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Welcome to Christian America and the evangelical Big Lie
Walt Ames, VTDigger
https://vtdigger.org/2022/07/03/walt-amses-welcome-to-christian-america-and-the-evangelical-big-lie/
...
Like most everyone else in the country, I’m ruminating over a series of small “What ifs” that coalesced into last week’s thunderbolt, setting back a century of American intellectual and scientific progress, empowering a Christian theocracy bent on its superstitions dictating the rule of law.
What if Merrick Garland? … What if Hillary? … What if RBG? … What if Bernie Bros? The chilling message in this decision is that what voters want is fast becoming immaterial to the court, and why not? Five of the justices in the majority were appointed by presidents who entered the White House after losing the popular vote.
Patiently waiting three decades for his day to come, Clarence Thomas made clear immediately that he wasn’t yet satisfied. He wanted more. In a concurring opinion, stunning in its implications, Thomas took aim at the heart of a nation already riven by the court’s overturning Roe v. Wade, intimating that the rights to marriage equality, intimate LGBTQIA + relationships and even contraception could eventually be heading for the SCOTUS chopping block.
... but can’t tear my focus from the self-mythologizing of the Christian right, and its sanctimonious recall of how Roe galvanized the movement in 1973, jumpstarting a half-century of activism leading to last week’s big SCOTUS victory.
Unfortunately, as William Barr might say, their recollection is total bullshit. Randall Balmer, the Mandel family professor of arts and sciences at Dartmouth, eviscerated what he termed a “durable myth” several years ago in Politico magazine. “It wasn’t until a full six years after Roe that evangelical leaders seized on abortion not for moral reasons but as a rallying cry to deny Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”
Largely conceived by the late Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, the new coalition’s long-term objective was political power, which, according to Weyrich, once achieved would “give the Moral Majority the opportunity to re-create this great nation.”
But Balmer reports a catalyst around which to rally was elusive: “Weyrich by his own account had tried out different issues to pique evangelical interest, including pornography, school prayer, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and even abortion,” but couldn’t get “those people” interested, admitting at a 1990 conference that he had “failed utterly.”
Contradicting the carefully manufactured mythology, we find the Christian response to Roe v. Wade was hardly a response at all, certainly not angry. It was mostly silence or even outright approval. Baptists thought the decision was “an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior.” W. Barry Garrett, writing in the Baptist Press at that time, suggested “religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”
But issues around money, power and racism proved too difficult to ignore and losing the federal tax exemption of their racially discriminatory private schools was a bridge too far and the religious right was born through no connection whatever to abortion.
Another concern for evangelicals was that if their “segregation academies” lost their status; gifts and donations to such institutions would no longer provide charitable tax deductions. Although abortion, writes Balmer, “emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lie not in the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.”
...
Misogynistic to the extreme; Draconian beyond measure; and so primitive Samuel Alito justifies the decision by citing (several times) Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th-century English legal authority who thought there was no such thing as marital rape, believing “I do” was retroactive consent, and presided over witch trials.
The very idea this character would convey even a shred of credibility in the victimization of women is simply loathsome.
Welcome to Christian America.
Unfortunately, as William Barr might say, their recollection is total bullshit. Randall Balmer, the Mandel family professor of arts and sciences at Dartmouth, eviscerated what he termed a “durable myth” several years ago in Politico magazine. “It wasn’t until a full six years after Roe that evangelical leaders seized on abortion not for moral reasons but as a rallying cry to deny Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”
Largely conceived by the late Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, the new coalition’s long-term objective was political power, which, according to Weyrich, once achieved would “give the Moral Majority the opportunity to re-create this great nation.”
But Balmer reports a catalyst around which to rally was elusive: “Weyrich by his own account had tried out different issues to pique evangelical interest, including pornography, school prayer, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and even abortion,” but couldn’t get “those people” interested, admitting at a 1990 conference that he had “failed utterly.”
Contradicting the carefully manufactured mythology, we find the Christian response to Roe v. Wade was hardly a response at all, certainly not angry. It was mostly silence or even outright approval. Baptists thought the decision was “an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior.” W. Barry Garrett, writing in the Baptist Press at that time, suggested “religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”
But issues around money, power and racism proved too difficult to ignore and losing the federal tax exemption of their racially discriminatory private schools was a bridge too far and the religious right was born through no connection whatever to abortion.
Another concern for evangelicals was that if their “segregation academies” lost their status; gifts and donations to such institutions would no longer provide charitable tax deductions. Although abortion, writes Balmer, “emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lie not in the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.”
...
Misogynistic to the extreme; Draconian beyond measure; and so primitive Samuel Alito justifies the decision by citing (several times) Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th-century English legal authority who thought there was no such thing as marital rape, believing “I do” was retroactive consent, and presided over witch trials.
The very idea this character would convey even a shred of credibility in the victimization of women is simply loathsome.
Welcome to Christian America.
11 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
arguing whether the countries should be Catholic nations or Protestant nations.
It's why the Founding Fathers declared "Freedom of Religion" as a tenet of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights.
I was done with organized religion many years ago. I sure as hell don't want it running the government.
Tax the Churches!
