It's Never About Racism: White Catholic Voters, Abortion, and How the Religious Right Culture Wars Began (Hint: It's About Racism)

In 1958, Jerry Falwell wrote the following:

“When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line,” and said that integration of “blacks & whites...will destroy our race eventually.”

This is the root of today’s #MAGA movement. They haven’t changed.

— Chris (@goingglocal) January 27, 2018

It's never about the racism with white Catholics who have signed onto the culture wars of the U.S. Catholic bishops, and who vote — or so they say — primarily on the basis of the single issue of abortion (with same-sex marriage also often thrown into their calculus as they choose predictably to vote Republican). It's never about racism with the alliance those white Catholics made a long time ago with white evangelicals who got the religious right ball rolling because of overt racism.

Charles Pierce on How "It's Not about Race Because Nothing Ever Is about Race."

Charles Pierce today at his "Politics" blog at Esquire, commenting on the "gerrymandered mess" the Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature has made of the state's election maps, and about the arguments the lawyer representing the Republicans in the legislature is advancing to defend said mess:

Hot Takes on Moore Defeat: White Evangelicals Did It! It's All About Abortion! (And Why Masterpiece Cake Will Likely Prevail)

Some takes on the Alabama election I should have anticipated, but did not:

1. Though 80 percent of white evangelicals in Alabama cast their votes for Roy Moore, Doug Jones won because — are you ready for this spin? — white evangelicals abandoned Moore!

The Bridge-Building Project in the U.S. Catholic Church and Reaching Out to the Poor Bishops as A Primary Task: My Take

It's very hard to get my mind around Catholic groups, including ones working for the full inclusion of queer people in the Catholic church, which think that the major challenge today is to invite the bishops to the table and to avoid being "angry" at the bishops.

A Twitter Thread in Response to Franklin Foer on What's Wrong with the Democrats

No mention at all of the significant role played by gerrymandering and voter suppression to lock in GOP control, as a minority. 1) https://t.co/PYX2jepDyW

— Bill Lindsey (@wdlindsy) June 21, 2017

This is a Twitter thread in response to Franklin Foer's "What's Wrong with the Democrats?" in the latest issue of The Atlantic. 

Claim That the Culture Wars are Over and Religious Right Is Obsolescent Links to Claim That Political Left and Identity Politics Are Responsible for Trump: My Take

One thing I suppose many of us can agree on about the current U.S. presidential election cycle is that it has been full of surprises. Not the least of those has been the surprising way in which Mr. Trump has risen to the top of the GOP heap, when one media guru and statistician after another — most of these folks living in media bubbles and elite enclaves set apart from the rest of the nation — smugly assured us as the campaign began that we could safely laugh at him, since he had a snowball's chance in hell of being the Republican presidential candidate.

The Little Sisters of the Poor, Kim Davis, and the Challenge of Preserving Real Religious Freedom: Frederick Clarkson's Important New Essay "When Exemption Is the Rule"

As Frederick Clarkson points out in a just-published (and exhaustive and richly-resourced) must-read overview of the religious liberty battles facing us in the U.S. today, the "I believe it, so it must be right" "religious freedom" argument that the Little Sisters of the Poor and the U.S. Catholic bishops want to shove in the face of the American public through the sisters' lawsuit against the Obama administration builds on the claim that the Supreme Court allowed to prevail in the Hobby Lobby lawsuit of 2014. As I noted in my previous posting today, the Little Sisters of the Poor object even to signing paperwork exempting them from responsibility for providing contraceptive coverage to their employees, with the claim that they believe that certain contraceptives are abortifacients, no matter what sound scientific evidence says about these contraceptives.

Rachel Held Evans on Faux Persecution Complex of Conservative Christians, and Betraying the Gospel

Rachel Held Evans argues that when the Christian brand becomes assertion of the "right to refuse" service rather than serving, when it becomes standing against those suffering real oppression rather than with them, Christians shouldn't be shocked that large numbers of people are walking away from their "gospel" at this point in history:

"I Am for Peace; But When I Speak, They Are for War": A Consideration of the Christian (and Catholic) Reponse to Obergefell

I've been thinking about war and peace lately, not primarily because, in response to the possibility of a peace-seeking agreement with Iran, one of my nation's two major political parties, which claims to represent Christian truth in some unique way, wants war — continued war, always war, always an enemy. I've been thinking about war and peace lately because of the continued bellicose determination of many American Christians, not a few Catholics included, to keep on making war on their LGBT brothers and sisters after those fellow human beings have gained the right to civil marriage.

Trend in American Christianity to Keep Our Eyes on Now: Talking About Exile

A trend in American Christianity to keep our eyes on now: as Christians of a certain stripe recognize that they may well lose the heated culture-war battles by which they defined Christian purity in the latter part of the 20th century — notably, the battles against women's rights and the full inclusion of gay people in church and society — many of these Christians are moving to abandon the public square. They're moving to a hard, determined Christ-vs.-culture stance in which they're calling for "pure" Christians to turn their backs on a world headed to hell in a handbasket, as they create enclaves of pure Christianity apart from culture.

Hans Küng, Can We Save the Catholic Church?: Implications for U.S. Catholic Bishops in Their Recent Meeting

Another reminder of what makes the church the church from Hans Küng, Can We Save the Catholic Church? (London: William Collins, 2013):

Richard Kim on Why Gays Can't "Accept a Polite Culture War Truce by Letting 'the Dissenters Opt Out'"

At The Nation, Richard Kim asks, "So why can’t gays accept a polite culture war truce by letting 'the dissenters opt out?'" He provides five answers to his questions--all are direct quotes from Kim's article:

Why Do the U.S. Bishops Sound So Unlike Pope Francis? Vinnie Rotondaro Provides Answers

Vinnie Rotondaro

I also want to recommend today Vinnie Rotondaro's examination of why Pope Francis's message of merciful concern for the poor, which is, after all, as old as the gospels, seems to come as such a surprise to so many people, American Catholics included. The reason Francis surprises us, Rotondaro surmises, is that he's so unlike many members of his own hierarchy--the U.S. bishops certainly included:

Frank Cocozzelli on Cardinal Timothy Dolan as "Neocon Cheerleader"

As a complement to what I posted earlier today about the statement of the German Catholic bishops re: the morning-after pill and rape cases, and the abysmal lack of pastoral and credible moral leadership on the past of the U.S. bishops, here's an excerpt from a hard-hitting essay by Frank Cocozzelli on Cardinal Dolan, president of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Conference, as a "neocon cheerleader":

Two Pictures, Two Thousand Words: Congressional Hearing on Religious Liberty

As Pema Levy notes at Talking Points Memo today, the picture at the head of the posting is from yesterday's Congressional hearing about "religious liberty," and has been circulating all over the Internet since the hearings were convened.

Can you imagine why?  Do you spot anything remarkable in this picture of men people gathered for an official hearing to talk about the healthcare needs of women?  

Culture War Issues Back Big-Time as 2012 Elections Approach

In the news today: they're baaaack.  The culture wars are back in a big way as the Republican party seeks to anoint a presidential candidate, and as signs that the economy may be mending slightly under the current Democratic president dishearten the Republicans and their allies, who are desperately seeking to change the subject from the economy to 1) the gays, 2) uppity women, 3) contraception, 4) religious freedom, 5) Obama's war on religion/Catholics, etc.  Take your pick.

Kristin Rawls on American Religious Right and Africa's Anti-Gay Bills

As Kristin Rawls notes at Alternet today, the same folks working overtime now to reignite the culture wars in the U.S. in the 2012 election cycle are also working in other places in the world to export American culture wars.  Uganda's "kill the gays bill" has been placed back on the table for a vote.  As Rawls says, the behind-the-scenes activism of the American religious right in promoting anti-gay sentiment in Africa is well-known, but not always easy to trace, because of the wide latitude granted to religious groups in the U.S. to engage in political activities without reporting what they're doing.  Or the money they're spending.

Alex Pareene and Sarah Jaffe on Why Republicans (and U.S. Catholic Bishops) Reignited Culture Wars

Alex Pareene at Salon this morning, on the Santorum bump as the political and religious right try to reignite the never-ending culture wars over women's and gay rights in the 2012 election cycle: 

(Would it be conspiratorial to note that these divisive cultural issues began attracting a great deal of right-wing attention very soon after the release of a positive jobs report? A little bit, probably.) (Also: Remember when the Tea Party meant the GOP was going all libertarian and abandoning social issues? Ha, ha.)

Tom Reese on Dolan-Kurtz Election as Culture-War Battle Cry

And here's Fr. Thomas Reese of Georgetown on the election of Dolan-Kurtz to head the USCCB:

This is a signal that the conference wants to be a leader in the culture wars. The two vice-presidential finalists were the two most conservative on the ballot. That says something about where this conference is going.

When top CEOs, who have all the power in their hands, and who control the branding of their product ("we are the teachers," Timothy Dolan has announced) find themselves with their backs against the wall, their first impulse is likely to be to engage in superficial re-branding.  Image management.

Diana Butler Bass on Continued Attempt of U.S. Religious Right to Use African Christians in American Culture Wars

Huffington Post recently carried a fine article by Diana Butler Bass, author of A People's History of Christianity (NY: Harper, 2009).  It's about a topic re: which I've blogged repeatedly in the past: the misreading of African versions of Christianity by Western Christians intent on using Africans and the churches of Africa as pawns in lethal culture-war games in the West.