Politics over Religion at MD&D

[_Kishkumen]

For what it is worth, the Church has been wanting to acquire federal land in Utah long before anyone heard of Donald Trump or Orrin Hatch. Back then the sentiment of Woody Guthrie's song about "This land is your land, this land is my land" and the memory of corporate/government misdeeds in the Teapot Dome scandal was strong.

Indeed, moksha. I am aware that these concerns did not spring up overnight, nor are they the brainchild of the president without a brain or a heart. What I am saying is that certain forces in Utah decided to throw their lot in with Trump because they saw in him an opportunity to get goodies they wanted, and boy does it look like it paid off for them. What all these folks seem to share, from my limited knowledge, is a hatred of public institutions, a fictitious view of history, and a desire to turn public goods into private gain. Now, the grudges and desires most certainly have historical roots, but some Mormons are given to rewriting history along self-serving theological lines and Trump is clearly a conspiracy theorist. So, it is a marriage made in hell.

[_honorentheos]

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/o ... tians.html

This article was quoted in the Wall Street Journal recent so I went to read it directly. While I disagree with many of the authors underlying beliefs I do think he makes a compelling appeal to Christians to consider their values to be in jeopardy when they embrace conservative politicians of questionable character because they may do things Christian conservatives favor such as nominate socially conservative judges.

[_Kishkumen]

You bring something up that makes me see some paradoxes. On the one hand, massive historical forgetfulness that is as astonishing as it is self-serving. At the same time, the distrust and disrespect of the federal government has deep historical roots going back to the Civil War (our congress today is operating much as the congress of the 1850s: a powerful block of southerners and their western allies wielding power all out of proportion to their economic importance and demographic size). Another is that this hatred of the federal government (from whose teat they feed greedily) coexists with the idea of America as the greatest country on earth. What makes America so great, then, if not the unique political system and the history of that system? America is one of the few and certainly the most successful countries on earth founded purely as an ideological project. And yet, the government set up by that system is the one they hate.

There is one slender line that threads easily through the needle of these paradoxes...

Myth replaces history. America can be what people want it to be so long as they rewrite its foundations and place it in the right theological framework. What makes America work, in my view, is that it provides quite a different framework from the one these fantasists imagine in which people of different views, backgrounds, ethnicities, etc., can live out their own lives and pursue their own destinies. Yes, that too is a fantasy of sorts, but I like it a lot better than the white Euro ethno-state under the banner of Protestantism (or Mormonism) that some of these folks salivate over. And it is, in my view, more compatible with the Enlightenment project of the Founding Fathers and the realities of life in a world in which people from the Americas, Africa, and Europe mixed together from the 15th century on. The road the U.S. took to becoming the North American empire was paved with the blood of Native Americans and African slaves. It is a grisly, disgusting mess in many ways. But this is what our white nationalist friends (and I am including in this many more people than the Richard Spencers of the world) really pine for. They see the evil fruits of genocide and slavery slipping through their fingers, and they experience a shared terror about losing that supremacy.

[_Kishkumen]

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/opinion/roy-moore-christians.html

This article was quoted in the Wall Street Journal recent so I went to read it directly. While I disagree with many of the authors underlying beliefs I do think he makes a compelling appeal to Christians to consider their values to be in jeopardy when they embrace conservative politicians of questionable character because they may do things Christian conservatives favor such as nominate socially conservative judges.

Thanks for sharing this, honorentheos. It is quite interesting. I join you in disagreeing with the author's quite frankly confusing set of alternate reality beliefs:

Behind social conservatives’ Trumpian turn, I suspect, is deep pessimism about America’s future. Many fear that under secularism’s relentless onslaught, Judeo-Christianity will be banished permanently from the public square. I feel similar angst.

How can anyone who can vote or speak out be banished from the public square? We all go to the ballot box, cast our votes, and elect representatives and leaders. "Christian" radio and television stations peddle their nonsense 24/7. How sick I am of this phony idea of a war against Christianity, which seems, from my vantage point, to be a civil war of nominal Christians against others to impose their special values on people who do not share their "faith" (tribalism).

As I walk through campus, I hear the lowest grade of stupid, ignorant Christian preaching shouted at students by preachers standing in front of banners ten feet high. I teach at a public university. These fanatical morons have been free to stain the name of Christianity with their bilge without interference from the state. Despite my disdain for the garbage they preach as "Christianity", I am heartened to see them there, and I find them rather amusing. I would rather see MsJack teaching things I disagree with from an informed perspective, but the situation is what it is, and I see no attempts to stop it.

I also find the smiling Mormon elders and sisters who play frisbee and ukeleles on the quad just as irritating. But again, free country, freedom of speech, and no one is interfering with them or any other religious group that tries to draw in unsuspecting students (I kid, I kid!).

But then I look back on the late 20th century, when, thanks to heroic figures such as Pope John Paul II, the Christian idea bested Soviet Communism, an ideology that was far more hostile to religious faith than America’s Enlightenment liberalism has ever been. I also look to the explosive growth of Christianity in places like China and Iran today.

I would love for someone to explain this one to me. It seems so far out of left field that I have no idea what to do with it, other than to say that to Catholics the Polish pope who defied a Soviet assassination attempt by surviving it is a symbolic figure of opposition to Soviet communism in the era that the Soviet empire collapsed. I do not see how the pope had any direct impact on the collapse of the Soviet Union. I am willing to be corrected. This just looks like the propaganda of the faithful.

Unlike under Communism or Iran’s Islamic theocracy, Christianity in America has the First Amendment and freedom of conscience. And there are other reasons to be optimistic about our place in the culture in the long term. The cascading harassment scandal, for one thing, suggests that even liberals may rethink some aspects of the sexual revolution. And if ultra-permissive liberalism is passing away, then the people who grew up in its wreckage will eventually turn toward tradition.

And yet how often it seems that the rightwing Christians of this country are the mirror image of radical theocrats in other countries. Out of a manufactured hysteria about their "persecution", they push to impose their lifestyle on others. Hey, I get it, yes in the past sodomy was illegal and you couldn't buy beer on Sunday morning. A woman who did not share your beliefs or want to raise a baby in adverse circumstances had to undergo a risky back alley procedure to get an abortion. Your world came crashing down around your ears, and yet somehow you still found your way to church on Sunday and were able to vote an incompetent, con artist and abuser of women into the Oval Office with the help of the KGB thug running Russia like an organized crime operation.

I feel so bad for y'all.

[_Res Ipsa]

There is a legitimate question about whether what Trump did was legal. The Antiquities Act is a delegation of power from Congress to the President. It delegates a single power: to designate. It does not delegate the power to undesignated or change an existing designation. Those powers were retained by Congress. That's the basis of several lawsuits that have been filed in response to Trump's action.

[_Kishkumen]

There is a legitimate question about whether what Trump did was legal. The Antiquities Act is a delegation of power from Congress to the President. It delegates a single power: to designate. It does not delegate the power to undesignated or change an existing designation. Those powers were retained by Congress. That's the basis of several lawsuits that have been filed in response to Trump's action.

Cool, Res Ipsa. I should have done a little more research on that. Thanks!

[_Res Ipsa]

There is a legitimate question about whether what Trump did was legal. The Antiquities Act is a delegation of power from Congress to the President. It delegates a single power: to designate. It does not delegate the power to undesignated or change an existing designation. Those powers were retained by Congress. That's the basis of several lawsuits that have been filed in response to Trump's action.

Cool, Res Ipsa. I should have done a little more research on that. Thanks!

You're welcome. I think there is a total of five lawsuits to date. Here is one of the complaints, which deals only with Escalante-Grand Staircase. https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/cam ... _Trump.pdf One think I didn't know was that Trump undesignated portions of the monument that had been added by Congress after Clinton's initial designation.

And here's one of the complaints for Bear's Ears: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/file ... 171207.pdf

[_selek]

They are crypto-fascists, not conservatives. Anyone who takes up the banner of Bannon or Trump is a compete chump. Gray is totally right. We see in Bannon and Trump people who understand all too well the tribalism and ignorance of their dupes and exploit it to the max--for their own benefit and at a high cost to the very same sad souls whom they tricked into supporting them.

What Bannon said about Romney made my blood boil. But, of course, it was entirely calculated. Bannon is out to destroy our nation and turn us into a new Fascist Germany; whatever he has to say to achieve that end he will say.

You'll be unhappy to know that I was a secret Trump voter, in one of the swing states that moved the election in his favor.

[Guest]

delete double post

[_Kishkumen]

You'll be unhappy to know that I was a secret Trump voter, in one of the swing states that moved the election in his favor.

Why? I don’t know you, and you don’t mean anything to me. It’s your life and your choice to live with.