We are in the silly season of US politics, but 'taint funny to witness the traumatization of a 3-year-old Honduran migrant as she witnessed the behavior of the US Gestapo (AKA ICE and Border Patrol) on the US border and everywhere else. The idiotic religionists who follow the HA (Horse's A$$) in the Oval Office think that when Jesus — in the King James Verson of their scripture : said: "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven" that meant to brutalize and traumatize 3-year-olds. The actual meaning of that passage is "Leave the children alone, and don't try to keep them from coming to me, because the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." If this is a (fair & balanced) charge of spiritual treason, as well as political treason, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
How To Break The Republican Lock On God
By Eags (Timothy Egan)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing
We know that slaveholders in the American South used Scripture to justify keeping their fellow humans in bondage. They could find no words from Christ on this, for there are no words from him. Just a line in the New Testament from mere mortals presuming to speak for him.
But perhaps it made those who tore apart families, who whipped insubordinates until they passed out, who sold children and cotton bales as similar commodities feel better to know that the monstrous crime of their daily enterprise could be a blessed act.
These days, no less an authority than Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said recently that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president.”
She offered no sourcing for this assertion, as is the case for vaporous claims that rise from the rot of the Trump presidency on a daily basis. But in blaming God for Trump, Sanders echoed a widespread Republican belief that the most outwardly amoral man ever to occupy the White House is an instrument of divine power. He’s part of the master plan.
Mocking Sanders and the many Ned Flanders of the GOP team is unlikely to make much of a dent. Nearly half of all Republicans believe God wanted Trump to win the election. To them, secular snark is a merit badge on the MAGA hat.
But there is a better way to sway the electorate of faith, as the rising Democratic stars Pete Buttigieg and Stacey Abrams have shown us. They apply something like a “What Would Jesus Do?” test to rouse religious conscience on the political battlefield.
Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., is a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan, a Rhodes scholar, married to a junior high school teacher. He’s gay and, more surprising for a modern Democrat, he is an out Christian, as quick to quote St. Augustine as Abraham Lincoln. On Sunday, he is expected to formally announce his run for president.
Like Abrams and Senator Cory Booker, Mayor Pete says his faith made him a progressive. Scripture directs him to defend the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the societal castoffs.
But Buttigieg goes much further than mere Bible-citing. He’s taking it directly to Trump and to Vice President Mike Pence, who flashes his piety like a seven-carat diamond on his pinkie finger. It’s hard to look at the actions of President Trump, Buttigieg said, “and believe they are the actions of somebody who believes in God.”
The mayor calls Pence the “cheerleader of the porn star presidency,” and he wonders whether the vice president “stopped believing in Scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump.”
Buttigieg’s marriage to Chasten Glezman “moved me closer to God,” he said in a speech last Sunday. To the “Mike Pences of the world,” he said, “your quarrel is not with me — your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
Abrams, who narrowly lost her race for governor of Georgia last year, also uses faith, part of a long African-American tradition, to marshal Christian principles against the repulsive acts of man. The daughter of two Methodist preachers, she said in one of her television ads, “My reading of the Bible says that Jesus Christ was a progressive.”
We should wince at any claim of providential partisanship. The founders were explicit about this in writing a strictly secular Constitution. George Washington’s Treaty of Tripoli, passed unanimously by the Senate, contains language stating that “the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
But when a president is held up by his own spokeswoman as an extension of divine will, and that president is embraced by the evangelical community as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, it’s fine to use the source material to fight back.
The best Christian argument against Trump comes from Christ. The essence of Christianity is his exhortation that people treat the sick, the hungry, the poor, the imprisoned as they would treat him. “Whatever you did to the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did to me.”
No one can know what’s in Trump’s heart. But his policies are inhumane in the extreme. Cursed are the meek, for under Trump’s command, children have been put in cages, and the poor in red states are denied the health care that should be available to them under Obamacare.
Pope Francis, an authority I would trust more than Sarah Sanders in this realm, said, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not a Christian.”
Trump is all about self. His bigotry, his boasting, his lies, his pride, his scams of the vulnerable, his worship of materialism, his insults of the dead, his turning a blind eye to refugees, his bragging of adulterous behavior, his treatment of “the least” among us — all of this is antithetical to Christian philosophy.
Buttigieg is right to call him on this. He’s right to attack Pence’s hypocrisy. But the moral high ground is a fragile perch, best visited on rare occasions. He’s thrown down a needed challenge. Now let Trump and Pence try to prove him wrong. ###
[Timothy Egan now writes a semi-monthly column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a BA ( journalism), and was awarded a doctorate of humane letters (honoris causa) by Whitman College (WA) in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016). See all other books by Eags here.]
Copyright © 2019 The New York Times Company
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
No comments:
Post a Comment
☛ STOP!!! Read the following BEFORE posting a Comment!
Include your e-mail address with your comment or your comment will be deleted by default. Your e-mail address will be DELETED before the comment is posted to this blog. Comments to entries in this blog are moderated by the blogger. Violators of this rule can KMA (Kiss My A-Double-Crooked-Letter) as this blogger's late maternal grandmother would say. No e-mail address (to be verified AND then deleted by the blogger) within the comment, no posting. That is the (fair & balanced) rule for comments to this blog.