What the Wingnuts REALLY Want: Control of Women, Control of Science, Control of Everything

You would think the so-called "pro-life" movement would be thrilled to support something like in vitro fertilization (IVF). After all, IVF should be a good thing: It's the active choice to get pregnant and have a baby in spite of various health or physiological factors that were preventing couples (or women) from natural reproduction. It's expensive, and painful, and not always successful: but thousands of people choose it because they want to be good parents. In the opposition to abortion - that it's "baby-killing" or "ending God's gift" - the choice of IVF would reflect that positivity of life.

And yet, those anti-abortionists - you can't call them "pro-life" in most respects now they're not even "pro-fetus" - are perfectly happy nuking from orbit IVF as a medical option, just like they did in Alabama's Supreme Court ruling earlier last week.

It has to do - mostly - with how it's done: Harvesting multiple ova and fertilizing each one, freezing the embryos until one is needed, implanting it, and hoping it works. All those extra harvested eggs become troubling to the "pro-fetus" believers because in their world-view those embryos are now persons, and any potential destruction of those embryos would be an act of abortion. There's also the problem that an implanted ova may not take, which becomes in their minds an abortion as well.

I'd also argue the "pro-fetus" people are annoyed - jealous, really - by how instead of relying on God for the miracle of childbirth, people can rely instead on Science and fertility doctors to get it done.

There's also the rage against feminism, the fear that single women would choose IVF with a random sperm donor and avoid the emotional - and oft-times physical - complications dealing with men. God forbid the Patriarchy - "OBEY your husbands, ladies" - be denied or disturbed in any way.

But it all boils down to what these wingnuts REALLY want. They want control.

I mentioned before how I've seen them in-person protesting at clinics, driven by rage and shilling fearmongering images of bloodied fetuses. Eager to pass "moral" judgment on women and families they didn't know, just so they could have some insane level of control over how the world around them truly works.

In the Religious Right's obsessive need to end abortion as a choice, they will tear down everything else to impose their religious views - their control - on everyone else. They will deny rape and incest as a problem to ensure women can't get abortions from unwanted pregnancies. They will obscure the reality that pregnancies are not 100 percent safe, and deny how miscarriages, stillbirths, and ectopic pregnancies can happen in "God's perfect world." They will demonize women who suffer miscarriages and seek to jail any doctors foolish enough to provide any kind of prenatal care in these Red States under theocratic misrule.

The Religious Right are going after IVF because it's still a choice, one they can't control and one that dares question their foundational belief in personhood for embryos.

The Religious Right are going after birth control - something that actually stops fertilization, so it shouldn't affect "personhood" - because these wingnuts want their control over the reproductive act for every woman, even the ones - liberal Christians, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim - who don't subscribe to their religion.

The Religious Right will bust down the doors of every house in America to check on your uteri, women, never mind your personal rights. These same enforcers won't lift a finger to go after men who commit onanism and waste all that sacred sperm.

These same Religious Right will deny you any chance to get pregnant and have families on your own terms, through IVF or through personal use of contraceptives until you're ready - emotionally and financially - to have children. Because they want to control that part of your lives as well.

As much as they'd love to control your souls, and demand your fealty to their Church (not their God, because they will deny other Christians any say in what God truly is), they know in the end they truly can't. So they want control - political, physical, public - of everything else just so they can make themselves superior to the rest of us. 

The Religious Right are doing all of this so they can sit themselves atop a throne to look down on the rest they view as sinners and un-persons. 

Doing all this so they can judge us, before God judges them for the damage they've done to their neighbors.

God DAMN them, and for the Love of a true and just God drive every one of these Christianist absolutists out of our elected offices and courtrooms.

Schisms Ahead

This was the big bombshell today, as the Catholic Bishops decided to go to war over who gets the daily wafer and wine (I think. I'm Unitarian, dammit, I'm not fully hep to the rituals of the Trinitarian types!) Via Sarah McCammon at NPR:

After a contentious debate, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has voted to move forward with a process that could call into question the eligibility of politicians like President Joe Biden to receive Communion.

The bishops voted 168-55 in favor of drafting "a formal statement on the meaning of the Eucharist in the life of the Church," officials announced on Friday afternoon, the final day of their three-day virtual meeting. Six bishops abstained.

Biden's election as only the nation's second Roman Catholic president has prompted renewed debate over denying communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, a position at odds with church teachings.

During their online meeting, bishops held a spirited discussion Thursday before voting on the proposal to direct the bishops' Committee on Doctrine to draft the statement. Such a document, once completed, could include guidelines for denying communion to public officials...

If you have any awareness of the Constitutional arguments over the Separation of Church and State, you might notice that this is drawing a very big line in the sand with a major church interfering with the order of the federal government.

Churches and religious leaders are not supposed to tell politicians what to do: Withholding something as sacred as Communion is a way of bullying an elected official to toe the church's faith instead of upholding the secular laws. In spite of the overtly religious psychotics running around out there claiming we're a Christian Nation, the United States is NOT supposed to be a theocracy. Congress (and the rest of the government) cannot put one church above any others (per the First Amendment), nor should they impose Religious Tests (per Article VI of the Constitution).

What the Bishops are doing here is imposing a Religious Test, in an attempt to put themselves - and their fellow Far Right anti-abortion Christian allies - above all other churches and Christian faithful who are Pro-Choice.

It should be telling that the Bishops are doing this in spite of the fact that a majority of American Catholics are Pro-Choice: The church leadership stateside is about to alienate a large portion of their own parishes doing this. It should also be telling that the Bishops are doing this in spite of their own Pope Francis - The Head of the Whole Damn Church, the one who is supposed to be Infallible and carrying the keys to Jesus' Kingdom - not to use the Communion as a weapon against their own churchgoers. 

It should be telling that this is a political move, not a religious one. If the Bishops were serious about punishing politicians who ignore Catholic church stances on Life, you'd be seeing the Bishops denying the Communion service as well to Far Right politicians (mostly Republicans) who cheer on the death penalty that the Church also condemns. The hypocrisy of this reeks.

At first glance, this looks like a partisan political power grab by the national Catholic leadership. A means of imposing their will in open violation to the Separation of Church and State they'd been observing for centuries. It would also seem to be organizational suicide, above all: The Bishops are about to drive off more than half of their own church-goers just to score cheap political points that would likely lessen their political influence on Catholic Democrats (their target in this matter) who can simply walk away, and are doing this at a time when church attendance across the board in the United States is spiraling downward. 

But here's the thing: Try to think the way the Far Right religious types - the Evangelicals and other anti-abortion churches cheering on the sidelines - think. Try to recognize who would truly profit from this move of the Catholic Bishops alienating both their parishes and their own Pope.

There are a handful of ways this will all play out, all of them benefitting the Far Right ultra-religious who currently hold sway over the Republican Party, keeping allegiance to the corrupt like trump and the racist, sexist world-views that underscore their hypocrisy.

Let's say the Bishops finish making this proposal a reality, and they go ahead with denying the Eucharist to liberals and Democrats who support a woman's right to choose. They risk the political reaction of having the Catholic Church's tax-exempt status taken away. What the Church might do here would be considered "issue advocacy" and violate their exempt status.

The simplest response by the federal government if the Catholic leadership goes this way would be to remove that exemption. It would certainly break the financial power the Church would have as a lot of their properties suddenly get taxed, and it would collapse a number of non-profits no longer able to stay well-funded when federal subsidies dry up. 

However, that response would be a public relations nightmare: The United States hasn't de-exempted a church organization of this size ever. In fact, the government has penalized just one church for breaking the Church-State separation when they revoked the exemptions for Pierce Creek Church in NY back in 1992 when it openly campaigned against Bill Clinton. Going after the ENTIRE Catholic Church in the U.S. would shock every Christian organization, even the ones that are liberal and pro-choice, and create a backlash that would create a political divide within Democratic ranks among those who are still church-goers and those who went secular (and have no qualms about taxing the shit out of rich churches. Sorry Bono, but your Catholic Church has its own fucking bank). It would certainly give the Religious Right political ammo to attack the Democrats as "anti-Christian," which they do now anyway but would finally have "proof" to back those attacks.

Another option for Democrats and liberals would be to walk away, abandon the Catholic Church in droves and accelerate the downward spiral of church-going turnout. It would cut into the Church's tithing and donations received: It would force remote parishes emptying out to close and relocate elsewhere, diminishing the Church's reach. This is something that could seriously hurt the Catholic Church both now and forever.

However, this is still something the Religious Right wants. They WANT the liberal left-leaning influence of the parishes gone, leaving behind only the "true" faithful of the conservative pro-fetus church-goers who will become devout foot soldiers in the Far Right's war on everybody else. You see it in other Christian churches that have also lost enough liberal followers to where the more conservative forces have taken internal control of the church organization. The Far Right wants the Catholic Church to be as fully Far Right as they are, even if it means reducing their numbers from millions to hundreds.

The Religious Right would also crow to their media allies how this shows liberals abandoning Christ, becoming as Godless and Un-Christian as they've claimed all along. In a nation where religion still holds cultural/social influence, this would be a big hit against the Democrats even in the Blue states.

A third option wouldn't involve American politics, but the Church's internal organization. By ignoring Pope Francis here, the U.S. Bishops are risking serious rebuke by their Boss. It wouldn't even be fearing any financial devastation that might hurt the Church if the U.S. revokes their tax exemption, this would be a serious act of insubordination that could force the Vatican to denounce their Bishops for going too far, with disciplinary actions ranging from forced retirements, banishments to other parishes overseas where they lose their political authority, up to something severe as straight-up defrocking similar to what they did to priests and bishops tied into the sex abuse and coverups.

However, any of those moves to regain organizational control over the rogue Bishops - even if Francis narrows it down to just a handful of ringleaders - could well create a schism within the Church on a global scale. There are a large number of conservative, extremely pro-fetus Bishops and priests who would quit the Catholic Church if they feel the Pope is violating the Church's own tenets against abortion (that he is, by allowing pro-choice Catholics to continue on, betraying the cause). Not just in the United States, but across Europe and Africa and Asia and Central/South America. Any mass resignation could cripple the Church's organization for decades and likely accelerate the turnout spiral just as much as having the liberal Catholics resign the Church.

This again profits the Far Right, because any attempt to weaken the power of the Catholic Church - which opposes the Evangelical and Protestant churches on various other issues especially regarding poverty and racism - will strengthen their own (not just in the U.S. but across a lot of other nations coping with the violent Nationalist movements that go against the Catholic Church's more pacifist leanings).

None of this looks like either Biden or Francis are getting out of this matter unscathed.

To refer to Adam L Silverman at Balloon Juice:

Pope Francis’s papacy, however, has been an attempt to reestablish some sense of institutional equilibrium and balance back into Catholicism after the very, very conservative papacy of John Paul II and the reactionary papacy of Benedict XVI. Especially in regard to Catholicism in the US. He has been challenged, however, by a group of traditionalist Catholic leaders whose political, social, and religious views mirror, and are in some cases more extreme than, those of the popes who selected them. Some of these clerics have been weaponized by Steve Bannon in his attempts to either overthrow Pope Francis in pursuit of his neo-fascist national populism or to create a new schism and split the Church...

...Today’s actions are not the end of this dispute and controversy, but just one important step towards advancing it. The next step is for the USCCB to vote on the measure in November, just as the 2022 midterm election cycle is beginning. And even if they do vote to put this into action, it cannot prevent any specific bishop from providing President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, or any other Catholic politician or public figure who tries to separate their faith from public policy from receiving communion. Frankly, denying them communion isn’t really the goal. The goal is to create controversy, because to quote the old professional wrestling adage, controversy creates cash. It also creates attention and political opportunity. The real fight here is not over whether President Biden or Speaker can or cannot take communion. The real fight is whether Pope Francis is legitimate if his papacy is not focused on the exceedingly conservative and revanchist pet issues of the Church’s reactionary episcopate...

None of this is really about faith. It's all about wealth, power, and patriarchy. It's all about achieving those things through the divide-and-conquer strategy of the Far Right that's been going on for decades.

Thing is now, it's moved from the back rooms and into the public forum. It's moved up to the stage where the Far Right divides us all, faith against faith, community against community.

I can't see a sane move here that could save either our nation's religious diversity or the Catholic Church's ability to stay intact. Either way, the goddamn wingnuts are going to win, and they are going to weaponize faith against everyone else who will get in their way.

The Soul of Liberty As the Equality Act Gains Ground

This still has to pass the Senate, but it's arguably one of the bigger deals the Democrats have gotten done (other than a COVID relief bill we're still waiting on dammit) as they pass a historic Equality Act in the House (via Danielle Kurtzleben at NPR): 

The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to pass the Equality Act, a bill that would ban discrimination against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It would also substantially expand the areas to which those discrimination protections apply.

It's a bill that President Biden said on the campaign trail would be one of his top legislative priorities for the first 100 days of his presidency. The House vote was largely along party lines, passing with the support of all Democrats and just three Republicans. The bill now goes to the Senate, where its fate is unclear...

The Equality Act would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to explicitly prevent discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The bill has been introduced multiple times before and previously passed the House in 2019. However, the law's impact would be different in practical terms now than it was then.

That's because the Supreme Court ruled in June of last year, in Bostock v. Clayton County, that the protections guaranteed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the basis of sex also extend to discrimination against lesbian, gay, and transgender Americans. The logic was that a man who, for example, loses his job because he has a same-sex partner is facing discrimination on the basis of sex — that, were he a woman, he wouldn't have faced that discrimination.

This act would explicitly enshrine those nondiscrimination protections into law for sexual orientation and gender identity, rather than those protections being looped in under the umbrella of "sex." However, the Equality Act would also substantially expand those protections.

The Civil Rights Act covered discrimination in certain areas, like employment and housing. The Equality Act would expand that to cover federally funded programs, as well as "public accommodations" — a broad category including retail stores and stadiums, for example...

One upshot of all of this, then, is that the Equality Act would affect businesses like flower shops and bakeries that have been at the center of discrimination court cases in recent years — for example, a baker who doesn't want to provide a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Importantly, the bill also explicitly says that it trumps the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (commonly known by its acronym RFRA). The law, passed in 1993, set a higher bar for the government to defend laws if people argued those laws infringed upon religious freedom...

What this law is trying to do is overrule any religious bigotry that would taint our citizenry's right to, you know, live like normal people.

One of the shameful elements of evangelical or conservative religious groups is how they use their Faith as an excuse to be hateful, in many ways defying core tenets of Grace and Charity that much of our Judeo-Christian-Islamic beliefs require from their followers (also any core tenets for Hindus and Buddhists I would hope. As a Unitarian Universalist I'm aiming for inclusivity, brah). It's that excuse that alienates more people from accepting religion, as one of the reasons over the years why people have been walking away from churches as those faiths become more identified as biased as hell.

Again, we're waiting on the Senate to take up this bill and hold a vote - pending the likely filibustering that's still baked into the system, what the hell Democrats get rid of that damn thing - but we're one step closer to equality and liberty for more Americans. That long arc is bending towards justice again, thank God.

The Never-Ending War Over the Almighty Uterus

Well, in the good-news bad-news kind of day it's been over the War on Abortion we've been fighting in this nation since Roe v. Wade, there's these two tidbits.

Good news: a Houston grand jury convened to investigate their local Planned Parenthood office for possible illegal acts involving fetus parts declined to indict the women's health care service on any charges. Instead, that grand jury indicted the anti-abortionists who accused Planned Parenthood and lied about it via heavily edited video recordings.

Back in August, the Harris County District Attorney’s office announced it would conduct a criminal investigation into a Planned Parenthood clinic located in Houston. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) ordered the investigation after a series of undercover videos released by anti-abortion activists accused the organization of illegally profiting from aborted fetuses. At least one of those videos featured footage of employees at that Houston clinic discussing fetal tissue donation...

The investigation did find that laws were broken — just not by the clinic itself.

Instead, the grand jury indicted two anti-abortion activists behind the videos, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, for tampering with government evidence, which is a felony offense. Daleiden was also indicted for the illegal purchase and sale of human organs, which is a misdemeanor.

Turns out, lying about who you are and what you're doing have consequences. Even if you really aren't harvesting and selling human organs, even lying that you are is a criminal offense. Who knew? It's kind of weird that the illegal sale and purchase of human body parts is only a misdemeanor: in a sane world that would be a felony (you don't want people harvesting your kidneys without permission, would you). Still, minor point.

The activists behind the multi-part video series, who posed as employees at a fake fetal tissue procurement company and secretly filmed their conversations with Planned Parenthood staff, have been widely criticized for the deceptive tactics underpinning the smear campaign.

Earlier this month, Planned Parenthood sued Daleiden’s organization, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), for allegedly engaging in fraud and illegally filming staff who were unaware they were on camera. The National Abortion Federation has also filed a federal lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order to prohibit CMP from making further videos public.

Nonetheless, CMP’s allegations against Planned Parenthood spurred Republican lawmakers across the country to launch investigations into the national women’s health organization on both the state and federal level. Those investigations have so far turned up evidence only that Planned Parenthood’s activities are legal.

When Daleiden and company pulled this stunt, they didn't really care if what they were doing was legal or not. All that mattered to them and to the other anti-abortion jihadists - can't even call them pro-fetus like I used to - was to embarrass Planned Parenthood, and make it easier for the federal and state governments to defund/shut down their offices despite the facts that PP doesn't perform that many abortions and that PP provides a lot of other health support to poor women. Daleiden and his ilk for some reason think it's okay to lie, to deceive, to break the law in their holy war against women's health care.

Turns out it's not okay, is it David?

So while those two anti-abortionists are stewing in criminal court for the next few years, we have a Bad News situation right here in the Sunshine State. The Florida Legislature is considering passing a state law banning all abortions (via Tampa Bay Times):

By an 8-3 vote Monday afternoon, a House criminal justice panel voted to advance the more sweeping legislation (HB 865), which would make performing an abortion or operating an abortion clinic a first-degree felony in Florida, punishable by up to 30 years in prison. Just hours earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court reiterated its longstanding ruling affirming women's right to the procedure...

"The Legislature finds that all human life comes from the Creator, has an inherent value that cannot be quantified by man, and begins at the earliest biological development of a fertilized human egg," the bill says.

It goes on to say that "personal liberty is not a license to kill or otherwise destroy any form of human life," and that the state has an interest in stopping abortions, unless the safety of the mother is in question.

It's likely that Van Zant's proposal, if passed by the Legislature, would lead to lawsuits citing the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling in Roe vs. Wade. That became even more likely Monday morning after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an abortion ban in North Dakota.

It's interesting to note this Republican-led legislature is so concerned with stopping "to kill or otherwise destroy any form of human life" and would turn right around and pass statutes allowing the goddamn death penalty.

It's horrifying to note that this bill clearly reflects religious intent - use of the word "Creator" - and violates Section 3 of the state's constitution... not to mention violates the federal First Amendment, both of which state "There shall be no law respecting the establishment of religion."

It's unsettling because this bill is coming up at a contentious moment: an election year. Normally we don't see controversial or confrontational legislation like this in election time - because none of the incumbents want to rock any boats - but this is different. This bill is going to be a litmus test, I guarantee it: the Far Right people in the state Legislature are going to see who among their ranks will stand up for this bill or try to block it before it goes too far.

And this becomes a problem because we're at the point in the Republican Party at all levels - federal and state - where the wingnuts are finally going to force the issue about their elected officials being on THEIR side or not. 'Cause what will happen is any Republican who votes against this No-Abortion bill will find him/herself facing a primary challenger. The deadline to file is May 23rd, four months away.

At the state level, facing a general election challenge tends to be a foregone conclusion because the gerrymandered district favors the incumbent, and indeed over 30 percent of them weren't even challenged in 2014. However, primaries can't be treated that way: the odds of losing to a wingnut challenger in an especially deep-Red district are pretty good especially if you're caught doing something the Far Right would hate you for doing.

There's a good chance a lot of the Republican Florida legislators will back this bill, to the shame and horror of our entire state, just so they can avoid a primary challenge from someone wing-nuttier than they. The legislators will likely convince themselves that the courts will overturn them anyway, so they'll view it as win-win ("See, I voted against abortion but them damn librul courts stopped us again!").

And the odds of the courts shutting this bill down are near-certain. The Supreme Court just rejected two harsh anti-abortion bills. Florida's bill goes so far against not only Roe but also Casey that it won't even find any friends at the Appellate level.

But this won't be win-win. The wingnuts will not be appeased on this - some might go ahead and primary on candidates anyway. Worse, passing such a blatant anti-abortion bill like this will anger up the majority of Americans who don't have a problem with abortion at all.

Here's why abortion is not a simple cut-and-dried matter. While a majority of Americans don't like abortion and will say they would never consider it, there's still a majority of Americans who realize there is a need for abortion in certain cases. You will always hear people accepting the exceptions for rape, incest, and where the life of the mother is threatened (because pregnancy is NOT 100 percent safe and easy).

And yet the Far Right ignores that, risking the wrath of voters who would otherwise not be bothered to pay attention on other concerns. They can't consider it: being absolutists who believe in All or Nothing to Win, they can't conceive or accept the nuance of compromising between the extremes on abortion.

It used to be the politicians would talk the talk but not walk the walk on this, knowing if they go too far they risk the ire of the pro-choice voters who would usually tune out of the mudslinging mess of modern politics. That is no longer the case: in red state after red state, the Far Right has been making access to abortion services tougher if not impossible for poor women to find. Pressing to see where the line is that can't be crossed... and crossing it anyways because they think themselves safe behind gerrymanders and voter disinterest.

But if they do this, if they succeed in pushing such bills that harm women's health like this, even when the courts knock this bill down the retribution against the Far Right is going to be swift. Women voters and pro-choice voters will show up and will vote and will drive out the anti-abortion politicians wherever they can. They did that against a couple of would-be Senator candidates in 2012, remember?

There's more than enough time, after all, for pro-choice candidates to sign up for the Democratic nominations in those state districts. Even the gerrymandered ones, which will still have a lot of angry women and upset pro-choice moderates looking for THEIR moment to vote to THEIR needs. It's about damn time they did anyway.

Get more candidates running for state offices, people. And get the damn vote out.

Thoughts About The Kentucky County Clerk, Christianity, and Self-Righteous Bastards

Given the Far Right Christian viewpoint opposed to gay marriage being a civil right now, it was inevitable that someone in a position of government - county clerks who are responsible for issuing marriage licenses in particular - would make a damn circus out of refusing to issue such licenses in order to stop gays from marrying.

And so we've got a County Clerk in Kentucky sitting in jail for Contempt of Court, gleefully and happily playing the role of martyred victim for all the world to see.

This is giving the Far Right Christians every opportunity to host themselves an endless series of pity parties, of oh "Woe is us, we are being hated and persecuted for our beliefs."

Problem is, the reality is different from their fantasy Persecution Complex.

To quote Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.com:

Just kidding. We’re totally fine. And anyone who says otherwise is a great big crybaby...

...It’s a familiar refrain, this sob story that letting other people exercise their constitutional rights is an assault on their religious freedom. Last month, when actress Ellen Page confronted GOP presidential contender Ted Cruz at a state fair, Cruz asserted, “At the end of the day, what we should not be doing is persecuting people who follow their faith.” 

It would helpful to remember here that Davis is not being “punished” for her beliefs. Davis was found in contempt for refusing to abide by a federal court order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. She is being appropriately dealt with for not doing the taxpayer-funded job the citizens of Rowan County elected her to do, for not upholding the Constitution she took an oath to abide by. I know that lots of Christians are used to cherry picking their Bible verses to make their points, but you’re not allowed to be quite so selective with the Constitution. Certainly not if you’re someone whose job involves issuing marriage licenses...

...And as a Catholic, I can quite honestly report that I have yet to be persecuted for my religious beliefs. I get a fair amount of pushback from secular friends who think I’m delusional, and conservatives who say I’m not a real Christian because I support reproductive choice and marriage equality, but I’ll say this — I am not writing these words from a jail cell. You know why? Because American Christians are not being persecuted. And considering that there are places in the world where Christians really are, this boo hoo hooing from people who are astonished that they’re not being given a free pass to discriminate against gay people is pretty damn enraging.

This is all true.  We are not seeing a massive wave of arrests of Christians for going to their churches, we are not documenting the numbers of street preachers getting dragged off in handcuffs for disturbing the peace, we are not engaged in any open warfare between faiths.

Number of churches under assault: several, but they all happen to be Black churches with the attacks aimed at them over race - such as the tragedy of Charleston - not faith.

We've had attacks on Unitarian churches for being targets of conservative hatred towards liberals.  I'm trying to think of a time when a liberal-leaning person did the same against a hard-core conservative church.

This is the United States.  The last time we had open warfare between religious sects was the fighting between Mormons and Protestants during the 1800s (neither side can claim the high moral ground by the by).

One of the genius moves by our Founders was to establish a No Religious Test in our Constitution to prevent one church-going group from gaining majority control of government and using our legal institutions to persecute non-Believers.  The First Amendment's point of confirming Congress not placing one religion over another encourages peaceful co-existence of faiths, and placed secular law separate from spiritual law.

And yet we get these charlatans and Pharisees who love nothing better than to use the excuse of faith to deny civil rights to others: there was a time - and there still are some Far Right Christians who still feel that way - when the likes of Kim Davis would have used her "faith" to stop Whites and Blacks marrying each other.

Davis' argument is that is answering "God's Authority" to deny gays to marry.  Using Leviticus and Romans and other cherry-picked parts of the Bible to back her argument.

This is coming from a woman whose violations of "God's Authority" over Adultery are well-documented.  Hypocrite.  Pharisee.  I have - millions have -better moral authority to label her on those sins than she does passing moral judgment on anyone else.

Davis wants to serve "God's Authority"?  Her solution is simple: go work as a pastor.  Go work in a church as an organizer, a lay person, go and serve God's will caring for the sick and the poor.

When you get elected to a public office, you are serving the Will of the People, of the citizens of your county and your state.  When you are a public official you serve the laws of the land, and if those laws conflict with your beliefs then by the Grace of God quit and find a better job for yourself.  If you want to fight those laws as unjust you have the courts (and they tend to be pretty supportive of church rights and faith in general): if the courts argue that the laws ARE just - and allowing gays the same rights in the law as straight people counts - you STILL have the freedom of your faith to believe as you do... to yourself and to your God.

There is a place for civil disobedience against unjust laws, true: there is still the expectation that those being disobedient still answer to the law and prepare themselves for jail (Thoreau, Rev. King, et al).  The end-game for those disobedience movements were reforms and freedoms for the many who were suffering unjustly.  What suffering was Kim Davis and the other anti-gay forces enduring that requires them to act this way?  Again, as Williams pointed out in her article, there isn't any suffering of the Christian Far Right: they're still free to move about, go to church, pray to God, commit adultery, etc. even as gays - a significant minority of people - are able to enjoy the same legal protections over marriage as heteros.

You do not have the right to impose that faith on others when serving the public trust.  That makes you the bully, the corrupt power in high places.  That's Sharia Law.  That's the sign of the Imposter, the one who does not have the self-confidence of a true religion.

In other news, gay people in that Kentucky county can now get married.

Marriage is supposed to be a good thing: stability, community, love, commitment, and celebration.  Good things.

And God abides.

Predicting Character: The Emptiness of Jindal

It's gotten to where you can tell a Republican is going to announce he will attempt a Presidential campaign run by how shameless and hypocritical he gets in pandering to the religious Far Right.

Example: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal issued an Executive Order for his state allowing (read: encouraging) anti-gay discrimination:

Jindal’s executive order is notable for two reasons. First, the Louisiana governor is clearly considering a run at the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Over the last few years, Republican strategists, pundits, and young ’uns have been telling us that this time around, the GOP would take a tolerant turn on gay rights. But like Jeb Bush, Jindal is doubling down on LGBTQ issues, zigging hard to the right even as the rest of the country zags further to the left. As the New York Times’ Ross Douthat admitted a while ago, the conservative endgame on marriage equality at this point is to guarantee anti-gay holdouts the legal right to demean same-sex couples and their families. Jindal, like Bush, appears to be more interested in pandering to this shrinking minority than appealing to the supermajority of Americans who support equality. (note: I wouldn't call it a supermajority but it's a clear and growing one)

The pandering part is easy to spot.  The hypocrisy part requires context:

Second, Jindal has been a vituperative critic of President Barack Obama’s executive orders, especially his order deferring deportation for many undocumented immigrants. In a press release, Jindal castigated Obama for “bypassing Congress” and “ignoring the American people,” slamming the order as “an arrogant, cynical political move.” Jindal seemed to be keenly concerned that Obama imposed his policy preference by executive fiat rather than allowing the people, through their elected representatives, to have their say. Now, though, the people’s representatives have firmly rejected Jindal’s bill—and rather than persuading the legislature to reconsider the measure, Jindal has simply imposed it by executive decree.

Only a painfully gullible naïf could be surprised to see a Republican eagerly aping Obama’s methods of governance while simultaneously denouncing the president’s maneuvers. Even as Mitt Romney condemned Obama’s executive orders in 2012, he planned a sweeping slew of his own. And Jeb Bush, who scores points on the campaign trail by lambasting Obama’s executive overreach, would enthusiastically issue his own favored executive orders in the early days of his presidency...

Sigh.

One can question if this was an impulsive move or a calculated one, but the end result is an obvious move by Jindal to keep his anti-gay bona fides fresh in the minds of primary voters for 2016.

It didn't have to be this way.  When Jindal won his governorship in Louisiana back in 2009, he was one of the bright smart shining stars of a GOP that had ruined its reputation over bad leadership and growing disdain for genuine deep thinkers.  He showed up on the stage warning the Republicans to "stop being the stupid party."  But then he turned right around and became a perfect example of what a person looks like after having a brain fart.

What happened?  The best argument to make is that Jindal's ambition got the better of him.  He saw the Republican Establishment at the national level insisting on a pure "tax-cut, school-cut, kill healthcare reform" agenda and sold his soul over it.  If we look at the Washington Post article on him from 2013:

...On Monday he dropped his tax reform plan that would have replaced income taxes with higher sales taxes, acknowledging a widespread backlash from the public, religious groups, business and state lawmakers in his own party. "It certainly wasn't the reaction I was hoping for," Jindal said...

There's Jindal offering himself up to the anti-tax Club for Greed crowd that pushes against a progressive income tax system in favor of a regressive sales tax system.

...Deep budget cuts, particularly to health care and education spending, have been unpopular. Polling suggests that a small majority also opposes the vouchers at the heart of his educational reform plan, which a judge has deemed unconstitutional...

The education spending in 2013 was just the tip of the iceberg: in 2015 Jindal is pushing for a major slash of spending for state universities to the point where Louisiana State - home of the LSU Tigers and a key SEC powerhouse - may well lose 82 percent of its funding and could well close its doors (has a major public university of its size ever close before?!).  There would certainly be a revolt by students and (surviving) faculty over the horrific decline of the school's accredited value.  And there's the fealty Jindal has again to the tax-cutter elites: he dare not consider bigger revenue hikes to help the educational system recover or right itself.

The voucher part of that paragraph refers to the ongoing Far Right obsession over "choice" in schools by giving parents the money to send their kids to schools they prefer (including private religious schools that won't answer to state regulations).  They're not really very popular with the parents to begin with, and the courts keep noting how unconstitutional they are.  But the wingnuts insist because it plays to two of their desires: the desire to scam more money out of the public funds, and the desire to have kids sent to private religious schools that would teach God, Creationism, and Fear instead of History, Science and Math.

It's telling how Jindal bends to the whim and will of his corporate and church overlords.  He does not seem to respond to the cries of the public, sticking to a script of "this is what's best for you, take it and shut up" and moving on to the next event that would keep his national profile afloat.  And he's getting to the point where his inflexible positioning over empty ideology has alienated his own party in the state.

If I have to chart out Jindal's positives and negatives and guess (ha) at his Character trait, it'd look like this:

Bobby Jindal - Governor, Louisiana
Positives: Has been able to win election as governor twice, so he knows how to campaign.  His background - Rhodes Scholar - clearly shows someone who had a functioning sober brain, which ought to put him one up on half the contested field.  His presence as a non-white on the debate platform eases the GOP's need to present themselves as "diverse" and not a bunch of old greedy sexist white guys.
Negatives: One of the blandest visible figures trying to run since 2009.  Can be flatter than drywall.  Early attempts to make himself the GOP's answer to Obama - a well-educated ethnic - were disasters. Flips-flops not over policies - he's been consistently conservative - but over marketing and public stances.  Jindal may be an intellectual but he betrays intelligence as a virtue every time he panders to the ignorance of the Far Right.  His actual record running Louisiana is terrible: he succeeded in pissing off a well-respected conservative pundit from the state, and that takes doing.
Chances: Doesn't look that good to begin with.  His popularity numbers are one of the lowest among sitting governors.  His pandering to religious issues does not separate him from the likes of Huckabee or Cruz, who both have a head start and better ground beneath them.
Character Chart: I keep coming back to how the Republican party itself leans so far over to Active-Negative behaviors - rigid Uncompromising attitudes above all - that every Republican candidate is pretty much going to fulfill that character.  On Jindal's specific woes, he's much like Huckabee in terms of a rigid social-religious ideology, but he also carries with him a hard-line economic mindset that would break the federal budget in the worst ways.  His record as Governor - alienating, uncompromising, stuck on broken issues - is proof of that.

It's also painful to note that just as our nation's population is drifting away from church and Christianity - the polls are showing downturns in attendance and affiliation - the Republicans are acting more desperate to pander to the hard-core religious types whose inflexible dogmas and insisting of shoving Religion into everyone's private lives are driving people away in the first place.

We see the likes of Jindal here pandering over discriminating gays at all costs,  We had Jeb Bush as Governor pandering to the pro-fetus crowd over Terri Schiavo (which wasn't a pro-life fight as it was a quality-of-life, which a majority of sane people recognized).  And Huckabee, the worst of these false Judges of us.  We've got a Far Right Purity Purge wrapped around God And Guns (and Tax Cuts) pursuing a platform unpopular with most voters but still unpunished for doing so because our rigged electoral system keeps them safe...

Yeah, I know, I'm ranting.  I'd best leave off with this little tidbit for Jindal to chew on if he ever sees this:

Matthew 23:23: Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices--mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law--justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.

Put that on your gay wedding cake and eat it.

Predicting Character: The Hubris of Huckabee

Just to mention, the inevitable jumping-in of Mike Huckabee into the GOP primaries happened.  Inevitable in that he'd been making the rounds at the key states, making noises about starting up funding efforts, making wildly inaccurate accusations about the godless heathens dancing to Beyonce.

He's been mentioned on this blog several times before.  And on several occasions I've made the observation that among the social conservative wingnuts running for the highest office - the likes of Santorum, Cruz, Palin, others - Huckabee is the one that can be the most credible threat to win the nomination.

He made a serious run in 2008 that got him in third behind McCain and Romney, and Huckabee did a serious job weakening Romney's standing among the Far Right religious voters.

That he didn't run against Mitt in 2012 was a slight surprise: against the faux purity of plastic ideology that Romney offered, Huckabee was a genuine Bible-thumping wingnut that the GOP wingnut crowd could back.  The thing is, Huckabee may buy into religious dogma but he's not completely blinded by political ideology: he could see the political landscape in 2012 still favored Obama, and likely didn't want to ruin his reputation on a doomed effort.  Still, he was the one who polled well enough against Obama to have been a real chance for the Republicans to take the White House then.

Why I need to re-address my views on Huckabee now, since I've already got my appraisals from 2008 and 2012 to verify how he'll do for 2016, is that this time I'm also looking at previewing / predicting the Character traits that Huckabee likely brings with him.  Using Professor Barber's system of uncovering the candidate's world-view, I hope to establish just how much of an Active-Negative Huckabee could be sitting in the Oval Office.

Pulling back up the brief preview I wrote earlier this year from his appearance at the Iowa Suck-Up Extravaganza:

Mike Huckabee - Governor, Arkansas
Positives: Populist political figure from a strongly conservative political region (Southeast).  Can govern.  Knows how to campaign in a Congenial style.  Remained a well-known figure on the national stage - by being on Fox Not-News as a pundit - after his failed primary campaigning in 2008.  He polled well as a possible candidate in 2012 (and showed enough awareness to tell it wasn't going to be a good election cycle for Republicans and stayed out of it).  Has legitimate religious conservative cred (ordained Baptist minister).  Can not only pander to the Tea Party base, he can do so without looking like it.
Negatives: Not exactly trusted by the anti-tax crowds still dominant in the backrooms of the GOP leadership (which is ridiculous as GOP dogma is too firmly obsessed with tax-cutting for anyone to violate that rule).  Has been away from elected office long enough for people to forget any good stuff he'd done as governor.  His time as a fear-monger on Fox Not-News will turn away moderate voters.  His early campaigning comments - going after "family values" issues and insulting Beyonce (?!) - are not exactly endearing him to any younger voters.  And that's not even going into legitimate scandals - granting clemencies to violent offenders who promptly killed (again), a son who killed a stray dog under obscure circumstances - that can become millstones in a national campaign.  Worst of all, Huckabee's advocacy of his religious beliefs - his failure to even respect the No Religious Test requirement IN THE CONSTITUTION ITSELF - threatens the sanctity of Separation of Church and State.
Chances: While he won't get the deep-pocket backers the way Jeb Bush (or even Mitt if Romney decides to make one more try) will, Huckabee has a high chance to use his charm and campaign skills to make a serious go at the nomination.
Character Chart: I stated earlier how the Republican Party is dominated by Active-Negatives and has an Active-Negative platform, yet needs a Passive-Positive candidate to appeal to regular voters.  Huckabee can present himself as a Passive-Positive better than any other candidate... but he's so Active-Negative with his strict religious convictions that he'll likely lean that way.

There are different ways a President can be an Active-Negative, but the one trait that type shares is the "I Must" mindset of a hidebound ideology.  As in, "I must do this thing because it is the only way to do it and I am the only one who knows how."  This is the Uncompromising trait that Barber wrote about in his studies on Presidential Character.  Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Wilson, Hoover, Andrew Jackson... each of them with different world-view backgrounds yet focused on the same unbending agendas.  Where LBJ's Uncompromising habit came from his need to succeed as the best, where Nixon's came from his need to prove himself in crisis, where Hoover's came from the unbending logic of an engineer, they all ended up in the same place: inflexibility regarding policy solutions that ended in disasters.

Of the previous Active-Negatives, Huckabee shares most with Woodrow Wilson, the Idealist among Presidents.  Wilson's idealism was a self-assured righteousness, not of faith but of politics.  It was that idealism that drove much of his progressive agenda but also led to pushing too hard for a peace platform in the wake of World War I that ended up isolating the United States in the worst possible way (not to mention various civil liberties violations like the Palmer Raids).

Huckabee's idealism is tied directly to his Christian faith.  Unlike most of the other Republican candidates, Huckabee is not a hardened fiscal conservative (although he'll sign any tax cut bill a GOP Congress will send to his desk) that the Establishment types would prefer.  He seems to genuinely come from the wing of the GOP that takes churching and proselytizing serious.  From the Washington Monthly article by Steven Waldman:

...I met Huckabee in the 2000s when I was running a multifaith religion website called Beliefnet. Huckabee was making the rounds promoting his efforts to encourage healthy eating. He was charming, reasonable, smart, and funny—conservative, to be sure, but empathetic and appealing. During his underfinanced campaign in 2008, he proved himself to be a far better candidate than John McCain. In a party that’s forever searching for the next Ronald Reagan, he’s the closest to the Gipper in temperament than anyone else out there...
...He could have energized religious conservatives while seeming hopeful to the rest of the population...

I know that Waldman's comparing Huckabee to Reagan should be a sign that Huckabee could well be a Passive-Positive - indeed, the one character type that could appeal to a broad range of voters at a time when all we have running are Active-Negatives - but then Waldman notes how Huckabee went and sold his soul:

Then he got a Fox News TV show. He evolved into an uninteresting, standard-issue religious-right pundit. He repeatedly said that Obama grew up in Kenya. He defended Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin. He champions David Barton, who argues that the Founding Fathers did not believe in separation of church and state. He even mocks Michelle Obama’s healthy-eating efforts, even though being the Biggest Loser (in terms of pounds, not votes) was his claim to fame once upon a time...

It's not so much that Huckabee went and re-branded himself as a Huckster.  It's that Huckabee saw an opportunity to make money and still stand on his reputation as a Moral-Majority Republican.  It's kind of a horrifying thought: that he not only got to sell snake-oil as a fear-mongerer, he somehow got to keep his self-image of a true believer whenever he looked himself in a mirror: the worst of both worlds.

Thing is, Huckabee didn't sell much of himself to Fox Not-News.  He had always been that fervent a "religious-right pundit".  Defending Barton - fake historian - over the issue of Separation of Church And State wasn't a new thing: Huckabee spoke against the precedents of Separation of Church and State years ago.  To the flashback machine of my blog:

...Please note sir, that your definition of what God is and what God wants, as a Baptist, is going to be different from even your fellow Christians, be they Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Calvinist, Reform, etc.

Please note Mr. Huckabee that your desire to rewrite the Constitution to reflect *your* point-of-view on God's Will, and it's only *your* will by the by, is going to scare the crap out of every other person who doesn't preach and pray to God the same way you do.  (add-on: and that includes fellow Christians)

Sir, you may be preaching thinking that you want to convert this nation from its seemingly godless ways, but rest assured we Americans are more driven by our faith and our acceptance of God moreso than any other Western nation. There is no need to make the Secular Law of the Land to mirror the Law of Faith. If you do, if you persist, you're going to find more people bickering and arguing over the Law of Faith the same as they bicker and argue over the Secular Law...

Huckabee hasn't changed since 2008.  The only thing's that changed is that Huckabee is more rigid in his denouncements of the "liberal" godlessness threatening Christians.  His claim that gay marriage will "criminalize Christianity" is just one big proof of how his fear-mongering has moved from being a smiley happy preacher to a dark doom-and-gloom judge of us all.

If we go into a more detailed biography - there are several in print, but one from the New Yorker in 2010 may help best - we can see the Uncompromising religious idealism of the man:

When Mike Huckabee was born, in 1955, the mores and values of Christianity seemed indistinguishable from the mores and values of the country. Growing up, Huckabee assumed that everyone was Christian, and in Hope, Arkansas—which is also Bill Clinton’s home town, though the two politicians did not become acquainted until adulthood—he was not far off. His family was not deeply religious, but his mother, Mae, took Huckabee and his sister to Sunday school every week, where the preacher would “literally scare the hell” out of him. “I grew up in a culture where everybody went to church but nobody took it that seriously,” Huckabee told me one afternoon a few months ago, drinking tea on the sunporch of his house in North Little Rock...

...When Huckabee was fifteen, he encountered an alternative. A young couple in his neighborhood offered Bible study at their home on Wednesday nights, and these meetings changed the way he saw his place in the universe. “For them, Christianity was not a cultural expression—it was a personal relationship with God,” he said. “It wasn’t about behavior.” He was attracted to the intimacy and depth of this vision, and to the couple’s emphasis on love rather than fear. "Evangelical essentially means people who have a belief in the authority and veracity of the Bible,” Huckabee said, “but who also believe that the Bible is about good news..."

...In some ways, Huckabee seems like a promising candidate for 2012: a squeaky-clean family man and bona-fide Christian who loves to talk. His communication is folksy but fluid; he never seems flummoxed, like George W. Bush, or befuddled, like John McCain, or unprepared, like Sarah Palin. “If we’re running a race against their most articulate guy,” Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s former campaign manager, told me, referring to President Obama, “we should put our most articulate guy. Huckabee’s that guy...”

This was in 2010.  Other than the change in messaging from hope and love to "war on faith" fear-mongering, there remains the constant of Huckabee's religious convictions.  It may not be a "fundamentalist" form of faith, but it's still an "evangelical" absolutism that few other Republicans can even fake.

It's that religious absolutism that made Huckabee free a lot of state prisoners who found out quick that professing conversion to faith as a quick ticket to paroles.  It's that same religious absolutism that will make him reject the growing public consensus that gay marriage is not a threat to heteros.  It's that religious absolutism that has convinced him that there should be Religious Tests and religious-based laws governing the nation, despite the Constitution and the proof of history that such laws were dangerous.  

Huckabee may have as a personality the Congeniality skills that makes him likable, and approachable among the lower-class citizenry that the other Republican candidates can't abide.  But he's an Idealist who won't bend on matters of personal faith that will dictate his public actions that will affect the rest of us.  That puts him in the Active-Negative category as much as the con artists making up the tax-cut pro-business Establishment candidates facing him in the primaries.

He's simply not a sane alternative to the likes of Cruz or Walker or Jeb or Rubio or any of the others.  In some ways he's worse: he's driven by a belief in God that isn't humble or accepting, it's demanding and inflexible.  It borders on hubris, a form of excessive pride that puts a man above others, making himself a god.  Huckabee may think of himself as God's messenger, but he's not: he's his own.  Hence the hubris, hence the pride.

And the Bible is pretty strict about what pride brings about.  Proverbs 16:18.

It Is Not Christian To Hate, Indiana

Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness.
- 1 John 2:9

My personal experience with Indiana is fleeting.  I drove through the state on a road trip to Chicago ages ago.  All I can say is that was the flattest piece of land I had ever seen in my life.  And I've driven through the Everglades on a regular basis, which is basically sawgrass as far as the eye can see.

I dunno if the flat unending bland landscape does something to the mindset of the locals, because I can't think of many other excuses that the state's residents can offer to explain how they elected a bunch of self-satisfied haters to run their government.

This is a historical thing.  People may well remember that Indiana was one of the major Union states of the Civil War and fought to end slavery and all that, but they need to remember that Indiana was one of the most redneck-y haters-gonna-hate state north of the Ohio River.  When the Klu Klux Klan, dear God, became a massive political movement that threatened to run its own candidate for the White House back in the 1920s, Indiana was the state with the largest membership at 250,000 men.  That was three out of ten white guys.

This is a historical debacle.  Indiana just passed and signed into law a bill that allows, in some ways encourages, private businesses to discriminate people even on the supposition those people are gay/lesbian.  There's actually laws similar to this one on the books in other states and even in the federal code, but as Garrett Epps points out at The Atlantic none of them do this:

...That becomes clear when you read and compare those tedious state statutes.  If you do that, you will find that the Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.
The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding...”  Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this...
...Of all the state “religious freedom” laws I have read, this new statute hints most strongly that it is there to be used as a means of excluding gays and same-sex couples from accessing employment, housing, and public accommodations on the same terms as other people. True, there is no actual language that says, All businesses wishing to discriminate in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation, please check this “religious objection” box. But, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk...”

The governor who signed this, Mike Pence, has spent the past few days trying to defend this law.  He keeps saying that the law is about "protecting religious liberty," but when asked about whether the law discriminates, or asked if it's wrong to discriminate, he avoids giving a straight answer.

It's telling that this "great and wonderful and Christian law" for religious liberty had to be signed behind closed doors and with only a handful of religious leaders - some of them known for their rabid brand of hate - rather than a broad range of church pastors and fellowships.  That's probably because a lot of the larger Christian denominations - Presbyterians, Episcopalians and most Lutheran churches in particular - support gay rights.  And a lot of other Christian churches such as the Methodists may oppose homosexuality on principle due to Leviticus and other books, but they refuse to make it a public stance to openly discriminate.

The thing is: this law does not protect religious freedom at all.  It has nothing to do with ensuring our churches stay open, it has nothing to do with protecting people who gather in public to pray, it has nothing to do with making sure that God remains in Heaven while the flock tend to their affairs within the world.

It has everything to do with letting haters use religion as a weapon to hurt others.  It has everything to do with twisting the words of love and forgiveness from Christ himself to justify rash and reckless judgment of others.  It has everything to do with those few so-called Christians who want to persecute and punish a very small minority group in the name of other Christians who do not want to hate at all.

And Indiana just keeps its historical reputation as a Hater state continue on.

Observations of the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby Ruling

Well, the damage is done for another Supreme Court calendar year, finishing up with a ruling on corporations refusing to provide healthcare coverage to employees with regards to birth control medication and devices...  while I'm not a legal scholar, I've been a witness to history and American politics long enough to understand a few things:

1) The ruling clearly puts the religious beliefs of an owner over that of the employees: rather than try to find a spot between which the owner's beliefs won't conflict with the employees, the Court took a side... which hurts more people (workers and their families) more than it would have hurt the owners.

2) Justice Alito's contention that the ruling specifically affects birth control makes it clear the decision was about abortion and not religious liberty (despite what the fundamentalists think, those issues ARE separate).  The ruling didn't bring into consideration other religious arguments against various medical treatments - for example, some churches object to blood transfusions and others might object to psychiatric meds - which means the Justices were only concerned for the one that mattered to them: the religious argument against abortion.  It didn't help that all five Justices ruling FOR Hobby Lobby are practicing Catholics, whose church decrees that birth control is equal to abortion (there's a sixth Justice who is Catholic, but Sotomayor is female, which brings us to the next point).

3) The ruling was passed due to five Justices all of whom - Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Kennedy, and Thomas - were not only Catholics but also all male.  The sixth male Breyer sided with the dissent, which was where the three sitting female Justices all argued against the ruling.

3a) Not to mention that the five Justices in favor are all Republican party appointees, with the four dissenters all Democratic.

If you were a Republican operative working on any outreach programs to young unmarried women (and even married women) who are in dire need of healthcare coverage to pay for medications like birth control (some of the meds are useful outside of birth control, such as reducing risks of ovarian cysts/cancer), all of a sudden you're going to find it VERY hard to find any women with any fondness for the GOP.  The Republicans were already having problems getting young women to support the party, now it's going to get worse...

4) While the Far Right and Pro-Fetus crowd may be celebrating the ruling, it needs to be said it is easier to rally your voters around a grievance than anything else.  Meaning the motivation is now all on the Democratic side of the midterms this year.

Now the Republicans will crow that this ruling hurts dreaded ObamaCare, and that may get the Far Right base out and voting this November.  But now the Democrats have motivation by pointing out to women voters that they need to get out the vote to keep Democrats in control of the Senate this 2014: It's the Senate that approves Supreme Court Justices after all, and the sitting Justices aren't getting any younger.  If Ginsberg - eldest of the left-leaning Justices - dies or retires with a GOP-held Senate (who will press for a Far Right candidate no matter what even with Obama making the nominations), that's a vulnerable vacancy that could secure a solid block for conservative rulings for a long time.  Or if any other conservative Justices dies or retires while the Democrats control the Senate with Obama making the nominations, that could well shift the balance of power in the Court away from the current 5-vote conservative side.

Either way, if women feel threatened by a conservative Supreme Court - and I'm willing to argue a lot of them will be, not just over abortion and access to healthcare but also employment and salary equality, access to education, access to voting (!) - they have a lot of motivation now to vote Democratic for Senate seats this 2014... and to vote Democratic for the Presidency (hi, Hillary!) in 2016.

This is still the key point: despite whatever the Supreme Court rules, it's still up to voters to put into political power in the White House and the Senate (as well as the House in Congress) those elected leaders who will pass the laws and enforce the laws that the Supreme Court rules upon.  It's up to the President and the Senate to put Justices onto the Court bench when the time comes.  It's up to the people - us - to vote the right people into office who will make damn sure the Court is made up of Justices who will follow the law rather than their own biases.

GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT WOMEN, AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.

P.S. point 5) This is still a slippery slope where "religious liberty" is going to get pursued in other fields of debate, such as education, social services, what have you.  Relying on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 to make this ruling is going to open up the possibility that questionable law can be argued for other ways the religious extremists can get around the restrictions and limits based on the Separation of Church and State.  This can get scary.

Part Two of Today's Post: Why I Think the GOP Is Going Overboard to Pass Anti-Abortion Laws

Actually, there's a good number of reasons.  For starters, banning abortion has been a top ticket item for the Republicans ever since Roe V. Wade became a campaign issue.  It's just never been a Top 10 issue for voters overall (most voters have as their top issues Jobs, Jobs, Better Wages for Jobs, Better Education, Education That Leads to Jobs, and Not Having Anybody Pay For Anything Anymore).

The second reason there's been a recent surge in the anti-abortion legislation has been that Tea Party "revolution" the Far Right kicked up in response to Obama's 2008 win.  While the Tea Party supposedly formed over libertarian issues such as opposing government-controlled health care reform, in practice the Far Right that benefited from Tea Party support has been pushing a harsh socio-religious agenda and ignoring economic issues outside of massive tax cuts to corporations.

But what got me quizzical is "why now?"  Why are the Republicans - at least at the state level - going batshit crazy trying to get restrictive legislation that would essentially block any abortion, and doing so in such heavy-handed ways?

It's not that the courts are suddenly more pro-fetus than ever before.  Wisconsin's anti-abortion legislation just got held up by the courts already, and there's a certain guarantee that the Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina anti-abortion laws (North Carolina's lege hid their anti-abortion bill in a motorcycle safety bill!) will get blocked by the courts as well.

And, here's the thing that gets me, it's not like the Republicans ever really pushed this hard against abortion when they really had the opportunities to do so.  I mean, look at the states that had a Republican-controlled legislature for the last two or three decades.  Outside of the occasional attempt to restrict funding and access - and taking on partial-birth abortions as a method sure to turn off even pro-abortion supporters - I don't recall any of those states making a major push before 2011.  I live here in Florida, where the Republicans have basically been in control since Jeb Bush was governor in 1998 onward: I don't recall any major anti-abortion fights (and still haven't, probably because of other reasons I'll get into later).  Texas has been pretty much all-GOP since Dubya was governor in 1994... until this year, not a peep.

The thing I figured out, pretty much around 2006, was that while the Republican Party talked tough on the abortion issue, they really didn't want to vote it out of existence.  Partly because it would get rid of their most fanatical voting base: the pro-fetus voters are almost uniformly single-issue voters, and uniformly GOP.  Get rid of that as a rallying issue and you'll see the support wither.  But also because if the Republicans did make a major push against abortion, it would not only rile up and unite the Far Left voters (who've been for the most part disorganized compared to their Far Right numbers) but also alienate the more moderate voters who normally wouldn't care.

It's one of the paradoxes of being human: we're against something unless we gotta be for it.  Most Americans would consider themselves pro-life in that they don't want to see a fetus get aborted: most would never consider it, they'd want to raise the child or see it raised by an adoptive family.  However, most Americans also know that there are cases - rape especially, also the health of the mother - where abortion is an honest option.  (This is why the Far Right tries to dismiss rape as an issue nowadays, they're trying to degrade rape as an exception.)  If the GOP went after abortion access even in cases of rape, incest and saving the life of the mother, there would have been a huge cry from voters who'd otherwise not even think of abortion and those voters would have switched to more pro-choice candidates.

I'd thought this was the real reason why, when the Republicans had all three branches of the federal government - Dubya in the White House, control of the House and for the most part the Senate, 5-4 control of the Supreme Court - they barely ever looked at abortion as an issue.  They went after partial birth in 2003, but then... nada.  Cricket chirp noises.

But now, ever since 2010 when the Far Right used Tea Party outrage to retake the U.S. House and a good number of state governments, there's been a massive push.

Part of it is due to Reason Two I gave earlier: the Tea Party movement brought into power elected officials who were far more wingnut than previous officials, and more likely to push the agenda in spite of the electoral hazards.  But this doesn't explain all the normally standard-issue Republicans suddenly backing these pushes (and fear of getting primaried out isn't that high a reason: there's too many seats involved and even Norquist doesn't have that kind of reach).  This is where Reason Three comes into play: the underlying fear by the GOP at both the state and federal level that their party is running out of time.

Look again to Texas.  Like I noted earlier, Texas has been GOP for decades, they've been socially conservative on a lot of issues for far longer.  But the population has been trending further Hispanic, (and not even due to illegals, simple birth rates are what's happening) enough that even the massive gerrymandering efforts to hinder Hispanic voter responsiveness won't protect Republican incumbents.  And Hispanics, despite being conservative on some issues, tend to vote for Democrats because they agree with Dems on health care and education. (the shift in Hispanic population is one of the reasons California's gone Blue State).  The painful thing: Hispanics may be prominently pro-life, but they still vote Democrat because health care and education and immigration are bigger concerns.  Texas may not shift to Democratic control by 2014 (or even by 2016), but sooner rather than later the Democrats will have solid control of Texas at a national, state and maybe even local levels.  Texas has an even better chance of going Purple (like Florida and Pennsylvania) this 2014, which still hurts the wingnut agenda.

The other states like Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina are under threat of losing Republican control as well (I'd throw in Florida, but for some reason we're not pursuing a heavy pro-fetus agenda in this state.  I think the heavy Hispanic population is already a deterrent), less due to Hispanic voters and more due to the GOP voting base - angry elderly white guys - dying off and getting replaced by Millennial voters who are more left-leaning on a lot of issues than even previous generations at their age.  Those states are not as solidly pro-Republican as the party would admit: North Carolina in particular is showing major signs of buyers' remorse letting the wingnuts take control, and the next election cycle might see a major purge (unless the voter ID laws they're bound to push effectively cut off voter turnout).  Walker might skip running for Wisconsin governor for the excuse of focusing on 2016 and the White House (conveniently avoiding the embarrassment of likely losing re-election in 2014).

It's this reason - the Republican Party as it knows itself is doomed by basic demographics and the march of time - that I think the Far Right has gone overboard this year pushing their pro-fetus, kill-Planned-Parenthood, fuck-women's-health agendas.  They may not get another chance like this again.  Even though this may accelerate the Republicans' loss of control by alienating more voters than ever before, they'll do it.  They have the wingnut will to do it now: and they only have two more election cycles (2014 and 2016) to do anything about it before the population really does turn against them.

For what it's worth: just don't vote Republican, okay?  Please?  Thanks.