Civil Commotion

Ever since the so-called Conservative Resurgence turned the Southern Baptist Convention into a decadent cult, they’ve been on a downward spiral of scandal after scandal after cover-up after cover-up. The annual meeting this year — beginning today in Birmingham, Alabama — might finally be the start of a reckoning.

First and foremost there is the problem of clergy sex abuse, with victims ranging from troubled women to teenagers to wide-eyed children. For decades, the Convention has refused to acknowledge the problem; what is more, that refusal has been abetted by a supine membership that was happy to ignore the problem when it didn’t affirmatively drive-off the victims. But countless news stories, including a special investigative series published several months back, has forced the issue. President J.D. Greear appointed a study group last year, and that group released a report a few days ago.

The report is a step in the right direction, but falls woefully short by failing to recognize that sex abuse in the church environment is uniquely abusive and more widespread than in other sectors of society; this is because the abuse inheres in the degradation of Christian thought and its hostility to sex. The report makes much of the fact that abuse occurs in other environments — the Boy Scouts, and schools, for instance — but doesn’t acknowledge that abusers are not protected in those environments, and victims are not re-victimized, but both are the norm in churches.

So I’m not optimistic about this initiative; ‘insiders’ simply cannot view themselves from the outside, can’t grasp that orthodox Christian teaching itself is a large part of the problem.

A second confrontation is going to occur over the status of women, or complementarianism, which says that men and women have complementary, cosmically ordained roles; most importantly, men preach and women keep their mouths shut. This is so fundamental to Baptist identity that I strongly doubt that there will be any change. What will happen is that more and more women will refuse to be associated with the denomination and the downward spiral will accelerate. Should be good for some fireworks, though.

The irony is that men and women really are different in ways more important than plumbing, because the natural selection of evolution operated to favor a division of labor and corresponding characteristics. The difficulty here is that Baptists generally see everything in strictly binary terms and are not subtle enough to grasp that reality apportions traits with a rheostat. Most women probably don’t have any business preaching and leading, and don’t want to; they want to stay home with the children and bake cookies and darn socks, and that’s what they ought to do. But some women certainly are capable of preaching and leading and managing a modern church business, and the opportunity to do that should not be foreclosed by genetics and the mulishness of fools who think everything is all settled because the Bible says so.

I’m guessing #SBC19 will produce nothing but hard feelings.

Never forget: You must always do as the Holy Man says, because y’all are no damn good.

When you get past the architecture, the music, the finery and the delicate circumlocutions, the sad truth is that Christianity sustains itself by degrading and then exploiting people. Go to a park today, instead of church; if Our Invisible Friend has anything to say to you, he can find you there, too.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Joseph Goebbels

Sound familiar?

This screed by Sean Hannity, approvingly tweeted by the Liar-in-Chief, is a good example of a commonplace with this administration: Big Lies, repeated as universally acknowledged facts.

We are not talking about ‘spin,’ embellishment, or any such thing; we are talking about self-serving fictions peddled as well-known facts. We are talking about the media strategy perfected by Joseph Goebbels in 1930s Germany — the strategy that Adolf Hitler rode to global catastrophe.

Do yourself and your country a favor this weekend: Get a copy of the Mueller Report — and read it. Some other recommended reading: The Nightmare Years, by William Shirer, and The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. We are reliving, right now, here in America, that awful decade when the loonies seized power and Germany passed into the hands of a malignant vengeance cult.

The Trump administration has decided to discontinue funding for research involving fetal tissue.

The Trump administration said Wednesday it is ending medical research by government scientists using human fetal tissue, a victory for abortion foes that comes despite impassioned pleas from scientists that some health problems can’t be studied any other way.

Research using fetal tissue that otherwise would be discarded has been funded by the government, under leadership of both political parties, for decades — and has led to life-saving advances including development of vaccines for rubella and rabies, and drugs for the HIV virus.

Officials said government-sponsored research by universities will be allowed to continue, subject to additional scrutiny.

The end of federal funding, and the rise of (undoubtedly hostile) federal scrutiny, means as a practical matter that use of fetal tissue is about to stop. The irony, of course, is that far more careful ethical thought goes into this research than the witless clichés endlessly repeated by pious boobs who have never in their lives had a genuine thought.