Just in case you were concerned that this election wasn't crazy enough, and I know you were, here's the lieutenant governor of Idaho, featured in a demonstration with some militia crazies, waving a Bible and a firearm out the window of her truck.
I recently read Kristin Kobes Du Mez's book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (NY: Liveright, 2020), and thought the following passages were significant. Du Mez grew up in the household of a Christian Reformed theologian teaching at Dordt University, her alma mater, and knows the white evangelical world inside out. As her book notes, her own Christian Reformed church has in recent years moved inexorably in the evangelical direction, as have wide swathes of American white churches including the Catholic church — hence Amy Coney Barrett. She knows whereof she speaks, in other words, in Jesus and John Wayne.
Read the responses of a number of bishops and the homophobic sector of Catholic Twitter to the recently released papal statement about civil unions for same-sex couples, and the word you will hear over and over is, No.
James Alison, "Pope Francis backing same sex unions isn't a surprise. But it's still a big deal"
As Jamie Manson tweets today, the usual Vatican shuffle is now taking place regarding what Pope Francis is said to have said (or is now said not to have said) regarding same-sex unions. You know that shuffle: it's a two step; one step forward, then walk the forward step back two steps, until no one knows who has said what (or not said what) or what was meant. As Jamie Manson also says in the tweet I have just linked, LGBTQ people deserve much, much better than this.
It's the militant atheism that so easily gloms together with the militant anti-Catholicism, both perfectly mirroring militant Catholicism and evangelicalism, that should give us pause to think:
Catholic bishop Tobin of Rhode Island tweeted during last night's debate, "Joe Biden promises that if he’s elected president he will end division and bring the country together. It won’t happen. With his politically expedient embrace of a very extreme position on abortion, he’s already alienated half of the nation."
