Religious Liberty – Page 8

Playing Cozy With The Nazis

It is getting very scary.

Over the past several years–aided and abetted by Trump’s normalization of racism and anti-Semitism–the GOP has become less and less distinguishable from its Neo-Nazi fringe, and less embarrassed by the relationship.

Just a few of the many available examples:

In Washington State, the Republican Party is paying a pro-Nazi blogger.

Arnold runs the far-right Telegram account “Pure Politics,” which traffics in Jan. 6 conspiracy theories, praise of controversial lawmakers, and anti-COVID-containment sentiments. It also has more than 12,000 followers who frequently comment with racist and antisemitic language.

But Arnold himself has said plenty of distressing things. As CNN reported last year, Arnold has advocated shooting refugees, killing undocumented immigrants, and has posted praise for Nazi Germany. He actually once said Adolf Hitler was “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand.”

In a statement shared last week with The Daily Beast, the communications director for the Washington Republican Party, Ben Gonzalez, didn’t deny Arnold’s employment but claimed his tenure was short-lived.

The paid tenure may have been “short lived,” but the party’s relationship with Arnold isn’t. The GOP congressional candidate who won this year’s Republican primary was photographed alongside Arnold, “a move praised by his followers.”

Other media outlets have reported on Arnold’s strong ties to white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes. Fuentes leads a group of “college-aged, far-right activists that refer to themselves as “groypers”—a rebranding of the racist alt-right movement”–and within the far-right “America First” movement, Arnold is a lieutenant.

The embrace of Nazi ideology isn’t limited to Washington State, nor to organized far-right groups. Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has endorsed an “out and proud” Oklahoma anti-Semite. Doug Mastriano, running for Governor of Pennsylvania, has a long history of anti-Semitism and has made anti-Jewish attacks on his Jewish opponent.

As one media outlet put it,

From Dr. Oz in front of Hitler’s car to Marjorie Taylor Greene spouting the Great Replacement Theory to the GOP supporting Kanye West—the message is clear.

GOP officials have praised figures like Hungary’s Victor Orban, and Americans have been treated to a stream of pro-Putin, pro-Orban, anti-Semitic propaganda by Fox News figure Tucker Carlson.

Even though Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kanye West was so expansive that it ran during both his Thursday and Friday night broadcasts, it appears the far-right cable host left out plenty of newsworthy footage, Motherboard reported on Tuesday.

These segments of the interview omitted from the final broadcasts showed the rap superstar, now known as Ye, casually peddling antisemitism while making strange claims about “fake children” used to manipulate his own kids.

Last week, before West went on an antisemitic tantrum on social media, he was welcomed on Carlson’s show to discuss the backlash he faced for donning a “White Lives Matter” shirt alongside right-wing provocateur Candace Owens at Paris Fashion Week.

In the interview that aired on Fox News, Carlson presented West as a conservative folk hero, praising his “interesting, deep, provocative” observations on politics and social issues, even shrugging off concerns about West’s mental-health issues and documented struggles with bipolar disorder.

Carlson has been a major apologist for the so-called “replacement theory”–the fear expressed by far-right White Christian Males that they will be “replaced” (displaced from their perceived status as “real” Americans) by Jews and people of color. The men who rioted in Charlottesville chanted “Jews shall not replace us.”

Almost immediately after his appearance on Carlson’s show, West used social media to issue antisemitic threats against Jewish people and was locked out of both his Instagram and Twitter accounts. Carlson has ignored the controversy and has continued to laud his “standing up for oppressed white people., as have most Congressional Republicans

Kanye West –now “Ye”–is currently a Republican celebrity, one of a small number of Blacks being used by the GOP to rebut charges of racism. (“I can’t be racist. Some of my best friends/current candidates are…”) Hershel Walker is another. As several pundits have commented, the issue for these cynical Republicans is how to handle personalities like West and Walker, both of whom have publicly struggled with mental health issues and seem unaware of their status as pawns.

As one observer put it, “I am not personally worried that Kanye is going to bomb a synagogue or something like that. I’m more concerned that there is a huge political movement that’s holding him up as this figure.”

Members of disfavored minorities used to worry about rightwing “dog whistles.” These days, the GOP isn’t bothering to whistle–instead, the party (now fully captured by its one-time fringe) is enthusiastically embracing its inner bigot.

The parallels with Germany in the 30s are too obvious to miss.

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The Morality Police

We are living in–and hopefully, through–an age of global upheaval. Most readers of this blog are probably aware of the uprisings in Iran, prompted by the death of a young woman at the hands of that country’s “Morality Police.” As the Washington Post reported,

Protests in Iran continue more than a week after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died after being taken into custody by the “morality police” for the offense of allegedly violating the country’s strict dress code. The Post reports: “The anti-government protests she inspired are still raging across Iran. Demonstrators, many of them women, are burning hijabs and fighting back against police; they are tearing down posters and setting fire to billboards of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.” More than 30 people have been killed. The Post has verified video showing the police firing into crowds of protesters.

Several media outlets have reported on the nature of her dress code violation: a loose headscarf.

A 22-year-old died because her headscarf–which she was wearing in compliance with Iran’s religious laws–was deemed “too loose.”

These reports reminded me of a book I read several years ago, and after racking my brain, I finally remembered the title: Hellfire Nation. I commend it to the attention of those who don’t think America has its own version of Morality Police. The publisher’s description is less hair-raising than I found the book itself, which was replete with descriptions of this country’s repeated moral panics.

This insightful new conceptualization of American political history demonstrates that—despite the clear separation of church and state—religion lies at the heart of American politics. From the Puritan founding to the present day, the American story is a moral epic, James Morone says, and while moral fervor has inspired the dream of social justice it has also ignited our fiercest social conflicts.

From the colonial era to the present day, Americans embraced a Providential mission, tangled with devils, and aspired to save the world. Moral fervor ignited our fiercest social conflicts—but it also moved dreamers to remake the nation in the name of social justice. Moral crusades inspired abolition, woman suffrage, and civil rights, even as they led Americans to hang witches, enslave Africans, and ban liquor. Today these moral arguments continue, influencing the debate over everything from abortion to foreign policy.

Written with passion and deep insight, Hellfire Nation tells the story of a brawling, raucous, religious people. Morone shows how fears of sin and dreams of virtue defined the shape of the nation.

As one reviewer noted, the book’s “explanatory work is performed by the ubiquitous trio of race, class, and gender.” The author demonstrated the various ways that “anxious Americans invoke the concept of sin to stigmatize and control dangerous others.” This stigmatization has allowed our home-grown bigots t to characterize America’s underclass not only as “other” but as “wicked”—and the book traced the implications of that characterization for policy formation. (My own scholarship confirmed that assertion; I found George W. Bush’s Charitable Choice initiative firmly grounded in a worldview that blamed poverty on a perceived lack of “middle-class values.”)

Hellfire Nation described a recurring political cycle, running from zealotry, to bigotry, to panic, and finally to state-enforced legal prohibitions. It also explains what so many of us see as hypocrisy: the self-described “small government” conservatives who are nevertheless all too eager to use the state to impose their own views of morality on others–a scenario we can most recently see playing out in the eagerness of those same conservatives to criminalize abortion.

It is, of course, more complicated than that.

The book documented two kinds of morality politics. The first kind is based upon a concept of sin as an individual moral failure that focuses on efforts to punish the sinner. The second kind locates sin in systemic failures and as a result, makes an effort to restructure the system.(It’s an intriguing way of mapping the differences between conservatives and progressives.)

Those who adhere to the first understanding of sin are preoccupied with what they see as affronts to God; the second group is more concerned with earthly justice.That said, in the real world, the two versions are not so neatly allocated. As the book tells us, abolitionists combined a progressive vision of racial justice with a very intense focus on personal industry and sexual purity.

America’s legal system separates church from state, but as any reading of our history will confirm, that has never stopped our homegrown Morality Police from trying–often successfully–to impose the mandates of their religious dogmas on their neighbors.

They want a version of Iran based upon adoption of their particular form of Christianity. It is not inaccurate to point out that we will be voting on that vision in November.

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Christian Grievance

Sometimes, a news article will hit several of my hot buttons. This recent one managed to do so. (Not that it is particularly difficult to piss me off…the older I get, the crankier…)

Here’s the gist of the story: a poll taken by Politico discovered that

about 57 percent of Republicans, and 70 percent of Americans overall, believe the Constitution would not allow America to be declared a “Christian nation.” Respondents were then asked “Would You Favor or Oppose the United States Officially Declaring the United States to be a Christian Nation?”

Sixty-one percent of Republicans were in favor of just that, with 78 percent of Republicans who identify as an evangelical Christian backing the idea. Support was even higher among older Republicans.

Regular readers of this blog know of my preoccupation with America’s low levels of civic and constitutional literacy. These percentages reflect that only 57 percent of Republicans understand–or are prepared to acknowledge– the intended effect of the First Amendment, or the history of America’s constitutional debates.

Then, of course, there’s the little matter of America’s still-pervasive racism. Evidently, there are still a lot of White folks who are dogged believers that the pre-Civil War South should rise again, whether or not it actually will…

Per Politico

Our polling found that white grievance is highly correlated with support for a Christian nation. White respondents who say that members of their race have faced more discrimination than others are most likely to embrace a Christian America. Roughly 59 percent of all Americans who say white people have been discriminated against a lot more in the past five years favor declaring the U.S. a Christian nation, compared to 38 percent of all Americans. White Republicans who said white people have been more discriminated against also favored a Christian nation (65 percent) by a slightly larger percentage than all Republicans (63 percent).

Regular readers are also well aware of my language prejudices; I have this old English-teacher belief that words have meanings, and that communication requires that the people using those words broadly agree upon those meanings.

In any sane world, the assertion that White Americans suffer discrimination would be met with incomprehension. I know that political strategists dislike the contemporary use of the term “privilege”–its users sound elitist, and when one thinks of “privilege,” what comes to mind is unfair advantage. (Actually, White skin does confer advantage, just not the kind of material advantage that this particular word brings to mind.)

The fact remains that, in the good old U.S. of A., what is perceived of as discrimination against White people is a very overdue erosion of the considerably privileged status that skin color has historically afforded them.

When I express my frequent criticisms of Christian Nationalism (which is, in reality, White Christian Nationalism), I try to be very clear that I am not criticizing Christianity. (To appropriate a phrase, some of my best friends are Christian..) I am happy to report that real Christians agree with me, as the following excerpts from a statement from Christians Against Christian Nationalism makes clear.

Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.

The statement affirms basic constitutional principles: That “one’s religious affiliation, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant to one’s standing in the civic community,” and that
“government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over nonreligion.” And it affirms others:

Conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion.

We must stand up to and speak out against Christian nationalism, especially when it inspires acts of violence and intimidation—including vandalism, bomb threats, arson, hate crimes, and attacks on houses of worship—against religious communities at home and abroad.

Whether we worship at a church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, America has no second-class faiths. All are equal under the U.S. Constitution. As Christians, we must speak in one voice condemning Christian nationalism as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to American democracy.

So Republicans who want to label America as a “Christian Nation” manage to hit several of my hot buttons: concerns about civic literacy and the normalization of racism, annoyance at the misuse of language, and deep, deep fear of the rise of Christian Nationalism.

Politico did it all with one statistic…

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It Isn’t Just Space Lasers

I’ve made a lot of fun of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s accusation that California’s fires aren’t the result of climate change, but instead were started by Jewish Space Lasers financed by George Soros. Greene and her loony-tunes ilk are perfect representations of an anti-Semitism that continues to attribute super-powers to an invented Jewish “cabal.” (Elders of Zion, anyone?)

If only we Jews were really that powerful…

There’s a robust academic literature attempting to explain some people’s need to pin the world’s woes on an identifiable, deliberate and malevolent group–and as Hitler figured out, it helps if the group chosen to be the bad guys is numerically small and unable to effectively protect itself.

Whatever has made Jews the “chosen” people to blame, it seems the contemporary GOP has become the preferred home for today’s anti-Semites, whose versions are marginally less whack-a-doodle than Greene’s, and for that reason, pose more of a threat.

A recent article in the Intercept recounted the then-Republican rejection of Pat Buchanan’s version of anti-Semitism, then contrasted it with what is occurring today.

Trump resurrected Buchanan’s strain of populist nationalism. He’s always nurtured business relations and personal ties with Jewish people, but his revival of “America First” — both the slogan and the ideas surrounding it — inevitably excited antisemites. In 2016, he tweeted out an image using a Star of David to symbolize Hillary Clinton’s “corruption.” The Trump campaign tweeted an altered version after an outcry but then ran an ad in the campaign’s closing days decrying “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities” coupled with images of Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein — all of whom are financial figures who happen to be Jewish.

Trump attacked his critics as a cabal of “globalists” and fixated on the secret powers exerted by Soros, who has displaced (or in some cases joined) the Rothschilds in the imagined role of secret Jewish financier orchestrating a series of catastrophes for profit. The explosion of militant paranoia that followed Trump’s rise — from the Oath Keepers to QAnon — has appeared both online and in the real world with occasionally deadly consequences in places like Charlottesville and Pittsburgh. Although much of this activity has taken place outside the party system, the energies on the right have crept into the Republican Party.

The article went on to report anti-Semitic statements by high-level Republicans (including a spokesperson for Ron DeSantis) and the close relationship of Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s GOP nominee for governor, with the ultra-right-wing social-media site Gab. (The site promotes Christian Nationalist themes, and its chief executive is an “out and proud” antisemite “who has promoted Mastriano as a fellow enemy of the Jews.”)

Is it fair to criticize the Republican Party for the views of its most distasteful members? The Intercept article is lengthy, with a number of other examples, but I found the closing paragraphs pretty persuasive.

There is a simple test to measure their influence. If antisemites were too marginal to pose any danger, it would be easy enough for the party to cut them off. (If you want to know what it looks like when Republicans decide to really throw somebody out of their party, look at their treatment of Liz Cheney.) Instead, they vacillate. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declined to comment on Gosar’s attendance at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s conference. McCarthy has likewise promised to restore Greene’s committee privileges if Republicans regain the majority.

Prosecutors have found that Trump’s January 6 rally attracted a significant number of people who share Hitler quotes, hold membership in neo-Nazi organizations, have a fixation with “white genocide,” and the like, making the party leadership’s desire to sweep the whole thing under the rug all the more dangerous. Whatever misgivings the remaining old-line Republicans may have toward the militant cadres Trump inspired, Republicans fear their political and even terroristic power. They no longer imagine they have the gatekeeping force to exclude the antisemites, less still to steer the party away from the kind of paranoid rhetoric that invites their participation.

The GOP’s overriding goal is to win, and it has decided this means accepting the support of anybody who will provide it. For three-quarters of a century, antisemites were locked out of major American politics or at least had to keep their bigotry quiet. Now the door is open.

I guess a Republican Party that has been deserted by people who are pro-choice, pro- LGBTQ, pro-public school, pro-gun safety regulation and pro-environment needs to replace those groups with whoever is handy…

However, watching them scrape the bottom of the barrel is making me feel distinctly unsafe.

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RFRA For The Rest Of Us…

Indiana’s ACLU has filed a second challenge to the state’s ban on abortion, and this is a challenge focused squarely upon the blatant hypocrisy of the U.S. Supreme Court’s purported concern for “religious liberty.”

In a series of cases, the Court has handed down decisions favoring Christian fundamentalist doctrines that are at odds with the beliefs held by more liberal Christian denominations, let alone by adherents of other religious traditions. Justice Alito, who authored the decision in the Hobby Lobby case as well as Dobbs, has clearly signaled his belief that his particular definition of “religious belief” deserves priority–and he now has four other theocratically-inclined colleagues who agree.

Alito’s definition of “religious freedom” as freedom for state-level lawmakers to impose conservative Christian dogma on Americans who hold very different “sincere beliefs,” is inconsistent with both constitutional jurisprudence and common sense. It’s “freedom for me, but not for thee”–and a not-so- tacit endorsement of the MAGA Republican claim that the United States is a “Christian nation” that should be dominated by their particular version of Christianity.

Ironically, the ACLU has filed this lawsuit under the state’s RFRA law–a law originally ballyhooed by those same Christian Warriors.

“Indiana’s RFRA law protects religious freedom for all Hoosiers, not just those who practice Christianity,” said Ken Falk, ACLU of Indiana Legal Director. “The ban on abortion will substantially burden the exercise of religion by many Hoosiers who, under the new law, would be prevented from obtaining abortions, in conflict with their sincere religious beliefs.”

The complaint points out that the new law violates the beliefs of the Muslim, Unitarian Universalist and Episcopalian faiths, as well as those who follow Paganism. (Rather obviously, it also violates the liberties of the growing numbers of non-religious Americans.)

As I have previously argued, a very large number of Americans believe that “liberty” is defined as the right of all citizens to follow the doctrines of their particular religions. When applied to the issue of abortion, any rational understanding of liberty means that people whose beliefs prohibit it are protected from measures requiring it, and people whose beliefs allow (or even, in some situations, require) it are equally free to follow their beliefs.

A free country–a country that takes liberty seriously–does not empower legislators to decide what prayer you say, what book you read, who you marry, or whether and when you procreate. Perhaps the most eloquent statement of that constitutional principle was that of Justice Jackson in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette. In a much-quoted portion of his decision, Justice Jackson wrote:

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.

Justice Alito’s decision in Dobbs essentially reverses Jackson’s 1943 definition of the meaning and intended operation of the Bill of Rights–a definition that has been endorsed by the courts for decades. Jackson’s definition has been taught in the nation’s law schools and is firmly embedded in the popular culture. In America, We the People make lots of decisions about our governance. We vote on who will represent us in our various legislative bodies, and–depending upon the state– participate in referenda and recalls.

We don’t vote on fundamental rights.

As any first-year law student (or anyone who took any of my Law and Public Policy classes) will confirm, the Bill of Rights is taught as a “counter-majoritarian” document. That means that, while a majority of voters can influence innumerable policies, that majority does not get a vote on whether it is permissible to deny other Americans the fundamental rights protected by the Bill of Rights.

We don’t get to vote on our neighbors’ First Amendment right to the free exercise of their religion.

A contrary decision by Indiana Courts would confirm Alito’s profound departure from and disrespect for the essential purpose of the Bill of Rights–and his obvious contempt for people who hold religious beliefs contrary to his own.

It would also highlight the hypocrisy of those Hoosiers who defended RFRA on the grounds that it protected “sincerely held” religious beliefs.

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