Borough Park, Brooklyn... A Living Journey Back In Time-- WAY Back In Time... And, Of Course, Thick With COVID And Trumpists

 

When I was growing up in Brooklyn, there were always rumors of Republicans being there-- just not very many, and certainly never enough to be an electoral factor. Even last cycle, decades later, Hillary won Brooklyn 595,086 (79.7%) to 133,653 (17.9%). Still... where the hell did those 133 thousand people come from? Oh, basically Russia... and Israel. Russian neighborhoods in south Brooklyn are breeding grounds for treason and full-on fascism, and Ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods like Borough Park are bizarrely alternative and nearly self-contained universes that have more in common with speaking-in-tongues and snake-handling communities in Tennessee and Arkansas than anything to do with Brooklyn.

Yesterday, the [Jewish Daily] Forward reported that in Borough Park, New York's pandemic central, an anti-shutdown protest turned into a Trump rally, complete with a reporter being assaulted. Keep in mind, the Ultra-Ordthodox in New York, like the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel are willful super-spreaders because they don't think man's laws apply to them-- just a warped Eastern European version of the Old Testament by which they live their lives. They're far more like extreme evangelicals than they are like actual Jews. A trio of Forward reporters wrote that "The religious Jews of Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood often pour into the streets during the harvest holiday of Sukkot to dance with Torahs in a celebration called Simchat Beit HaShoeva, a ritual having to do with rainfall." [Yes, these are very, very primitive people who have barely progressed from the Bronze Age.] "On Wednesday night, they danced along Borough Parks’s 13th Avenue holding Trump flags."

Heshy Tischler, a community agitator and candidate for New York City Council, drew a crowd for the second night in a row to protest new social-distancing restrictions that Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have imposed on the neighborhood and eight other ZIP codes with at least double the city’s positivity rate for coronavirus. And though he promised no violence after a counter-protester on Tuesday was beaten to the point of critical injuries, a Hasidic journalist was hit in the head, kicked and berated as a “Nazi” during Wednesday’s gathering of more than 300.

“Here is my army!” Tischler said Wednesday night pointing to the crowd that included Haredi-- or ultra-Orthodox-- Jews of all ages, some from outside the neighborhood. “We’re gonna fight back. This is our city, our town, our country.”

Tischler is not a rabbi, scholar or elected official, but he has emerged as a popular figure in this deeply religious neighborhood because its usual leaders have not been able to manage their communities’ resentment against the news media and government officials they see as biased against them, or even antisemitic.

“Community leaders all have their issues with standing up to the government,” said one protester, Avraham Mintz, who lives in Borough Park. “They don’t want to fight with Cuomo and de Blasio. So Tischler stood up and said, ‘I’m just going to stand up and scream.’”

Tishler had put out the call via social media and WhatsApp for people to find him at 13th Avenue and 50th Street at 9 p.m. The crowd included many young families with strollers, some grandfathers wearing masks, and teenaged boys from yeshivas in nearby neighborhoods, eager to see what would unfold. Women and girls stood on the sidewalk, as men gathered in the middle of the street to listen to Tishler and also dance to religious music played on loudspeakers.

After some protesters burned masks on Tuesday in a sign of defiance against the coronavirus restrictions, there was something of a concerted effort to show compliance with social distancing on Wednesday. Volunteers walked around handing out masks, and early into the festivities, some Hasidic teenage boys approached a news photographer and asked him to take pictures of them wearing masks.

The gathering was the place to be in a neighborhood unusually quieted for the holiday by the pandemic. “The boys are bored,” said one Hasidic mother who declined to give her name, pointing to the teenagers gathered in the street, rushing about in groups, clutching onto their kosher phones. “They didn’t have camp, they’re off from school now. This is all they have now.”

A teenage girl who said she was visiting from Israel, standing with a gaggle of girlfriends, also refused to identify herself to a reporter. “We’re here for both the protest and the party,” she said. “There’s not enough holiday action this year, so we came to see what’s happening here.”

Tuesday’s rally came a day after Cuomo’s announcement of new coronavirus restrictions that would essentially shut down the final weekend of the Jewish High Holidays in many of the state’s Orthodox communities. Synagogues are limited to 25% capacity with no more than 10 people inside, public and private schools have been ordered closed as of Friday, along with restaurants.

At that rally, protesters burned masks, and two people were attacked. One went to the hospital.

...Tishler, a gadfly who got 4% of the votes when he ran for City Council in 2017, has not issued demands or described specific goals for this new protest movement. He does say that he is running again in 2021 in the 48th District, which includes the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Midwood and Sheepshead Bay-- also subject to Cuomo’s new crackdown-- but not Borough Park.

The coronavirus might have provided him with a new lease on political life, although it is not clear what he is going to do with it.

“He tapped into the vacuum of no leadership,” Jacob Kornbluh, a Hasidic Jew who, like Tischler, lives in Borough Park, and is a journalist for Jewish Insider, said in an interview earlier on Wednesday.

Kornbluh has previously sparked the community’s ire by calling out violations of social-distancing rules. Tischler threatened him in a video he tweeted on Wednesday during the day. And on Wednesday night, when he recognized Kornbluh among the journalists covering his rally, Tishcler sent the crowd to chase him down the street.

Kornbluh was hit in the head and kicked by protesters, who screamed “Nazi” and “Hitler” at him.

Most of Tischler’s neighbors are Hasidic, but he is not. He does not wear the community’s uniform for men of black and white clothing, or curled sidelocks.

He works as an “expediter,” who facilitates official permits and other paperwork for construction professionals, but he also runs a weekly call-in show on YouTube and Facebook. After studying in yeshiva, he served time in prison for immigration fraud. He ran for City Council, but got only 4% of the votes.

Yet since the summer, when he gained wide attention among Orthodox Jews for taking bolt cutters to the chains around playgrounds in Hasidic neighborhoods, his profile has been rising.

“I don’t understand, why only the Jews?” Tischler said in an interview Wednesday, expressing the widespread Orthodox conviction that Cuomo’s rules unfairly single out their communities. “We contribute to this country more than anybody else, so you will respect us.”

In recent weeks, as coronavirus cases have spiked in Orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn and other parts of the state, he has risen in prominence because religious and government leaders failed to explain that the community could open in the summer, but would likely need to shut down religious life again in the fall to accommodate a second wave, Kornbluh said.

“What they did is basically argue for a reopening process without communicating a message of adhering to certain measures: Wear a mask, social distance,” Kornbluh said.

The community also felt alienated by city workers and contact tracers, who Orthodox groups have suggested were culturally insensitive. The city admitted last month that it had only five Yiddish-speaking contact tracers on staff. “We have been targeted terribly,” said one Hasidic female protester at the Wednesday rally. “That’s what we are feeling right now.”

Tischler provides an appealing alternative.

“Heshy Tischler is popular because he has a certain charisma, a certain charm,” said Ezra Friedlander, a Borough Park resident and political consultant, adding that Tischler’s rhetoric is “totally unacceptable.”

And he expresses people’s anger for them.

“Coronavirus is a new flu, until God brings us a new virus,” said one Hasidic woman at the Wednesday night protest. “This is part of galus [exile]. People are gonna die and gonna live. If Hashem wants you to live, you live. If He wants you to die, you die.”

"Haters of Israel"

On Wednesday afternoon in Borough Park-- between the two evening protests-- life resumed as normal, with men carrying bags with prayer shawls, as well as the palm branches and etrog fruits that are used in prayer services during the harvest festival of Sukkot, which is this week.

Few in the neighborhood knew Tischler’s name, but the things they said demonstrate that he knows the grievances they harbor against both media and government.

At Amnon’s Kosher Pizza at 4814 13th Avenue, a man turned to a woman and warned her in Hebrew that there are “journalists, she should be careful,” pointing to a corner where TV stations were setting up. She turned to them and screamed, “Haters of Israel!”

“De Blasio and Cuomo hate us Jews,” said one Hasidic woman who declined to give her name.

Cuomo and de Blasio have repeatedly said that they are enacting the restrictions based solely on rates of positive coronavirus infection, which are highest in Orthodox areas.

In Borough Park, the rate was about 6% at the beginning of this week, according to state data. In Rockland and Orange Counties, rates are considerably higher: In Kiryas Joel, the Hasidic hub, positive test rates reached nearly 30%, the highest in the country. The New York state average is just above 1%.

Tischler maintains-- without evidence-- that those numbers are fake.

“These are not real tests,” he said of results from state-administered coronavirus tests.

Tischler’s comments reflect a widespread skepticism in the Orthodox world of the statistics on which the government is basing its shutdown of Orthodox areas. He suggested that the city’s testing machines are not giving accurate results, and that there are few people actually getting sick from contracting the coronavirus at the moment. Cuomo has said that hospitalizations are rising.

Orthodox organizations should do their own testing, privately, and report their results to the state, Tischler said.

“Let me do the testing,” he added. “My tests are negative.”

...His Twitter account has under 1,000 followers, and only 790 people watched a recent show on YouTube from September.

But his videos are shared widely on WhatsApp, where he occupies a role once played by one of his inspirations, Donald Trump, as the community’s outspoken id who tells it like it is.

Tischler said Trump’s return to the White House after being hospitalized for COVID-19, and the president’s claims of recovering from the disease, had inspired him to protest the new restrictions. Tischler also downplayed the deadliness of the coronavirus, claiming without evidence that Orthodox Jews who died from COVID-19 more often died from poor hospital care than the disease itself.

“When I’m on the street, I don’t have to wear a mask, just like the president,” he said.

...On Wednesday, Aron Wieder, a Rockland County legislator representing the Hasidic hub of Monsey, released a video urging his community to continue to distance and wear masks, not for Cuomo’s sake, but because it adheres to Jewish values that promote saving a life over religious obligations.

“When people lose trust in government, chaos happens,” Wieder said in an interview. “I was trying to mitigate that by acknowledging” the community’s anger at Cuomo.

So far, Tischler’s political strategy seems to be more about amplifying anger than mitigating it.

Some of the protesters were grateful to him for his community organizing. “I don’t know what he’s doing but he opened our parks for our kids, and now he organized this,” said one Hasidic mother, pointing to the young men dancing in the street. “He is saying that it’s time for us to get out and show we have a voice, too.”

Life is dangerous for Jews who behave, Tischler said.

“We tried to follow the laws and the governor and mayor still came after us. My father is a concentration camp survivor,” Tischler said. “We were quiet then, and we behaved. Not anymore.”

Time to roll out the classic definition of "idiot" again-- a kind of a palate cleanser after before the dueling OpEds coming up:

First is by Eliezer Brand, a right-wing rabbi in Brooklyn who senses a kinship between his own primitive Haredi tribe and the worst of the evangelicals-- and is all gung-ho on Amy Coney Island and writes that Mike Pence represents him and "has been a great leader for religious people in general and for Orthodox Jews in particular." It starts with Pence's anti-Palestinian and pro-Zionist beliefs "but," he wrote, "it’s not just Pence’s foreign policy that has gained him support in our community. It’s his larger view of life-- specifically, how deeply and unapologetically impacted it is by his religious beliefs."

Early in the Trump presidency, the Washington Post reported that Pence never eats alone with a woman other than his wife Karen, and that he won’t attend events that serve alcohol without her by his side.

This became known as the Pence Rule and was widely misunderstood, mocked, misrepresented as something sinister and outright ridiculed. Even Kamala Harris, now his opponent, jumped at the chance to attack his faith. “I disagree with him when he suggests it’s not possible to have meetings with women alone by himself,” she told Politico. “I think that’s ridiculous-- the idea that you would deny a professional woman the opportunity to have a meeting with the vice president of the United States is outrageous.”

But Pence’s rule is not about denying women opportunities; it’s about making sure you are living by your values every minute of the day.

It’s something we Orthodox and Haredi Jews are well versed in. We, too, have a rule about not being alone with a woman who isn’t your wife or a man who isn’t your husband. It’s one of a few things that unites us with evangelicals, many of whom adhere to the practice known as the Modesto Manifesto, which Pastor Billy Graham created. It was meant as a display of integrity, a means of avoiding sexual temptation, just like our rules of yichud-- not being alone with members of the opposite sex.

This isn’t something we choose to believe in; it’s a tenet of our larger belief system that is not optional. And yet, it’s not something we can discuss openly without facing the mockery, derision, and blowback Pence faced.

And though I was dismayed at the media reaction to Pence’s adherence to his religion, I was also happy that it did garner attention. To have this in the national news helped bring this issue to the forefront and normalized it somewhat. It made us Orthodox Jews feel less alien to the culture at large.

There’s another front on which Pence is a friend to religious Jews. He has since his days as Governor of Indiana has been a champion of religious liberty, and not just for evangelicals.

He has been a strong supporter of Indiana’s private-school voucher program, a meaningful position for Orthodox Jews who largely send their kids to private school. And in 2015, Pence signed a state bill protecting religious liberty, hailed by local Orthodox Jewish leaders as positive.

Now, together with President Trump, he is backing another proudly religious person for the Supreme Court-- Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

Listening to Pence talk, I feel that he represents my interests and my fears as a Haredi Jew. He is a friend to the faithful, and, like me and my community, he does not compromise on his religious beliefs, even when they are unpopular, even when they come in for mockery.

In this sense, he is something of an avatar for Orthodox Jews in public life, despite being an evangelical Christian.

Yesterday, The Forward published an OpEd by Joel Swanson warning Jews about what Trumpism really is. "Sharing video of the protests, right wing Twitter activists decided to portray the tensions between Orthodox Jews and the police as 'rounding up Jews,' which President Trump retweeted with the added commentary, 'Wow, what does this grim picture remind you of? I am the only thing in the Radical Left’s way! VOTE.' It’s not the first time President Trump has sought to portray himself as a defender of the Jews, though comparing Democrats to Nazis is a new low."

But in light of new evidence confirming where the true threat to Jews comes from, it went from dangerous and disingenuous to absolutely galling. On the same day that the massive protests against new coronavirus restrictions broke out in Borough Park, the Anti-Defamation League released a massive new study of social media usage in the run-up to the 2020 election. The organization had uncovered what it called a “deluge” of antisemitism directed against Jewish members of Congress. According to the ADL’s findings, at least 10% of social media attacks against Jewish politicians are explicitly or implicitly antisemitic in nature, with 39% of those attacks focused on the false, antisemitic claim that Jewish Holocaust survivor George Soros is responsible for “funding and organizing the political careers of Jewish incumbents, the media, and Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests in order to assert a Communist or ‘Jewish supremacy’ agenda in the United States.”

The ADL particularly attributes what it calls an “alarming” rise in Soros-linked antisemitism directed against American Jewish politicians to the spread of the QAnon conspiracy theory on the far-right. But Trump himself has played a role in mainstreaming this fringe, antisemitic view, praising supporters of the conspiracy theory for their support for his candidacy and calling some its most prominent adherents “rising stars” in the Republican Party.

For President Trump to try to cast himself as some champion of the Jews in light of his own mainstreaming of one of the biggest antisemitic conspiracy theories of our time is absolutely ludicrous.

...[T]he coincidence that these anti-mask protests happened on the same day that the ADL released its new report on rising election-related antisemitism in the United States, showing that the overwhelming majority of this antisemitism comes from the far-right directed against Democrats and the left, reveals the breathtaking cynicism of politicians like President Trump trying to portray themselves as some kind of protector of the Jews.

On a week when the Department of Homeland Security has itself acknowledged far-right white supremacy as the leading cause of terror in the U.S., no one should be taken in by President Trump’s cynical attempts to portray himself as the protector of the Jewish people. A lot of new information came out this past week about where the real violent threats to the Jewish community in the U.S. lie in the final weeks leading up to the 2020 election. And President Trump is not going to protect us from those threats.

What do we know about religionist extremists (especially ones who wear uniforms as their everyday garb)?

• You can do anything and everything, no matter how savage and inhuman, in the name of their God
• They are extremely paranoid and way beyond self-righteousness and over the line into insanity
• They don't live in the contemporary world (except as leaches)
• They are, by definition and mass self-image, better than anyone else (outsiders)
• Magical thinking is A-OK, in fact, critical thinking is blasphemous, heretical and punished by ostracism if not death
• Members with normal IQs flee as soon as they can get away... which is very bad for the gene pool of the remaining community
• Classically speaking, the members are idiots, a problem for society
• And they gravitate towards authoritarian movements like Trumpism.

How Extreme Is Speaking In Tongues Handmaid Amy Coney Island? She Belongs On The Bench As Much As Trump Belongs In The Oval Office

Before dawn on Wednesday, Frank Schaeffer, the world's leading expert on the sociology (and pathology) of evangelism, was up and tweeting. "It wasn't enough for Trump to nominate a pro-life Catholic to the Court," he wrote. "He had to pick a Catholic who is also a part of and leader in, an extremist protestant-style Pentecostal cult of domination and control that even most evangelicals find crazy. Amy Coney Barrett: Nutcase." Yep... a nut case who is better suited to be a minister in a fringe religious cult than a judge on any kind of a court of law, let alone the U.S. Supreme Court. It makes sense that the worst president in history would pick the worst judicial nominees in history. And Coney Island is the worst yet.

On Tuesday, the Christian Science Monitor published a deep dive into Coney Island by Henry Glass, who began by explaining the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, an arm of the ADF, the Alliance Defending Freedom, which aims to train Christian lawyers to "foster legal systems that fully protect our God-given rights." Glass noted that "The program’s student and teacher alumni now include dozens of law clerks, a U.S. senator, and at least six federal judges-- most notably Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who could soon become the youngest member of the U.S Supreme Court. The reach of the ADF and other conservative Christian legal organizations is further still. If Judge Barrett is confirmed, it would represent a culmination of decades-long efforts by the conservative Christian legal movement to move from the periphery of the legal world into the mainstream. And it is coming at the same time that fewer Americans-- just 65%-- identify themselves as Christian."

The ADF is one of several richly funded conservative Christian legal organizations (CCLOs) that constitute that movement, training lawyers, arguing-- and winning-- high-profile religious liberty cases in the courts, and increasing their influence on policy and politics. That movement is now reaching maturity, and law in the U.S. is thus poised to shift-- starting perhaps as soon as the Supreme Court term that began this week-- substantially toward favoring religious liberty over all other rights, legal experts say.

Indeed, among the movement’s stated goals is the protection of free exercise of religion as a fundamental right above all others. Such a shift in the law could prompt the diminishment of other rights, such as abortion access and same-sex marriage. CCLO attorneys, for their part, say that they just want to ensure that courts give religious beliefs the respect and protection they deserve.

“True tolerance, where people of different views and faiths can peacefully coexist-- that is ultimately what we’re advocating for,” says Matt Sharp, senior counsel for the ADF.

Judge Barrett, a former professor at Notre Dame Law School whom President Donald Trump appointed to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, is expected to begin her confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court next week. A devout Roman Catholic, she has no direct affiliations with any CCLOs, and in her brief time on the 7th Circuit she has not developed a deep record on religious liberty or other rights, like abortion and same-sex marriage, with which it has often conflicted.

If confirmed, she would join a conservative high court that has been incrementally expanding free exercise protections along with other rights that conservative Christians see as limiting their religious freedom.

CCLOs began to form around this issue decades ago, says Jordan Sekulow, executive director of another leading Christian legal organization, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). The establishment clause in the First Amendment, which prohibits the establishment of religion by Congress, “had basically eaten the free exercise of religion away.”

“It shouldn’t be more important than any other First Amendment right, but it was trampled on,” he adds. “And I wouldn’t say it’s come back.”

...The conservative religious movement began in the late 1970s and ’80s as a reaction to what it saw as an erosion of traditional family values and government intrusion on religion-- most notably to end racial segregation in Christian schools. But groups like Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority still struggled to break into Washington’s elite circles.

“They’ve been outsiders to the mainstream of the conservative legal movement,” says Joshua Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Denver who studies the Christian conservative movement.

So, he adds, “they developed their own institutions and resources to make a parallel conservative Christian movement.”

Conservative legal groups like the ADF, ACLJ, the Becket Fund, the First Liberty Institute, and the Thomas More Society were all formed in the 1990s.

Most of these groups are tax-exempt 501(c)3 nonprofits, and thus not required to publicly identify donors. But they are well funded, with the ADF raising almost $61 million, the ACLJ almost $23 million, and the Becket Fund almost $7 million, according to their most recent 12-month tax-filing period. (For comparison, Lambda Legal, a national nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ rights, raised just over $17 million in the 12 months of its most recent tax filing.)

And unlike their common opponents on the left, conservative Christian legal groups have always focused entirely on religious liberty issues.

“They have a longing for what religious liberty protections were before 1990,” says Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School and founder-director of the school’s Law, Rights and Religion Project.

“They’re trying to have the courts reread the Constitution in a way that elevates religious liberty rights over all other individual rights, as well as the public interest.”

“Positive change”

Some of the Supreme Court’s more conservative justices agree. This week, in a short opinion declining to hear a case related to same-sex marriage, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito criticized Obergefell v. Hodges, the court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, as having “ruinous consequences for religious liberty” by “choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right.”

The court’s recent grappling with religious liberty claims has focused primarily on two issues: religious institutions’ ability to access state funding, and religious individuals’ ability to exercise their beliefs around sexual norms in public life and in their private business.

For the most part, the court has narrowly favored religious liberty. Religious institutions and businesses have been granted exemptions from contraception mandates. Religious schools have been given access to state funding. A state has been rebuked for punishing a Christian cake shop owner for refusing to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Many of these cases have been pushed by CCLOs.

Of the 11 cases it has been lead counsel for at the Supreme Court, the Becket Fund has won nine. The ADF had more Supreme Court wins in First Amendment cases than any other litigant between 2013 and 2017, according to Empirical SCOTUS. In every religious liberty case the court hears, there are usually friend-of-the-court briefs filed by CCLOs.

The hundreds of mostly young, conservative federal judges appointed by President Trump-- not least Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh-- have certainly helped in that regard, say lawyers for conservative Christian groups.

“We’ve seen a lot of positive change on the courts,” says Michael Berry, general counsel for the First Liberty Institute. “By and large the president [has a strong] record of nominating originalist, constitutionalist judges.”

And among the more than 200 judges the Senate has confirmed are six who are alumni of conservative Christian legal organizations. Those six include Kyle Duncan, a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals judge who was general counsel for the Becket Fund, and  Lawrence VanDyke, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judge who was a Blackstone fellow and listed by the ADF as an “allied attorney.”

Judge Barrett’s short tenure on the 7th Circuit hasn’t brought any rulings from her on issues like abortion, marriage equality, or free exercise rights. But she is a popular nominee for social conservatives, and if confirmed would likely align with the court’s most conservative justices.

...If you ask CCLO attorneys what the “end” is, most say it’s for the free exercise of religion to have the protection and deference of a fundamental right.





In a landmark 1990 opinion, the late Justice Antonin Scalia explained why courts have chosen to not do that.

The case, Employment Division v. Smith, concerned whether it was unconstitutional to deny state unemployment benefits to two Native American men for ingesting peyote, a controlled substance, as part of their religious ceremonies.

But obligating someone to obey a law only when it coincides with their religious beliefs, wrote Justice Scalia, “permit[s] him, by virtue of his beliefs, ‘to become a law unto himself.’”

The case this term concerns a Catholic agency being banned from the city of Philadelphia’s foster program because it refuses to license same-sex couples. The court-- which by the scheduled Nov. 4 oral argument may include a newly appointed Justice Barrett-- could overturn Scalia’s opinion in Smith. As a result, it could be much easier for religious objectors to gain exemptions from laws.

“Some religious exemptions are appropriate and necessary,” says Professor Franke, the Columbia Law School scholar. But “they need to be given sparingly, or else we really undermine democracy itself.”

Special protection for religious liberty is especially needed now “to ensure that those viewed as ‘out of step’ [with social and cultural change] are not effectively expelled from society,” writes Catholic Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in the case.

“That anticipated time is already here,” he adds, quoting Justice Alito’s dissent in Obergefell that those with “out of step” views “will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”

Persecution of Christians is a major concern for CCLOs and jurists like Justice Alito. In one concurrence last term, he compared the anti-Catholic animus that motivated 18th-century laws banning public funding for religious schools to the racial animus that motivated Jim Crow laws. He illustrated the point with a political cartoon from the time depicting Catholic priests as crocodiles slithering toward schoolchildren.

The court struck down that state ban, continuing a trend of slowly but steadily strengthening free exercise protections. This term that pace of change could accelerate-- especially if Judge Barrett is confirmed.

Washington Post reporters Emma Brown, Jon Swaine and Michelle Boorstein wrote that while Trump's Coney Island Baby "has faced questions about how her Catholic faith might influence her jurisprudence, she has not spoken publicly about her involvement in People of Praise, a small Christian group founded in the 1970s and based in South Bend, Indiana." She admits she has served on the board of a network of private Christian schools affiliated with the group. "The organization, however, has declined to confirm that she is a member. In recent years, it removed from its website editions of a People of Praise magazine-- first those that included her name and photograph and then all archives of the magazine itself." Her role in the super-secretive, extremist organization, for all her efforts to hide it, is starting to seep out now that Trump is trying to push her onto the Supreme Court. In 2010 "she held the title of handmaid,' a leadership position for women in the community."

She comes from a territory where reigious bigots feel they are being persecuted if they can't use their "religious beliefs" to justify breaking the law and persecuting and oppressing minorities. Amy Coney Bigot is the very definition of someone who doesn't belong on the bench.

[W]hile in law school, Barrett lived at the South Bend home of People of Praise’s influential co-founder Kevin Ranaghan and his wife, Dorothy, who together helped establish the group’s male-dominated hierarchy and view of gender roles. The group was one of many to grow out of the charismatic Christian movement, which sought a more intense and communal religious experience by embracing such practices as shared living, faith healing and speaking in tongues.

Barrett’s ties to the group, which has conservative stances on the role of women in society and other social issues, did not come to light until after she was questioned by senators considering her nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in 2017. Senators are preparing to question her next week over her nomination to the high court.

...People of Praise was established in 1971 by Ranaghan and Paul DeCelles, then young academics at the University of Notre Dame. It was formed as a “covenant community,” in which members looking for close community promise to abide by a common agreement.

While People of Praise is open to all Christians, the vast majority are Catholic, like Barrett. At the time the group was founded, many denominations-- including the Catholic Church-- looked warily at groups that adopted different practices and created insular, separate communities. That wariness has largely subsided.

...The community was led by men, who taught members to run their families according to their interpretation of biblical views of gender roles, according to former members and group documents.

“Women were homemakers; they were there to support their husbands,” one former member said in an interview. “My dad was the head of the household and the decision-maker.”

A person who was raised in the community said she was instructed by elders not to “emasculate” her male peers by getting the better of them in conversation. “I was made aware of the difference from a young age,” the person said. “I was aware that it would have been better if I had been born a boy.”

...A 1986 community handbook obtained by The Post said each member is “personally accountable to God for his or her decisions,” but also emphasized “obedience to authority and submission to headship.”

Members are typically assigned a “head” to give them spiritual leadership and guidance on life matters such as buying a car or finding a romantic partner. Younger men and women are led by older members of the same sex, according to former members, but husbands typically take over as “heads” for their wives following marriage.

Men’s “headship” of their wives, and the male-dominated governance of the community, has been the basis of accusations from some critics of Barrett that People of Praise is built on the sexist expectation that women defer to men.

The summer 2015 issue of People of Praise’s magazine, Vine & Branches, featured an article titled “Holiness in Marriage,” which it said was based on a talk given to women in the community in the 1980s by Jeanne DeCelles, wife of co-founder Paul DeCelles.

“Make it a joy for him to head you,” Jeanne DeCelles said, according to the article. “It is important for you to verbalize your commitment to submission... Tell him what you think about things, make your input, but let him make the decisions, and support them once they are made.”

Connolly said every People of Praise member is responsible for his or her own decisions. “In the People of Praise we live by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which recognizes that men and women share a fundamental equality as bearers of God’s image and sons and daughters of God,” he said. “We value independent thinking, and teach it in our schools.”

...John Fea, a prominent historian of U.S. religion at Messiah University, said Barrett would be the first Supreme Court justice to come from a charismatic Christian background.

Fea said he believes it is fair for senators to ask Barrett how she views the blending of her small, insular community and a job judging for a nation. But he said People of Praise’s belief in distinct gender roles is similar to what is lived and preached across much of America today, in faiths as different as Catholicism, the Southern Baptist Convention and orthodox Islam and Judaism.

He said that believing men should be the spiritual leaders of the family does not mean that women cannot be professionally ambitious. “Everything about Amy Coney Barrett’s career contradicts the idea that women in People of Praise can’t have careers or be successful,” he said.

...Since its earliest days, some People of Praise members have lived in communal homes or lodged with elders before marrying. Former members said this was a way for older members to show a model of family life. Over the years, multiple members stayed at the Ranaghans’ nine-bedroom house in South Bend, often while studying at Notre Dame and after graduating, former members said.

Barrett lived with the Ranaghans when she was a Notre Dame law student, according to a person who knew her at the time.

“Let’s just say it was one of the better experiences of our life. She is just a gem. But I don’t feel comfortable talking right now,” Dorothy Ranaghan told The Guardian, which first reported the fact that Barrett lived with the Ranaghans on Tuesday.

Kevin Ranaghan, a theology scholar and teacher, was already a major figure in charismatic Catholicism, speaking internationally and hosting prayer events at Notre Dame that drew hundreds and sometimes thousands of people in the movement’s early years.

Dorothy Ranaghan, a former high school religion teacher, co-wrote two books on charismatic Christianity with her husband in the years around People of Praise’s founding.

She lamented the impact of modern feminism in a 1991 essay that said “the basic differences between men and women should be respected and given cultural expression” and promoted the traditional roles of husbands as decision-makers and wives as homemakers, even as women pursue professional ambitions.

“The wife for her part is called to submit to her husband, not as a slave, but as a companion,” Ranaghan wrote, while stressing that there was “no room here for domination, oppression or of thinking of her as less than a full and free human person.” The Post obtained a copy of the essay from a former People of Praise member.

The essay also criticized a magazine for Girl Scout leaders as presenting an “overly aggressive idealization of girls and women.”

After Barrett graduated from law school in 1997, she worked in D.C. as an intern and then as a judicial clerk, according to biographical details she has submitted to the Senate.

Meanwhile, her future husband, Jesse Barrett-- whose family also had long ties to People of Praise, according to an obituary he wrote for his grandfather-- remained in South Bend to finish law school. In a court record for a February 1998 speeding offense, Jesse Barrett’s address is listed as the Ranaghans’ home.

Jesse graduated in 1999 and married Amy later that year.

...Barrett did not mention her membership in People of Praise in response to questions from the Senate about groups with which she has been affiliated, either that year or in conjunction with her current nomination.

Numerous references to Barrett and her family that previously appeared on People of Praise’s official website have since disappeared from the site, according to a Post review of versions of the site that are hosted by the Internet Archive.

Links to at least 10 issues of Vine & Branches that included mentions of Barrett or members of her family were removed from the site during the first half of 2017, the review found. On May 8, 2017, Barrett was nominated by Trump to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.

In one of the removed issues, from May 2006, Barrett was pictured at the group’s 2006 Leaders Conference for Women in South Bend. An accompanying article described the gathering as “three days of talks, sharings and conversations, all of which revealed the explosive power of love.”

Other issues of the magazine that disappeared from the site included announcements of the births of some of Barrett’s children and articles that mentioned relatives of Barrett and her husband, Jesse.

The section of the People of Praise website that for years featured a gallery of links to full issues of the magazine dating back 14 years was removed from the site altogether soon after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death last month, the archives show.

Connolly said the changes to the website were made “after discussions with members and nonmembers raised privacy concerns with the heightened media attention.”

Do You Think Donald Worships Jesus?

Fox News judge Andrew Napolitano makes a big deal about being a conservative Catholic brimming over with "conservative Catholic values." The day before Fox suspended him-- for his second wild gay sex scandal-- he was on TV celebrating the nomination of another conservative Catholic to the Supreme Court. I doubt Amy Coney Barrett is in a gay closet like Napolitano. But she is a profoundly bigoted homophobic fanatic (which, presumably is how she defines her conservative Catholic values.

Republican hypocrites like Napolitano are rending their garments and setting their hair on fire because the godless Democrats are supposedly questioning Coney Island about her conservative Catholicism. Now, I don't know how devout Joe Biden is, but he sure seems more religious than the ones who are accusing the Democrats of being anti-Catholic... as usual. And they back DONALD!

The McKay Coppins piece in yesterday's Atlantic Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters, was the kind of really good writing we've come to expect from him. Does it surprise you that former Trump aides say that in private, Señor T has spoken with cynicism and contempt about religious believers, mocking their leaders as charlatans, recognizing them as they same kinds of hustlers and scam artists that he's been for his entire life? Trump, never one for nuance, didn't mince words: "They’re all hustlers."

Coppins wrote that his unlikely "alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. 'My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,' he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. It’s a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barrett-- a devout, conservative Catholic-- to the Supreme Court. But in private, many of Trump’s comments about religion are marked by cynicism and contempt, according to people who have worked for him. Former aides told me they’ve heard Trump ridicule conservative religious leaders, dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base."

From the outset of his brief political career, Trump has viewed right-wing evangelical leaders as a kind of special-interest group to be schmoozed, conned, or bought off, former aides told me. Though he faced Republican primary opponents in 2016 with deeper religious roots-- Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee-- Trump was confident that his wealth and celebrity would attract high-profile Christian surrogates to vouch for him.

“His view was ‘I’ve been talking to these people for years; I’ve let them stay at my hotels-- they’re gonna endorse me. I played the game,’” said a former campaign adviser to Trump, who, like others quoted in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers-- often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle. The former campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing “faith healings,” while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, “Man, that’s some racket.” On another occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at Joel Osteen’s media empire-- particularly the viewership of his televised sermons.

In Cohen’s recent memoir, Disloyal, he recounts Trump returning from his 2011 meeting with the pastors who laid hands on him and sneering, “Can you believe that bullshit?” But if Trump found their rituals ridiculous, he followed their moneymaking ventures closely. “He was completely familiar with the business dealings of the leadership in many prosperity-gospel churches,” the adviser told me.

The conservative Christian elites Trump surrounds himself with have always been more clear-eyed about his lack of religiosity than they’ve publicly let on. In a September 2016 meeting with about a dozen influential figures on the religious right-- including the talk-radio host Eric Metaxas, the Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, and the theologian Wayne Grudem-- the then-candidate was blunt about his relationship to Christianity. In a recording of the meeting obtained by The Atlantic, the candidate can be heard shrugging off his scriptural ignorance (“I don’t know the Bible as well as some of the other people”) and joking about his inexperience with prayer (“The first time I met [Mike Pence], he said, ‘Will you bow your head and pray?’ and I said, ‘Excuse me?’ I’m not used to it.”) At one point in the meeting, Trump interrupted a discussion about religious freedom to complain about Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and brag about the taunting nickname he’d devised for him. “I call him Little Ben Sasse,” Trump said. “I have to do it, I’m sorry. That’s when my religion always deserts me.”

And yet, by the end of the meeting-- much of which was spent discussing the urgency of preventing trans women from using women’s restrooms-- the candidate had the group eating out of his hand. “I’m not voting for Trump to be the teacher of my third grader’s Sunday-school class. That’s not what he’s running for,” Jeffress said in the meeting, adding, “I believe it is imperative … that we do everything we can to turn people out.”

The Faustian nature of the religious right’s bargain with Trump has not always been quite so apparent to rank-and-file believers. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals are more than twice as likely as the average American to say that the president is a religious man. Some conservative pastors have described him as a “baby Christian,” and insist that he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his savior.

To those who have known and worked with Trump closely, the notion that he might have a secret spiritual side is laughable. “I always assumed he was an atheist,” Barbara Res, a former executive at the Trump Organization, told me. “He’s not a religious guy,” A. J. Delgado, who worked on his 2016 campaign, told me. “Whenever I see a picture of him standing in a group of pastors, all of their hands on him, I see a thought bubble [with] the words ‘What suckers,’” Mary Trump, the president’s niece, told me.

Greg Thornbury, a former president of the evangelical King’s College, who was courted by the campaign in 2016, told me that even those who acknowledge Trump’s lack of personal piety are convinced that he holds their faith in high esteem. “I don’t think for a moment that they would believe he’s cynical about them,” Thornbury said.

Trump’s public appeals to Jewish voters have been similarly discordant with his private comments. Last week, the Washington Post reported that after calls with Jewish lawmakers, the president has said that Jews “are only in it for themselves.” And while he is quick to tout his daughter Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism when he’s speaking to Jewish audiences, he is sometimes less effusive in private. Cohen told me that once, years ago, he was with Trump when his wife, Melania, informed him that their son was at a playdate with a Jewish girl from his school. “Great,” Trump said to Cohen, who is Jewish. “I’m going to lose another one of my kids to your people.”

One religious group that the Trump campaign is keenly fixated on this year is Mormons. In 2016, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rejected the Republican ticket in unprecedented numbers. To win them over in 2020, the campaign has made Donald Trump Jr. its envoy, sending him to campaign in Utah and other Mormon-heavy states. The president’s son has cultivated relationships with high-profile conservatives in the faith. Earlier this year, he invoked Mormon pioneers in a call with reporters to describe his father’s “innovative spirit.”

In fact, according to two senior Utah Republicans with knowledge of the situation, Don Jr. has been so savvy in courting Latter-day Saints-- expressing interest in the Church’s history, reading from the Book of Mormon-- that he’s left some influential Republicans in the state with the impression that he may want to convert. (A spokesman for Don Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.)

I’ve been curious about the president’s opinion of Mormonism ever since I interviewed him in 2014 at Mar-a-Lago. During our conversation, Trump began to strenuously argue that Mitt Romney’s exotic faith had cost him the 2012 election. When I interrupted to inform him that I’m also a Mormon, he quickly changed tack-- extolling my Church’s many virtues, and then switching subjects. (He remained committed to his theory about 2012: During his September 2016 meeting with evangelical leaders, Trump repeatedly asserted that “Christians” didn’t turn out for Romney “because of the Mormon thing.”) I’ve always wondered what Trump might have said if I hadn’t cut him off.

When I shared this story with Cohen, he laughed. Trump, he said, frequently made fun of Romney’s faith in private-- and was especially vicious when he learned about the religious undergarments worn by many Latter-day Saints. “Oh my god,” Cohen said. “How many times did he bring up Mitt Romney and the undergarments …”

Our old friend Frank Schaeffer is always who I consult about these kinds of things, basically because he always has a solid, well-informed perspective and can tell me what I'm missing. This morning he pointed out that "Trump mocks evangelicals behind their backs. Duh! Ask yourself this: when Trump is out of office do you think he’ll ever call Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr. (in rehab) or Ralph Reed just to chat? Will he drop by First Baptist in Dallas for old time’s sake? Evangelical's delusion about Trump begins with their delusions about their own pastors and leaders who-- as I well know because I grew up as one of them-- also mock rank and file church goers. The grifters who run the Big Time God Biz are cut from the same cloth as the Trump clan. They too run nepotistic family businesses. They too run fake universities and pad expense accounts. And they too 'love the uneducate' as Trump said he does. The Trump clan and the evangelicals leaders share a lot and one thing is utter contempt for the people who trust them, fund them and worship them."

A little note about why Trump is courting Mormons. It isn't because of Utah. He has those 6 electoral votes locked up. Same with Idaho, which has the third biggest Mormon population. The second biggest Mormon population is in California and they're not go to swing that state's votes for him. But the big Mormon populations in Wyoming, Montana and Alaska are part of Trump's base in those in-the-bag states. What Trump's efforts are all about are the 423,056 Mormons in Arizona (6.1% of the state's population) and, to a lesser extent, the 182,617 Mormons in Nevada (6.21 of that state's population). Mormon voters are not likely to deliver Nevada to Trump but without a massive turnout by Arizona's Mormon voters, that state's 11 electoral votes are going to Biden. Ditto for Florida's 154,921 Mormons. They're only 0.75% of Florida's population but in a state where elections are won by the smallest of margins, that many Mormons would be worth Trump, Jr. pretending he's converting.

Now, let me share a Tiny Desk home concert (just one song, "Soccer") by the Good Ones with you. What a ray of sunlight! My old friend Ian Brennan just sent it to me. He produced it, recorded it in Rwanda. By the way, that thermos Janvier Havugimana is using for percussion, is filled with milk.

Another Gay Hater Caught With The Meat-- Almost-- In His Mouth

Evangelicals must believe that Satan sent Grindr to test them-- and what a test it is! I remember the first time I ever experienced it. I was driving through Hollywood and my friend was in the passenger seat. His cell phone kept going off every 30-40 seconds. What the hell is that, I asked. "Oh, it's Grindr," he said. "It buzzes whenever we pass a gay guy." For a typical evangelical pastor that must be like the First Temptation of Christ writ large.

Barry Poyner is an elder at the Kirksville Church of Christ, an anti-LGBTQ hate group, where Poyner gives rapidly anti-gay sermons that are unrelated to Jesus or his message. You might think anti-Jesus "Christians" deserve this but, unfortunately, Poyner is also a communications professor at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri and he's been using Grindr to offer your boys money to allow him to blow them. Some complained and the police set up a fake "would love to have a sugar daddy relationship" account on Grindr. Poyner told an undercover officer he would buy him a tank of gas and "might throw in an Arby’s gift card" in exchange for sex. They agreed to meet at the gas station on December 3 but when the cops showed up, Poyner sped away.

The cops caught him and Poyner claimed he doesn't so anything with minors and that he wasn't going to really have sex with the "kid," just give him some gas to help him out. He's not allowed on the campus and could wind up serving 6 months in prison if found guilty.

Kirksville is the county seat of Adair County in northeastern Missouri and is home to around 17,500 people, including a relatively large population of Congolese refugees. The county is part of Sam Graves' very backward, very red 6th congressional district (R+16).Obama lost it both times he ran and Trump beat Hillary 63.1% to 31.7% district-wide. In Adair County Trump's victory was 59.4% to 34.5%. The primary however, showed people were looking for change. And Bernie beat the Democratic Party establishment's status quo candidate 58.8% to 40.7%. Last year Adair's performance in the congressional race was R+31.

His rate my professor page didn't report him trying to rape anyone, but it does sound kind of creepy; lots of stuff like this:

Not that it matters. He's fired-- from the university. Not sure how the anti-Jesus church is handling the whole sticky wicket.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Sunday Thoughts:

Republican Christians don't even feel they have to bother with rationalizing their long list of prejudices. Their very fine Christian god has already skipped that step for them, and, they are "just following his orders."

Who Will Stand Up To Hatred And Bigotry-- Trump? Bernie?

We've covered her quite a bit before but in case you've forgotten, Brandy X. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at Yale, best known for the bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Friday she penned an OpEd for the New York Daily News, Trump’s mental condition seems to be getting worse: He should subject himself to a rigorous assessment now. She wrote that in the two years since she organized the conference at Yale "about how mental health professionals could warn the public ethically and effectively" about what Trump is, their "predictions have borne out to be true: Donald Trump in the office of the presidency has proven more dangerous than people suspected, has grown more dangerous by the day, and, without proper treatment, is becoming increasingly uncontainable."

She points to many easy to recognize symptoms of his increasing mental impairment-- the more frequent and more vitriolic tweets, the vicious and violent rallies, the crackpot conspiracy theories that show him unable to tolerate reality but "most markedly," she wrote, "he has of late been growing less and less coherent. His two-hour Conservative Political Action Conference speech revealed many rambling sentences, tangential thoughts, repetitions and word-finding difficulties. There was also the 'Tim Apple' episode a few weeks ago, and then his calling Venezuela a company, confusing his grandfather’s birthplace with his father’s, mispronouncing 'oranges' for 'origins,' and stating, out of the blue, 'I’m very normal.' These are signs of cognitive decline, the source of which we cannot know without examining him, but there is no question he needs an evaluation... If an employee showed the kind of impulsivity, erratic thinking and belligerent behavior that the president does, the employer would likely have demanded testing right away before the employee could resume work. In the United States, the people are the president’s employers. An unprecedented Washington conference on fit leadership revealed that even non-mental health professionals agree that the president needs urgent mental health intervention. So the choice now seems clear: the president needs to submit to a proper, independent evaluation of fitness, or if not, he can always resign."



Yesterday I watched him at Sheldon Adelson's Kapo Convention in Las Vegas (video up top). Right after he introduced a slew of far right Republicans from Georgia, South Carolina, Bakersfield, North Dakota-- not exactly Jewish-friendly places but very Israel-friendly (see the difference and why here), he launched into a typical cheap shot, slandering Ilhan Omar (D-MN), soon after Patrick Carlineo, one of his supporters, was arrested by the FBI and charged with threatening to kill Congresswoman Omar. The Trumpist told authorities that he's a patriot who loves Trump, and "that he hates radical Muslims in our government." Trump always refers to Rep. Omar as a "radical Muslim," which isn't true. Carlineo told them that he had told Omar's office that "If our forefathers were still alive, they'd put a bullet in her head." [You can contribute to Ilhan's reelection campaign here.]

Trump spreads hatred and rancor whenever he goes and whenever he speaks. Bernie, an American Jew from Brooklyn-- we grew up a few blocks from each other and went to the same elementary school (PS 197) and high school (James Madison)-- has a different way of approaching people. Please, please, please watch this video. "Love Will Conquer Hate: Bernie Visits Islamic Center in California." That's the likely choice we'll be making in 2020. I can't tell you strongly enough how important this short video is:

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Meet the new face of the Republican Party! No, it's not Uncle Fester; this is West Virginia (say no more!) Republican state legislator Eric Porterfield, a rising new star in Republican Party politics. Please, no jokes about inbreeding in them thar hills (I'll get to that). Why is Porterfield being so well thought of in the world of Trumpian politics? Well I'm so glad you asked! First of all, he's a God-fearing, gay-hating "Christian" minister who has overcome his physical blindness to become the leader of his own Blind Faith Ministries. His mental blindness is a whole different matter, but hey, he knows what Republican voters like and why they elected him.

Fester, er, a, Porterfield's reputation in the Republican community is rising because like virtually all "Christians" and Republicans, he goes all out in playing the "I'm so abused" and "I'm being victimized" cards. He recently used the slur "faggot" in a committee session and says gays are a "terrorist group" and says he's being "persecuted." It seems that the LGBTQ community make the MAGA hat-wearing legislator so... well... uncomfortable. "I'm terrified of these people. They represent a socialist activist agenda." Last Wednesday, which was also known as "All kinds are welcome" day in the state. Porterfield claimed that "The LGBTQ is a modern day version of the Ku Klux Klan." Funny thing about that one is that you would think most Republicans might think he's paying the LGBTQ folks in West Virginia a compliment and get all angry with him.

What set Porterfield off into such a tizzy? Easy, Democrats in the state legislature introduced a bill to ban discrimination against gay people. He feels the ban would be an affront to "religious liberty" and he's determined to preserve his right to be a bigot. Democrats feel the bill is necessary because some municipalities in the state have recently passed ordinances that grant permission to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

As of this writing, Porterfield has not been censured or removed from any committees. Don't hold your breath waiting. Hell, his party leadership probably sees him as presidential or at least cabinet level material by now. Two days ago, I posted about Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker and i wondered where Trump finds such freaks, listing several by name. Looking at pictures of Whitaker and Porterfield side by side, one can't help but wonder if they are brothers from the same sister and if Porterfield is in line for a "Supreme" Court nomination or perhaps a new position as secretary of a newly created Department of What Would Republican Jesus Do.

OMG! Some People Think Texas Republicans Are Islamophobes

There are 5 counties in Texas with over a million people: Harris County (Houston), Dallas County, Tarrant County (Ft. Worth), Bexar County (San Antonio) and Travis County (Austin). Four are basically blue counties that elect Democrats. Tarrant, with nearly 2 million people, is the outlier. This was Trump's share of the vote in each:

• Harris- 41.8%
• Dallas- 34.9%
• Tarrant- 52.2%
• Bexar- 41.0%
• Travis- 27.4%

Gerrymandered savagely, Tarrant County, is part of 6 congressional districts-- and five are held by Republicans, just one by a Democrat (Marc Veasey). These are the congressional districts and the percentage the congressman got this past November:

• TX-06 (Ron Wright)- 53.1%
• TX-12 (Kay Granger)- 64.3%
• TX-24 (Kenny Marchant)- 50.6%
• TX-25 (Roger Williams)- 53.5%
• TX-26 (Michael Burgess)- 59.4%
• TX-33 (Marc Veasey)- 76.2%

Why all this Tarrant County information today? There's a reason. The vice-chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party is Shahid Shafi and there is a move among some Republicans to remove him from office-- and tonight's the vote. And it's not because he's a surgeon. "Shahid Shafi identifies as a Republican," wrote Alex Samuels, "because of his firm belief in small government, lower taxes and secure borders. But his commitment to core GOP values hasn’t shielded him from ire within his own party."

“This is, unfortunately, not the first time that people or my political opponents have tried to use my religion against me to distract the voters,” Shafi, who declined to be interviewed by the Texas Tribune before Thursday’s vote, told the Washington Post. “And unfortunately, I don’t think it will be the last either.”

Dorrie O’Brien, one of the precinct chairs leading the charge to recall Shafi, did not respond to The Tribune’s request for comment. She’s previously said, however, that her support for ousting Shafi stems not from his religion, but whether he supports Islam or is connected “to Islamic terror groups,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In a series of lengthy Facebook posts, O’Brien wrote that she “never doubted” her side has “the votes to rescind Shahid Shafi’s ratification as vice chair.”

“We don’t think he’s suitable as a practicing Muslim to be vice chair because he’d be the representative for ALL Republicans in Tarrant County, and not ALL Republicans in Tarrant County think Islam is safe or acceptable in the U.S., in Tarrant County, and in the TCGOP," O'Brien wrote on Facebook, adding that "there are big questions surrounding exactly where Dr. Shafi’s loyalties lie, vis a vis Democrat and Republican policies.”

...It’s unclear whether Thursday’s vote will happen in public, behind closed doors or be delayed indefinitely, Easton said. The Star-Telegram reported that, since the movement to remove Shafi has picked up steam, it has expanded to also target some of his defenders, including Easton and a Republican party official who is married to a Muslim.

Shafi, who came to the U.S. in 1990 and became a naturalized citizen in 2009, has repeatedly defended himself against the attacks on his religion. In an open letter, he wrote that he believes “much of the hate against Muslims is driven by a fear of terrorism.”

“Here are the facts. I have never had any association with the Muslim Brotherhood nor [the Council on American-Islamic Relations] nor any terrorist organization,” he wrote. “I believe that the laws of our nation are our Constitution and the laws passed by our elected legislatures-- I have never promoted any form of Sharia Law. I fully support and believe in American Laws for American Courts.

“I am honored to be an American and a Republican,” he concluded.

Jeremi Suri, a professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas at Austin, said claims that Shafi’s religion impede his ability to work with the Republican party are “completely unfounded.” He compared the attacks against the surgeon to rhetoric the Ku Klux Klan used in the early 20th century against Catholics and Jews running for political office.

“The Klan argued that if you’re a Catholic, you obviously put the pope before the country so how could you be an American leader? That’s the same argument this Tarrant County group is making," said Suri.

Though the movement to reconsider Shafi’s appointment was afoot well ahead of last year’s midterm elections, Thursday’s vote comes just months after Tarrant County-- considered the most conservative urban county in the country-- narrowly flipped in favor of Texas Democrats’ star senatorial candidate, Beto O’Rourke. In Tarrant County and the surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth region, several Texas Senate and House seats went to Democrats, including the district previously held by conservative state Sen. Konni Burton of Colleyville.

Brendan Steinhauser, an Austin-based GOP strategist, worries that Shafi's ousting would harm the Tarrant County GOP and state party in the 2020 elections.

“These are the kinds of headlines the party doesn’t need right now,” Steinhauser said. "Doubling down on shrinking the tent is a very bad idea. It does make me wonder what’s next. Are they going to say no Catholics can be in a leadership positions in the party or no Jews? I mean, what is the religious standard that they want to impose?"

Kenny Marchant may be most hurt by the latest GOP bigotry scandal

Could this bigotry scandal harm the chances of the 5 congressional Republicans up for reelection in 2020? There isn't enough of Tarrant County is Roger Williams' district to make any difference. But Kenny Marchant and freshman Ron Wright could both be in for trouble if Democrats make an issue out of it. TX-24 (Marchant's district) looked like this in Marchant's 2018 race:

In other words, if he loses any significant support in the Tarrant part of the district, he's dead. TX-06 is more than 2/3s Tarrant County and the Tarrant County part of the district is already trending blue. Just a few less votes in a Tarrant County with a Republican Party in turmoil will mean Wright will be a one-termer.

What to Expect from a Kavanaugh Court: Government-Funded "Religious" Education

Image: plherrera via Salon

by Gaius Publius

“There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education…Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God’s kingdom.”

—Education Secretary Betsy DeVos

This begins a short series detailing the radical changes to the way our government operates — changes to its constitution if you will — that will be force on the nation by an unelected Supreme Court containing Brett Kavanaugh as the final piece of a 5-4 radical majority.

The list of these changes is long and frightening. They include:

• Reversal of Roe v. Wade, freeing states to outlaw abortion
• Presidential freedom from prosecution, further establishing the "imperial presidency" so feared by the founders
• Destruction of remaining Fourth Amendment protections, freeing government even more in matters of surveillance, search and seizure, while at the same time...
• Expanding First Amendment protection to corporations
• Assault on efforts to mitigate climate change
• Assault on government regulation of all kinds, including...
• Constitutional assault on the regulatory state itself, on the right of the Executive Branch to regulate commerce at all
• Assault on freedom from discrimination based on race, gender and sexual preference, but...
• Expanded First Amendment protection for discrimination based on "religious" reasons
• Even greater assault on labor unions, worker protection and consumer protection
• Reintroduction of Jim Crow-style voting restrictions
• Court-confirmed death of net neutrality (it violates the First Amendment rights of ISPs)

And finally:

• Conversion of the country, to the greatest extent Court rulings make possible, into Charles Koch's ideal libertarian paradise

That's a hefty, scary list, especially the last, which will not be difficult at all to document. For a hint at what the "Koch network" (author Nancy MacLean's phrase) has planned for America, consider just some of the constitutional amendments they want to pass at the Constitutional Convention they're pushing so hard to create.

Some items on the list above may look small and "manageable," but others are too huge even to contemplate. Striking down Roe v. Wade will turn all states but the most liberal into virtual back alley abortion dens, a horrifying, deadly thought. I've dealt with the assault on the regulatory state in a preliminary way and will have more on it later. But needless to say, striking down the general right of the Executive Branch to regulate commerce at all will reverse the New Deal almost in its entirety.

Consider the nation which those changes will create; then consider the nation's response, once the voters, all of them, realize how much has been lost, been given away, never to be gotten back. 

So let's look briefly, one at a time, at these aspects of a "Kavanaugh Court" — a 5-4 radical right-wing-majority Court — starting with religion and religious education, which are intertwined.

The Kavanaugh Court on Religious Education

When Kavanaugh is confirmed and seated, brace yourselves. Get ready for a series of 5-4 rulings that enshrine giving government money to religious schools, especially those espousing virulent forms of what is inaccurately called "fundamentalism." Betsy DeVos' stiffled dream, in other words, will be fulfilled from the bench.

For a taste of how that would work, consider this piece from the New York Times:

Kavanaugh Could Unlock Funding for Religious Education, School Voucher Advocates Say

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, in a speech last year, gave a strong hint at his views on taxpayer support for religious schools when he praised his “first judicial hero,” Justice William Rehnquist, for determining that the strict wall between church and state “was wrong as a matter of law and history.”

Mr. Rehnquist’s legacy on religious issues was most profound in “ensuring that religious schools and religious institutions could participate as equals in society and in state benefits programs,” Judge Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to succeed Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court, declared at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization.

Words like that from a Supreme Court nominee are breathing new life into the debate over public funding for sectarian education. Educators see him as crucial to answering a question left by Justice Kennedy after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for the state of Missouri to exclude a church-based preschool from competing for public funding to upgrade its playground: Can a church-school playground pave the way for taxpayer funding to flow to private and parochial schools for almost any purpose?

The answer to the last question is yes.

The purpose of that flow of funds would not be to ensure that a broad spectrum of religious ideas get funded — imagine the response from conservatives, for example, if a large group of Muslim madrassas were funded by the U.S. government or one of the states. That response would be like the response from whites if a large group of blacks in, say, Alabama exercised their Scalia-minted Second Amendment rights and took open-carry to the streets.

The purpose of that new funding would be to "save the nation" by creating an army of politically active fundamentalist true believers. 

"Confront the culture to advance God's Kingdom"

Voucher programs like the ones conservatives advocate exist to give government money to schools at the intersection of "libertarian" ideology and fundamentalist religious beliefs — schools like those that Dept. of Education secretary Betsy DeVos would like use tax dollars to finance.

The Times again:

Scott Sargrad, the managing director of primary and secondary education policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, wrote that while Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s school voucher agenda has not gained traction, “if confirmed, Kavanaugh may be the solution to her problems.”

“It is not a stretch to imagine a series of 5-to-4 decisions that slowly decimate public education in favor of voucher schemes,” Mr. Sargrad wrote.

Ms. DeVos has been among the most vocal critics of the legal prohibitions on parochial school vouchers. In a speech to leaders of religious schools this year, she called the prohibitions — born out of anti-Catholicism — “the last acceptable prejudice” that “should be assigned to the ash heap of history.”

Ms. DeVos has stalled in her efforts to create a $1 billion school voucher program, but after the Trinity decision, she has moved to loosen regulations that exclude religious colleges from participating in federal aid programs.

Here's Ms. DeVos belief about the mission of education: “There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education…Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God’s kingdom.”

DeVos wants to devote government dollars to that mission. And that's the mission a Kavanaugh Court will enshrine into law. Just one of many reasons confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court would be a generational disaster for a nation already in crisis.

GP