Civil Rights Center in Tennessee and Black Churches in Louisiana Burn as Hate Crimes Increase

Churches burned, death threats against civil rights leaders, synagogues attacked - and 3rd straight year of hate crimes spiking, according to FBI. This is happening, not hypothetical. pic.twitter.com/Q3aFJ3yj9t

— Tom Perriello (@tomperriello) April 7, 2019

Tweets and articles with a common theme that have caught my eye in the past few days, which I want to share:

Readers Ask: How Do We Live in a World or Church with No Connection to Evil? My Response: I'm Saying, "No More. Not in My Name Any Longer"

Neil Gabler, "And So It Begins: Normalizing the Election"*

Thank you all for your responses to my last posting. Since they're directed to me personally, for the most part, I do intend to respond to each one by commenting in that thread. In the meantime, I appreciate Sister Lea's good question, which gives me the opportunity to make clear some points my statement about repudiating my Catholic ties may not have made clear: you say, Sister Lea, 

What "Pro-Life" White Christian Voters Have Brought Us: Shouts of "Heil the People!" As National Registry of Muslims Is Mulled Over

Seig heil! ✋ pic.twitter.com/FhuFuZq6Sc

— Tila Tequila (@AngelTilaLove) November 19, 2016

This is my own running chronicle of what's rapidly unfolding, from just the past several days. You probably have your own tally going, too. It behooves us to be paying attention. God in heaven knows, the "pro-life" Christians and the "liberal" Catholic or other Christian journals who give the work of those "pro-life" Christians high profiles are not going to be keeping us informed about all of this. Despite their professed commitment to upholding the sanctity of life, they seem, in fact, oblivious to it and even jubilant that they have scored a "pro-life" victory in electing Donald Trump:

81 Percent of White Evangelicals Who Elected Trump, and the (Totally Non Pro-Life) Legacy of the White Evangelical Church in Racial Violence in the American South

Katherine Stewart, "Eighty-One Percent of White Evangelicals Voted for Donald Trump. Why?"

May 1927: my mother was nearly five years old, living 25 miles south of Little Rock. In that year and month, the last lynching (up to today, that is — who knows what the future holds for us now?) occurred in my hometown of Little Rock.

As Trump Presidency Is Normalized in Mainstream and Religious Media, Attempts Underway to Sanitize White Evangelical, White Catholic, Mormon Vote for Trump

The attempt to normalize Donald Trump and his presidency is well underway, and anyone following the trajectory of the mainstream (and religious) media in this country from the Reagan period forward could have foreseen this. To its great shame, National Catholic Reporter published an article last week by one of its leading "pro-life" writers attacking those protesting Trump's election, noting that the Dow is up, and claiming that we're seeing a "peaceful transition of power" with Trump — even as incidents of violent speech or acts directed against members of minority communities proliferate all over the nation. To my knowledge, NCR has yet to publish any statement at all about those incidents of violence. It's as if, for "pro-life" Catholics applauding the "peaceful transition of power," those being targeted simply do not exist — not as fellow human beings whose human lives must count in any credible rendition of a pro-life ethic.

As White U.S. Christians Go to Church Today . . . .

Lauren Markoe at Religion News Service 

Another scrapbook item (above) to show the next generation when they ask (and they will ask: they have a right and obligation to do so), "Where were you and what did you do when Donald Trump rose to power?" and "Why did white Christians choose a man so eminently unqualified for the presidency, whose election released a torrent of hateful incidents directed at minorities?"

Quote for Day: "Deny Them That 'We' — That Vast and Inclusive Plural"

How do we fight back now? Fred Clark's suggestion, as a white evangelical Christian who moves against the pro-Trump tide of his white evangelical community: Deny them the use of the word "we" to describe all of us:

Media Now Begin Noticing Outpouring of Acts of Hate and Violence Against Minorities After Trump Election: "People from All Types of Communities" Targeted

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":

"All This and More, in Just 36 hours, at the Time of Writing, in Trumpland": Our Moral Obligation to Document Outpouring of Hate Speech and Hateful Acts in Trump's New America

Middle school students in Royal Oak, Michigan chanting "Build The Wall!" pic.twitter.com/38vcnN9mnk

— Philip Lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) November 10, 2016

And then there's this for you to consider: testimony, I call it. It's documentation of what's happening right before our eyes, in just two days, brought to us by white Christians in the U.S. What do we intend to do about it, the more than half of the nation who did not choose this? Will we stand by in silence? Will we be duped by the calls for "healing" issued by influential media gurus representing the very churches (white evangelical, Catholic, Mormon) who are inflicting these grave wounds on our social order? Can we do anything to change any of this, now that fewer than half of us chose, under the guidance of white Christian leaders, to place the nation entirely in the hands of the political party Mr. Trump represents? 

Reports from Every Corner of the Nation of Verbal or Physical Attacks on Members of Vulnerable Minority Communities: What the White Christian Vote Has Wrought

John Pavlovitz, "White Christians Who Voted for Donald Trump: Fix This. Now."

Look, I don't know if I'm doing much good flapping my lips here. The problems we are facing as a human community (and, in the U.S., as a nation, are enormous), and the lip-flapping doesn't seem to help much when all is said and done. I don't, and most of the people who read this blog and respond to it don't, have the power within the institutions of our society to make a real dent, to change much at all.

The Alt-Right and Donald Trump's Campaign: A Brief Primer

As Charles Pierce wrote yesterday, this is "the week everyone in America started saying 'alt-right.' " As a service to you readers, here's a list of article I've read in the past two days about the alt-right and its mainstreaming via Trump's campaign, which have struck me as helpful. I don't by any means pretend that this is an exhaustive list of articles commenting on these themes. They're only ones I happen to have read in my daily scanning of the news, which I'd like to share with you.

Matthew Shephard and James Byrd Act Signed after Decade-Long Battle

And good news today: President Obama signed the hate crimes bill making it a federal hate crime to assault people based on sexual orientation, gender and gender identity. This bill caps more than a decade of debate about whether sexual orientation ought to be added to already existing categories in laws criminalizing violence towards targeted minorities. It comes 11 years after the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.

And as I celebrate this progressive move of the federal government to defend human rights, I grieve--I'm ashamed, to be frank--that the Catholic right are up in arms at the moment about the purported support of the United States Catholic Bishops' Conference for an inquiry into hate speech in the media.

The USCCB's Department of Communications belongs to the So We Might See Coalition, which includes the United Church of Christ’s Office of Communication, the National Council of Churches, the Islamic Society of North America, Presbyterian News Service, and the Communications Services of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

So We Might See has sent a letter to the FCC asking it to look into possible connections between hate speech in the media and violent crimes. The coalition is particularly concerned about spikes in violence against Hispanic immigrants that seem to coincide with anti-immigration diatribes on right-wing talk shows.

Archbishop Chaput's Catholic News Agency has been concerned that the USCCB might support this attempt to curb hate speech. In response to CNA's inquiries, Helen Osman, Secretary of the USCCB’s Department of Communications, assures CNA that the USCCB did not join in the petition with other So We Might See constituents.

Instead, the USCCB has sent a separate letter to the FCC, noting that there are “difficult constitutional and regulatory questions” involved in attempts to curb hate speech. These include questions about whether expressions of religious teachings could be interpreted as hate speech--e.g., might Catholic teachings on homosexuality be deemed hate speech by advocates of gay rights?

If I'm reading this discussion correctly, it appears that the United Church of Christ, the National Council of Churches, the Islamic Society of North America, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America are all concerned about violent effects of hate speech in the media.

Catholics, not so much. To our great discredit.