Everybody Has a Story: Updating You on Recent Events in My Husband Steve's and My Life

Weeks back, I alluded to a hard patch through which Steve and I have been walking, and told you readers of Bilgrimage that I would say more about this when the time was ripe. I am now free to talk. I shared the following statement on Facebook yesterday. I feel a certain ambivalance about making this story public, and I think the ambivalence arises from my concern that I not target the individuals who created this hard patch for Steve and me.

Trump's Presidency and White Evangelical and Catholic Voters: "Trumpism Is Basically a Religion at This Point"

Things I've read today that I'd like to share with you:

What Twitter Is Saying About the GOP Wealthcare Bill: "Broad Tax Cut to the Affluent, Paid for by Billions of Dollars Sliced from Medicaid"

What folks are saying on Twitter about the wealthcare bill the Republicans have finally released after weeks of secrecy as they seek to ram it through the Senate:

The Senate GOP bill isn't health care, it's #wealthcare. https://t.co/psNDJ3I34a

— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) June 22, 2017

Sunday Morning Soul-Enriching Resources: Ex-Evangelicals, Catholic Sexual Abuse and Fr. Tom Doyle, Rev. William J. Barber and Healthcare

Some Sunday morning soul-enriching resources I'd like to share, dealing with disparate topics:

"Church Should Provide Healthcare Coverage, Not State": Two Statements Confronting This Claim of Many U.S. White Christians with Reality

if you applauded 24 million losing healthcare and you're planning on attending a church this weekend—I'd pray about how you're OK with that.

— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) May 6, 2017

As a way of prefacing the two articles to which I'm pointing you below, with excerpts, I want to remind you of several observations made by Frances FitzGerald in her book The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2017) (for previous discussions of this book, see here and here). First, there's this:

"If There's a Single Worst Actor in This Drama, It Is Ryan": Time for White Catholics to Face Responsibility for Trump

Jamelle Bouie writes, 

The GOP’s passage of Trumpcare is one of the most callous things the party has ever done.

Charles Pierce on the Party in D.C. Today: Celebrating Taking Healthcare from Poor People to Give Trillion-Dollar Tax Cut to Super-Rich

This is the moral bankruptcy of Christian Conservatism:

National day of prayer, praise their god, then kill healthcare for millions

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) May 4, 2017

Charles Pierce hits the nail on the head: 

GOP Votes to Rip Healthcare from Millions of Americans, Beer Bash Ensues: Twitter Documentation of Today

Republicans cheering the fact that they're about to vote for a measure that strips 24 million of coverage (while preserving their own care) pic.twitter.com/mdMiY3WaoO

— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) May 4, 2017

Twitter capturing what's happening in Washington, D.C., today as a bill to strip millions of Americans of healthcare coverage to afford tax credits to the richest people in the country passes the House, and cases of beer are rolled into the Capitol for the celebration:

White Christian Right "Over the Moon" About Trump Presidency: News Worth Noting Today

#Christian pic.twitter.com/3ZA6pRFGJS

— Ani Sangye (@SangyeH) April 26, 2017

Some "in the news" items I've noticed in the last day or so, which have to do with matters we often discuss here, and to which I want to draw your attention:

The Healthcare Debacle and the GOP Culture of Cruelty: "A Display of Incompetence and Cruelty"

Thoughts and prayers with Paul Ryan, whose youthful dream of robbing poor people of their health coverage was dashed today.

— Ned Resnikoff (@resnikoff) March 24, 2017

New York Times, "The TrumpRyanCare Debacle": 

As Day Goes On, William J. Barber's Prophetic Moral Testimony about Trump-Ryan Take Health Care Away Death Bill

Reverend William J. Barber II speaking yesterday at a protest of the Trumpcare legislation — by way of Charles Pierce: 

What's at Stake with Trumpcare: Educational Resources from Social Media (and Other) Sources

From Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Jonathan Chait, "7 Charts Explain the Horrors of Trumpcare": 

As Trumpcare Goes Up for Vote, Commentary on Theological-Ideological Roots of GOP Cruelty Towards the Poor

As healthcare coverage for between 20 and 30 million Americans goes on the chopping block today due to the voting decisions of large percentages of white American Christians claiming to be "pro-life," some religion-and-politics things for us to think about, most of them hot off the press:

Reactions to the Trumpcare "Healthcare Plan" = Tax Cut for the Super-Rich: "How About Everyone Gets the Same Healthcare Coverage Congress Gets. Easy!"

Matt Shuham at Talking Points Memo

David Dayen, "The Republican Health-Care Bill Is the Worst of So Many Worlds":

Fundamentally, the ACHA is a tax cut bill, which just happens to make millions of Americans sicker and more vulnerable in the process.

Trumpcare, Some Questions You Might Ask: Will the "Pro-Life" Catholic Bishops Provide Access to Healthcare for Millions Who Lose Coverage?

True headline 1: the bill is basically a tax cut ($600 billion) funded by gutting Medicaid. 4

— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) March 7, 2017

To borrow shamelessly from the title of a Mary Oliver poem, some questions you (and I) might ask now that the horror show of the Trumpcare "replacement" plan for the Affordable Care Act has been unveiled:

High-School Teacher in Tennessee Calls for Christian Discussion of Healthcare Coverage — and This Is Shocking News to Many Christians

Seriously urge everyone to watch this entire question from a woman at GOP #Obamacare townhall in Tennessee: pic.twitter.com/8mBGE1z6Rj

— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) February 10, 2017

To me the central message of Jesus Christ is pulling up the oppressed, the vulnerable, and the poor. You could apply that to a lot of things today. Black Lives Matter, people with disabilities, the LGBT community, the refugees, or health insurance. The central principle remains the same.

Why Does the "Heaven" of the Religious Right Look So Much Like Hell to the Rest of Us?

Can Someone PLEASE Get Word to Archbishop Chaput That Banning Refugees and Ripping Away Healthcare Coverage Are Not "Pro-Life"?

P.S. Can someone please get a few of the tweets (with shocking photos attached) featured in my last posting to His Excellency Archbishop Charles Chaput, as he praises the current president as a champion of life and castigates the president's critics? The disconnect between . . . oh, let's be daring and call it reality (the real world and unvarnished truth about it) . . . and what His Excellency wants to sound forth in the name of a "pro-life" ethic is, well, downright embarrassing.

Commentary on Trump's "Pro-Life" White Christian Base As Healthcare Is Ripped from Millions of Poor People: "Tell Me Again How These People Are Pro-Life"

For that scrapbook I've been urging you to keep for the next generation, when they ask you, "Where were you and how did you respond when Donald Trump rose to power?" And when they ask, "And you tell me 'pro-life' white Christians supported him in heavy percentages? How did they imagine that ripping healthcare coverage from millions of poor people to put millions of dollars into the pockets of the super-rich is 'pro-life'?"

Where Do Christians Go From Here? When "Pro-Life" Christianity Deals Death, Time to Turn Our Backs on the "Pro-Life" Game

4 in 5 white evangelicals, 3 in 5 white Catholics and Mormons — "pro-life" voters — brought us the Trump nightmare.

I will not forget.

— Bill Lindsey (@wdlindsy) December 15, 2016

"Now is the time to talk about what we are actually talking about," declares Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in a powerful, hard-hitting post-election essay rich in moral insight that refuses to entertain the palavering, both-sides-have-a-point games of the American chattering classes — when those morally evasive games have brought us Donald Trump. They have been, in fact, signposts and paving stones for the path that has led the nation to Trump, though getting the nation's intellectual arbiters in its media,  its churches, and its academies to admit the large role they have played in paving and signposting the road to Trump is a meaningless and futile enterprise: moral awareness is simply not what the chattering classes do, even as they engage in moral rule-making and ethical pontificating.