Sadly, the documenting continues, and becomes ever more difficult, because the acts of hatred unleashed by this election are proliferating and spreading rapidly, all over the nation, so that not even the media, which enabled Trump's rise to power, can pretend they are not occurring. As Lily Workneh writes today in the Huffington Post article to which the headline above links, "Countless Acts of Hate Have Been Carried Out Since Trump's Win":
Since Tuesday, people from all types of communities ― black, Latino, Muslim, Jewish, Asian, queer people, women ― have been physically harmed, slandered with hate speech or been the targets of racist graffiti.
"This is white America now. Take your retarded self and go somewhere else now," towards American Sign Language (ASL) user#TheTrumpEffect 😔 pic.twitter.com/HAWNzPfTDo— Nyle DiMarco (@NyleDiMarco) November 11, 2016
A leading pro-life Catholic theologian, Charles Camosy, wrote yesterday that the election of Donald Trump (with the decision of 8 in 10 white evangelicals and 6 in 10 white Catholics to vote for him) is a monstrous defeat for the pro-life movement, for the following reason:
The pro-life movement has over the years painstakingly put itself in a position where it can authentically resist the attempts of our opponents to marginalize us as led by old, white, privileged, racist, misogynist men who want to use and control women’s bodies.
But with the election of Trump — who could not fit better into that category — all of our work now risks being undermined.
But for anyone with eyes wide open, that's all the "pro-life" movement really ever has been or has been about. It is no accident that the very same people who voted Trump into office claiming he's "pro-life" also voted for the death penalty by large margins in several places in the nation. The "pro-life" movement has deliberately targeted women and gay people, people of color, demonstrating that it has no concern for the lives of real, post-birth human beings on the margins of society. It has promoted economic policies and elected political leaders who make the lives of poor people living hell, while claiming it is motivated by respect for life.
The "pro-life" movement has fought tooth and nail against providing insurance coverage for people on the margins of society — a tremendous sin and scandal when this behavior masquerades as a concern for an ethic of life. The "pro-life" movement is not credibly pro-life by any stretch of the imagination, never has been. Pro-lifers: Ask those of us you've targeted in the name of your pro-life ethic to give testimony about who you are and what you represent. You'll get an earful. Start with gay folks and women. Many of us have not been deceived about what you represent, nor are we surprised at the bitter fruit that your "pro-life" vote is bearing in acts of heinous violence targeting minority groups.
Why did it take so long for you to see this about yourselves? Why has it taken the election of Donald Trump for you to begin asking questions about how heterosexual male privilege and racial privilege blind you to the reality of the lives of people all around you, even as you claim you stand for respect for all life?
As Robert P. Jones reminded us yesterday, the Trump election — the behavior of white Christian America in this election — is really all about rage, when all is said and done. It's about rage directed towards those who are different from white Christian Americans, those perceived as a threat to the hegemony of white Christian Americans and their ownership of America. And we are seeing that rage begin to pour out in the acts of violence towards minority communities that the political choice of white Christian America in this election legitimates and elicits in the most direct way possible. Jones writes,
Between Barack Obama’s 2008 election and 2016, America has transformed from being a majority white Christian nation (54 percent) to a minority white Christian nation (43 percent).
But on Election Day, paradoxically, this anxious minority swarmed to the polls to elect as president the candidate who promised to "make America great again" and warned that he was its “last chance” to turn back the tide of cultural and economic change.
One clue to the power of this racial and religious identity can be seen in the striking similarity of a map of white Christian population density by state to the red and blue election night map. While the similarity of those maps in Kentucky and West Virginia might not be a surprise, the same similarity in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania goes a long way to explaining why Hillary Clinton’s Midwestern firewall did not hold on election night.
The choice before the country was starkly clear. Donald J. Trump's Republican Party looked back wistfully to a monochromatic vision of 1950s America, while the major party fronting the first female presidential candidate celebrated the pluralistic future of 2050, when the Census Bureau first projected the United States would become a majority nonwhite nation.
Jones is absolutely correct about all of this: white American Christians are, indeed, enraged — enraged about their perceived loss of control. And he's right that this election was their last chance, demographically, to assure that this control is locked in even as they become a dwindling minority in the nation's population. They were determined to lock in their control — as a minority— for the nation's foreseeable future.
They have now done just that with the election of Donald Trump and a Republican Congress, and there will be great hell to pay for a lot of people already suffering due to injustice and marginalization. The fact that this suffering being heaped on the heads of people who are already on the margins of society is being dished up by an ostensibly "pro-life" white Christian minority who claim ownership of the whole shebang though they are a dwindling minority group is a bitter pill to swallow, indeed — for anyone who cares about the real meaning and message of the Christian gospels.
As you archive the Huffington Post lead headline at the top of the posting for that scrapbook I've been suggesting you keep, to bring out when the next generation asks, "But where were you and what did you do when Donald Trump came to power?," think about this: When your children and grandchildren ask you, "But why did white Christians choose for all this violence against minority communities to start after the election, and why did they want it to happen?," how will you answer them?
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