Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Christian crusader wars diversify and intensify

How Christian nationalism deals with
truth, respect, secularism and democracy


Overturning Roe was just the first cannon blast from Christian nationalist theocrats. That was just the opening attack. Remember those crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) I wrote about last week? They're baaack and on the attaaack! Blooomberg writes:
Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

The so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ are turning to social media, including Snap Maps, to lure young people

When Lisa suspected she was pregnant, she did what other teenagers might: She Googled her options to terminate. One of the first links that popped up in the search engine was a clinic in Volusia, Florida, where the 19-year-old lived. The offer of a free pregnancy test tempted Lisa into booking an appointment and she drove there with her boyfriend, parking across the street. It was a small town, and she did not want to be recognized.

The consultation room was filled with posters depicting fetuses with speech bubbles, as if they were asking to be born. Lisa sobbed as one of the women running the clinic confirmed she was pregnant; they had refused to let her take a test home. Lisa needed to return for an ultrasound in four weeks to be certain, and then they could discuss options. But until then, they told her, she absolutely should not go to an abortion clinic. “Maybe you’ll miscarry and then you won’t have any problems,” the woman suggested.

As Lisa started to realize it wasn’t a medical facility, she became terrified for her privacy. “This information can’t go anywhere, right?” she begged a receptionist on her way out the door. “No one is gonna know that I was here?”

The answer wasn’t reassuring. “I remember her saying: ‘Well, honey, this is what happens when you have sex.’

Lisa, who asked not to be identified by her real name, did manage to get an abortion from a different provider. But she also ended up in a database. The center continued to call her every few weeks to ask for an update on the baby and offer parenting classes. And as women like Lisa around the country are led unsuspectingly into anti-abortion centers, known as “crisis pregnancy centers,” academics and advocates for reproductive rights are concerned about what happens to this potentially incriminating data — especially after abortion becomes illegal in many states following Friday’s Roe v. Wade ruling.
Once states pass laws making abortion and helping someone to get an abortion a felony, maybe first degree murder, then people's social media will lead enraged avenging Christians right to their victims. Who would have ever thought that a blither on a person's Facebook page or a Google search could get a pregnant woman or someone helping her put on death row? 

As far as respect goes, CPCs could not care less about respecting a woman's privacy. Roe was based on a right to privacy that the Christian nationalist God says does not exist. So why would a CPC respect other kinds of privacy, except for their own of course?

Speaking of disrespect, here is some disrespect from Clarence Thomas, along with gigantic hypocrisy: "Clarence Thomas says American citizens are seemingly 'more interested in their iPhones' than 'their Constitution. .... They're interested in what they want rather than what is right as a country. .... Thomas said Scalia had similar sentiments as him about a lack of urgency in protecting liberties." 

Thomas talking about what is right for the country or lack of urgency in protecting liberties?? Thomas and his fellow Christian nationalist theocrats are attacking civil liberties and they say they are the defenders?? 

Give me an effing break. What a lying hypocrite. Thomas wants to convert the US from a secular democracy to a Dark Ages Christian fundamentalist theocracy. Thomas' vision of what's right for the country is cruel, bigoted, iron fisted Christian Sharia law at the center of it all. 

Although he has been criticized for hypocrisy in saying this because he was a radical right Christian fundamentalist himself, Barry Goldwater once warned:

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”

The Republican Party Christian fundamentalism is undeniably engaged in an all-out war against democracy, secularism, pluralism, two-party rule, and inconvenient fact, truth and sound reasoning. There is no possibility of compromise or mercy from these cruel, enraged, vengeful, Christian warriors. And it is cruelty to treat people like terrified Lisa with callous contempt like ‘Well, honey, this is what happens when you have sex.’ 

Well people, that is the contemptuous disrespect that Christian nationalism shows to everyone who crosses their sacred lines. God does not tolerate miscreants or their bad behaviors. He will smite them hard. Miscreants will be re-educated, shut up, discriminated against, oppressed, put in jail and/or put to death.


What about Loving, and the due process and establishment clauses?
The Christians elites, bigoted and racist as they are, will probably not overturn Loving v. Virginia for now. The 1967 Loving decision made interracial marriage legal. That decision held that bans on interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Since Thomas is a Black married to a White wife, the bigoted White theocrats on the Supreme Court will probably let that minor inconvenience in the eyes of God slide, as long as Thomas is alive. 

But make no mistake, high priority Christian nationalist legal goals include gutting the due process clause and the establishment clauses of the Constitution. Both stand squarely in the way of establishing the bigoted, (I really do mean bigoted) kleptocratic theocracy that God demands America to be. After Thomas is gone, Loving will probably be gone too.[1] 

The establishment clause is now pretty close to being obliterated. Just a few more pro-Christianity Supreme Court decisions will finish it off for good. 

People, we are at war!


Footnote: 
1. Maybe that overstates the case, but maybe it doesn't. These people are hard core fundamentalists. That sacred ideology that includes the central dogma that White people are morally superior and chosen by God to rule over all others. The Christian nationalists will vehemently deny all of the criticisms I am levelling at them here. Their arguments are that they are defending liberty and making America into what it should be in accord with the Constitution. They say the US Constitution is a religious document, but that is a colossal lie. It is a secular document.

One of the core problems here is that Christian nationalists are chronic, shameless liars. To get put on the bench, they all told us that Roe v. Wade is settled law. Like hell it was settled law. Christian nationalists lie about their religious crusade to make America theocratic and kleptocratic again. This is not new. Christian nationalists have been liars for decades. Liars deserve no credibility or trust because they earned none.

I'll keep warning in defense of democracy until they come for me and force me to shut up. Then, I suppose I'll shut up.


Thomas' concurrence in Dobbs
the case that overturned Roe v. Wade
Due process cases that Thomas wants to overturn
or as he puts it, "reconsider":

Griswold: The Constitution protects the right of marital privacy 
against state restrictions on contraception
Lawrence: criminal punishment laws against sodomy are unconstitutional
Obergefell: same-sex marriage is a constitutional right

That is only part of the poison the on the 
Christian nationalist legal agenda

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