Civil Commotion

Have I ever mentioned that the Supreme Court sometimes relies upon nuances of reasoning that are inaccessible to the average bonehead? I think so.

A South Dakota lawmaker on Monday said businesses should be able to turn away customers based on race.

In a Facebook comment, state Rep. Michael Clark, a Hartford Republican, said business owners should have the final say in who they serve.

“He should have the opportunity to run his business the way he wants,” Clark wrote. “If he wants to turn away people of color, then that(‘s) his choice.”

The remarks came in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s narrow decision Monday siding with a Colorado baker that refused to make a cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding.

Clark apologized for the remark shortly after the news story was published, but people who don’t mean things like that would never say it in the first place.

I was reared in Detroit, Michigan, and the great northern migration of southerners, especially blacks, to work in the factories caused a lot of cultural upheaval. Little remarked now is that the UAW’s Walter Reuther was a genuine hero of the civil rights movement, and the UAW contributed mightily to smoothing the way for blacks to enter the workforce and, eventually, the middle class. There was plenty of racism around, but it was never so structural, implicit, and invidious as it is here in the south — and I’m talking about today, not when I was a kid. If it were not for the public accommodation laws passed in the ’60s during the Johnson Administration, blacks would still be denied the opportunity to sit at the lunch counter.

And thanks to the foolishness of the Supremes, we can now look forward to a long succession of new test cases that were fought decades ago.

I’m getting a lot of calls [to my law practice] saying ‘listen, if I report this, I have 70 people in my church, if I report this and they find out I reported it, I might lose 5 or 6 families and then my church gets cut in half.’

Josh Bryant

This is from a lawyer who advises churches.

It is well-known that congregations almost invariably rally to a pastor who sexually abuses their children, and visits additional injury upon his victims (de facto shunning, usually) — even when the pastor pleads guilty in court. But they would abandon a church whose pastor reports child abuse?

I should not be surprised by this, I guess, but I admit that I am. After all these years of tracking church indecencies, it seems that the ‘family values’ and love-love-love marketing lies that we were all reared with still have some subterranean influence upon me.

Well, God dammit, how about we start paying attention to how much suffering these beliefs are causing? Millennials are paying attention, and that’s why they are exiting churches stage left and right. If Evangelicals have their way, abortions will, once again, be performed in back rooms and alleys. If Evangelicals have their way, LGBTQ people will be driven to the utter darkness of the closets from whence they came. If Evangelicals have their way, atheists will be silenced and God returned to his “rightful” place in public school classrooms. Yes to school prayer! Yes to Bible reading is the classroom! Yes to creationism being taught in science classes! Yes to churches, pastors, and parachurch groups having ready access to public school students! What Evangelicals want is a return to the glory days of the post-World War II 1950s. No matter how much suffering such a move causes, all that matters is that Evangelicals (and ostensibly, their God) get their way. Unwilling to pray and wait on God, Evangelicals have turned to politics to gain their desired objective. In doing so, they have forsaken whatever moral ground they once held. The moment Evangelicals voted President Pussy-Grabber into office, their moral authority was gone.

Bruce Gerencser

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 ‘movement so-called 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.

Me, November 24, 2016

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single… well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book.

Gore Vidal

Apparently, the Supreme Court has tried to craft a narrow decision in favor of the Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

The Supreme Court ruled narrowly in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to bake a cake to celebrate the marriage of a same sex couple because of a religious objection.
The ruling was 7-2.

The court held that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission showed hostility toward the baker based on his religious beliefs. The ruling is a win for baker Jack Phillips but leaves unsettled the broader constitutional questions the case presented.

The court appears to have taken exception to anti-religious animus expressed by the Colorado civil rights commission.

However narrow the intent of the decision, anybody who thinks this won’t inspire other shopkeepers to exclude and refuse service to Buddhists, atheists, mixed-race couples — on and on — is out of his mind; this decision will inspire more overt racism and religious hostility.

The court seems not to know that the great mass of Americans are idiots who need simple rules to follow, that pettifogging nuances are inaccessible to them; it has erred, and everybody who is “other” will pay dearly for its blunder.

The Southern Baptist Convention has 270 more churches than at this time last year — and fewer members, and performs fewer baptisms.

If the number of churches increases, and the number of members goes down, there can be no explanation but that the new congregations are cannibalizing existing churches and growing at their expense. This is not sustainable.

And I’ll bet those statistics were compiled before the Paige Patterson scandals, and churches are already coping with its radioactive dust. The SBC is running on fumes.