News bits: Secularism and civil liberties under direct attack, etc.

Legalized discrimination is on the horizon thanks 

to the radical Republican Christian nationalist Supreme Court

The Jacobin writes:

Secular Schooling Is Critical to a Functioning Democracy

The US education system is being desecularized as public money floods into private religious schools. This mix of religious conservatism and free-market fundamentalism threatens to unravel public education.

.... our radicalized Supreme Court has handed down a series of decisions that annihilate the proverbial wall of separation between church and state, emboldening those who would use our privatized public education system to push a conservative Christian social vision.

In this context, we should treat #YeshivaGate not as an isolated scandal but rather as a preview: religious straitjackets are coming for more American students if we don’t aggressively defend the role of secular schooling in a pluralist democracy.

In recent years, the de-secularization of our nation’s public school system has proceeded rapidly on numerous fronts — some more eye-catching than others. The bizarre Bremerton case made headlines, for example, when the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled in favor of a football coach who repeatedly engaged in ostentatious public prayer during school events. This ruling counters decades of precedent, paving the way for sanctioned proselytizing by authority figures in public schools.

One development that may be less familiar concerns taxpayer funding for schools that, like the Hasidic yeshivas, force children to study religious doctrine. Since 2002, it has been constitutionally permissible for states with voucher programs to direct taxpayer funding to religious schools. And .... the Supreme Court ruled that in fact states must subsidize religious education wherever they subsidize secular private education. So although the Times’ yeshiva reporting asserts that “tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education,” legally speaking, that isn’t true.  

In Carson v. Makin, two families sued Maine’s education commissioner, claiming that she had violated their freedom of religious expression by refusing to fund their children’s tuition at two different Christian schools.

One of the schools in question lists as its first educational objective: “To lead each unsaved student to trust Christ as his/her personal savior and then to follow Christ as Lord of his/her life.” Their Statement of Faith declares that any sexual activity or identity expression that falls outside of a Christian marriage between “one man and one woman” is a “sinful perversion,” and that a wife must “submit herself to the Scriptural leadership of her husband.” The other school’s mission includes fostering “within each student an attitude of love and reverence for the Bible as the infallible, inerrant, and authoritative Word of God,” and “imparting a biblical understanding of the nature of government and an appreciation for our Judeo-Christian heritage as Americans.” Both schools have policies that discriminate against students and staff on the basis of LGBTQ status and religious affiliation.

A core Christian nationalist dogma is to 100% eliminate secular public education and replace it with mandatory religious education, preferably fundamentalist Christianity. The Republican US Supreme Court is doing what is needed to make that vision of America become a reality as soon as it possibly can. Like it or not, radical Republican fundamentalists are going to ram God down our throats.

A recent NPR segment indicated that the teachers at some fundamentalist Jewish religious schools are grossly ignorant and many students that graduate cannot read or write. In one case a young student told to tell his science teacher that the Earth was not the center of the solar system or the universe. The teacher was flabbergasted, but at least looked it up and changed his mind. Other fundamentalist teachers will not be so open to reality.

Something is wrong with the mainstream media --

It's ossified and fossilized, or corrupted by profit motive, or both

A WaPo opinion piece by Jennifer Rubin makes the point that something is wrong:

SNL has better coverage of Herschel Walker than the mainstream media

The mainstream media persist in portraying unfit Republican candidates as normal and the midterms as an ordinary clash of policy differences. As New York University’s media guru Jay Rosen put it on Twitter, “Election coverage begins by positing the existence of two parties operating in roughly the same way, but with different ideologies. That picture is the foundation, on top of which consensus practices rest.” He adds, “With the foundation now in ruins, the practices are snapping and breaking.”

Put differently, voters can get a more exact picture of the election from “Saturday Night Live.”

Coverage of Herschel Walker’s shambolic debate performance on Friday provides a clear example. Mainstream media “takeaways” mostly portrayed the event as clashes on abortion, inflation, President Biden and Medicaid. Walker beat expectations, some reported. He helped himself!

What debate were they watching? Surely, the event’s significance boiled down to Walker’s decision to defend his claim to have worked for law enforcement by holding up an honorary police badge, which has no official significance, and declaring, “I am work with many police officers.”

The devastating moment should have been the story coming out of the debate, as SNL’s “Weekend Update” recognized. The parody newscast captured just how bizarre the moment was, and unlike many in the media, highlighted Walker’s inability to put a simple sentence together. The same could be said of social media, where the stunt quickly became a meme.

The New York Times, by contrast, mentioned the badge stunt as one of its five key moments from the debate and included Walker’s remark that the badge is “not a prop. This is real.” But the article didn’t explain that the badge was only an honorary recognition, nor did it include quotes showing Walker’s incoherent syntax.

This moment was as devastating as former Texas governor Rick Perry’s “oops” moment or Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s stumble in the 2016 GOP presidential debate. Yet too many in the mainstream media chose to downplay Walker’s unfitness and habitual lying.

Likewise, Walker’s rejection of a price cap on insulin because “you got to eat right” didn’t even make some of media outlets’ takeaway lists [reminds me of Reagan saying that ketchup is a vegetable]. It was as if the difference between the candidates amounted to sober disputes over health-care policy. 

Democracy watch

Demagogue: a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument (Google);  a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power (Merriam-Webster); a person, especially a political leader, who wins support by exciting the emotions of ordinary people rather than by having good or morally right ideas (Cambridge dictionary); NOTE: I have been informed that demagogues originate in democracies and they go from demagogue to tyrant on their route to power, so all those definitions fail to mention that aspect of the demagogue

A WaPo article comments:

Leaders of democracies increasingly echo Putin in authoritarian tilt

From Italy to Brazil to the United States, political leaders increasingly are echoing Russian President Vladimir Putin and one another by embracing far-right authoritarianism

In a flurry of elections, some of the world’s major democracies have been leaning toward or outright embracing far-right authoritarian leaders, who have echoed one another by promising to crack down on loose morals, open borders and power-hungry elites.

Voters in Italy last month elected a nationalist leader whose party proposes a U-turn from the effects of globalization. In Brazil, right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro injected doubt into the results of his reelection bid by speculating that the vote would be rigged against him in a conspiracy driven by the country’s elites. In the Philippines this year, voters chose the son of their former dictator Ferdinand Marcos as president, electing to stick with strongman politics.

Though hardly a champion of democracy, Russian President Vladimir Putin late last month delivered an address that would sound familiar — and, to many people, attractive — in democracies from the United States to much of Europe. Putin railed against expansive definitions of gender, calling the idea a “perversion,” part of a “complete denial of man [and an] overthrow of faith and traditional values” by “Western elites.”  

In the United States, former president Donald Trump has presumptively rejected future election results, and a majority of Republican candidates on the ballot this fall for major state and federal elective offices have joined him in repudiating the outcome of the 2020 presidential election — an epidemic of election denialism in the United States that historians and political scientists define as a core element in any country’s drift toward authoritarian rule.

Anti-democratic rot and shameless demagoguery is not confined to other countries. It is here in the US right now. The global authoritarian movement is aggressive, morally rotted and demagogic (lies, slanders, crackpot, irrational emotional manipulative, etc.). It seems that all these powerful conservatives the world over, and they are radical right conservatives, appear to be scared to death of LGBQT people, and the loss of traditional values. But that's just a ruse to rouse the rabble and undermine faith in democracy. 

But exactly what are are those traditional values? Based on current radical right rhetoric and politics, here’s some of them for the American authoritarians, mostly radical Christian nationalist and/or brass knuckles capitalist Republican elites:

• Freedom to discriminate against, including firing them from their jobs, LGBQT people, atheists, women, non-White people, those with unacceptable political opinions and any other deemed deserving of oppression, disrespect, ridicule and/or physical attack  
• Freedom to deny or downplay any and all inconvenient science, especially including climate change and the role man plays in it and the damage it is causing
• Freedom for wealthy and powerful elites to steal from the nation and its people in the name of infallible God who has anointed them as leaders by virtue of their God-given wealth and/or power
• Freedom to lie, slander and deceive the masses, for example by lying about and deny the secular origin and nature of American society and its constitution and laws, falsely claiming America was ordained by infallible God as a White Christian nation to be ruled with a self-righteous iron fist by angry White Christian heterosexual men
• As per Jennifer Rubin’s WaPo opinion piece (above), freedom to attack, undermine, subvert, neuter and fossilize the MSM into a useful tool for liars, autocrats, theocrats and kleptocrats 

This kind of demagoguery, e.g., those points or local variants thereof, shoots through the authoritarian propaganda all over the planet. Attack democracy and distributed power by scaring people witless so that they fall for the propaganda and embrace of the comforting lies that demagogues hawking autocracy, fascism, kleptocracy and theocracy routinely offer.

Qs: Has the MSM become more the enemy than friend of the democracy, the rule of law and the people? Do sources like SNL provide better coverage of bad but important things like The Herschel than the MSM? Is American political and religious conservatism more anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian-theocratic than liberal politics and religion?