"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Midnight Meme Of The Day!
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by Noah Mike Pence is waiting in the wings. For all we know, he is the biggest leaker in the Trumpanzee administration but he's also just another in a long, long line of typical Republican douchebags and worse. You can bet he shares his boss's envy of dictators who kill journalists with impunity. After all, his desire to torture our gay brothers and sisters is proud public knowledge. Ripping babies from their mothers arms? Yeah, that too. Perhaps the only differences between Pence and Trump are Pence's alcohol intake and his religious fervor or, call it what it is, religious insanity. Pence, like most of his kind, will tell you that he believes in what he perversely calls "the sanctity of life" but if you, embrace those who blow up places where a woman can get an abortion, those who kill journalists, and those who steal babies, then you are no different than those you envy who do the same. Republicans will point at ISIS but really, the only difference is opportunity. Fanaticism is fanaticism. Just give them a little more time. In fact, we don't need ISIS. Yes, they are dangerous, but American has proven before that it can come up with its own version.
Earlier today, Frank Schaeffer, whose dad, Francis Schaeffer, was one of the founders of the Religious Right, reminded his readers that this country was never meant to be a theocracy and still isn't. Odd that he had to say so-- but today was the day it needed to be done. "For seven hours today," he wrote, "the remains of the evangelist Billy Graham will lie in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Why? Billy was a family friend but this is not appropriate. We aren’t Iran. We aren’t a theocracy. Watch Franklin Graham and Mike Pence strike a blow for further establishing of a homophobic white nationalist American theocracy this week by abusing the Billy Graham funeral/lying in state hoopla. And Trump will try to get in on the afterglow too."
The Religious Right is set to hijack Billy’s remains as his own son Franklin has long since planned to do. I first met Billy Graham when I was nine. He visited my parents’ home and spent the day with us. I sat next to him and his then nine-year-old son Franklin, as they listened to my father preach in our living room that doubled as our chapel at my parents’ evangelical mission of L’Abri” (the shelter) in Switzerland. I last saw Billy in the early 1980s when I was with my evangelist father Francis Schaeffer (“credited” as one of the founders of the religious right) who was undergoing treatment at Mayo Clinic. Billy, Dad and I met several times there when Billy was visiting for his checkups. It seems to me that Billy died in the very year that the subculture of white evangelicalism he helped create has committed suicide by continuing to support Trump. And the double irony is Billy’s son Franklin has led what might now be called the Trump Crusade, not for Christ, but for power.
Trump’s most vocal evangelical supporter is Franklin Graham. Admired among far right white evangelicals, Franklin has defended Trump on television and social media through the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, the crackdowns on immigrants and refugees, the Stormy Daniels scandal, and the slur against Haiti and Africa. When Barack Obama was president, Franklin Graham was part of the “birther” conspiracy that claimed the president was not an American citizen. He lied suggesting that Obama was not a Christian and might secretly be a Muslim. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Franklin held rallies in 50 states to pump up evangelical turnout on what he called a “Decision America Tour.” There’s a bizarre symmetry here: To get elected Trump held Graham-like mass “evangelistic” rallies and led white Christians to deny the faith Billy Graham had once preached. They denied Graham’s Jesus for the sake of accepting earthly and utterly corrupting power as their new “personal savior.” Trump becoming president may turn out to be the lasting Billy Graham legacy. Graham’s funeral in North Carolina on Friday, which Trump will attend, will serve as a reminder of nothing so much as how the evangelical movement has mutated and splintered from one generation to the next. And sadly Billy fused his faith message with 1950s American anti-communism in ways that are still playing out today. As Anthea Butler writes in Religion dispatches (February 22, 2018 Billy Graham and the Gospel of American Nationalistic Christianity):
With Graham’s death, it’s time to reconsider how his promotion of a nationalistic version of Americanized Christianity has influenced evangelicals today. Graham’s proximity to the office of the presidency and government since the Eisenhower administration is part of why we see scenes of eager evangelicals embracing President Trump. It’s also responsible for a large cohort of evangelicals who are actively supporting Islamophobia, isolationism, and America first policies. Billy Graham may have been “puffed” by William Randolph Hearst newspaper reporters in his first crusade in Los Angeles, but the more important event in Graham’s ministry was his Washington, D.C. crusade in 1952. It was there that he would begin what was part of his lifelong work: fusing Christianity and Americanism together to create a potent cocktail of Evangelical Christian Nationalism.
...Franklin Graham is cashing in on his parents’ deaths by making a shrine of their final resting place, and this was against his mother’s wishes. White evangelical Trump supporters don’t care about such niceties these days. They are into Franklin’s magical thinking-- that Trump is president because of God’s will, notwithstanding details like being a scum woman-abuser-- and no doubt think that Franklin is even more in touch with God’s will-- even in matters of where his mom wanted to be buried-- than the rest of us, let alone his mother. Billy made magical thinking mainstream. He shaped a movement that then became as political as he was in his Nixon-supporting years and unlike Billy, never turned back. Full circle: Billy Graham sought to forge a movement that was distinct from the Southern racist fundamentalism of his day, yet that is precisely what today’s evangelicalism has become again. Magical thinking isn’t a very good basis for policy or politics. “I believe Donald Trump is a good man,” Franklin Graham said on CNN, last month. “He did everything wrong as a candidate and he won, and I don’t understand it. Other than I think God put him there.” Graham’s converts from the 1950s to 1990s (my generation, old, white, and tired) lined up to support not only Trump but Roy Moore. One of their very own, Sarah Huckabee, stands up every day and knowingly lies for Trump, covering for his multitude of sins on everything from racism to his lies about paying off porn stars, to abusing scores of women and denying that the Russians attacked our democracy to help get him elected. Graham and the neo-evangelicals, as they called themselves, tried to create religious revival in the United States. Fifty years on what they got instead was Trump and Roy Moore, climate change deniers, white nationalism and the NRA’s lock on the party evangelicals uniquely empower. Franklin Graham actually went to bat for the NRA. He blasted President Obama for his stand against military weapons being legal. Graham parroted the NRA/Gun-Lobby line in a Facebook post (January 6, 2016): “Your executive actions will do nothing to change this horrific problem. You can take all the guns in America and put them in a pile on the Mall in Washington DC, and those guns will stay there and will eventually rust and decay. Not one gun will crawl out of that pile and shoot or harm anyone. It takes a human being, and a human heart bent on evil, to pick up a gun, load it, and pull the trigger.” Do evangelicalisms’ leaders remain interested in the spiritual at all these days as Billy Graham sincerely was? Or has their agenda become merely political? Trump is the answer to those questions. The fatal arc of decline is clear. To use the biblical analogy of Saul, before he converted and took the name of Paul, holding the coats of the killers stoning St. Stephen to death, Graham’s son’s Franklin, is “holding Trump’s coat” while he stones American decency to death. Franklin even says this is God’s will. Billy Graham’s veneer of pious civility is long gone from the white evangelical movement. It’s been replaced by Billy Graham’s own worst inner demons that he repented of after he’d become Nixon’s confidant. As he sat by Dad’s bedside Billy told Dad and me how he lamented supporting Nixon and never would “be political” again. The context of this conversation was when Billy was explaining to my father why he would not support Dad’s anti-abortion efforts. Franklin never got the memo. The image of the white evangelicals these days is not of sinners repenting as they surge forward to the altar call while the hymn “Just as I Am” wafts over them, but rather of Nixon-type online trolls supporting gun rights by spreading vile lies about grieving high school students. If Trump remains the defining bookend bracketing the Billy Graham era of white evangelical empowerment historians may judge Graham’s stated purpose to reach “the lost” for Christ as failed. His lasting significance may rather be understood as having contributed to the creation of a power-crazed movement that enabled an American tragedy.
A GOP theocracy coup against checks and balances is gaining momentum through Trump’s court picks. Trump’s legislative failures are in the news but his far-right theocracy-facilitating judicial appointments are the bigger story. Trump’s picks will have a lasting outsized impact on American life. Trump has many judicial vacancies to fill because the GOP anti-Obama-obstruction worked. Trump doesn’t care about the religious right’s agenda but since he has ceded the selection of judges to the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, ultra-right groups that do care, the religious right is literally being put in power in ways most Americans don’t seem to understand. I do understand because in the 1970s and 80s I helped craft this plan. We’re well on the way to making Evangelical Sharia Law permanent. Trump’s Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation judges will roll back the expansion of civil rights and civil liberties that have developed over the past seven decades. Women, gays, blacks-- beware. America is headed for Saudi-style repression and religious theocracy in the name of “religious liberty.” What’s been astounding in filling the open seats left because of GOP- Obama obstruction is the rapid pace of committee hearings and confirmations for Trump’s Federalist Society-Heritage Foundation far-right religious extremist judicial nominees. The breakneck pace is unprecedented. This is not a coincidence. It fulfills a dream hatched by my late father Francis Schaeffer and me. We crafted this in Dad’s book A Christian Manifesto (1983). It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The media paid no attention. The ideological evangelical/conservative Catholic extremism of Trump’s Federalist Society-Heritage Foundation appointments should alarm anyone not willing to live in what will amount to an American version of Iran. The nominees are deeply conservative and often unqualified. No one on the right cares about their lack of qualifications because they will reverse abortion rights, gay rights, voting rights and affirmative action. One of Trump’s judicial nominees has supported “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ youth and supported legislation that would allow employers to discriminate against gay employees under the guise of religious liberty. Another Trump judicial nominee called Justice Anthony Kennedy a “judicial prostitute” for supporting gay rights. Another Trump nominee stated that being Muslim is synonymous with being a terrorist and called transgender children “part of Satan’s plan.”
Theocracy looms. Put it this way: Mike Pence’s Francis Schaeffer inspired ideology looms! A memorandum made public last week proposed a court-packing plan that will give Trump hundreds of new appointments to the federal judiciary. These partisan religious right picks will make the federal judiciary a theocracy stronghold that won’t shift for decades. Remember that facts don’t matter here anymore than judicial pick’s qualifications. Trump doesn’t deceive his followers rather he creates an environment in which whether something is true or not becomes irrelevant. All that matters is if it feels good for a moment. And Trump’s white evangelical supporters crave winning the culture wars I helped start-- even while Trump’s GOP shafts them by raising their taxes to make rich GOP donors richer. And nothing distracts (middle-class voters from the fact their Medicare is about to be cut) better than sharply focused hate. “Those most powerful in society have always been able to wield religious freedom arguments for their own interests,” says Tisa Wenger, associate professor of American religious history at Yale. The Christian right’s religious freedom talk is designed to be a distraction as used by Trump. But there is an underlying reality: Religious conservatives are set to impose their cultural mores on broader society. Trump’s borrowed theocracy policy began gradually in the late 1970s and ’80s, following Roe v. Wade. My dad Francis Schaeffer and I led the way on this with C Everett Koop who then became Ronal Reagan’s surgeon general. Forty years later the white evangelicals gave us Trump out of frustration because their agenda wasn’t winning. Now it is! And I found myself writing these words in my new book, LETTER TO LUCY-- A manifesto of creative redemption in the age of Trump, fascism and lies:
“I ask myself these questions silently and inwardly: How may I atone for helping to poison America with certainty addiction? How do I defend my grandchildren against the religious right juggernaut I helped create? How do I reject what my parents stood for (fundamentalist fanaticism) and yet honor the love they gave me? How can I help my grandchildren stumble upon the goodness of life before they’re sold towering mounds of brain-damaging garbage? How do I help save the world? (And what kind of deluded messianic fool am I to believe that this is even possible?)”
Evangelicals and conservative Catholics settled on a highly effective framing of “religious freedom” painting any participation in (or association with) gay rights or abortion as an infringement on their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” As I describe in Letter to Lucy, Dad and I began this strategy in reference to taking away women’s abortion rights as a matter of Christian “conscience.” Evangelicals and conservative Catholics have successfully taken what we did and 40 years later are framing their opposition to gays and abortion rights in a compelling way making freedom of conscience their claim but ALSO forcing their religious fundamentalism on millions of Americans-- in fact on the majority-- who have no connection to extremist religious beliefs. This is tyranny. “Religious freedom” litigation in the 21st Century has increasingly attempted to expand the definition of what may be considered a religious practice. A ruling in favor of Masterpiece Cakeshop against gays would expand this sphere to the very gates of theocracy. And this is just a foretaste of what Trump’s deluge of court-packing appointments will do. With legal recognition for LGBT people Trump’s evangelicals are recycling the “religious freedom” argument to oppose gay and women’s rights. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) a “Christian” legal nonprofit is leading the way imposing theocracy as “religious freedom.” It models its strategy on the Christian legal groups Dad inspired in the 1980s like the Rutherford Institute. Just as evangelicals today use the arguments Dad and I forged against legal abortion rights to bash gays, so too using the “religious freedom” evangelical argument white supremacists will soon also be using religious exemption non-discrimination laws. Their plan will be to facilitate the resurgence of Nazis and white supremacist activities as above the law, exempted from restraint because bigotry too will be a religious right. Trump’s far-right white judges will rule in their favor. Given the highly effective Evangelical/Catholic legal framing of “religious freedom” Dad helped invent, look for Nazis and white supremacist (Trump’s “good people” carrying torches) working on rulings in favor the right to a faith-based Nazi hate bubble. Anti-Semitism is also a Christian tradition! Bedrock American religious liberty ideals have been used to justify imperialism, racism, slavery, misogyny, and (recently) anti-LGBT animus. Trump’s far-right religious zealot judicial picks will soon be deciding cases in favor of overt discrimination as a bedrock all-American “religious freedom.” Despite the long history of Supreme Court adjudication of religious freedom claims, the precise nature of what the Court considers to be a legitimate faith-based issue used to vary widely. It’s now tilting to the far theocratic right.
I want to add one thing to what Frank has to say. Trump will continue nominating reprehensible and dangerous judges for as long as he's in the White House and the Senate will continue rubber-stamping confirmations for as long as the Republicans control the Senate. It's absolutely crucial to defeat every Republican senator up for reelection in 2018. Every one of them has rubber stamped every single Trump nomination, regardless of their lack of competence. The Democrats you'll find by tapping on the ActBlue 2018 senatorial thermometer on the right are vetted progressives who can be counted on to fight against the spread of theocracy. Replacing Ted Cruz with Beto O'Rourke in Texas is especially important-- as is going to the wall to reelect incumbents Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. The health of what's left of our democracy depends on it.
-by Noah Now we have the Republican Party warmly welcoming and embracing the Senate candidacy of Alabama's Judge Roy Moore. You can see some of the highlights of Moore's utter insanity and complete lack of character in the meme, but there is more, much, much more. It's not just things like his belief that homosexuality should be criminalized. For instance, Judge Moore is also on record as saying, on camera no less, that the people who lost their children to a crazed gunman in New Town, CT. deserved it because we had all wandered from Moore's god and his warped, bizarro-style form of what so many Republicans call Christianity. Moore talks about his god just like ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists talk about theirs. His claim about New Town is no coincidence, of course. Do not forget that one of Donald Trump's favorite "journalists" is Alex Jones, who has pushed the sicko story that the New Town massacre was a false flag event, i.e. perpetrated by the Obama administration. To what end this was done, in the sick minds of Republicans, is anybody's guess. Some Trump-supporting republicans go even further, saying that the whole New Town thing was a hoax and never happened at all; never mind the feelings of those whose children were murdered. Trump may have endorsed Moore's primary opponent, Luther Strange, but either man is fine with Trump and he has said so. Moore and Trump are brothers in insanity; both equally severely mentally ill and dangerous to society. Moore is the inevitable result of the Republican mindset and way of "thinking." Once Republicans embraced Trump and psychotic homicidal freaks like Paul Ryan, there was no doubt that people like Roy Moore would follow. No wonder they cheer his nomination. Moore possibly pushes the envelope into crazyland even further than Señor Trumpanzee himself. If Moore actually gets elected, we can only wonder how much further the Republican Party will continue to go. They might as well find a Hannibal Lecter, and they will, if they have to scour every insane asylum and prison and turn over every rock they can to find these candidates of their twisted dreams. Given what we have already seen, I can see republicans extolling the virtues of cannibalism by 2020, if not sooner.
