Civil Commotion

Trump sees that the church is a big part of what made America great, and he sees that the state persecution that President Obama began hurts the country. I hope that he sees more, sees Christ as his savior. But in his role as Caesar, protecting our rights is quite enough.

John Zmirak

This quote is a nice pointer to the unreality in which the Evangelical Right lives.

Who is in prison, thanks to the “state persecution that President Obama began”? Whom has he forbidden to pray? What church did he shut down? Who has had their children taken away?

And notice this, too, the offhanded, casual nature of the remark — as though the “state persecution that President Obama began” is something everybody knows and requires no explanation. Notice, especially, that Ross Douthat never calls him on it, never asks, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Seriously: These people are living in, and sharing, a paranoid fantasy.

5-0? What is the Buffoon-in-Chief talking about? Roy Moore, a Republican, lost a special election for the Senate (which is part of Congress) less than a week ago. Now, I understand that the Deplorable One-third are not fact-based, and generally have the memory of puppies, but this is an egregious falsehood by even their dismal standards.

What do you know? The Centers For Disease Control has presented its staff with a list of words that are no longer to be used:

• Vulnerable

• Entitlement

• Diversity

• Transgender

• Fetus

• Evidence-based

• Science-based

Y’all will be comforted to know that the CDC Elders are ready with alternatives to the forbidden words:

In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or ­“evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered.

I guess this means that Tony Perkins, as a spokesperson for community standards, will be consulted to help decide what the CDC’s public policy recommendations ought to be regarding the spread of Chlamydia?

This is in addition, of course, to the EPA’s determination to scrub the words “climate change” from the national conversation. Those words have been systematically eliminated from the EPA’s Web site, and apparently the government has decided to deny that transgenders exist, too.

Control the language, control the vocabulary, and you control the public’s thoughts.

I saw this coming more than a year ago, when I predicted that the incoming administration would be hostile to professionals.

Under Trump the obsequious, the craven, the ignorant … will inevitably, necessarily, rise to the top, and professionals will find themselves working against longer and longer odds to keep the machine going, and doing it surreptitiously with the hope that nobody notices.

Naively, but to their moral credit, professionals throughout the government have done exactly what I predicted they would do: They have surreptitiously tried to do the right things even as the administration denies well-established science, ignores facts, declares that up is down, and undertakes to circumscribe the language of science itself.

So the EPA has hired somebody to hunt down the pros.

One of the top executives of a consulting firm that the Environmental Protection Agency has recently hired to help it with media affairs has spent the past year investigating agency employees who have been critical of the Trump administration, federal records show.

[ … ]

Mr. Blutstein, in an interview, said he was taking aim at “resistance” figures in the federal government, adding that he hoped to discover whether they had done anything that might embarrass them or hurt their cause.

My advice to them today is the same as it was a year ago: Get out. The government is in the hands of ignoramuses who view professionals as reproaches to their own incompetence — and with the election of Donald Trump they have the whip-hand. Only after you have left, and let the government grind to a halt, will the American Gothic crowd who support Trump realize that they’ve been pissing down their own well.

What do you know? The Johnson Amendment will remain in the tax code, and the parsonage exemption is out.

First, the Johnson Amendment:

A Democratic senator taking part in talks on the GOP tax package says a provision allowing churches to endorse political candidates and still keep their tax-free status won’t be in the final bill.

Good. This should never have even made it into the tax bill. If churches want to do electioneering, then they shouldn’t be able to do it with tax-free dollars — basically, a public subsidy.

Second, a federal court has ruled against the parsonage exemption.

A federal judge ordered the IRS to stop letting clergy deduct housing allowances, after finding that the federal law violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by endorsing religion.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled for atheist group Freedom From Religion Foundation, or FFRF, in October, finding that a provision of the tax code, Section 107(2) of Title 26, unconstitutionally allows Christian ministers to deduct housing allowances from their taxable income, because it benefits religious leaders and no one else.

Good, again. If the members of a church wish to put their Holy Man in a mansion, more power to them. But ordinary decency — the Christian prohibition against theft, I should have thought — should have precluded the expectation that the rest of us would subsidize the project. I’m sure this decision will be appealed, but the housing allowance is so egregious it’s difficult to see how it could be sustained.

As the smears of Robert Mueller and the FBI intensify in order to manufacture an excuse for firing him and then claiming the institutions of governance are too corrupt to properly investigate Trump, it occurs to me that this dog-and-pony show has legs only because a lot of the country has no idea what it is to be a professional.

Every day in this country, every single day, without exception …

• Journalists accurately report about people and events they don’t like.

• Engineers execute flawless designs for projects they don’t like for clients they loathe.

• Lawyers walk into court and free people they wouldn’t allow anywhere near their spouse or children.

• Doctors fight valiantly to save the lives of people they despise — cop killers, mass murderers, drug dealers, on and on.

• Teachers struggle to educate children they privately wish had been aborted.

• Biographers write trustworthy accounts of the life of Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Lenin, on and on, even though they aren’t big fans of totalitarians. Conversely, Parson Weems’ life of George Washington is an exemplar for what a professional biographer wouldn’t do.

• Military officers carry-out orders given by officers they dislike and whose purpose seems dubious.

• Pharmacists dispense medicines whose use they disapprove.

• And on and on. Contractors build homes on property they wish had remained undeveloped, mechanics repair Japanese cars whose popularity put his brother-in-law out of a job, librarians help patrons find books they consider odious — and the work gets done properly.

Likes and dislikes and facts and responsibilities are separable, and professionally-minded people do separate them. Every day.