about Reconstruction. New analysis poses uncomfortable questions about a system that generates massive generational wealth for white Americans but denies people of color similar advantages. New studies shed light on the myriad systems that adversely affect people of color – housing, medical, education, police, prisons – and they document in detail how these systems work and how they are “broken” by design.

If you watched Senator Ted Cruz trying to put Judge Katanji Brown Jackson “in her place” during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, you surely heard the phrase “Critical Race Theory” or CRT. Republicans, who have adopted the white Christian Nationalist critique of scholarship challenging institutional racism, disparage CRT as the spawn of Marxists, atheists and “woke” academics who devised it expressly to make white school children cry.

You probably also heard Senators grilling Judge Jackson about gender, asking her for an open-ended definition of “woman” while accusing her of lenient sentences for child pornographers and being complicit with “child sexual predators” in the “grooming” of victims. Much of this is the stuff of QAnon conspiracies. Some is part of a White Christian Nationalist agenda that Republicans openly pursue. The rest is simply terror that America is changing – and the only tool that Republicans can think of to stop it is repression.

“Running the Negro Out of Tulsa” – The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Republicans lampoon books written to help white liberals understand how culture and privilege sustain structural racism. They ridicule books that simply explain how Black folks feel about life in a racist society. Although they may be read by white people who sometimes clumsily embark upon a bit of self-reflection, titles like Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an Anti-Racist” or Michael Eric Dyson’s “Tears We Cannot Stop” are dismissed by the white Christian Nationalist Party as malicious and “un-American.”

These blanket dismissals apply as well to popular and well-researched works: how laws have been written expressly to harm minorities (Richard Rothstein’s “The Color of Law“); how structural racism works in the criminal-legal system (Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow“); how racist concepts evolved to justify slavery and other forms of oppression (Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History of White People“); how America was founded on genocide and slavery (David E. Stannard’s “American Holocaust” or Kendi’s “Stamped from the Beginning“); and how, for every gain Black America makes, White America pushes back (Carol Anderson’s “White Rage“).

In fact, Anderson absolutely nails it in “White Rage.” White Christian Nationalists resent having themselves and their “Lost Cause” called out.

The ferocity of white Christian Nationalists “pushing back” includes banning or ensuring that books like those mentioned have no place in libraries or ever find their way into school curricula. Academics who conduct research, educators who design curriculum, public officials who turn new findings into policy, or legislators who address social justice issues – all now find themselves with targets on their backs, placed there by Republicans with their white Christian Nationalist agenda.

But none of this is new.

Early 20th Century writers like James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. DuBois, and mid-century writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin were widely-known and gave white Americans much to think about. They may have been literary giants but the wisdom of each was discounted. Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” (1962) was quickly savaged by American Conservatives, notably William F. Buckley who called the book a “poignant essay threatening the whites” and a call for “the end of Christian Civilization” and “morose nihilism.” White Christian Nationalism was alive and apparent in America’s best-known Gentleman Conservative of the day.

James Baldwin 1924-1987

In 1958 Lederer and Burdick’s “The Ugly American” created quite the stir when it challenged American motives, morality and competence as the U.S. began placing “advisors” in Vietnam. We still feel the divisions that the war in Viet Nam caused. Some people today will say “thank you for your service” to members of the military who were directly or indirectly responsible for killing as many as two million Vietnamese civilians. Others question if the services these servicemen and women rendered in questionable wars actually served any constructive purpose.

In 1968 the Kerner Report pointed out that we were moving inexorably toward two “separate but unequal” Americas, one Black, one white. The report pointed to structural and cultural racism in America and it angered white Americans, including many Liberals. In Chapter 4: Basic Causes, the report says bluntly, “… certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans. Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively in the past; it now threatens to do so again. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive m1965 mcixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”

Instead, most white Americans preferred to read about the supposed moral deficiencies of Black families in overtly racist reports such as the 1965 McCone Commission’s report on the Watts riots or the 1965 Moynihan Report, which laid blame on Black families and Black culture for their own mistreatment.

The 1619 Project is a collection of materials curated by Nikole Hannah-Jones and published by the New York Times which show how the United States was founded upon slavery and genocide. Like their book-banning German cousins, Florida explicitly bans 1619 Project materials. Instead, among the GOP-preferred 1776 Project’s recommended readings on race, curated by a private Christian university, is the old Moynihan Report.

Martin Luther King, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin were each disappointed with white liberals for being unreliable allies in a struggle for justice that can only succeed with dependable friends. Baldwin’s seven-hour discussion on race and society in 1970 with Margaret Mead was eventually transcribed into a book “A Rap on Race.” Yet for all of Mead’s considerable learning and Yankee sensibilities, her discussion with Baldwin revealed a white Liberal blindness to many aspects of racism and privilege. This is a blindness that extends from simply not “getting it” to complaisance in the face of white supremacy.

“Don’t say primate” – Scopes Trial Cartoon, Kirby, 1925

For as long the the United States has existed, facts, research, science, and statistics have all been at times inconvenient secular truths for some Americans. In 36 states we have regressed so far into the past that we have returned to the year 1925, when the state of Tennessee arrested a teacher, John Thomas Scopes, for violating the state’s Butler Act which criminalized the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

Those of us of a certain age remember Spencer Tracy playing a fictionalized Clarence Darrow in “Inherit the Wind,” pleading movingly for modernity and science. Perhaps because Darrow’s dialog was so moving, and perhaps because our founding myths always have a Hollywood ring to them, it’s easy to forget that Darrow actually lost the case. John Scopes was found guilty and the Butler Act remained on Tennessee’s books until 1968 when statutes violating the Establishment Clause were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. It took another decade for Tennessee itself to remove the statute.

The end of Creationism in the schools must have been a hard pill for white Christian Nationalists to swallow. And they have continued to chip away at the Establishment Clause.

It was just a matter of time before religious zealots and culture warriors came for the books in SouthCoast school libraries.

Last Spring Dartmouth had a MAGA school committee candidate who wanted to ban books. Recently, Fall River, Tri-Town (Rochester, Marion, Mattapoisett) and Little Compton, Rhode Island, all had run-ins with religious extremists, most of them sponsored by local Republican town committees.

PEN America, an association that fights for freedom of expression for writers, issued a timely report titled “Banned In the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools.” PEN has identified over 50 groups involved in censorship campaigns – a number of them listed as hate groups, including MassResistance – a bunch of haters from Waltham, Massachusetts.

Fall River

In Fall River, a group called the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property launched a “Rosary Rally” in Fall River:

On October 24th the “TFP” brought its “Rosary Rally” from Crazytown to Fall River. The group has a long list of policies and people they hate, thinks its antics constitute “spiritual warfare” and defends colonialism and forced conversion based on the “Right of Conquest.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has been watching this group of crackpots for a while and had this to say about them:

“Maybe the weirdest bunch in were from the American Society for Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), a self-described Catholic organization whose representatives seemed to be wearing red cloaks. The TFP table had a particularly noxious pamphlet – ’10 Reasons Why Homosexual ‘Marriage’ is Harmful and Must be Opposed’ – that argued that same-sex marriage ‘ignores a child’s best interests’ and that it ‘turns a moral wrong into a Civil Right.’ The pamphlet blamed same-sex marriage for forcing Christians to ‘betray their consciences by condoning … an attack on the natural order.’ Another TFP pamphlet warned hysterically about the dangers of ‘socialism,’ which, for some unknown reason, given our hyper-capitalist economy, they seem to think is on the march and targeting ‘traditional marriage’ and ‘parental rights.'”

Little Compton

In Little Compton, Rhode Island, the Little Compton Taxpayer’s Association, essentially a proxy for the GOP, sent out a homophobic, Q-Anon inspired campaign mailer asking recipients to vote a straight Republican (what else?) ticket.

Tri-Town (Marion, Mattapoisett, Rochester)

In the Tri-Town area at least two School Committee members are Christian nationalist MAGA supporters flogging “anti-CRT” nonsense and shouting at maximum volume, “They’re indoctrinating our children!”

Old Rochester school committee member Joe Pires and Rochester school committee member Anne Fernandes are also anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, anti-CRT, anti-gay, and (of course) anti-diversity. Posts from both deny that racism exists anywhere than in the hearts of nasty people. Apparently, the moment that Abraham Lincoln liberated slaves, all of America’s race problems simply disappeared magically.

Both of these idiots are up for re-election next year.

Recently, Pires condemned LGBTQ+ books at ORR as “pornographic.” From one side of his mouth Pires claimed to oppose banning books. But from the other he was still calling for, well, banning books:

Pires reposted a Hillsdale College livestream. As Kathryn Joyce pointed out in Salon magazine, Hillsdale is the sharp end of the assault on public schools by Christian Nationalists.

In coordinating his attack on district school libraries, Pires managed to violate Open Meeting laws by coordinating the attack with fellow committee member Anne Fernandes, a kindred spirit, on a Facebook group Pires founded called “Tri-Town Buzz.”

I located three of Pires’ Facebook accounts (this and this and this) and two of Fernandes’ (this and this). Fernandes seems to spend a fair amount of her time promoting an Evangelical church as well as many of the groups that PEN identifies as censorship organizations.

Pires is bad enough, but Fernandes is a real piece of work. In addition to her hate-filled posts about gay children and parents, Fernandes ignorantly dispenses conspiracy theories and just plain bad science. There are numerous examples of Facebook flagging her posts with the polite equivalent of “BS!”

Fernandes is just the sort of creature that Republicans love, which is why the Mattapoisett Republicans sponsored her talk at the local library:

At that October 27th presentation organized by the Mattapoisett Republicans, Fernandes worked from PowerPoint slides, claiming that librarians are indoctrinating children with “CRT” instead of history and passing themselves off as sex education teachers (she’s confusing them with teachers). And for an “expert” with 22 years of teaching, Fernandes seems completely clueless that LGBTQ+ kids are at risk and that books that represent them help.

For all her swearing up and down that she doesn’t believe in book banning — here are the books Fernandes wants to ban:

Efforts like Fernandes’ are part of a wider Republican campaign to gut public schools. In Arizona, gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (who is trailing Katie Hobbs with 79% of the vote counted) promised to scale back education on science, math, and history. North Carolina’s Christian Nationalist Lt. Governor, Mark Robinson, wants to ban science and history outright in elementary schools.

If science shines light on contagion and vaccination, and history sheds light on social ills that still plague us, it’s pretty clear what Christian Nationalists think of both. State legislation, especially in the South, has literally made it a crime to speak of sexual identity or racism in schools.

Moms for Liberty, one of the most vocal and fast-growing groups of Christian Nationalists attacking school districts, has teamed up with so-called “Constitutional Sheriffs” to investigate alleged “indoctrination” of children in the schools. The Claremont Institute, a MAGA think tank, is now offering Sheriff’s Fellowships to facilitate more muscular takeovers or compliance of school boards.

The right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), known for its dangerous legislation, is now targeting local school races. Its spin-off, the American City and County Exchange (ACCE), is now coordinating efforts with the GOP, Moms for Liberty, the Heritage Foundation, the DeVos family, and others to recruit and run candidates to take over local school boards.

The next right-wing school committee candidate your local Republican town committee sponsors will be amply funded and likely supported by not only locals but ACCE.

Community members fight back

One group fighting back is Tri-Town Against Racism. In response to the attempted book bans at ORR, TTAR circulated a petition which described the harms to children:

“Attempts to ban books highlighting underrepresented kids sends them the message: You shouldn’t exist; your story doesn’t matter and we don’t want our kids to empathize with you. This is a dangerous message which can result in grave consequences, like depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation. No child should feel like they are unworthy and undeserving of love and respect.”

The petition received tremendous support in the community, was signed by 631 people, and was presented to the superintendent — who apparently listened.

In a powerful letter to the New Bedford Light, Mattapoisett resident Nicole Demakis explained in more detail why access to books that conservatives find offensive is critically important to LGBTQIA kids:

“I believe it is imperative that we allow kids to have access to literature in our schools which represents a broad spectrum of experiences for those who may be struggling with identity, whether that be children of color, gay, straight, bi, asexual or transgender. It may be an uncomfortable truth for those who don’t understand other’s experiences growing up facing prejudice, confused about their feelings, being bullied, made fun of or excluded because that child does not understand who they are. Not to be cliché, but no one knows another’s reality until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes; and to discount that reality further by stigmatizing literature that may speak to them, but not you, is wrong. As an example of this, studies show that LGBTQIA youth are not inherently prone to suicide risk because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Rather, they are placed at a higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society.“

To raise the level of public debate on this issue, TTAR is holding the third of a series of Community Conversations on November 14th. You can sign up here.

In Fall River, United Against Hate is holding a similar Community Conversation About the Recent Rise in the South Coast of Book Banning, Drag Queen Story Time Protests And Hate Speech on November 16th. Contact United Neighbors of Fall River for a Zoom link.

In Rhode Island, Love Wins Coastal responded to the LCTA’s homophobic mailing with a rally in the Town Commons. One Democratic Rhode Island legislator, on her own initiative, joined in solidarity.

Democratic Party needs to start fighting

As much as I hate to say it, all these efforts by kind and caring people, including exemplary legislators acting independently, are still not enough. They are no match for the think tanks, the laboratories of repressive legislation, the rapidly spreading extremism, and the Republican Party itself.

Equality, diversity, education, race, history, libraries, free speech, and respect and acknowledgement of differences. These are today’s battlefields for Republicans.

It’s high time that local Democrats started fighting alongside the brave and lonely defenders who have been waging the Democratic Party’s battles for them.

The Democratic Party is the only thing standing in the way of the Republican Party replacing America with a Christian theocracy.

And that is an absolutely terrifying thought.

The geriatric Democratic Party leadership — faced with an ongoing Republican coup, a Christian nationalist Supreme Court, dramatic assaults on civil liberties and separation of church and state, a war in Ukraine, energy price spikes, galloping inflation, the possibility of a recession, and more mutations of the COVID virus — well, they’ve certainly had their hands full.

But they’re fighting a national five-alarm fire with a home extinguisher.

Rather than leveraging the tools of a government still in power, Democrats have refused to enforce party discipline on Democratic Senate free agents like Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema, abolish the filibuster, prosecute January 6th insurrectionists, expand the Supreme Court, or employ the considerable powers of the Presidency to preserve what’s left of American democracy. There is no presumptive Democratic candidate for President in 2024 and no apparent plan to replace the many geezers in Democratic House and Senate leadership roles.

There’s also no way Joe Biden can run and win the next presidential election. GOP hostility is a given, but many Democrats are worried that Biden & Co. are not up to the many challenges and disasters facing the country. Biden would be 82 if he actually began a second term as President. But who wants him? Not GOP voters, and not engaged progressive Democrats.

Merely competent, Biden has exhibited few of the leadership skills necessary to pull the country back from The Abyss. He is not a reassuring presence, as FDR or even Jimmy Carter were. His public addresses have been few and far between and he and the Democratic Party he leads have backtracked on almost every progressive promise ever made.

Right down the line — canceling student debt, expanding Medicare, enacting police reform, bolstering voting rights, shrinking the Pentagon budget — the Democratic House may have put on legislative dinner theater, but the Senate has done little to advance these bills. Is Chuck Schumer really less gifted than Mitch McConnell? Or is there simply a lack of will when it comes to full-throated support for Democratic policies like racial equity and abortion rights? — values once regarded as mainstream but now apparently too “far left” for some Democrats. A 2019 article in The Atlantic by Peter Wehner enumerates many of the fears of these Democrats who have internalized conservative claims that “self-styled progressives” from the “Far Left” are “taking over” the Democratic Party.

But that’s nonsense, say progressive Democrats. NY Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fires back on the “Far Left” label with: “The extreme left is taking over WHERE. In Texas, Republicans passed a law allowing rapists to sue their victims for getting an abortion. Can anyone name a ‘far left’ policy that extreme implemented anywhere? We can’t even get our party to import cheaper RXs from Canada.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s complaint raises the bigger issue that you can’t get Democrats to take strong action on even wildly popular issues. Take the worst of recent Democratic losses — abortion. Democrats lost abortion because they didn’t try hard enough to keep it.

For years Democrats refused to formalize abortion rights into law. Asked if his administration would fight for the Freedom of Choice Act — which he had promised to do as a candidate — President Obama told CNN senior White House correspondent Ed Henry that it “is not the highest legislative priority.” Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate was a long-time foe of abortion. Nancy Pelosi famously argued that “of course” you can be [both] a Democrat and against abortion.

Like Obama, the younger Biden also refused to support abortion rights. “I do not view abortion as a choice and a right. I think it’s always a tragedy,” Biden was quoted in a videotaped interview with Texas Monthly. “I think it should be rare and safe […] I think we should be focusing on how to limit the number of abortions.”

Even after the leak of the draft overturning Roe v Wade, the Democratic Party went out of its way to undermine pro-choice Democrat Jessica Cisneros in a primary contest with Henry Cuellar, an anti-abortion Democrat being currently investigated in an illegal scheme with Azerbaijani energy interests.

There’s no denying that budgets are expressions of priorities. While there never seems to be much money for the social safety net, expanding healthcare, subsidizing education, making vaccines available to poorer nations, or providing debt relief for our own students, somehow Democrats managed to scrounge together an extra $53 billion lying around the house to give to defense contractors for the Ukraine war. And the war is just getting started.

This is in addition to the record $800 billion Pentagon budget passed by a three-to-one majority by the Democrat-controlled House. Representative Andy Levin, a member of the Progressive Caucus, expressed his dismay: “On the whole, the National Defense Authorization Act exemplifies the basic fact that we spend far too much on military-first solutions and far too little on diplomacy and on human needs at home and around the globe.”

Even our foreign policy under a Democratic President has not departed considerably from that of the Trump administration. While Trump (and Bush before him) may have glimpsed a soul in Vladimir Putin’s eyes, Biden is no slouch when it comes to sucking up to autocrats and repressive regimes.

Biden’s recent hat-in-hand trip to the Middle East was an embarrassment. Instead of penalizing Israel for killing American-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, Biden gave it an extra billion dollars in military aid and agreed to restrict the rights of Americans who support boycotts against Israel’s Apartheid-style occupation of the West Bank. And by the time he got to Saudi Arabia, rather than sanctioning the Saudi regime for the gruesome murder of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, Biden allowed himself to be lectured by Khashoggi’s killer in order to extract Saudi concessions to produce more oil.

If Democrats think that they can run Biden or continue to limp along with leaders like Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer, and Clyburn, they are mistaken. Yet we are sure to hear that “now is not the time” to let a new crew steer the ship of state. Some new iteration of an uninspiring “Better Deal” or “Build Back Better” campaign will be unloaded on voters and we will be reminded how competently Democratic septuagenarians and octogenarians saved the economy from calamity and kept thousands from dying of COVID.

And they’re not totally wrong. But what American voters want is not mere competence but boldness. And here’s why.

The fact is, no one has much faith that American democracy as it now exists can survive with perpetual gridlock, such intense political divides, endless conflicts between state and federal courts and law, and ongoing assaults on people of color and sexual minorities. To this, throw in the fact that no solution to this stalemate is possible under our deeply flawed, deeply destabilizing, and deeply anti-democratic Constitution.

We are in the midst of a Constitutional crisis not so much because one party figured out how to sabotage it but because the Constitution itself is such a mess. Until this document is shredded and re-written, we can have no political stability.

And this is precisely why American voters are always seeking bold change instead of unexciting competence. Like it or not, setting fire to the country does constitute bold change. If Democrats want to compete, then, where are their bold ideas? Purposely thrown overboard as “too far left.”

I fear that the potential of the idealized “America” which most of us grew up with and truly love will be gone in a few years — permanently disfigured by Christian nationalists and abandoned by those who couldn’t bring themselves to fight harder to hold onto it.

If gerrymandering, voter suppression, Dark Money, the Electoral College, an equal number of Senators for states mammoth or tiny, an Imperial Presidency, or pardons for felons weren’t all bad enough for American democracy — now add the Supreme Court, where Christian Nationalists enjoy a 6-3 edge, thanks to a president who actually tried to stage a coup.

To say that democracy is hanging by a thread is total nonsense. We saw the last frayed thread a long time ago. The Court’s six radical Justices (Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts and Thomas) are now poised to polish off democracy for good.

When Judge Katanji Jackson ultimately replaces Breyer it should escape no one’s notice that an unelected Christian Nationalist majority will prevail over an all-woman and all-minority minority.

Just like America.

The Court has set about gutting even nominal democratic norms to create a veritable Gilead. States no longer have the right to regulate weapons and are obliged to dole out public money to religious schools. Citizens no longer have the right to be read their Constitutional rights by officers in a growing police state.

Legally, women are now Court-regulated wombs with no say over the most private of medical decisions. Instead, a fanciful and unscientific notion opposed by Jews, secularists and others insists that life begins at conception. With the overturn of Roe v. Wade expected at any moment, the Court has arrogated itself the right to make medical and scientific judgements.

If you thought 1692 marked the last of American witch trials you were wrong.

State courts are ready to prosecute abortionists and women who seek abortions. States have sanctioned vigilantes to report fellow citizens and offer bounties for tips if a woman is found guilty of even seeking an abortion. Even those who suffer miscarriages will now have their personal tragedies compounded by state and mob violence. There are now reasonable concerns that data from period tracking apps will be used as evidence in criminal prosecutions.

It remains to be seen if this totalitarian descent into a new chapter of witch trials will result in the lynching of abortionists or death sentences for women and health care providers.

But, given the mob and state violence that Christian nationalism has unleashed, we’d be foolish to rule it out.

Americans have become highly segregated into ideological silos. So much so that if they venture outside their comfort zone they feel endangered, queasy and agitated — as if they had strapped on a VR headset and were gazing into an unsettling virtual reality.

People on the Left and Center don’t spend a lot of time in right-wing virtual reality. And the reverse is true. The far-right certainly doesn’t place a high premium on science, verifiable fact or primary sources.

For example, you would be hard-pressed to find many Republicans who have actually read any of the authors of foundational texts on things they despise — like Critical Race Theory, for instance. Instead, they rely on a network of think tanks and crackpots to interpret and propagandize.

I mean, why read Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic — two of the founders of Critical Race Theory — when you can read the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who has a long history with far-right think tanks — and in one gig with the Discovery Institute promoted Creationism for a living?

Now, I am pretty sure my version of reality contains a bit more, well, reality than the right-wing’s virtual world. But it’s important to inform oneself. And not only do I trust primary sources over second-hand accounts, but I want to know what these people actually think, and why.

Just like liberals, the right-wing has its own news sources. FOX News may be the best-known, but any list should include Breitbart News, Epoch Times, WND, One America News, the Daily Signal, Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit, the Blaze, and a variety of Christian-ish news sources that offer everything from weather reports and dating advice to devotionals and End Times prophecy.

Then there are the social networks. Parenthetically, let me just say that it has been a huge mistake to “deplatform” right-wing crackpots by kicking them off Facebook and Twitter. These exiled “thought-leaders” have simply fled to right-wing social networks like Gab, Gettr, Parler, and Trump’s new (and still not working) Truth Social — dragging all their supporters with them, where they may be out of sight but are still very much out of their minds. Only, now it’s more difficult to track what they’re up to.

Platforms like Bitchute, Rumble, and PlayerFM host videos and podcasts that might not pass muster on mainstream media streaming services. The messaging program Telegram has also become a popular app for hosting far-right chat groups.

For those determined to keep a toe in the mainstream, YouTube is still an option for delivering content — unless the content creator is spreading COVID disinformation or raises some other flag. Some will just bite their tongues and show a little restraint in order to stay on Facebook and Twitter.

I signed up for Gettr, Parler, Truth Social and Telegram. Gab has been removed from both the Apple and Google stores so I couldn’t try it, and I was never able to actually use Truth Social because two months after signing up I’m still in a waiting queue.

Just like Facebook and Twitter, each turned out to be primarily an echo chamber for news and opinion pieces published elsewhere. The level of civility was no worse than on Facebook or Twitter. But far from being oases of free expression, right-wing social networks do censor liberal views. Trump Truth Social reportedly goes so far as to ban criticisms of Donald Trump.

I ultimately gave up on the right-wing social networks (as I did long ago with their mainstream cousins), instead turning my attention to news and opinion pieces from think tanks and news sources that manufacture (not simply echo) right-wing virtual reality and right-wing talking points.

One of these talking point on which I agree wholeheartedly is that social networks really do pose a problem to democracy with their censorship.

Not only have COVID disinformation spreaders and the most repellent of racists run afoul of censors, but so have socialists, commentators who may have appeared on Russian media at one time or another, foreign policy critics, supporters of the BDS movement, Israel critics, Russian artists and musicians, newspapers covering whatever there is to report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and those now falling victim to American social media’s new mission as a partisan in the West’s sanctioning of Russia.

But let’s not blame any one party for this. Censorship and forced political and social exile has been a bipartisan phenomenon as long as I’ve lived — and that’s a life that includes the McCarthy era.

Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine — despicable as it is — has led to the West pulling out all the stops to ban Russian anything and even snatching internet domains. The almost McCarthyite frenzy which Putin’s invasion has unleashed serves to remind us that internet freedom exists only at the pleasure of Western governments and their digital gatekeepers.

The fact that corporations have now become deputized agents of state policy should also shock us. Because if there is no daylight between the media and the state, or if the media is deeply “embedded” with the state (a phenomenon that the Iraq War highlighted), then it’s ultimately the state itself that is engaged in censorship.

That said, the American Right has never been more dangerous than it is today. It is truly an enemy of democracy and tolerance, and a racist and misogynistic force of repression that hasn’t given up on the idea of erasing any separation of church and state. And today, while those of us on the Left and Center bicker, all the far-right’s moving parts are firing in synch like pistons in a well-tuned V8 engine.

The final layer of right-wing opinion-shaping is a stunningly vast network of right-wing think tanks and well-funded foundations which include ALEC, Christian Coalition, Civics Alliance, Claremont Institute, Colson Center, Coolidge Foundation, Eagle Forum, Family Research Council, Federalist, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (!), FreedomWorks, Gingrich 360, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute, National Association of Scholars, National Legal Foundation, Pioneer Institute — and hundreds (if not thousands) more.

But don’t take my word for any of this. Follow the American right-wing yourself. Feedly is a great tool for following RSS feeds. Whenever a new article from any one of the 70 right-wing media outlets I follow is published, it appears in Feedly. If you want to start with my list, you can download my OPML configuration and import it into your own Feedly account or most any RSS reader.

Thankfully, there are a number of organizations that also follow the American Right. Some of the best are the Southern Poverty Law Center, Right Wing Watch, Political Research Associates, the Anti-Defamation League, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, the ACLU, and the NAACP.

Read them, donate to them, and take their warnings seriously. And — I won’t say “enjoy” — but good luck in your own explorations of right-wing virtual reality.

As I wrote in a previous post, many of the ideological battles we are having today were conceived in the war of words between abolitionists and apologists for the “peculiar institution” of slavery which raged in the decades before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Though they may be centuries apart, Republicans today share not only a similar world view but routinely employ polemics strangely similar to those of antebellum apologists for slavery.

Take, at random this Republican Party assessment of now-confirmed Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson: “she will act as a Far-Left activist judge and a rubber stamp for Biden’s woke agenda if confirmed.”

If anything, this sounds more like typical snark from right-wing members of Congress. But if you dive a little deeper into the choice of words it’s not just McCarthyite or Bircher vocabulary that the GOP is using. It’s a way of communicating a certain world view.

Whether Ketanji Brown Jackson grew up a red diaper baby devouring the works of Marx and Lenin (which she didn’t) or began her career as a corporate lawyer (which she did) is immaterial. When Republicans say “far-left” Liberals hear the word and want to confront its literal meaning. When Evangelicals hear the word they know it’s code for “un-Christian.” Likewise, when Republicans use the words “woke” or “activist” they also know that Evangelicals will infer certain meanings from them.

The fact is, anyone to the left of Marjorie Taylor Green and her Proud Boyfriends is considered “far-left” (ie., infidel, atheist, socialist, communist) by today’s Republicans. And nobody in their right mind would deny that Republicans themselves are effective activists. But as the GOP increasingly adopts white Christian Nationalist language, their rhetoric increasingly mirrors arguments and phrases found in pro-slavery apologetics. One of the most often-cited examples of the latter is James Henley Thornwell’s sermon entitled “The Rights and Duties of Masters.”

Thornwell was a South Carolina Presbyterian minister, slave owner, and prolific slavery apologist. Disgusted with smug abolitionists calling slavery immoral, on May 26, 1850 he preached “The Rights and Duties of Masters” at the dedication of a church for slaves. Thornwell prefaced his remarks with a line from Colossians IV:1. Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven. He was reminding each member of the audience, Black and white, that the Confederate social order had been ordained by God.

Thornwell began by accusing abolitionists of “woke” hypocrisy and persecution:

The slave-holding States of this confederacy [this was 11 years before the Confederacy was actually created] have been placed under the ban of the publick opinion of the civilized world. The philanthropy of Christendom seems to have concentrated its sympathies upon us. We have been denounced with every epithet of vituperation and abuse, as conspirators against the dignity of man — traitors to our race, and rebels against God. Overlooking, with a rare expansion of benevolence, the evils which press around their own doors, the vices and crimes of their own neighbors and countrymen…

Then he accused the abolitionists of creating “divisiveness” and insurrection:

This insane fury of philanthropy has not been content with speculating upon our degradation and wretchedness at a distance. It has aimed at stirring up insurrection in our midst.

Thornwell implied that a smug little group of abolitionists actually presented an existential threat to the Confederate order established by God:

A spurious charity for a comparatively small class in the community, is dictating the subversion of the cherished institutions of our father, and the hopes of the human race — the utter ruin of this vast imperial Republick, is to be achieved as a trophy to the progress of human development.

Then he slammed Northern and European “liberal” values for the excesses of “unchecked democracy” and mad secular social scientist tinkerers. In fact, you can practically hear Thornwell railing against the “lawless” Black Lives Matter movement and its allies:

The agitations which are convulsing the kingdoms of Europe — the mad speculations of philosophers — the excesses of unchecked democracy, are working out some of the most difficult problems of political and social science; and when the tumult shall have subsided and reason resumed her ascendancy, it will be found that the very principles upon which we have been accustomed to justify Southern slavery, are the principles of regulated liberty — that in defending this institution we have really been upholding the civil interests of mankind — resisting alike the social anarchy of licentiousness — that we have been supporting representative, republican government against the despotism of masses on the one hand, and the supremacy of a single will on the other.

Ignoring the issue of slavery, Thornwell instead portrayed the conflict between Northern and Southern modernities as a “clash of civilizations.”

But that the world is now the theatre of an extraordinary conflict of great principles — that the foundations of society are about to be explored to their depths — and the sources of social and political prosperity laid bare; that the questions in dispute involve all this is dear and precious to man on earth — the most superficial observer cannot fail to perceive.

Then Thornwell named names of his enemies — leftists and atheists — again offering “regulated freedom” as the alternative. Thornwell predates right-wing critics of Critical Race Theory who object to an “oppressor-victim” dynamic and deplore secular tinkering with the order God has created:

The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake. One party seems to regard society, with all its complicated interests, its divisions and subdivisions, as the machinery of man, which, as it has been invented and arranged by his ingenuity and skill, may be taken to pieces, reconstructed, altered or repaired, as experience shall indicate defects or confusion in the original plan. The other party beholds in it the ordinance of God; and contemplates ‘this little scene of human life’ as placed in the middle of a scheme, whose beginnings must be traced to the unfathomable depths of the past, and whose development and completion must be sought in the still more unfathomable depths of the future – a scheme, as Butler expresses it, ‘not fixed, but progressive, in every way incomprehensible;’ in which, consequently, irregularity is the confession of our ignorance, disorder the proof of our blindness, and with which it is as awful temerity to tamper as to sport with the name of God.

In the Confederate world any threat to the established order (one with plantation owners at the top, white sharecroppers in the middle, and slaves a the bottom) was an abomination. For Thornwell, any sort of “activist” was an enemy of “order and regulated freedom” — and that included not only Communists and Jacobins but “red” Republicans (the Mitt Romneys and Susan Collinses of their day).

The remainder of Thornwell’s long sermon is well worth reading. Highlights include: denying that slavery is the physical ownership of a person; that only a slave’s labor is property; that Paul of the Gospels was less concerned with slavery than a slave’s reverence toward his master, a reverence that reflects God’s order; that, far from denying a slave his humanity, slavery makes him an equal partner in God’s plan; … and the like. The sermon is so long, in fact, that Thornwell seems to have employed every pro-slavery argument he could think of and, in the process, made it a perfect exemplar for future study.

Because of its growing economic and political isolation, and because of the need to defend slavery from liberal criticism, the South slowly developed an alternative view of modernity that turned its back on liberal values that were at least given lip service in Europe and the North. And while one may be tempted to conflate the “Lost Cause” with slavery alone, the “Lost Cause” was the South’s alternative modernity, one that featured agrarian Capitalism based on chattel (not wage) slavery, “regulated freedom” (a high and very selective level of repression), a rigid hierarchical social order, a highly porous separation of church and state, and an ideologically and racially homogeneous citizenry.

Southern Christianity was also diverging from the North’s. For preachers and other apologists of slavery, their sermons increasingly focused exclusively on the life of the spirit rather than the temporal lives of slavers and their “property.” Working for social justice or calling for change to social structures defied the Southern social order established by God (in actuality the C.S.A.) and was therefore “un-Christian.”

Anthea Butler points out in “White Evangelical Racism” that many of these world views still exist in white American Evangelism — including in some cases the refusal to condemn slavery. One such apologist is John MacArthur, pastor of the Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. While acknowledging the horrors of Roman slavery, MacArthur paints a rosy picture of biblical slavery and refuses to condemn the Southern Christian version, explaining that:

New Testament teaching does not focus on reforming and re structuring human systems, which are never the root cause of human problems. The issue is always the heart of man–which when wicked will corrupt the best of systems and when righteous will improve the worst. If men’s sinful hearts are not changed, they will find ways to oppress others regardless of whether or not there is actual slavery. On the other hand, Spirit-filled believers will have just and harmonious relationships with each other, no matter what system they live under. Man’s basic problems and needs are not political, social, or economic but spiritual ….

After Emancipation and well into the present day, this same religious justification continues to be used to wave away state and collective responsibility for current or historical racist oppression. The same religious justification has more recently become a convenient rationale for banning even the mention of racist systems of oppression or teaching about them. While we may be irked to hear Critical Race Theory reviled as a leftist plot, what is really jaw-dropping is to understand that, for Evangelicals, racism does not actually exist in society but instead exists only in the heart.

Using another pro-slavery argument based on the Southern Christian slave / master / God power structure, MacArthur reduces slavery to simply working for a living:

Throughout history, including in our own day, working people have been oppressed and abused by economic intimidation that amounts to virtual slavery–regardless of the particular economic, social, or political system.

For MacArthur resisting the oppression of slavery is “un-Christian” because it violates the power structure. Seen from the same perspective, any opposition to oppression must therefore be “un-Christian”:

Nowhere in Scripture is rebellion or revolution justified in order to gain freedom, opportunity, or economic, social, or political rights. The emphasis is rather on the responsibility of slaves to serve their human masters faithfully and fully, in order to reflect the transforming power of God in their lives. […] In his letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul wrote unambiguously, “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ; not by way of eye service, as men-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart” (Eph. 6:5–6).

Note that MacArthur uses precisely the same citation from Paul of the Gospels that Thornwell did in 1850. Note also that the Evangelical rejection of injustice in the real world is completely at odds with most of Judaism, mainstream Christianity, Catholic Liberation Theology, and the Black Church. In other words, for all their talk about so-called “Judeo-Christian” values, they don’t actually share critical understanding with Jews and other Christians.

It’s important to acknowledge that while some Evangelicals are white Christian Nationalists, not all are. A perfect illustration is the bitter fight that erupted within the Campus Crusade for Christ (now called “Cru”) when that organization recognized it had a racism problem and brought in diversity trainers. As you might imagine, the Christian Nationalists within Cru pushed back. Similarly, there are currently two different battles going on within the Southern Baptist Conference: one about Critical Race Theory and another about the Disney Corporation. And SBC nationalists use the same insulting rhetoric against their religious brethren that they use on their outside enemies.

The 179-page document that the SBC nationalists created provides an excellent overview of what white Christian Nationalists believe about subjects as far-ranging as the role of the church, social justice, race, sexuality, gender issues, and Critical Race Theory. It also contains well-organized tables listing think tanks and individuals who manufacture objections to Critical Race Theory, and each of their talking points.

If you want to understand how Christian Nationalists see race — at least within the Evangelical world — read Seeking Clarity and Unity.

Christian Nationalism has been with us almost from the founding of this country. And it has always combined the worst elements of national myth and religion.

The nation was barely a year old when the Articles of Confederation (1777) were written. A decade later the Articles were superseded by the Constitution of the United States (1787), a document drafted in secret sessions by land speculators, Federalists and creditors, and regarded by some today as somewhat of a counter-revolution.

Before ratification, the Federalists (mainly Alexander Hamilton and James Madison) sharpened their quills to sell their new form of government organization to the skeptics. Many of these documents were collected and are known as the Federalist Papers. Federal versus state rights arguments are nothing new.

No sooner was the ink dry on the Constitution than Americans lost their collective minds to the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840), another in a series of religious revivals that rejected many of the Constitution’s supposed democratic values (although not as resoundingly as the very fact of slavery).

The United States may have been born respecting the separation of Church and State, but religion had no respect for the laws of man and, almost from the beginning, began undermining secular law and government.

Barely half a century into the new experiment in government the United States was deeply divided, which led eventually to the Civil War. The South rejected even token Enlightenment values professed by Northerners and Europeans and ended up with its own concept of modernity. That modernity happened to include a romantic, chivalric, religious, deeply hierarchical and repressive culture, an agrarian economy based on slavery, with a national myth based on blood and soil. On the other side of the ocean a nationalist myth based on the same Blut und Boden was emerging in what would eventually become Germany.

Partly as a consequence of its defense of slavery but also due to growing economic and intellectual isolation, Southern Christianity soon diverged from that of Northern Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches. Because of the role imputed to Southern clergy in upholding social norms, the defense of slavery became their responsibility — one carried out with great enthusiasm and creativity. South Carolina Presbyterian minister James Henley Thornwell’s The Rights and Duties of Masters offers an example of the tortured logic found in many slavery apologetics.

As Stefan Roel Reyes points out, there were stunning similarities between the proto-fascism of post-Weimar Germany and the Confederate States of America. But there were equally stunning historical differences. In The Lost Cause Rides Again Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

“The distinction matters. For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought to erect, lives on. It had to. The terms of the white South’s defeat were gentle. Having inaugurated a war which killed more Americans than all other American wars combined, the Confederacy’s leaders were back in the country’s political leadership within a decade. Within two, they had effectively retaken control of the South. […] Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.”

How the South lost the war but managed to preserve its “Lost Cause” has been a topic studied in depth. One excellent treatment is Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920.

The amber that preserved the Lost Cause was Southern Christianity — a vessel which preserved not only the moral fervor and anti-secularism of the old-time religion but disgust for federalism and apologetics for repression and slavery.

It should be mentioned that the North and South each developed separate national myths and flavors of Christianity. Wilson notes that a “civil religion” reflects both the political and religious views of a nation:

“A civil religion, by definition, centers on the religious implications of a nation. The Southern public faith involved a nation — a dead one, which was perhaps the unique quality of this phenomenon. One of the central issues of the [Northern] American faith has been the relationship between church and state, but since the Confederate quest for political nationhood failed, the Southern faith has been less concerned with such political issues than with the cultural question of identity. Because it emerged from a heterogeneous immigrant society, the [Northern] American civil religion was especially significant in providing uprooted immigrants with a sense of belonging. Because of its origins in Confederate defeat, the Southern civil religion offered confused and suffering Southerners a sense of meaning, an identity in a precarious but distinct culture.”

Solemn quasi-religious rituals, often relating to the military, evolved in both North and South. In the North’s case, the Union was the Cause that Won. For the South, the Confederacy was the Lost Cause.

Let us now set the calendar ahead, only a few decades from the present, when thousands of Confederate monuments were erected to preserve the honor and nobility of Confederate generals (but so did the North). Almost all were dedicated with blessings from the clergy. And when the South embarked upon an orgy of lynchings, once again, many were carried out right after church for the convenience and enjoyment of white congregants. The terror of “Christian” KKK members and lynch mobs continued through the years with the bombings of Black churches, murders of Black ministers, and cross burnings.

Some Christian Nationalists are simply opportunists (Republicans) or extremists (neo-Nazis with their Aryan “churches”). But although white Christian Nationalism hardly represents the teachings of Christianity it is nevertheless found disproportionately within the Evangelical movement that formed it — even as many Evangelicals reject it.

Take Campus Crusade for Christ (now called “Cru”) for example. The Evangelical organization realized it had a race problem and brought in diversity trainers. The pushback from Cru’s more nationalist Evangelicals was swift and angry. Similarly, the Southern Baptist Conference is now divided into religious and nationalist factions over the issue of Critical Race Theory.

But for a “pro-life” community supposedly steeped in the love of Jesus, nationalist Evangelicals are known to be more antisemitic, Islamophobic, militaristic, anti-communist, anti-feminist, pro-capitalist, pro-gun, hyper-patriotic, anti-immigrant, and pro-death penalty than the average American.

Many of today’s culture wars have been launched by these followers of Jesus. But the version of Jesus they revere is not the man of miracles and multitudes who showed compassion for a woman about to be stoned to death. For Christian Nationalists the canonical Jesus is a lamentable “woke” sissy who would turn the other cheek, look for the best in people, oppose exploitation, and feed the hungry.

Instead, the version of Jesus best represented by Evangelical opinion polls is the vengeful killer from Revelations 19:13, riding in on a war horse, robe dripping with blood, eyes blazing with fury, sword slashing, bronze boots stomping to death anyone who ever got in his way.

Anthea Butler, a Black theologian, professor, and author of “White Evangelical Racism,” described in an interview with Political Research Associates how Evangelicals became politicized by religious crusades starting in the Forties:

“As early as the 1940s, Billy Graham had fused Christianity with patriotism and White supremacy. His goal was to make believers–including Black and Brown folks who had started to listen to him–conform to White, male, Western Christian ideals. He demonized Communists, Catholics, and immigrants. Interestingly, he got support from William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, which gave these ideas added prominence. […] American exceptionalism–the idea that the U.S. is blessed by God–as well as Christian patriotism were used by Billy Graham, the Rev. Bob Jones, and other White male religious leaders of the mid-20th Century to put parameters around what it meant to be an American and a Christian. It does lead directly to MAGA.”

While overt expressions of racism may be out of fashion even as the nation has begun to acknowledge its own racist institutions, nationalist Evangelicals stubbornly deny the existence of racism and actively campaign to shut down any public discussion of it:

“Even though some White evangelicals have made statements about racial reconciliation, or even ‘color blindness,’ right now they’re fussing about having to discuss critical race theory. They’re upset about the 1619 Project’s focus on the racist underpinnings of the United States. And even though Southern Baptists apologized for slavery in 1995, they have not changed any of their behaviors so you can see through their statements and conclude that they’re posturing.”

In 2010 the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights with the assistance of the NAACP published Tea Party Nationalism. This was one of the first warnings about white supremacist, neo-Nazi, pro-KKK, and Christian Nationalist elements within several of the not-so-grassroots Republican groups. IREHR has a website that updates recent developments.

In 2011, Matt Barreto and others published The Tea Party in the Age of Obama: Mainstream Conservatism or Out-Group Anxiety? in Political Power and Social Theory. The paper made the case that the Tea Party had transitioned from pseudo-conservative to simply “paranoid,” that the movement harbored white nationalists, and that their concerns were mainly centered around changing American demographics.

In 2018 the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism published New Hate and Old: The Changing Face of American White Supremacy, which documented the rise of the Christian Identity movement, a good example of White Nationalism outside the Evangelical movement.

In February 2022 the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC) and the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) jointly published Christian Nationalism at the January 6, 2021, Insurrection. The authors described a long history of similar displays of white Christian nationalist power, starting with the 1925 KKK March in Washington, DC.

We have come a long way from antebellum Southern Christianity to the Evangelical Christianity that preserved the essence of the Lost Cause; from Billy Graham’s crusades to the Tea Party; from the emergence of white Christian Nationalism to Trump; and the metamorphosis of all this into today’s Republican Party.

And we’ve barely scratched the surface. The 1936 presidential election, for example, is worth looking at if you want to see how Christian Nationalism played out within several political parties and managed to attract real-life Nazis for the first time.

America’s illiberal impulses have had a long trajectory. It’s astonishing that the Party of Lincoln is now largely a bunch of white supremacists hiding behind a cross. But this is who they are and who we must fight.

Sweeping racism under the rug while quoting Martin Luther King

I attended the Dartmouth Candidate Forum last night and took notes on the School Committee candidates. I have been following MAGA candidate Lynn Turner’s entry into the race and in a previous piece I summarized what we know about her views and what we still do not:

“If Lynne Turner is every bit the culture warrior she seems to be, electing her will mean: blocking diversity curriculum; censoring the teaching of actual history; handicapping schools’ ability to impose public health and safety mandates when necessary; undermining public schools in favor of charters; promoting privatization and vouchers; banning library books and textbooks; and refusing to play nice with the other kids. It’s also reasonable to assume that Mrs. Turner would do nothing positive for gay kids, trans kids, BIPOC kids, or sex education. These are all issues upon which she has so far refused to elaborate.”

While the forum shed some light on Lynne Turner’s views, there’s still a lot we don’t know. And the forum didn’t really illuminate much.

The forum was moderated Paul Santos, who has a show on New Bedford Guide. Present were Kate Robinson from WBSM and Chris Shea from Dartmouth Week, who put questions to the candidates.

Candidates John Nunes and Lynne Turner were present. Chris Oliver had a work commitment and could not attend the forum. Only two of the three candidates will be (re)elected when voters go to the polls on April 5th.

The hot topic was the Dartmouth mascot, which consumed much of the segment. Each candidate got a chance to demonstrate that his or her love for Dartmouth was deep and eternal and that his or her reverence for the mascot epitomized it. All were in favor of an agreement with the Aquinnah (to the exclusion of all other local tribes) in order to legitimize the town’s use of the mascot. Turner said the quiet part out loud: “I think we should not look any further than our local native tribe to find the answer that we need.”

Sure, because if you ask any other tribe, you won’t get the answer that you need.

Both candidates were asked if books should ever be banned in schools. Shockingly and without reservations, both Turner and Nunes said they had no problem with censorship. Both were asked about School Resource Officers and both replied that armed police playing social workers was great, pointing to how an SRO presence makes children view police more favorably.

Mainly, however, it was an evening for softball. There were no questions about: charters; health classes that dealt with sexual preference, identity, or contraception; what the candidates thought of trans kids on sports teams or in bathrooms; the District’s right to impose masking or vaccine mandates; and – despite questions raised by the MAGA candidate’s anti-CRT campaign – what the candidates understood of Critical Race Theory.

Instead, the question was: “Do you believe the School Committee should have a role in deciding whether to teach about race and identity, or should it be left up to the educators?”

This was a completely botched question. The first half should not have used the word “race” but instead “teaching American history involving racial injustices and struggles.” And the last half should have been “or should it be left up to parents with pitchforks?” A less open-ended question about specific curriculum materials like the 1619 Project or the 1776 Project might have kept candidates on-topic.

But even this wobbly softball seemed to shock Turner, who stammered, “Race and identity? And your question was, the School Board? Could you repeat that?”

After buying herself some time, Turner’s response was still non-responsive. “I believe that the School Committee is already involved in teaching and developing curriculum to address those issues through the Diversity and Equality Committee. They actually have charges that are about equity. There’s nothing in there about equality. But there’s a lot of discussion in them. I do watch them on the Zoom, and there’s a lot of discussion about race at those meetings. So it already exists. And, as far as how that is addressed I think we need to be careful and not to put so much focus on dividing people into boxes by race or identity. I think we need to take people as they come and to love all people however they come. I think that Martin Luther King had it right, that we should not be looking at the color of someone’s skin but the content of their character. I would like for our schools to focus more on….”

Anything but real American history. And since when do people who want to sweep racism under the rug get to quote King?!

Turner had also apparently not bothered to do her homework on school budget issues or the mandates that had irked the culture warrior enough to enter the race. Nunes at least knew his way around state and COVID funding, the schools’ aging infrastructure, and long-term planning, and he pointed out that many of the COVID-related mandates Turner hates so much came from DESE and the state Department of Health.

Both Nunes and Turner agreed with the Superintendent’s proposal to raise administrator salaries, but both managed to confuse salaried administrators with unionized teachers whose pay rates are determined by contract.

While Nunes and Turner share many views, Chris Oliver expressed concern for extremist views that Turner has expressed online and in emails to the Committee, calling them a “political agenda that is bad for our students.” Oliver asked voters to “dig a little deeper” to understand each candidate’s “true motivation for running for school committee.”

Sound advice.

Dartmouth voters go to the polls this year more motivated than ever. The hot-button issue that could easily quadruple voter turnout is a referendum on the town’s “Indian” mascot.

On one side of the issue are most Native American tribes and those who find mascots offensive, pointing to a large body of research showing that such imagery is harmful to Native children.

Those who want to preserve the mascot fall into a couple of categories. The majority are people who either went to Dartmouth schools themselves or have kids in sports or marching band. The Indian was a harmless tradition – or so they thought – and they probably don’t give a lot of thought to how offensive it really is.

But a minority, fiercely ideological and unmistakably MAGA Republicans, can be found waging their culture wars on social media and on right-wing talk radio. Retiring the mascot, like packing Confederate statuary off to museums or teaching kids about the Tulsa race massacre, threatens white dominance of “their” culture. Any reckoning with America’s ugly racial history is something they’re just not going to tolerate.

Dartmouth’s Town election on April 5th will return or replace various incumbents, including one member of the School Committee. Two committee seats are held by John Nunes and Chris Oliver, both die-hard mascot supporters. One of them could be unseated if voters are careless.

As in much of the nation, the Bristol County GOP has been overrun by the Tea Party. It doesn’t matter whether you visit the MassGOP website or MARA, the Massachusetts Republican Assembly. Both peddle a similar cocktail of mandate opposition, school privatization, vouchers, charters, parent vetoes on curriculum, and [white] Christian Nationalism. The MassGOP has become so extreme that it regularly disparages its own Republican governor.

“Critical Race Theory,” or CRT, is a post-graduate research methodology that has nothing to do with teaching history in public schools but – facts be damned – it has become the latest MAGA dog-whistle in dozens of states where Republicans have enacted Constitutionally-questionable laws to limit speech, control thought, and to have history written by legislators. With MAGA pedagogy, children can’t be permitted to learn about the colonialism, slavery and genocide that made America what it is today.

But if you can’t sanitize and weaponize school curriculum for culture wars, the next best thing is to create a beachhead in school boards across the country, fielding candidates on cautiously-worded anti-VAX, anti-mask, anti-CRT platforms – blowing all the right dog-whistles to MAGA World while trying not to let careless voters know who you really are.

It so happens we have one of these on the Dartmouth ballot for School Committee.

Lynne Turner told Dartmouth Week she was inspired to run for the School Committee after trying unsuccessfully to speak out against school mask mandates. Turner started her campaign on Facebook, telling a reporter that she wants to bring a “fresh view” to diversity issues which can be “very divisive.” Her new website is short on details, but clearly she has a problem with public health mandates, diversity education, talking about race, or teaching an honest account of history.

Here is candidate Turner in her own words:

Safety: I value helping our schools create and maintain a wholesome, safe, environment that challenges children to think and grow into responsible people who strive to reach their potential and develop great character.

What does safe and wholesome mean? Metal detectors? Drug testing? Abstinence vows instead of sex ed? Book bans? What are Turner’s views on School Resource Officers? If “safe” means preventing bullying, how does this square with promoting a mascot that offends non-white students? Turner’s vague formulations just raise more questions.

Mandates: Now that mask mandates have been lifted, I hope we can focus on supporting everyone’s choice on how they want to manage the risks the pandemic incurs. Children thrive in normal, predictable, and social learning environments, and the pandemic has cheated them of all of that. In addition, I oppose segregating and discriminating against individuals based on their “vaccine” status.

Mercy! Discrimination? Segregation? Who knew white Republicans were in such dire need of civil rights legislation to protect them? Here is MAGA victimology on full display. On Turner’s Facebook page the new challenger confirms she is “against all mandates,” including masks and vaccinations. Turner seems to be saying: why bother with public health experts and science when you can decide for yourself if COVID or anthrax is dangerous? “I believe where there is risk, there must be choice or you run the risk of having a dictatorship,” she says, dropping another MAGA vocab builder.

Character Counts: I would like Dartmouth to help our community get beyond race, and strive to help our students “judge not, by the color of one’s skin, but by the content of one’s character.” ~Dr. Martin Luther King

When MAGA Volk wrap themselves in the flag, scripture, or Martin Luther King, watch out! Fifty years ago the Kerner Commission discovered what everyone had known all along – Black and white Americans live in vastly different realities. Today this is still the case. MAGA Republicans may want to turn the page and “get beyond race,” but maybe we ought to do that after every race gets the same great deal that white folks have had for the last half millennium.

Curriculum: I think our children will be best served with curriculum that incorporates many learning styles, and if considering curriculum with an undercurrent theme, I would likely prefer one that it is uniting for our country, giving kids a sense of pride and unity, because in these very unique times, division has run rampant.

No argument about accommodating different learning styles, but talking about slavery or genocide of indigenous people sounds like it might not be quite “uniting” enough or engender sufficient national-patriotic pride for Mrs. Turner. But high-schoolers, old enough to drive to Montreal to drink, and old enough to head down to a military recruiting center, are also old enough to tackle tough subjects and confront the world as it is. Turner’s position on curriculum is in direct conflict with her next talking point – indoctrination. If a topic is too “divisive” for her taste, what’s the solution? Curriculum and book bans? Force-fed patriotic messaging? Compulsory flag-waving?

Indoctrination: I oppose indoctrinating children into trying to get them to think a certain way about controversial topics, and insinuating that if they think differently on a topic there is something is wrong with them. Our goal should be to support respectful, dissenting points of view, and I know many teachers and staff do a beautiful job of it, however, some do not. Older children will be interested in some of the current events but instead of saying this is the right way to think about the topic, I prefer an approach that lets them look at all sides and see what views resonate with them.

I wonder if Turner shares the sentiments of Gina Peddy, curriculum director for the Carroll (Texas) Independent School District, who actually used the Holocaust as an example of an event that required hearing from “the other side” (in her district). But sometimes facts are just facts and the “other side” died by suicide in a bunker. Does Turner really subscribe to the Kellyanne Conway School of Alternative Facts? – if something “resonates” with you, then it must be true? Reality carve-outs permitting “equal time” for conspiracy theories, creationism, and pseudo-science may appeal to MAGA World but they have no place in a real school.

Public Comments: I support public comments at our school board meetings and I feel they should be welcomed and considered valuable. For example, I do not want important comments to be lost, simply because it is not on the agenda.

I actually agree with Turner on this one. But my idea of permitting public comment would be to allow any topic to be added to the next agenda rather than permitting MAGA zealots to completely derail a scheduled school committee meeting like angry truckers circling the Capital.

School Logo: I am in support of keeping our beautiful and respectful Native American Logo. This issue will also be voted on at our town vote on April 5th, so mark your calendars and please get out, and vote!

Expressed just like you-know-who: “Our beautiful and respectful logo.” In this divided town Turner leans heavily on her pro-mascot position. On March 8th she attended the Equality and Diversity subcommittee hearings at the high school and used the opportunity to distribute campaign literature that avoided tough issues but made clear she was against “woke elites.” It’s a smart move: the buzz over the mascot can only work in her favor.

Turner also took pains to signal on Facebook that she’s a member of New England Homeschoolers and considers her platform a Kids First Agenda. It’s not clear if Turner had any connection with the group when she taught in the West, but “Kids First Agenda” is the slogan of a school privatization initiative first launched by the California Charter Schools Association, which promotes school vouchers and privatization, and throws great wads of cash at school board candidates who promote “fresh mandates.”

From Turner’s use of MAGA planks, themes and buzzwords, to her own slogan, to casually dropping her homeschooling bona fides, an attentive reader gets a none-too-subtle hint of how bright red and far right on an ideological litmus strip Lynne Turner is on any given educational issue.

I contacted the candidate to get her views on other matters of interest to voters. She declined a sit-down interview but agreed to answer written questions. After days had gone by with no response, Turner politely informed me she was too busy to answer but added, “I created a website over the weekend with more details about my campaign, […], if you want, you can refer to that in addition my campaign page on facebook.”

After looking at her website and finding few answers to my questions, I made one final attempt: “I am still hoping you will make clear your positions on SROs, charters, vouchers, teaching about race, book bans, and trans kids on sports teams and in bathrooms. Voters have a right to know. That offer to speak in person still stands. Any place of your choosing.”

Crickets.

If Lynne Turner is every bit the culture warrior she seems to be, electing her will mean: blocking diversity curriculum; censoring the teaching of actual history; handicapping schools’ ability to impose public health and safety mandates when necessary; undermining public schools in favor of charters; promoting privatization and vouchers; banning library books and textbooks; and refusing to play nice with the other kids. It’s also reasonable to assume that Mrs. Turner would do nothing positive for gay kids, trans kids, BIPOC kids, or sex education. These are all issues upon which she has so far refused to elaborate.

If voters can’t get a straight answer from a candidate on important issues, it would be wise to vote for someone else. But maybe there’s still one last chance to ask all the school candidates some hard questions.

A Dartmouth Candidates Forum will take place virtually and in person at Dartmouth Town Hall (Room 305) on Wednesday, March 16th at 5:30 pm.

Have your questions ready.

I just finished Anthea Butler’s excellent book, White Evangelical Racism. Butler is an associate professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book is tour through one aspect of our malignant American history, specifically: how a perverted “slaveholders” version of Christianity has managed to corrupt virtually every aspect of American politics over hundreds of years.

As a former Black evangelical, Butler’s book is both a repudiation of white evangelism and a challenge to it. In an interview she gave to Religion and Politics, Butler not only challenges the “cultural whiteness at the heart of evangelicalism that anyone who enters the community has to receive” but the white supremacy behind the “cultural whiteness.”

As white evangelicals reached consensus on the inferiority of non-whites, they internalized a white supremacist version of Christianity, which has guided even religious missions: “In the Reconstruction period,” Butler says, “the ‘Religion of the Lost Cause’ lamented the end of slavery and asserted that Black people were inferior. The missionary movement asserted that foreigners were ‘heathen’ in need of civilization, which was invariably couched in white expressions of Christianity.” But this is nothing new: it is at the heart of the colonialism that violently conquered the “New World.”

From Reconstruction through 1952, there was not a single year in which Black Americans were not lynched by white mobs. Most of these lynchings occurred on Sundays immediately following church services. Jamelle Bouie, writing in Slate, remarks that “these lynchings weren’t just vigilante punishments or, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes, ‘celebratory acts of racial control and domination.’ They were rituals. And specifically, they were rituals of Southern evangelicalism and its then-dogma of purity, literalism, and white supremacy.”

White evangelicals have replaced what the religious Right’s Dave Daubenmire calls sissified Christianity — that is, a traditional Christianity that deals in kindness and justice, one that doesn’t suit their purposes — with a more violent, punitive, white dominated, and male dominated version. White Evangelicals pretend that their many intrusions into politics are nothing more than the Word of a Living God. But there is barely a trace of Christ in white Evangelical Christianity — except for the sword-wielding slayer of the Second Coming. The truth is, the white evangelical movement, masquerading as a religion, is little more than cover for white supremacist politics.

If a religion can be hollowed-out to fit a political agenda, then why not also the fabric of reality? For White Evangelical America, truth is what you say it is, what you “just know,” what’s simply “common sense.” What we can’t see can’t hurt us. Everything in the Bible comes straight from God. White people are God’s gift to humanity. Being gay is a chosen lifestyle. Evolution is a lie. God will protect me from COVID-19. Slavery wasn’t so bad. It’s no surprise that reckonings with our white supremacist history, in efforts like the 1619 Project, must be firmly opposed.

No amount of fact, personal testimony, or science will convince white evangelicals of views that challenge white supremacy. Time after time their thought-leaders and politicians not only reject verifiable fact but traffic in manufactured lies, the more outrageous the better. Anything to “own” the Libs. Though the Space Station clearly shows the earth is round, it looks pretty flat down here on earth. So trust your eyes! And, anyway, the whole space program was a hoax filmed on a Hollywood back lot. For white evangelicals, if reality is too convincing, too real, then just call it a lie. And if that fails, you can always claim that God has sent you a prophetic dream or that a failed political candidate was “anointed” by God. Election results be damned.

Given white Christian America’s contempt for any reality but its own manufactured version, the Conservative media — print, online and broadcast — shows little interest in producing fact-based news but instead cranks out rightwing propaganda at a rapid pace, much of it pouring down hate on non-whites, immigrants, LGBTQ people, scientists, academics, and social justice reformers. Much of today’s Conservative media reads like the 21st Century equivalent of Julius Streicher’s Stürmer.

White evangelicals make up only 25.4% of the population but they are the largest single religious denomination in the United States, beating out non-religious Americans at 22.6%, Catholics at 20.8%, and traditional Protestants at 14.7%. 76% of white evangelicals are white, 49% live in the South and 22% in the Midwest. 66% see themselves at odds with mainstream American culture, lamenting positive changes in immigration, secularization and demographic diversity. For white evangelicals, these changes are all related. Immigration, civil rights, secularism and feminism all threaten Christian white male domination.

Which may explain why White America has chosen white evangelicals to be its voice. A recent Atlantic Magazine article notes, “These days, everyone assumes that this is just a fact of life: Evangelicals are Republicans, and Republicans are evangelicals.” The article goes on to describe how white evangelicals made themselves useful to the Republican Party and, within short order, how the Republican Party became a vessel for propagating white evangelical supremacy. This story is also recounted in Anthea Butler’s book as well. It’s a love story of two dying demographics.

But it’s not hard to see the attraction. White America fears the demographic changes that are assuredly coming. Specifically, White America fears the loss of five centuries of racial supremacy. The Republican Party — 81% white and 73% Christian — and disproportionately Southern — has cynically adopted or defended the “Lost Cause” teachings of Southern white evangelism — not to mention its monuments — and tolerates evangelical hostility to science and disregard for mainstream American views, and the many conspiracy theories that it circulates. It is no surprise that QAnon is spreading most rapidly among white evangelicals.

White America has entered a new Jim Crow era. Voting rights, along with secular freedoms, are now being threatened by the GOP and its white evangelical base in dozens of states. Support for police repression has increased. Since George Floyd’s killing, police killings are unabated. 255 more Black people have been murdered by police — the 21st Century agents of lynching. In several states laws permitting motorists to run down Black Lives Matter protesters have been signed. Permission to carry unlicensed or conceal-carry weapons have been written into law. That’s on top of “stand your ground” and dozens of clearly racist laws that permit vigilantism to varying degrees.

Now with Jim Crow just starting up again, it seems all too clear — if parts of White America could get away with it, we’d be seeing Sunday lynchings once again.

If you’ve been biting your fingernails while watching HBO’s Years and Years or Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale, don’t dismiss your Angst as the result of dystopian fiction. A lot of it is really happening. While the Imperial Presidency was tweeting White Supremacist attacks on enemies of all sorts, except (of course) whites and Christians, defying Congress and lying non-stop, members of his administration just served up a few more dishes in the endless buffet of Gleichschaltung Americans are being force-fed by Republicans working under the Führer principle.

This month Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched his Commission on Unalienable Rights — an end-run around internationally-recognized standards of human rights. Instead of international laws, Pompeo wants to privilege his friends in Riyadh, K Street, and Jerusalem who espouse religious freedom but are hostile to secular freedoms. Margaret Drew, a law professor posting to Human Rights at Home, writes that “to accomplish this weeding out of human rights, Commission members will examine the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among other documents, to determine what rights are fundamental and, among other questions, who has the power to grant rights. The likely answer is God, who no doubt will be whispering in the ears of commission members.”

Prosecuting people who leave water in the desert for asylum seekers, ending asylum in violation of international norms, and keeping asylum seekers in abysmal concentration camps all must be excused by redefining human rights. It’s something Orwell would appreciate.

Liberals justifiably don’t want to fund these assaults on human rights. Robin Wright, writing in the New Yorker, and noting Trump’s many friendships with dictators and dictatorial regimes (besides his own), cites the “unbelievable hypocrisy” of the commission. Serra Sippel, the president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, said in a statement, “It’s time to call the Commission on Unalienable Rights what it really is: a thinly veiled religious fundamentalist panel that aims to cut back the human rights of people all over the world.”

Columbia University’s Human Rights Law Review publishes the “Trump Human Rights Tracker,” which charts human rights abuses under the Trump administration: “It is difficult to keep up with all that the new administration is doing that threatens human rights.” Masha Gessen writes in The New Yorker that “the new commission will contemplate who is and isn’t human, and who, therefore, possesses inalienable rights.” Fetuses will be accorded rights, and the LGBT community stripped of them. The ACLU writes that “Pompeo’s commission is a dangerous initiative intended to redefine universal human rights and roll back decades of progress in achieving full rights for marginalized and historically oppressed communities. It is likely to use religion as grounding to deny human dignity and equality for all. It will undermine the existing State Department’s well respected and legally-mandated Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Affairs. And it will be a waste of taxpayer dollars, which would be better spent on implementing U.S. human rights treaty obligations and putting an end to Trump’s era of human misery and assault on our humanity.”

In an administration that cares little for diplomacy and international norms, Pompeo has become less a Secretary of State and (in line with Gleichschaltung) more a Propaganda Minister. In late June Pompeo convened the “Second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom.” The event was organized, in part, by Thomas Farr of the Religious Freedom Institute, whose own website betrays its Islamophobia. Predictably, VP for Christian Citizens Only Mike Pence delivered the keynote address.

Apparently running concentration camps, winking at journalists being hacked to death by “friends,” supporting decade-long occupations, and cozying-up to the world’s dictators are no impediments to targeting the real problem afflicting our society — those pesky constitutional protections which prevent the government from championing a specific religion — Christianity. Breakout sessions were led by representatives from a number of countries where religion is used to persecute non-religious and sexual minorities. Parallel to Pompeo’s “Ministerial,” Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights Campaign were looking into the question of whether religious liberty is being used as a tool to deny secular freedoms.

If all this were not bad enough, members of the Trump Administration and his FOX News Cabinet participated in the National Conservatism conference at the D.C. Ritz-Carlton. As billed, the emphasis was on “nationalism.” For three days you could hear renowned White Supremacists and Islamophobes — including Tucker Carlson, Daniel Pipes, John Bolton, Daniel McCarthy, Amy Wax, Peter Thiel and others — argue for a return to Anglo-Saxon traditions. Organized by the Edmund Burke Society, Israeli-American and Kahanist “political philosopher” Yoram Hazony took center stage to outline the ultra-nationalist ideology — with a twist — that he was selling.

The nationalist ideology he was selling has a name: Zionism. Hazony argues that the United States needs its own form of Zionism — as opposed to U.S. imperialism (though many would argue that Zionism too is imperialistic). Daniel Luban summarizes Hazony’s argument in a piece in the New Republic: “Hazony frames his theory around a conflict (‘as old as the West itself’) between two principles of international order: ‘an order of free and independent nations,’ and a universal empire striving to unite all nations under a single legal regime. The former ideal, he suggests, originates in the Hebrew Bible, with the biblical kingdom of Israel serving as the first national state, but reached its apotheosis in early modern Europe under the ‘Protestant construction of the West.’ The golden age of nation-states stretched from roughly the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 until the end of World War II. But after Hitler discredited nationalism (wrongly, for he was actually an imperialist rather than a nationalist) the imperial principle made a comeback, at least among ‘educated elites who have, to one degree or another, become committed to a future under an imperial order.'”

Hazony’s take-away is that nation-states should not expand, invade and then have to embrace internationalism like the Roman empire. Instead, they need to build walls around themselves and expel those who don’t fit nationalist criteria of race and religion.

As Jeet Heer summarizes in the Nation, “Instead of the blunt jeers heard at Trump rallies, where the name of Ilhan Omar raised the chant of “send her back,” the attendees of the conference spoke in more genteel terms about the need for national cohesion and an immigration policy that respected the nation’s cultural traditions. Yet these more mellifluous words differed from the hooting of Trump rallies only in terms of tone, not intent.”

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley must have brought his bedside copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with him because he mentioned “cosmopolitans” a number of times. “They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community,” Hawley said of the “cosmopolitan elite.” “And they subscribe to a set of values held by similar elites in other places: things like the importance of global integration and the danger of national loyalties; the priority of social change over tradition, career over community, and achievement and merit and progress.”

Although Heer himself didn’t conclude Hawley’s speech was anti-Semitic, he noted: “Hawley’s use of the loaded word ‘cosmopolitan’ was combined with a denunciation of four academics, three of whom were Jewish. One of those was the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. When Hawley mentioned her, the crowd hissed. Hawley’s speech has been accused of containing anti-Semitic dog whistles.”

But Amy Wax didn’t need dog whistles; instead she had her weasel words. “Let us be candid,” she said. “Europe and the first world, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white for now, and the third world, although mixed, contains a lot of nonwhite people. Embracing cultural-distance nationalism means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites. Well, that is the result, anyway. So, even if our immigration philosophy is grounded firmly in cultural concerns, it doesn’t rely on race at all.”

Admittedly, these were people who can string two sentences together without a 280-character limitation or a Covfefe. But their racism is as crude as Trump’s or anything uttered at a Klan meeting.

The hyper-nationalism and racism we first glimpsed from Trump in 2015 was real. Trump is a racist. Trump is a nationalist. Trump is a neo-fascist. Trump is almost singularly obsessed with building a wall on the Mexican border, stopping even legal immigration, and disenfranchising voters of color. His 2016 campaign was based on white male privilege. His 2020 campaign is also likely to be about Whiteness, if not also Christian privilege. In fact, Trump has now doubled down on racist attacks on House members of color, and it seems calculated. Toluse Olorunnipa and Ashley Parker tried to make sense of these calculations in their Washington Post piece:

“Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist and former White House official, said that even if Trump’s rhetoric offends some suburban voters, they will still vote for him rather than siding with Democrats. ‘He can excite his base without alienating suburbia to the point where they’re not voting for him,’ he said. ‘That’s what a coalition is. Not everyone agrees with everything.'”

Note: Excite his base = appeal to white racism.

While Republicans are confident that racism will be a unifying strategy, Democrats aren’t so sure if it will succeed or backfire.

“Democrats are banking on the idea that even if Trump’s language excites his base, it is likely to offend a diverse coalition of voters who will turn out to defeat him. ‘I don’t think it’s going to depress Democrats. I think it’s going to make them angry,’ said Jennifer Palmieri, an adviser to Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Brian Schaffner, a political science professor at Tufts University, said a review of exit polling data from 2016 does not give a clear sense of what effect Trump’s amplified appeal to white working-class voters will have in 2020. ‘We can’t really know for sure from our data whether the white grievance rhetoric is going to mobilize more support for Trump in 2020,’ he said. ‘And it’s very possible that he may mobilize just as many — or maybe even more — opponents with this rhetoric.'”

Given how racist this country is, it’s a good bet it will win Trump the next election.

A couple of years ago I was in Berlin walking through a plaza, the Bebelplatz. This is where the Nazis started burning books by Jews, liberals, and democrats (with a small D).

In the plaza is a monument that recalls this period of anti-intellectualism. If you stand in just the right spot you can peer down through pavement glass into a miniature library with empty shelves. In Germany reminders like this – like the Stolpersteine that memorialize the Nazi victims – are everywhere and literally underfoot.

In the United States we haven’t begun burning books – although we have a fierce group of fundamentalists and patriots who regularly succeed in banning them from libraries and expunging them from curricula.

What we have instead nowadays is a climate of anti-intellectualism which regards knowledge as irrelevant, facts as inconvenient, civiliity as pretentious political correctness, and democracy as a plot by a dangerous cosmopolitan liberal elite to impose their foreign values on red-blooded Americans.

Only a portion of American intellectuals are Jewish, of course, but the American Right is using precisely the same phrases that its goose-stepping cousins used eighty or so years ago.

Following the hostile corporate takeover of our government, per Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages, we’ve moved from denial, to anger, to bargaining, and on to depression. But damned if any of us should accept the death of democracy. This is what we’re trying to prevent.

It is important to keep harping away at the fact that this administration does not have a mandate, that the president lost by almost 3 million votes, that the nation is 86% urban and, as such, we are disenfranchised by a broken electoral system that gives rights to states, not people. And that this administration does not represent American values.

While some point to the election results as a vindication and re-empowerment of White Christian majority culture, the demographics keep moving toward a browner nation. More importantly, the election demonstrated how easily White Evangelicals could turn their backs on not only democracy but their own professed religious values.

White Evangelicals are comfortable taking rights away from non-Whites, non-Christians, and non-citizens, and embracing an autocrat. But don’t blame it on religion. It’s the “whiteness” talking. By way of contrast the Black church has historically done precisely the opposite – shown a strong commitment to social justice, called for broadening democracy, and shown reverence for the Old Testament prophets who spoke truth to tyrannical power.

In over six hundred passages, the Judeo-Christian bible is filled with rape, murder, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. It is truly a wonder it isn’t banned from more Southern and Midwestern libraries. In Deuteronomy the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivvites, and Jebusites all get slaughtered, to the last infant, by someone’s idea of God. In Hosea the Samarians get theirs too – “their infants shall be dashed, and their pregnant women shall be ripped up.”

But if we hate ISIS we should remember that our own “majority culture” is likewise founded not only on violence but on a violent ideology. Multiculturalism rarely gets sympathetic treatment in the western Bible. “To the winner belong the spoils,” as Donald Trump reminded us recently. Losers are annihilated, their lands (and oil) are seized, and those not murdered are sent into exile or barred from entry. For centuries scripture has served as a virtual cookbook for colonialism.

For some the Bible is a literal document and the intolerance found within must be observed and respected as God’s word. This seems to be the preferred version of Christianity for many White Americans. For most the document is a repository of sometimes conflicting cultural and spiritual thought and the intolerance must be viewed in a historical context – and then rejected. The positive aspects of religions preserve the heart of their ethical traditions.

The book of Exodus warns us to “not oppress the foreigner” – for we were strangers ourselves in Egypt. The Book of Leviticus tells us we can not merely “tolerate” foreigners but must treat them as fellow citizens. The Book of Ruth (the Moabite) recounts a story about honor, kindness and loyalty – one involving a foreigner who becomes accepted by her new family and people.

One look at the new White House raises the question – where are all the moderate Judeo-Christians? With the Twitter Administration now filled with (white supremacist) Christian fundamentalists and a supposedly “devout” Orthodox Jewish son-in-law, their treatment of immigrants and other faiths highlights a certain religious hypocrisy. Those who play Christians on TV, including Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson, have sung Trump’s praises. Realty TV’s “Rabbi to the Stars” Shmuley Boteach supports Trump and even chief-anti-Semite Steve Bannon.

It’s safe to say that most religious people in America are appalled by the country’s new direction. Yesterday I got an email from a Jewish peace group working with Muslims to fight Islamophobia. The meeting was taking place in a Quaker Meeting House. This said a lot about how most religions view our culture, and I was moved by the expression of people really living their faith in a way that wasn’t doing violence to others. But with America’s White Evangelicals it’s a different story.

In 2015 a World Magazine poll showed only 3% of Evangelicals supporting Trump, scarcely better than Hillary Clinton. By mid-2016 the Christian Post was running a piece with the self-explanatory title, “No, Donald Trump Doesn’t Have Majority Support Among Evangelical Voters,” showing that 64% of Evangelicals had voted for someone else in the primaries – but Trump’s numbers were rising. By last November, however, exit polls showed 80% of Evangelicals had voted for Trump in the general election. So much for religious principles.

Evangelicals comprise a major part of the Tea Party. Evangelicals (and right-wing Jews) also make up a major part of the Islamophobia network. They regard Islam as a political movement, or worse, and not a religion. Or, if they do recognize Islam as a religion, it’s as a competitor in a zero-sum Clash of Civilizations game. A Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) article says Evangelicals view Middle East realities in a Biblical context. A Pew Forum survey showed that they have the most negative views of Muslims of all Americans. Their views have long been uttered by “mainstream” Republicans like Steve King (R-Iowa) who calls the United States a White Christian country and denigrates the contributions of others.

There are, of course, notable exceptions. At least some Evangelicals despise the 45th president. And in many ways religious American Muslims and Christians share a common social conservatism. But in general, Evangelicals have traded in their Christian charity and professed moral values for an opportunity to grab power. And this is what they’ve historically done.

NPR’s Audie Cornish interviewed Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress and asked him why Evangelicals support Trump. Jeffress pointed to the 1980 election:

Americans at that time had a choice between [..] a sincerely born-again Christian who taught Sunday school in his Baptist Church and was married faithfully to one woman. His name was Jimmy Carter. The other choice was a twice-married Hollywood actor […] whose wife practiced astrology. […] Christians overwhelmingly chose Ronald Reagan not because he was the most religious candidate but because he had the quality people thought was most necessary at the time, and that is leadership.

Jeffress continued:

[the] same-sex marriage ruling actually made evangelicals more open to a secular candidate like Donald Trump […] many evangelicals have come to the conclusion we can no longer depend upon government to uphold traditional biblical values. Let’s just let government solve practical problems like immigration, the economy and national security. And if that’s all we’re looking for government to do, then we don’t need a spiritual giant in the White House. We need a strong leader and a problem solver, hence many Christians are open to a secular candidate like Donald Trump.

For Evangelicals like Jeffress, it was the failure of “government to uphold traditional biblical values” – specifically, not being permitted to deny civil liberties to gays – that made them give up on democracy and embrace a strong man, a caudillo, a führer. For Evangelicals, democracy is not about equal rights for all but about replacing the Bill of Rights with a Protestant Bible and privileging their own ethno-religious group. And with the right man sitting in the Oval Office perhaps they’ll get the Christian shariah they’ve always wanted.

It is an Orwellian abuse of language to describe “religious freedom” as the right to oppress others or to take rights away from them. But this is precisely the vision Republicans and their corporate, religious and racist constituencies have. Liberals and Progressives have a truer vision for America – one that guarantees everyone the same rights. It is a vision our nation has steadily enlarged upon, and it is a vision still seen in our bruised and violated Constitution.

A vision we need to keep faith with now, more than ever.

A little side show at Rick Perry’s Christapalooza, “The Response” in Houston. Who would Jesus hate? Well, if you ask guest speaker Mike Bickle of IHOP, the answer would be: everyone besides Christians.

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Regarding Juanita Schoff’s letter (“Founding fathers firmly rooted in faith”), there is no question that some of our nation’s founders were deeply respectful of religion and its mission to uplift morality. George Washington, an Episcopal vestryman, delivered this message in his farewell address. Adams and Jefferson and many of the other founders had similar views.

And there is no denying that religion was a major part of the landscape of the 17th and 18th centuries. But it was – as it is today – also to be feared and criticized. Thomas Paine in his best-seller, The Age of Reason, pilloried many aspects of religion and argued for skepticism and reason over revelation. But he also shared Washington’s and Jefferson’s views of religion as a moral agent.

Schoff mentions the Mayflower Compact, which was hastily written to prevent a faction that did not share the religious views of the majority from splitting off to settle in Virginia. But their own religious intolerance was one reason Rhode Island was founded, and the colonists’ “morality” did not prevent them from murdering the native Wampanoag who had befriended them. We had early warnings that mixing religion and politics was a bad idea.

Nor did religious morality put up much of a fight against slavery or slow down the destruction of millions of Native Americans. In fact, religion happily offered metaphors and language for America’s “Manifest Destiny.”

Schoff mentions Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson, who literally took scissors to the bible to produce his own redacted version, had ethics and society in mind. Religion (like the French, Latin, and Greek, math, law, and science he studied) to Jefferson was intended to improve man’s reason and nature. But learning and reason were equally esteemed.

I find myself agreeing with much of Juanita Schoff’s letter. Who’s to dispute the fact that America was founded by Christian fundamentalists? But it’s clear that the message of her letter was: “Faith is important and the Founding Fathers said so.”

But our conception of religion 250 years later is quite different. America is no longer a homogenous Anglo-Saxon Protestant colony with citizens used to, or tolerant of, a state religion. We live in a world where religious power has been attenuated for centuries. And we have other options – philosophy, ethics, and humanism – or our own combination, including our own religious views. And in the interest of learning to live with our fellow man, these philosophies are best shared with like-minded friends – and not foisted upon the public at large.

But writers like Juanita Schoff continue to press religion on us publicly. So perhaps it is time to question whether religion truly has a monopoly on creating ethical and moral behavior – as the founders assumed. If not, then these assumptions are no longer valid. Cannot service, contemplation, cultivating respect for the rest of humanity, and following precepts like the Golden Rule lead to an ethical life? I think so. And if so, why do we need to revive the Continental Congress’ practice of buying bibles?

Religion is best practiced privately and earnestly, rather than poorly and in public.

Whatever the limits of the founders’ vision, today our Constitution prevents government from establishing any national religion or imposing any religious litmus tests on public officials. I wish groups like the one Schoff cites would quit trying to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. We’ve seen what religious regimes look like in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Iran. We don’t need one here.

This was published in the Standard Times on January 2, 2010
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20100102/opinion/1020321

Barak Obama, in noting that he was born to an 18-year-old mother, asked his supporters to “back off” of criticisms that Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin’s daughter is pregnant. Obama pointed instead at McCain’s impulsive choice of a running mate with only 20 months of experience as governor of a state with a relatively small population.

But since Sarah Palin was expressly chosen to appeal to an Evangelical Christian constituency which largely believes in denying the right to young women to decide for themselves when to obtain an abortion, and which promotes sexual abstinence as the only acceptable sex education program, this is an issue that is not going to go away. The issues of Choice and Sex Education have now stuck to Palin like superglue.

The governor’s family, particularly her daughter, deserves absolute privacy in this matter. Nationally, however, the case highlights the high incidence of teenage pregnancies in the U.S. According to the Centers for Disease Control, one out of three girls becomes pregnant before the age of 20, and 80% of those pregnancies are unintended. As a comparison, the teenage pregnancy rate in the U.S is ten times that in the Netherlands.

Palin, as a mom, should not have to answer to anyone about how her family has chosen to act. But Palin, as a fundamentalist politician who wants to force others to share her social and ethical values around sex and pregnancy, should not get a free pass. She is going to have to answer questions about the failure of the abstinence programs she prescribes.

In respecting Palin’s right to pursue her own family’s values around a surprise pregnancy – and I hope the nation will – we must also recognize that this is a right that every family and all women deserve.

Peter Friedman writes “a reversal of Roe v. Wade would place the decision where it belongs – in the political jurisdiction of each state legislature, where it would likely remain legal.” As long as this is a hot topic for middle-aged white men, let me join in and demonstrate how ridiculous his argument is.

Mr. Friedman forgets why the Supreme Court had to rule on Roe v. Wade in the first place. Texas law had made it illegal for a woman to attempt to obtain, or for a physician to even consult on, an abortion – regardless of the circumstances. With states like Texas usurping intimate decisions and intruding into medical decisions historically left to patients and physicians, the Supreme Court was forced to rule on the basis of invasion of privacy. But it also considered prevailing views and abortion’s historical legality in ancient and Anglo-Saxon law.

The Supreme Court noted in its ruling that American laws against abortion originated late in the 19th century. Prior to this, abortion laws were based on English Common Law, which permitted abortion before “quickening” of the fetus. In the 1830s, Connecticut and New York were the first to write Common Law into legislation. It wasn’t until much later that “activist judges” of Friedman’s stripe started changing the laws and made abortion illegal.

In defending “choice,” the Supreme Court defended the decision that a “woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.”

The Court also wrote that “some amici argue that the woman’s right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses. With this we do not agree.” In so ruling, for the past 32 years there have been reasonable limits on abortion, respectful of controversy and morals, but the Roe v. Wade decision stands primarily as a defense of the rights of individuals to decide intimate matters themselves.

As Roe v. Wade itself shows, states will often violate civil liberties if Constitutional rights are not pressed. As we have seen in the case of states’ support for segregation and recent anti-gay statutes, states are all too often ready to deny rights to the citizens they should be protecting.

Friedman spends half of his column whining about how his graphic description of partial-birth abortion was edited by The Standard-Times. Such abortions are hardly the norm, and the shock value of depictions of them is a totally separate matter from matters of civil and personal rights. He maintains that support for legalized abortion dropped to 43 percent in 2000.

But the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University reported a large majority of Americans in 2000, while hardly in favor of reckless use of abortion, nevertheless supported the right of a woman and her physician to choose it. Lydia Saad of the Gallup Poll confirmed similar results for 2000 and 2004 polls. But if Friedman really does believe his own figures, then he can’t also claim that abortion “would likely remain legal” if it has this much opposition.

States should be free to legislate and govern as they please, but never free to deny civil rights or privacy to citizens. Thank God for our federal Constitution.

This was published in the Standard Times on January 24, 2005
http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/01-05/01-24-05/zzzoplet.htm
(link may be broken)

I read Barbara Cornwell’s letter on gay marriage (“Leviticus is my guide on the marriage issue,” March 5 Standard-Times), and marveled at how much of the book of Leviticus is selectively quoted. Leviticus is regarded by many scholars to have been written by the priestly Levites long after God gave the Torah to Moses, and much of it was written to specifically guide the Levites’ own conduct as priests.

Besides its views on homosexuality, I wonder how many of the other laws in Leviticus guide people such as Ms. Cornwell? Do they follow the letter of the law in regard to burnt offerings? Do they keep kosher, observe jubilee years, abstain from wearing cloth made of blends? Leviticus calls for adulterers to be killed, prohibits shaving, and prohibits –virtually every religious institution in New Bedford is guilty of this – using pillars in construction.

Perhaps this line from Leviticus is more important: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s what tolerance and civil rights truly boil down to.

This was published in the Standard Times on March 10, 2004
http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/03-04/03-10-04/zzzoplet.htm
(link may be broken)

I read Alan Dias’ letter on gay parenting in the Aug. 7 Standard-Times and found his facts and arguments to be seriously flawed.

Dias begins by quoting a 1995 study by an Australian academic, Sotirios Sarantakos, that makes many claims about the result of gay parenting. It apparently doesn’t occur to some that gay parents often adopt, and these children are frequently troubled or developmentally delayed before they enter an adoptive home. A 2003 study by an Australian Law Reform Institute generally discredits Sarantakos’ findings. Among the problems with Sarantakos’ study, it turns out, are that many of the parenting issues found in single gay parent families are identical to those in single straight mother families.

Mr. Dias also quotes a University of Southern California study by Stacey and Biblarz and again makes sweeping generalizations about all gay parents. However, it turns out that the USC study is primarily based on single gay mothers. There was also not enough data on gay father families in this study to draw any conclusions.

This is hardly a study worth quoting.

If one wants to be a bit more thorough, there is other research (for example, Bigner and Jacobsen) which indicates that there is little difference between the parenting styles of gay and straight fathers. Or Flaks, Ficher, Masterpasqua and Joseph, which showed slightly better parenting awareness among gay parents. Or Green, Mandel, Hotvedt, et al, which showed no differences between IQ or social development among children in gay and straight families.

At the very least, the issue is far from settled. But who is Dias to pontificate on the suitability of parenting styles or to decide who is “dysfunctional”? In our society I see the results of horrible parenting every day, and the overwhelming majority of dysfunctional members of society have come from straight parents.

Gay unions and gay families are not a threat to the rest of us. The more people who grow up in stable, loving homes, the better. If Mr. Dias wants to prop up the institution of heterosexual marriage, he should start with the causes of divorce, which is now about 43 percent in the US.

It now takes two parents, each working the typical 50 hours a week, to make ends meet in this society. Vacations and leisure are virtually a thing of the past and it is a lucky family that has meals together. Why not start here instead?

This was published in the Standard Times on August 11, 2003
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20030811/opinion/308119935