Last Thanksgiving — almost a year ago, now — I set out four reasons why I felt optimistic overall about America’s future, even as I anticipated epochal ugliness during the Trump administration.
First, I pointed out, a majority of voters had rejected Trump. I figured the number of Americans opposed to him could only go up as it became plain to even nitwits that he is incompetent and has bad character. Since his approval rating hovers around 35%, and support amongst even Evangelicals — who aren’t famous, after all, for high standards of reason and character — has dropped 18%, I’m calling that prediction a win.
Second, I predicted that he would find the courthouses chilly because of his plain attempt to bully a host of judges into submission. I’m slightly ahead on that one, too.
I said the media would never surrender to Trump and — Hoo-Boy! — I nailed that one. CNN has even produced a couple of advertisements that plainly mock the Buffoon-in-Chief.
Last, I predicted that the close association of Trump and the Evangelical Right would finish them as a political movement.
Third, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and that will eventually sink into public consciousness, as in, Wait a minute! What are you saying? The church people gave us that piece of sh*t p***y-grabber?! Yep, they did — and that will be the tale of how the Evangelical Right and so-called ‘movement conservatism’ committed political suicide. They might make some noise, occasionally score a small victory … but they are done. The Trump administration, with its inevitable serial indecencies and corruptions, is their achievement, and they will never live it down.
Now that the entire world is shaking its head at the breathtakingly stupid rationalizations offered in defense of Roy Moore’s interest in pubescent girls — Joseph was interested in teenies, too, and that gave us Jesus — there is hardly anyone, anywhere, who hasn’t recoiled from the Godly with frank disgust. See Frank Bruni, of the New York Times, for instance:
Joseph & Mary & Roy Moore: You can't make this stuff up. But you can be sickened by it. My column, https://t.co/KLUth0FlGr
— Frank Bruni (@FrankBruni) November 10, 2017
And business reporter Kurt Eichenwald leaves no doubt that he has had a bellyful of the Godly, too:
Through their support of Donald Trump and rationalizations of Roy Moore, the "Christian' right has proven itself divorced from any religion or morality. It is my hope that young people continue to turn away from their hypocrisy.
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) November 10, 2017
As I watch the rationalizations of the Christian right about nazis, pedophiles, racists, hatred, Trump, and Moore, I have reached a conclusion:
They think the Bible is fake news.@GovMikeHuckabee @ralphreed
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) November 10, 2017
Christianity is the revolt of all things that crawl on their bellies against everything that is lofty. The gospel of the “lowly” lowers.
Nietzsche
With centuries of pogroms, public executions, blasphemy laws, general preening and cult-ish underhandedness since the rise of the secular states, the Pious made it unseemly to criticize or doubt their preposterous narrative. And now, though it has been almost 4-decades since Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority and they set out to recreate society in their own cracked and damaged image, they have managed in the course of just the past 2-years to make it unseemly to have anything to do with them.
Nobody with two eyeballs and a properly functioning mind should feel any confusion: These cataracts of squalor is the truth about the Evangelical Right; this is who they really are. And they are finished.