The Current Spectacle of Astonishing Cruelty in U.S. Cheered by White Christians: Jesus Makes Winners, Not Losers!

This is going to the worst day of a lot of people's lives. And for absolutely no reason. Astonishing cruelty.

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) July 26, 2017

Mark Joseph Stern tweeted the tweet above one minute ago.

He's right. Except that there actually is a reason for the astonishing cruelty we see top levels of the U.S. government visiting on broad segments of the American population right now. The reason is that some of us revel in this cruelty and elected Donald Trump and a Republican Congress so that we could see this day happen — so that we could gorge ourselves on a spectacle of cruelty designed to reassure us that we're winners and the losers are finally getting what they deserve. Are finally getting what we would have designed for them if we'd been made lords and masters of the universe . . . . 

People like my evangelical Christian cousin who recently logged into my Facebook page to inform me, "You queers make me sick," then proceeded to preach about Jesus and the bible, are celebrating what happened yesterday in the Senate and what's happening today as the president of the U.S. opens the day with a roaring hate-filled declaration that no transgender person will serve in his military . . . 

In the military in which he himself did not, in fact, serve when he was eligible for enlistment and claimed that his feet hurt too much to permit him to do military service . . . . 

People like my evangelical Christian cousin — I refer to her as an example, as one among many others — are cheering the spectacle of cruelty on right now, laughing and talking about Jesus as they smell the possibility of ripping healthcare coverage from 23 million Americans, because, as they see it, those Americans are losers and not winners like themselves. They were losers from the moment they were born with brown or black pigmentation.

Jesus does not care what happens to them, or to any dirty queer. Jesus doesn't make losers.

Jesus makes winners.

Like us.

This is what's happening in America right now, world. And it absolutely has a religious gloss, a religious basis, as hard as it may be for many of you in more civilized and humane places, in nations that do not have the soul of a church, to imagine that.

He's going to lean in to culture war the more threatened he feels and it will get far far uglier.

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 26, 2017