Civil Commotion

These are times in history that are unlike anything that we had before. God birthed Kim Davis, and Joe Davis, and each one of you for this moment in American and world history. God is looking for people who love Jesus Christ and who will stand for Him, who will not flinch when their time is called and that person is Kim Davis and Joe Davis. May God raise up more.

Matt Staver, Kim Davis’ lawyer

I’ve no doubt that most of the Biblical heroes and heroines were the Kim Davises and World Net Daily nuisances of their day; update the Bible’s stories to our own day, and most of them are people you don’t want to know and would be embarrassed to be caught associating with.

This particular offense against intelligence and decency was committed at the so-called Values Voter Summit, the annual Family Research Council-sponsored event in Washington, D.C.

Good for them! It cheers me to see the sheeple stand up for decent behavior instead of cravenly submitting.

I accept that people have good faith differences over issues like abortion, but I’ll be damned if I understand the logic of causing kids to go hungry in order to defund Planned Parenthood.

The ongoing fight over a budget provision to block Planned Parenthood funding for one year has cast doubt on future short-term funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), once known as food stamps. (On Thursday, the Senate halted Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, and it appears a vote on a clean budget bill is approaching.) Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, told the Huffington Post this week that Democrats concerned about food stamp funding should support the GOP’s resolution to keep the government running and gut Planned Parenthood.

So: You must carry that baby to term, so that the Republicans can use it as a political pawn, and let it go hungry if they don’t get their way?

There is something rotten and sick in the Republican Party now, a mean-spiritedness and short-sightedness that are new, and I say that as somebody who voted almost exclusively Republican most of his life. I don’t see any easy way for the party to heal itself, either, for it has become the political arm of a fundamentalist religious movement — of people who are unmoved by either facts or appeals to decency.

Who’s up for organizing a third party?

Kevin Drum marvels today at evangelical support for Donald Trump, pointing toward this exchange with David Brody.

David Brody asks Donald Trump, “Who is God to you?…You’ve contemplated this before, or have you contemplated this?” Here’s his reply:

Here we are on the Pacific Ocean. How did I ever own this? I bought it fifteen years ago. I made one of the great deals they say ever. I have no more mortgage on it as I will certify and represent to you. And I was able to buy this and make a great deal. That’s what I want to do for the country. Make great deals. We have to, we have to bring it back….

Wait. A question about God produces a stock speech about what a great dealmaker Trump is? Yep. Then this:

….but God is the ultimate. I mean God created this [points to his golf course and nature surrounding it], and here’s the Pacific Ocean right behind us. So nobody, no thing, no there’s nothing like God.

Drum adds:

Brody defends Trump’s lack of a “biblically thorough answer” and says that Trump may well appeal anyway to the “I’m Sick and Tired” evangelical voter. That’s good to know. I had no idea that it was so easy to appeal to evangelical voters.

The Atlantic puzzled over the same curious fact last week:

Donald Trump is immodest, arrogant, foul-mouthed, money-obsessed, thrice-married, and until recently, pro-choice. By conventional standards, evangelical Christians should despise him. Yet somehow, the Manhattan billionaire has attracted their support.

According to the most recent polls, Trump is one of the top picks for president among evangelical Christians. One Washington Post poll even had him as the group’s favorite by a margin of six points.

<< SIGH >>   That this is a puzzle evidences how poorly most Americans — or, at least, most journos — actually understand evangelical Christianity.

Friedrich Nietzsche explained it more than 125-years ago. The Jesus Movement of 1^st-century Palestine was a reaction of the underclass against their betters, and their sacred New Testament texts are the texts of a despised subterranean cult born in the underclass. Never mind 2000-years of marketing; Christianity was founded on envy and malice, and those impulses shape their responses today to the prevailing zeitgeist.

H.L. Mencken ‘got it’, too.

Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.

Now comes … THE DONALD!, carrying in each hand a slopping, overflowing bucket of trash-talk. It’s like — Dare I say it? — a match made in Heaven; of course they adore him. He gives a voice to otherwise incoherent malice. It is as simple, and squalid, as that.