An awakening of concern for church-state separation?

The Daily Beast writes in an article, There's No Separation of Church and State on the Supreme Court:

In a democracy founded on the separation of church and state, we’ve got a Supreme Court on the cusp of a decision that cements a theological view of abortion that even most Catholics don’t abide by.

All five of the justices who signed onto the draft opinion that would dump Roe (and any ruling associated with it)—plus Chief Justice John Roberts—are progeny of the Federalist Society. Over the past three decades, the legal group’s blessing has become a de facto requirement for Republican presidents who owed their election to white evangelical voters and ran on a promise to deliver an anti-Roe Supreme Court.

“Religion is the elephant in the room,” says Amanda Tyler, executive director of Baptist Joint Committee (BJC), a legal advocacy group for religious freedom that doesn't take a position on abortion. “We are all free to be religious or not, but we expect our government to be secular and to rule for all Americans and not for their religious views. And that principle is being threatened by at least the appearance of what’s going on in this case,” Tyler adds.

She points out that the words “religion” or “religious” do not once appear in Alito’s leaked draft opinion, yet he calls abortion “a profound moral issue”—phrasing that goes beyond the rule of law. “Many people read into the word ‘moral’ a religious objection, even though he’s going out of his way not to use religion,” says Tyler, which is why she calls it the elephant in the room.

She calls the looming decision by five Federalist Society alums “a flagrant violation of the separation of church and state…an assault on the core pillar of our democracy and the DNA of America.”

The ascendancy of conservative, anti-Roe Catholic jurists has been forty years in the making, dating back to the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982.

“The intersection of the religious right with conservative politics occurred with the anti-abortion agenda, and because evangelicals were lacking a bench of legal scholars, they had to turn to Catholics,” says Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth College. “Political conservatism is baked into Catholic legal scholarship.”

“All picked by the Federalist Society,” Trump boasted. “All gold standard,” Trump declared as he rallied conservative voters with the promise of delivering the Court they wanted.

When Amy Coney Barrett, a law professor at Notre Dame at the time, testified in 2017 before the Senate for a lower court position, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced concern about her religious affiliation with an evangelical offshoot of the Catholic Church. “I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma,” Feinstein said. “In your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”

Feinstein was castigated—and not just by Republicans—for straying into territory that felt uncomfortably close to a religious test. Three years later, Democrats questioning Barrett for the Supreme Court didn’t quiz her on her religious activism and what connection, if any, it might have to her views on Roe.

So, as late as 2017, Senators could not even ask about the role of religion in a nominee’s life. That reflects two things. First how utterly clueless Democrats were and still are about what the Republican Party has become. Second, it shows how effective Republican Party propaganda and messaging tactics really are. They are so effective that the targets of their deceit and lies are unaware of the true nature of who the opposition is and what their intent is. 

Even worse than 2017, by 2020 Senate Democrats had been cowed into not even raising the issue of the role of radical conservative Christian fundamentalism in a judge’s reasoning. Sadly, it is not the case that asking the question would have made any difference. The Republican Party would put any religious freak on the federal bench, no matter how anti-democratic and radical theocratic. The GOP elites, and most of its rank and and file are just fine with White male Christian-dominated neo-fascist theocracy. And, their judicial nominees do not hesitate to use the KYMS[1] tactic on the Senate or to lie by both affirmative lies and lies of omission, all of which they are expert at. 

Clueless does not do justice to what the Democratic Party has degenerated into. At least they voted against radical Christian theocrats and their jihad to replace secular law with Christian Sharia law. An end-game vestige of political opposition. Whoo-hoo, there's a little spunk left in ’em!

The church is swallowing the state before our eyes and most Americans cannot see the threat due either to sheer ignorance and deceit, or they cannot accept the reality because the truth hurts too much. As one observer put it about such situations generally, their fee-fees would be hurt so they do not see what is in plain sight and remain psychologically comfortable and self-assured. But maybe a few more people are starting to wake up to the seriousness of the Christian theocratic threat. Just maybe.

Footnote: 

1. The KYMS or keep your mouth shut propaganda tactic. It is manifested in various popular deceptive, faux responses to questions among professional political propagandists and liars. Popular KYMS examples for judges include ‘I don't recall’, ‘I can’t remember’, ‘no comment’, ‘I can't answer that’, ‘I can't prejudge that until the issue is before me’, ‘that is just a hypothetical and I do not comment on hypotheticals’, ‘it is settled law’, ‘Senator, that is a settled precedent the court has relied on for decades’, etc., etc., etc.

The hypocrisy chronicles: Republicans are against free speech against themselves, but for it against others

The Washington Post writes:

The Republican governors of Virginia and Maryland, where the homes of Supreme Court justices have become the targets of protests, are demanding that Attorney General Merrick Garland enforce a federal law that forbids demonstrations intended to sway judges on pending cases.

Demonstrators have gathered over the past week at the homes of several conservative justices, spurred by the leak of a draft opinion suggesting that the high court is preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision guaranteeing access to abortion nationwide.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan wrote to Garland (D) on Wednesday, just days after some conservatives faulted Youngkin for not having protesters outside the Alexandria, Va., home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. arrested under a state statute prohibiting demonstrations at private residences.

“There’s no changing their minds. We’re expressing our fury, our rage,” said Donna Damico, a 70-year-old grandmother who protested outside Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Montgomery County, Md., home last week. “We’re impotent and this is really all we got other than praying that people vote in November.”

A hanger symbolizing unsafe illegal abortions was drawn in chalk outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh over the weekend as abortion rights activists protested in Chevy Chase, Md.

Lots of snotty rich people live in Chevy Chase

Brett and his colleagues are not one of us, they are one of them

Good old Republican politicians. They love and support free speech and slanders used against their enemies. They hate and shut it down it when it is directed at them (e.g., this). Republican elites are fucking shameless, spineless free speech* hypocrites.

 

* And most everything else. Some of 'em are wife beaters too.

Questions: Are Republican elites free speech hypocrites? Whaddabout the rank and file?

Long-term planning and human welfare

Comments here brought up the human trait of weak capacity to do long-term planning. We now possess technologies that can significantly wreck the environment by pollution and climate change. There are nuclear bombs that can blow modern civilization to smithereens in a matter of a day or two. There are pandemics coming that we are just not prepared for. Heck, we're still not prepared for the one we are living through right now. Global supply chains are weak and sometimes break. 

Science is aware of human weakness about long-term planning and preparation. We often just don't do it well enough and react to crises when they pop up instead of planning for them before they hit and kill or harm people. A long article The Conversation published, Is humanity doomed because we can’t plan for the long term? Three experts discuss, considers the issue. It's an interesting article and topic. TC writes:

We are built this way

Robin Dunbar

COVID-19 has highlighted three key aspects of human behavior that seem unrelated but which, in fact, arise from the same underlying psychology. One was the bizarre surge in panic buying and stockpiling of everything from food to toilet rolls. A second was the abject failure of most states to be prepared when experts had been warning governments for years that a pandemic would happen sooner or later. The third has been the exposure of the fragility of globalized supply chains. All three of these are underpinned by the same phenomenon: a strong tendency to prioritize the short term at the expense of the future.

Most animals, including humans, are notoriously bad at taking the long term consequences of their actions into account. Economists know this as the “public good dilemma”. In conservation biology, it is known as the “poacher’s dilemma” and also also, more colloquially, as “the tragedy of the commons”.

If you are a logger, should you cut down the last tree in the forest, or leave it standing? Everyone knows that if it is left standing, the forest will eventually regrow and the whole village will survive. But the dilemma for the logger is not next year, but whether he and his family will survive until tomorrow. For the logger, the economically rational thing to do is, in fact, to cut the tree down.

This is because the future is unpredictable, but whether or not you make it to tomorrow is absolutely certain. If you die of starvation today, you have no options when it comes to the future; but if you can make through to tomorrow, there is a chance that things might have improved. Economically, it’s a no-brainer. This is, in part, why we have overfishing, deforestation and climate change.

The process underpinning this is known to psychologists as discounting the future. Both animals and humans typically prefer a small reward now to a larger reward later, unless the future reward is very large. The ability to resist this temptation is dependent on the frontal pole (the bit of the brain right just above your eyes), one of whose functions is to allow us to inhibit the temptation to act without thinking of the consequences. It is this small brain region that allows (most of) us to politely leave the last slice of cake on the plate rather than wolf it down. In primates, the bigger this brain region is, the better they are at these kinds of decisions.

In humans, failure to inhibit greedy behavior quickly leads to excessive inequality of resources or power. This is probably the single most common cause of civil unrest and revolution, from the French Revolution to Hong Kong today.

There is a simple issue of scale that feeds into this. Our natural social world is very small scale, barely village size. Once community size gets large, our interests switch from the wider community to a focus on self-interest. Society staggers on, but it becomes an unstable, increasingly fractious body liable at continual risk of fragmenting, as all historical empires have found.

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The power of politics

Chris Zebrowski

“Discounting the future” may well be a common habit. But I don’t think that this is an inevitable consequence of how our brains are wired or an enduring legacy of our primate ancestry. Our proclivity to short-termism has been socialized. It is a result of the ways we are socially and politically organized today.

Businesses prioritize short-term profits over longer term outcomes because it appeals to shareholders and lenders. Politicians dismiss long-term projects in favor of quick-fix solutions promising instant results which can feature in campaign literature that is distributed every four years.  

Our capacity to deal not only with future pandemics, but larger-scale (and perhaps not unrelated) threats including climate change will require us to exercise the human capacity for foresight and prudence in the face of future threats. It is not beyond us to do so.

This is another example of importance of human cognitive biology and social behavior. Everything or almost everything we do comes back to that. So, if one wants to understand humans, politics and religion at least a little better, one needs to learn at least some things about those aspects of human beings.

WE BELIEVE THAT CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM THREATENS OUR FAITH AND COUNTRY

 

As Christians, our faith teaches us everyone is created in God’s image and commands us to love one another. As Americans, we value our system of government and the good that can be accomplished in our constitutional democracy. Today, we are concerned about a persistent threat to both our religious communities and our democracy — Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.

 As Christians, we are bound to Christ, not by citizenship, but by faith. We believe that:

• People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square.

• Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions.

• One’s religious affiliation, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant to one’s standing in the civic community.

• Government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over nonreligion.

• Religious instruction is best left to our houses of worship, other religious institutions and families.

• America’s historic commitment to religious pluralism enables faith communities to live in civic harmony with one another without sacrificing our theological convictions.

• Conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion.

• We must stand up to and speak out against Christian nationalism, especially when it inspires acts of violence and intimidation—including vandalism, bomb threats, arson, hate crimes, and attacks on houses of worship—against religious communities at home and abroad.

Whether we worship at a church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, America has no second-class faiths. All are equal under the U.S. Constitution. As Christians, we must speak in one voice condemning Christian nationalism as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to American democracy.

https://www.christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org/statement

Meet some of the endorsers

Christian leaders are standing up to the threat of Christian nationalism. Click on the link:

https://www.christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org/endorsers

“Christian nationalism perverts the gospel and the Constitution."

“Christian nationalism is a threat to the United States' wellbeing, the world, and the Christian faith. To be clear, there is nothing Christian about ‘Christian nationalism.’ "

“The merging of faith and politics into a single ideology is idolatrous and dangerous."

“‘Christian nationalism’ is an oxymoron and a dangerous movement rooted in supremacy and hate."

“As followers of Jesus, his command to love our neighbors means neighbors of every type, of every faith, not just our own."

Clueless Democrats & press, lying Republican Senators

Collins' deceit: It is 'completely inconsistent' that Gorsuch, 

Kavanaugh would support overturning Roe v. Wade

Most Democratic Party elites certainly look to be clueless about how politics works and what the Republican Party is. Just clueless. Politico writes:

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said Sunday that multiple Supreme Court justices lied in their confirmation hearings about abortion, echoing the statements of Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins in the wake of the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion.

“If a corporation put these kind of statements in their quarterly filings, they would be seen to be purposefully misleading and deemed fraud,” Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think they misled the Senate with the intention of getting their confirmation vote with the intention of overruling Roe.”  

Collins ignored repeated questions from reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning about whether she felt Kavanaugh had lied to her. "I put out a statement," she said.

As usual for Republican politicians, the KYMS (keep your mouth shut) tactic is employed to avoid saying something stupid to the press. She is an experienced politician. She is practiced at lying and deceit.

Gillibrand, a Democrat, apparently does not know that there are either no laws to prevent judicial nominees from lying in confirmation hearings or if there are laws, they are not enforced. It was to be expected that the Republican nominees lied to and/or mislead the Senate. 

What the Republicans stand for these days, shameless mendacity and deceit, neo-fascist laissez-faire capitalism and radical Christian fundamentalism, is not supported by most Americans. The GOP and its judges had to lie or mislead. So they did. That is a no-brainer. 

One can also wonder at the press is thinking or knows, if anything. Politico's comment that Gillibrand echoes the statements of Murkowski and Collins is inexcusable misinformation. It leaves the impression that they really did not think they were being lied to during the Senate vetting process. Everybody knows that (i) the Federalist Society picks only radical right Christian fundamentalist judges who hate abortion, and (ii) the ex-president publicly promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe. That is exactly what he did. Everyone reasonably connected to reality and facts knew all of this. 

And what about the mainstream press and media? One expects lies, deceit and irrational manipulation from the Republican propaganda Leviathan, e.g., Faux News. But even the professional MSM keeps referring to Murkowski and Collins as moderate Republicans. That is simply wrong. They are radical right authoritarians, not moderates.

To be honest and professional, Politico should have at least pointed out that Murkowski and Collins are either lying or they themselves were clueless idiots about what their own party intended to do. One can reasonably believe that they are liars. Neither of them is stupid. Both are intelligent, politically savvy and experienced. They knew exactly what was going on. Pretending otherwise is an arrogant insult, but that too is just the standard poisonous, neo-fascist Republican attitude toward the American people.

Murkowski's faux bewilderment:  her “confidence in the  

court has been rocked” by the draft opinion

Question: How stupid do these politicians really think we are, or since this is tribal cult politics, it does not matter how stupid we are, because what we think does not matter?

What we want does not matter

What wealth wants does matter

An unremarkable story about the power of polarizing propaganda

 

How radical right puppetmasters  

demagogue the political left

The New York Times writes:

FORT SMITH, Ark. — In the fall of 2020, Kevin Thompson delivered a sermon about the gentleness of God. At one point, he drew a quick contrast between a loving, accessible God and remote, inaccessible celebrities. Speaking without notes, his Bible in his hand, he reached for a few easy examples: Oprah, Jay-Z, Tom Hanks.

Mr. Thompson could not tell how his sermon was received. The church he led had only recently returned to meeting in person. Attendance was sparse, and it was hard to appreciate if his jokes were landing, or if his congregation — with family groups spaced three seats apart, and others watching online — remained engaged.

So he was caught off guard when two church members expressed alarm about the passing reference to Mr. Hanks. A young woman texted him, concerned; another member suggested the reference to Mr. Hanks proved Mr. Thompson did not care about the issue of sex trafficking. Mr. Thompson soon realized that their worries sprung from the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that the movie star is part of a ring of Hollywood pedophiles.

For decades, Mr. Thompson, 44, had been confident that he knew the people of Fort Smith, a small city tucked under a bend in the Arkansas River along the Oklahoma border. He was born at the oldest hospital in town, attended public schools there and grew up in a Baptist church that encouraged him to start preaching as a teenager. He assumed he would live in Fort Smith for the rest of his life.

But now, he was not so sure. “Jesus talks about how he is the truth, how central truth is,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview. “The moment you lose the concept of truth you’ve lost everything.”

A political moment in which the Supreme Court appears on the brink of overturning Roe v. Wade looks like a triumphant era for conservative evangelicals. But there are deepening cracks beneath that ascendance.

Across the country, theologically conservative white evangelical churches that were once comfortably united have found themselves at odds over many of the same issues dividing the Republican Party and other institutions. The disruption, fear and physical separation of the pandemic have exacerbated every rift.

If he spoke against abortion from the pulpit, Mr. Thompson noticed, the congregation had no problem with it. The members were overwhelmingly anti-abortion and saw the issue as a matter of biblical truth. But if he spoke about race in ways that made people uncomfortable, that was “politics.” And, Mr. Thompson suspected, it was proof to some church members that Mr. Thompson was not as conservative as they thought.

The NYT article goes on to point out that many churches are fragile because attendance remains well below prepandemic levels. Christian denominations are declining, along with the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian. at least some observers see a “seismic shift” underway, with white evangelical churches dividing into two camps. One embraces Trump-style messaging and politics, including belief in crackpot conspiracy theories. The other follows a different path, maybe less emotional and more grounded in reality and reason.

In my opinion, the pastor’s comment about losing sight of truth is a key insight about a key trait of modern authoritarian conservative propaganda. Loss of truth is central to how followers of intolerant, irrational falsehood-driven political-religious messaging exerts power. Those people have to detach from truth. They are mostly unaware of what has happened to them. Effective propaganda works mostly unconsciously to deceive and manipulate. 

When people have lost truth to effective propaganda, their power to decide and act on the basis of truth has been taken from them. The flow of power from the deceived and manipulated to the deceiving manipulators is real. Such personal power loss has serious, life-changing consequences for millions of average people’s lives.