Civil Commotion

The SBC has claimed for years that it has no control of the operation — and sometimes criminal behavior — of Southern Baptist churches because they are autonomous entities; they are not franchises, that is, but independent freestanding organizations which ‘cooperate.’

Whether or not this is a valid claim, or a chintzy rhetorical dodge of responsibility, is hard to say. The SBC can declare a church with LGBTQ sympathies out of cooperation and disfellowship it, and does the same if a church calls a woman pastor, but has so far failed to discipline churches which fail to respond appropriately to claims of sexual abuse at the hands of its pastoral staff. So, theology that doesn’t pass muster with the whole of the Convention is cast out, and criminal behavior is not.

A Virginia lawsuit may soon decide the question.

“I have some concerns about potential liabilities,” Joe Knott, a North Carolina lawyer, told fellow Baptists at an executive committee meeting in Birmingham, Ala., where the country’s largest coalition of Baptist churches was conducting its annual gathering in June.

The national spotlight was on the SBC as it debated how to protect its flock from sexual abusers. But Knott was also worried about a proposal for an SBC committee to conduct “inquiries” into how churches handle abuse allegations.

Such a proposal, he warned, could weaken the SBC’s argument that it has no control over its member churches — an assertion that leaders have said gives the SBC immunity in sexual abuse lawsuits.

[ … ]

“This idea that everyone’s completely autonomous is a facade and it’s self-serving,” said Kevin Biniazan, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys in the case.

In an attempt to counter the claim that the SBC has little oversight of its churches, the lawsuit states the SBC has had no problem exerting authority over churches when it wants to, pointing out that churches that “endorsed homosexuality” were kicked out of the convention.

Meantime, more and more cooperating churches refuse to use the word “Baptist” in their name because the brand-name has been wrecked by the SBC’s resolute ignorance, fundamentalist-leaning theology, and sympathetic-to-Trump political activism.

The SBC is in decline, and deserves to be. My guess is that it won’t be worth suing long before the courts settle whether it can be sued.

The White House claims Mr. Trump suspended Ukraine’s military aid in order for it be reviewed. But, as CNN reported, the Pentagon has already completed the study and recommended that the hold be lifted. Yet Mr. Trump has not yet acted. If his recalcitrance has a rationale, other than seeking to compel a foreign government to aid his reelection, the president has yet to reveal it.

Washington Post

The gist of the thing is this: The First Felon, who adores Putin and wants him restored to the G-7, and who lied about Barack Obama’s role in Russia’s annexation of Crimea, is withholding military aid to Ukraine pending that country’s assistance to his re-election campaign via a bogus investigation of Joe Biden’s son.

Do your duty, Congress.

A black writer confronts the N-word.

Earlier this year, I had just finished with the “Snowfall” writers’ room for the season when I took a similar job on a different show at a different network. I’d been in the new room for a few weeks when I got the call from Human Resources. A pleasant-sounding young man said, “Mr. Mosley, it has been reported that you used the N-word in the writers’ room.”

I replied, “I am the N-word in the writers’ room.”

He said, very nicely, that I could not use that word except in a script.

I can sympathize with Mosley’s discomfort; cleansing language has the side-effects of constricting thought to pre-approved channels — pre-approved by anonymous somebodys — and, worse, protecting people who don’t deserve protection.

Recall, for instance, the ’60s political slogan “law and order.” It was coined and used for racist purposes as part of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and served as a sort of dog-whistle for racists; it meant, “I’ll keep those darkies in their place.” But: How is a politician supposed to promise safe, not crime-ridden, streets in jurisdictions where crime is a centerpiece concern — Detroit, say? What words is he supposed to use when “law and order” is automatically construed as a racist appeal?

Ironically, the Evangelical Right has successfully flipped the formula. No demographic group in American life has more divorces and subsidiary family pathologies, and none prattles so relentlessly. emptily, or unassailably about its “family values.”

George Orwell had it right, and all of us should be on guard: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

According to several Holy Men, Hurricane Dorian is a deep-state false-flag operation whose purpose is to distract the public from the imminent imprisonment of James Comey et. al.. It’s too sinister for a basically honest guy like me to follow, but I’m sure that a pack of genuine-article experts on sin can be trusted.

On last night’s episode of his “The MC Files” program, radical conspiracy theorist Chris McDonald and his guest, fellow radical right-wing conspiracy theorist and so-called “firefighter prophet” Mark Taylor, agreed that Hurricane Dorian is a “false flag” created by the “deep state” supposedly in order to distract Americans from the fact that former FBI director James Comey and other high-level members of the Obama administration will all be going to prison.

McDonald insisted that it was not a coincidence that just as the news was focused on the fact that even though the Department of Justice had decided not to prosecute Comey for leaking memos chronicling his conversations with President Trump, the president and his associates were suggesting that Comey’s legal troubles were not over, when suddenly everyone turned their attention to the hurricane.

“When you get these stories and all of a sudden—boom—you’ve got an almost Category 6 storm,” McDonald said, “it does not take a genius to figure out it’s called a distraction and it’s called a false flag.”

So there you go. I’m guessing that, thanks to their expertise in messing with the climate, this is a collaborative effort with the Chinese, and the so-called trade war is itself a distraction intended to mask their aid in this important national business.

I may start a newsletter all about it.

I suppose it’s good to see it confirmed in academic language, but the nihilism of marginalized attention-seekers has been in plain sight for a long while.

The authors describe “chaos incitement” as a “strategy of last resort by marginalized status-seekers,” willing to adopt disruptive tactics. Trump, in turn, has consistently sought to strengthen the perception that America is in chaos, a perception that has enhanced his support while seeming to reinforce his claim that his predecessors, especially President Barack Obama, were failures.

Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux find that those who meet their definition of having a “need for chaos” express that need by willingly spreading disinformation. Their goal is not to advance their own ideology but to undermine political elites, left and right, and to “mobilize others against politicians in general.”

Certainly, the incandescent hypocrisy of the Evangelical Right — Donald Trump’s hardcore base — is animated by its declining status. I’m not so sure this explains conspiracy ‘theorists’ of the Ales Jones stripe, however; what status did those whackjobs ever enjoy? They’re more a case of Hunter Thompson’s famous observation, I suspect: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”