Friday, November 23, 2018

Two major federal actions against transgender rights in the US - Nov. 23, 2018

On Friday, Nov. 23, 2018, the Trump administration made two major moves against transgender rights.

Proposed U.S. ban on transgender soldiers may jump over appeals court and go directly to Supreme Court

A personal memory from Dana Delgardo in the book Surviving Transphobia:

“...on July 26, 2017, the Trump administration announced a ban on trans military service. I was enraged, offended, hurt, and confused about the sudden turn of policy. So many servicepeople had come out and now were exposed. We felt betrayed by an institution we trusted and had dedicated our entire lives to.
* * *
I was coded as undeployable for almost two years. I sat in this limbo and felt useless to my squadron, the team I had bonded with for years, knowing they relied on me as I relied on them. 'Readiness' is crucial to being in the military, and I was being judged on it solely because I was trans. I was ready physically, scored 99 percent on my fit-to-fight ratings based on male (not female) standards, and had no mental health issues, yet I was nondeployable?
* * *
We stay because we belong. This is all we have known since we were young. ... The Air Force met my needs as identified by Maslow’s hierarchy of physiological safety, love, belonging, self-esteem, respect, and self-actualization. It provided me with an education, skills, opportunities to travel, and the profession that I still hold today.”
— Dana Delgardo, “A Trans Man in the Military,” in Surviving Transphobia. ed. Laura A. Jacobs. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023.

Trump proposed the ban in July 2017 via Twitter. He ordered Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to develop a plan for implementing this ban, which Mattis did. The ban was challenged, however, in part on the basis that Trump's directive was groundless ("the result of discrimination, rather than a study of how allowing transgender personnel affects the military").

In November 2018, the administration "asked the Supreme Court to bypass the usual legal process to take on...President Trump’s decision to ban transgender people from military service." (Washington Post, Nov. 23, 2018) Jennifer Levi of GLAD referred to "the open service policy that was thoroughly vetted by the military itself and has been in place now for more than two years." Lower courts upheld those challenges. Trump administration "Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco asked the justices to consolidate the challenges to the ban," the Washington Post article said, "and rule on the issue in its current term." The article said:

"The Trump administration has taken an aggressive posture when lower courts have ruled against it on important issues. It has asked the Supreme Court — with varying degrees of success — to accept the cases before they have run through the normal appeals process. ... The effort has drawn criticism from those who say such requests puts the Supreme Court in position to be seen as doing the administration’s bidding."

The New York Times reported the same day that "The Supreme Court does not ordinarily intercede until at least one appeals court has considered an issue, and it typically awaits a disagreement among appeals courts before adding a case to its docket." The ban on transgender soldiers has not yet been ruled on in an appeals court, although arguments have already been heard in the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco which has not issued a ruling yet, and another appeal is scheduled to be heard in the District of Columbia Circuit next month. Cases from federal trial court may jump the line, without being first heard by an appeals court, and go directly to the Supreme Court, if the case is shown to be of "imperative public importance as to...require immediate determination in this court.” Solicitor General Francisco claimed in his brief that the ban on transgender soldiers indeed meets that standard. Joshua Matz, a lawyer who filed an amicus brief for challengers, wrote: “Trump’s lawyers fail to understand that the government is not entitled to play leapfrog whenever it loses in federal court.”

Analysis:

Masha Gessen wrote in their 2020 book Surviving Autocracy that many of Trump's pronouncements were "promising to shield Americans from the strange, the unknown, the unpredictable. Queers can serve as convenient shorthand." His order-by-tweet "juxtaposed the military — the symbol of Americans' security — with transgender people, who make so many Americans feel so anxious."

Detailed guidance about the rights of transgender federal employees is removed from the Office of Personnel Management

On the same day in November 2018, it was noticed that information had been removed from the Office of Personnel Management's website sometime earlier in the week. The Office of Personnel Management oversees all federal employees. The website "still state[s] that discrimination on the basis of gender identity is prohibited — consistent with an executive order President Obama issued that is still in effect." However, all the previous detail, "ensuring that trans workers could dress according to their gender identity, that they were called by their preferred names and pronouns, and that they were allowed to use restrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity," is gone, unannounced, according to an article in ThinkProgress.

Climate change will reduce U.S. GDP by 10 percent by the end of the 21st century

In the New York Times on Nov. 19, 2018:

"Reports of the threats from a warming planet have been coming fast and furiously. The latest: a startling analysis from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicting terrible food shortages, wildfires and a massive die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040, unless governments take strong action."

And the New York Times on Friday, Nov. 23:

"A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday [today] presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.

The report, which was mandated by Congress and made public by the White House, is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s agenda of environmental deregulation, which he asserts will spur economic growth."

* * *

"...in direct language, the 1,656-page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American exports and supply chains could be disrupted, agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast, the report finds."

CNN reported the same day about the same publication, saying that it "delivers a dire warning about climate change and its devastating impacts, saying the economy could lose hundreds of billions of dollars — or, in the worst-case scenario, more than 10% of its GDP — by the end of the century."

"Coming from the US Global Change Research Program, a team of 13 federal agencies, the Fourth National Climate Assessment was put together with the help of 1,000 people, including 300 leading scientists, roughly half from outside the government.

It's the second of two volumes. The first, released in November 2017, concluded that there is "no convincing alternative explanation" for the changing climate other than "human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases.""

Thursday, November 15, 2018

On Jewish, Black, and transgender hate crime statistics

Update: If you'd like to see newer NYPD hate crimes data, it's free online. Use the little calendar at top-left to select a date range. For example, of 522 reported incidents in 2021:

  • Jewish: 196
  • Black: 38
  • Transgender: 17

— as seen 16 June 2022


About this new statistic that's floating around. Here it is in a recent article in the New York Times:

"Contrary to what are surely the prevailing assumptions, anti-Semitic incidents have constituted half of all hate crimes in New York [City] this year, according to the Police Department. To put that figure in context, there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks. Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20."

- "Is It Safe to Be Jewish in New York?" by Ginia Bellafante, New York Times, Oct. 31, 2018

This statistic excites some people, perhaps because they like to show that their group is more oppressed than others. But, of course, we should not perceive hate crimes statistics as a competition; the desirable rate for all groups is zero. As someone who is both transgender and Jewish, I do not feel better—neither more assured of my own safety nor more righteously outraged—knowing that there are more crimes against one of my identities than another.

It's also important to unpack various possible meanings of these numbers before we rush to interpret them.

First of all, there are 20 times more Jews than transgender people in New York City. New York City has a population of 8.5 million, including (on a low estimate) 1 million Jews. Transgender people are currently estimated to make up about 0.5% of the total population of the United States, which would predict about 50,000 transgender people in New York City. One possible explanation of why 20 times more hate crimes are reported against Jews than against transgender people is that there are 20 times more potential Jewish individual targets than potential transgender individual targets.

Then again, it may not be especially relevant how many individuals there are in the targeted group. What might matter more is how many haters there are, because they are the ones committing the crimes. This would require an analysis of active hate groups. It may indeed be true that hate groups focus more on ethnic/racial/religious identity than on gender/sexual identity.

I do not know what to make of Bellafante's report of the NYPD statistics that four times as many anti-Jewish crimes were reported than anti-Black crimes, since there are twice as many Black people as Jewish people in New York City. Many black people fear interacting with the police even to report crimes against them, or they expect that it's at minimum a waste of their time to do so because they believe their reports will not be pursued. Many of the Black people in New York City are recent immigrants, so they may be even less likely to report hate crimes, or, when they do report them, these crimes may be categorized — I am speculating — as representing bias on the basis of nationality or religion rather than race.

It's also important to note that hate crimes do not always target individuals. Sometimes they target institutions. There are far more visible Jewish institutions (synagogues, community centers, non-profits, political action committees, Israeli-American or Zionist organizations, Judaica stores) than transgender institutions, so it is (sadly) predictable that the visible institutions might be targeted more often.

Furthermore, once a hate crime has occurred that affects multiple members of an organization, it seems that is more likely to be reported than if it had occurred to an individual. When the janitor finds hateful graffiti on the door of a synagogue, she reports it so that the synagogue members can be aware and feel that the issue is being properly addressed. The janitor does not necessarily report graffiti on the door of her own home, for any number of reasons: she is too busy to speak to the police in her "free time," she needs to use her "free time" to clean up the graffiti and once she cleans it up it won't be there anymore to show to the police, she rationalizes it as being "just kids" and not a real threat, she worries that it is a real threat and that she will endanger herself more if she reports it, she is battling intense emotions (shame, anger, sadness, fear of more attacks, anxiety about not being believed) that reduce her available energy for reporting it, she doesn't have a witness to corroborate her account and help her with the administrative task of reporting it, she worries that she knows who did it and that she'll need to take them to court and she can't afford a lawyer, etc.

Many transgender individuals — unlike most Jews — also worry about being "outed" to their family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers — and to the police. Even if they are comfortable stating their transgender identity, their gender may be complicated to explain to others, and they may find it a hassle to explain why they believe an incident was a hateful attack on their gender. This may reduce their willingness to report hate crimes against themselves to the police. And, due to pressures they face from their other identities — their race, nationality, language, immigrant status — they may be further reluctant to interact with the police to report encountering hateful attacks based on their gender.

Therefore, in repeating the New York City statistic that appeared in the New York Times, I would be wary of misusing it to downplay the occurrence of hate crimes that are motivated by bias against Black and transgender people. We can combat anti-Semitism while also combatting other forms of racism and bigotry. In fact, we have to combat all kinds of hate simultaneously. Hate groups have multi-faceted agendas out of which their attacks grow. Deciding selectively which kinds of attacks are more important to each of us personally is missing the broader threat. We can't bat down visible, reported anti-Semitism without also batting down what those same hate groups are doing to other groups. If we don't care about all of it and support each other, we will still find ourselves targeted on whatever basis "they" come up with.

A new statistic from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism (CSHE) at California State University San Bernardino, as reported by LGBTQ Nation in August 2019, "found that hate crimes across the U.S. have risen by nine percent over the last year including against LGBTQ people, Jews and people of color." Indeed, "though crime overall in major cities declined in the last two years, bias-motivated crime rose."

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Zayn Malik doesn't identify as Muslim: "I don't believe any of it"

In the British Vogue, Giles Hattersley writes of Zayn Malik:

...it’s a simple “Zayn” these days, ever since the 25-year-old boyband survivor from Bradford with perfect hair and poptastic falsetto dispensed with his surname and went fully Cher. That was a year after he fled One Direction, in March 2015, when the world’s most successful group was at the hormone-addled apex of its fame. For a brief moment, Zayn was the YouTube generation’s answer to John Lennon (or Geri Halliwell, at least), devastating millions of fans across the globe with his shotgun exit, then thrilling them a year later with a record-breaking, Billboard-topping debut album. He moved to the States, clocked up billions of streams, dueted with Taylor Swift, shot campaigns for Versus and endured the peculiar menace of having a dozen paparazzi camped outside his door every day. He also became an international figurehead for biracial success and anti-Islamophobia. And I mentioned the hair, right?

While he's "routinely touted as Britain’s most famous Muslim," he told the interviewer that he believes in God, but not in Hell, and that he prefers to keep his beliefs private and wouldn't call himself a Muslim today. He simply wants to be "a good person" and "behave well," and he hopes that this will result in his being "treated well" so that "everything is going to go right" for him.

He says: "I don’t believe you need to eat a certain meat that’s been prayed over a certain way, I don’t believe you need to read a prayer in a certain language five times a day. I don’t believe any of it."

Some may see this as lending new meaning to the lyrics to his song "iT's YoU" (you can listen to it on Apple Music or buy it on iTunes):

I won't, I won't, I won't
Cover the scars
I'll let 'em bleed
So my silence
So my silence won't
Be mistaken for peace

That is, we cannot consent to let others continue to hurt us, and if they do hurt us, they cannot expect us to take it silently. When we acknowledge what is hurting, we may be seen arguing (not keeping the peace), but that argument is essential to honesty and survival. For some, this may describe how they feel affected by religion.

Saturday, November 10, 2018

LGBT people struggle to survive a purge in Tanzania

In Tanzania, the Dar es Salaam regional commissioner has asked the public to report gay people. "Give me their names," he said on Oct. 29. "My ad hoc team"—a committee of 17 police and media officials—"will begin to get their hands on them" in just one week. The next day, he reported that he'd already received over 100 names in over five thousand messages. Although the Tanzanian government clarified that this regional effort does not represent the national government's official policy, it was not clear if the national government intended to stop the Dar es Salaam regional purge.

The organization Jinsiangu, supported by the International AIDS Alliance (donate), has helped people relocate internationally to Nairobi, Kenya for their personal safety.

Background

Tanzanian law, an inheritance from British colonialism, punishes men who have sex with other men with 30-years-to-life in jail.

CNN reported:

"According to 2014 UNAIDS data, 17.6% of men who have sex with men in Tanzania are living with HIV — a rate more than four times higher than the 4.5% in the nation's general adult population. * * * Being forced into hiding also means people do not want to engage in any way with health services and will not test for infections or go to collect HIV treatment. People will avoid anything that will link them to being LGBT and subject to identification, [International HIV/AIDS Alliance executive director Christine] Stegling said."

Recently, LGBT organizations have been shuttered. In February 2017, Tanzania's deputy health minister claimed that homosexuality is not found among animals, only exists among people who live in cities, and is a social construct. The health ministry prohibited HIV/AIDS clinics from running their programs, and then arrested 13 people—including deporting three South African lawyers—who met to discuss how to challenge that new policy. The shutdown of the clinics and the arrest of the activists was done on the grounds that it is illegal to promote homosexuality.

According to a Guardian article: Geofrey Mashala, an activist who is "making a documentary about the Tanzanian LGBT community," said that, considering “all the steps we made as LGBT activists" over the past several years, "it’s like we have to start over again.” Erin Kilbride of the human rights group Front Line Defenders interviewed 80 LGBT people and sex workers earlier this year; "all but two said they had been sexually assaulted or raped by police in custody."

Monday, October 29, 2018

Ways one oughtn't respond to anti-Semitic domestic terrorism

On Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018, eleven Jews were murdered while worshipping in a synagogue in Pennsylvania. The President tweeted this:

Later that evening, the President appeared at a self-promotional rally and joked about nearly having canceled it — not because he believed the morning's tragedy warranted more attention or solemnity from him, but because standing in the rain to give a news conference about the attack had caused him to have a "bad hair day."

To cap off the evening, he tweeted:

By Monday, Oct. 29, the President returned to his usual authoritarian line that the media is the "enemy of the people." His press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, came up with a "both sides" explanation: "I think the president has had a number of moments of bringing the country together. Once again, I'll remind you that the very first thing the president did was condemn the attacker. And the very first thing the media did was blame the president." Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to the president, suggested that late-night television comedians in particular bore responsibility for triggering anti-Semitic violence. She Christian-splained that the Jews "were there [in the synagogue] because they're people of faith," that comedians have unfortunately made a culture in which it's usual "to make fun of anybody of faith, to constantly be making fun of people that express religion," and that what is needed is more religion in "the public square." (Diaspora Jews, on the whole, have always been really quite skeptical about religion in the public square.)

The President, for his part, took a different tack in claiming that he had not meant to generalize about "the media," but had only meant to refer to the media that is "fake."

Meanwhile, the Vice President invited clergy of the Messianic Jewish religion — a religious movement that most Jews recognize as Christian and that they resent for being culturally appropriative and theologically deceptive in their deliberate mimickry of Judaism — to publicly speak about the matter. The Messianic Jew prayed for Republican victory.

Friday, October 12, 2018

Logical errors in 'Gender Identity and the Invisible Pasta God'

Some words about Stephen Measure's satirical short story Gender Identity and the Invisible Pasta God.

Spaghetti in a colander.
Image by "kalhh" on Pixabay

Measure currently sorts his writing into three topics on his website.

  • "Same-sex sexuality," further explained thus: "Sexual identity is an anti-moral weapon, nothing more."
  • "Gender identity," defined as "a religious belief that I don't believe in."
  • "Dehumanization," or, what he fears the people he opposes will do to him.

If these sentences are a little difficult to parse, just use the takeaway that his position is basically anti-LGBT. He maintains that everyone (or nearly everyone) is physically either male or female, that people cannot or should not claim a gender identity based on their subjective feelings rather than their physical sex, and that people should not engage in sexual activity with members of the same sex. He doesn't seem especially interested or curious in LGBT people's beliefs or lives, and his main concern is that he should not be accused of bigotry for holding this position.

Had I known that Gender Identity and the Invisible Pasta God is an anti-transgender rant, I wouldn't have paid three dollars for the eBook. But the author's stance was not obvious from the book description, so I bought and read it, and here we are.

The book is a brief discourse (about 40 pages) against the idea that people should respect each other's gender identity. It begins as a fictional story focusing on a character so juvenile, awkward, and obnoxious that my burning question from the very first page was not "What will happen next in this story?" but rather "Can anything possibly redeem this character, or at least help me relate to him, over the course of this story?" The answer to the latter question turned out to be "no." There wasn't a real story anyway. The main character's existence is a mere plot device because he sits in a chair for the entire book — wearing a colander on his head — and is lectured to, along with an audience full of passive people wearing the same headgear, by two unnamed white men.

If the lecture were good, that would count for something. It is not. It is a straw man. It has enough material for a weak op-ed, and it is painfully stretched across dozens of pages. Its talking points are repeated without gaining force. In a debate, a lecturing character (the one with whom Measure does not sympathize) fatigues and essentially drops out of the argument, so the remaining character, Measure's champion, wins by default.

The anti-transgender proponent is "Goatee man" (a manly man, you see) and the pro-transgender devil's advocate is "Ponytail man" (a hipster fop). Each of their arguments is undeveloped, both on a philosophical level and in the sense that the proponents don't have relevant personal history (after all, the author didn't even bother to name the characters). Goatee man has at least mastered his own rudimentary argument on a high school level. Ponytail man, by contrast, is thoroughly inarticulate. Upon being questioned, he quickly decompensates into cursing, complaining about being tone-policed, babbling nonsense, and — in the (ableist) coup de grâce — drooling on himself.

The debate is over people who assert gender identities different from the genders originally assigned to them based on their physical sex. Ponytail man's premise is that everyone should respect everyone else's asserted gender identity, including by allowing everyone to enter the bathroom (men's or women's) of their choice. Ponytail man insists that he is secular and that his opinion is based on science. He refers to "brain scan" studies that have shown that some transgender people exhibit brain activity more typical of the gender with which they identify and less typical of the gender assigned to them at birth, suggesting that gender has a scientifically demonstrable reality in the mind or perhaps that the brain has a sex, and that mental gender identity can be independent of reproductive anatomy.

Goatee man, for his part, says that he sometimes maintains beliefs based on science "because they can be proven to me" and other times based on religion "because I choose to believe them." Later, he says: "Science is shared through proof. Religion is shared through persuasion." These two descriptions of religion are potentially contradictory. If religion is something one believes by choice and without proof, that seems like belief on a whim — and then how is one ever supposed to persuade anyone else of this belief? If Goatee man maintains that there is a way to persuade others of one's own religious beliefs, then he ought to explain why he is not willing to listen to Ponytail man. Perhaps he would say that he finds Ponytail man an inarticulate and ineffective champion of his own cause. Fine, then, but then the readers of this story deserve to hear from a better representative, and perhaps Goatee man ought to seek one out. It really isn't fair or consistent for Goatee man to say that people can (in principle) be persuaded to adopt someone else's religious belief, but that Goatee man personally will never and indeed no one else should ever adopt Ponytail man's religious beliefs simply because they are religious. It is self-contradictory for Goatee man to take those positions.

We may debate whether "science" and "religion" are the best names for these two categories of truth-claims. A bigger question, though, is why we would limit ourselves to only two options. Having set up this false dichotomy, Goatee man claims to be more expert than Ponytail man at embracing and analyzing both types of truth-claim. He seems interested in championing science as preferable to religion, but other times he claims he does religion better than his interlocutor insofar as he (Goatee man) is at least conscious of when he is doing religion and not science.

Also, Goatee man bases his inquiry more on his consciousness of his own positions and on his own self-assessed coherence, and not at all on empathy or respect for others (neither on his own claim to have it, nor on anyone else's testimony that he has it), which makes his argument rather narcissistic. He's talking about being smart without even trying to be attentive to how his words affect others. And, insofar as there's no peer review process (he hasn't asked anyone for critical feedback), his philosophy touting the importance of science isn't ultimately very scientific, either.

Goatee man points out that we do not use brain scans to determine everyone's subjective gender identity and that even Ponytail man would never use a discordant brain scan to disallow anyone from enjoying the gender identity of their choice. The counterargument should have been that science can show trends and probabilities, and not necessarily unwavering correlations. So if, for example, studies show that Bolivians and Malaysians are on average shorter than Dutch and Canadians, in the real world this does not mean that we must either be willing to inform all tall people that they are Dutch or Canadian and all short people that they are Bolivian or Malaysian and that our only alternative to this blanket assumption would be to discard all height measurements so that we don't know anything about average heights by group. But this world of false alternatives is Goatee man's position. He sees no way to reflect the incontrovertible reality that some Bolivians and Malaysians are tall and some Dutch and Canadians are short. Following his logic, it would be unscientific to say so, because the results of a scientific study must work for everyone and be able to prove or disprove what any given individual is.

Also: Goatee man doesn't explain why he sometimes chooses science and other times religion. Does he flip a coin or follow a whim? Or is there a meta-rule by which he decides what beliefs require scientific reasoning? If he lacks scientific evidence, does he form a religious belief, and if he gains scientific evidence is he obligated to abandon that belief?

Goatee man compares gender identity to doctrines of "resurrection or reincarnation" or to being a "prophet." This is not a good comparison. Gender identity — considered as a personal belief, state of mind, language, or behavior that can be successfully lived out in the real world especially if others support it — is very much unlike a factual claim about something supernatural that cannot exist and cannot even be coherently described. As a secular person, Ponytail man should have responded that bodies can't be raised from the dead, souls can't be put in new bodies, and people can't prophesy the future, but that individuals really can live in more than one gender role over the course of their lives. That's one reason to think it isn't "religious" to acknowledge others' self-asserted gender identity.

Goatee man keeps trying on this point. He says: "The word 'prophet' is a real word with a real meaning — just like the words 'man' and 'woman' are real words with real meanings." But the question is not whether words have definitions. All words — at least the ones used in debates, the ones we encounter in life, the ones we encounter in this book — are real. All words have meanings. It's not useful to compare randomly selected Word A with Word B just because they both have entries in the dictionary. A better question is what kind of words they are and how they are used. And what I see is that the word "prophet" is unlike the words "man" and "woman" in various ways. If their similarities amount to "hey, these are both words!" and no inventory is taken of their dissimilarities, I see no reason to proceed further with this line of inquiry.

When Goatee man says, "Gender identity is either a religious belief or it is a delusion," is he inadvertently drawing a parallel between religious beliefs and delusions? As previously mentioned, "religious belief" isn't well defined in this book. It is taken to mean, vaguely, things we choose to believe for unscientific reasons. Delusions, then, seem to fit the bill. That makes this sentence potentially more of a comparison than a contrast.

Goatee man acknowledges the existence of intersex people, but dismisses them as having "a really crappy birth defect." This, clearly, does not display willingness to learn something about gender from those people.

Ponytail man, in perhaps his most articulate moment, says that gender is a "social construct." This is the right direction in which to take his argument so that he can begin to answer Goatee man's concerns. Unfortunately, he, as an inarticulate character, is unable to take it any further.

Even if we were to grant Goatee man's claims that someone's gender identity is an unprovable assertion (thus a "religious belief") while their physical sex is easily provable (thus a "scientific belief"), that doesn't in itself provide any justification for the social agenda of sorting people in public bathrooms by their physical sex. Why not let them self-sort by their gender identity? Alternatively, why do we bother sorting at all? The presumed importance of the sorting, since it is not argued for at all, is certainly unproven within this text — and, therefore, the presumed importance of the sorting seems to be a religious belief, according to Goatee man's own definitions. This is not minor. This is foundational to the entire purpose of the book. If there is a debate about how people decide who is allowed to use men's and women's bathrooms, and if we are asked to seriously entertain the possibility that people's ideas about their own gender are full of unproven or unprovable nonsense (simply because we haven't been shown a decent explanation of gender identity within this book), it seems we must also consider that our assumed need to strictly gender the bathrooms and to control other people's access to them is itself unproven or unprovable nonsense (as we haven't been shown a decent argument for why it's important to control bathroom access, either). If regulating bathroom access is a "religious belief," can people who don't want to regulate or be regulated go ahead and ignore those who persist in such religion? Can we ask them to keep their religion to themselves?

Goatee man says: "Strip off everyone's clothes in this room, and I'll wager I can identify each and every person's gender." There are two problems here. First, this imagery is violent and it may be an ad baculum fallacy (appeal to force) or perhaps an ad verecundiam (appeal to authority). I have no doubt that, if Goatee man saw me naked, he would quickly issue an opinion (correct or not) about my sex/gender. That he is capable of forming instant judgments in service of whatever argument he wants to make is not a question in my mind. I would prefer, rather, to respond but there is no situation in which it is OK for you to strip me naked and pass judgments on my body; in delivering that response, however, I expect that he would, if I am to be realistic about the situation, somehow interpret my refusal to submit to his judgment as my conceding his point. If it works that way, he is committing some fallacy based on his own presumed authority to make violent threats to win arguments. Second, since Goatee man has acknowledged that intersex people exist, from a scientific perspective he does need to consider the implications of his inability to identify literally "each and every person's gender." If there is even one person whose physical sex is confusing or unapparent to him, he has encountered a problem for his argument. Plus, sometimes the "really crappy birth defect" is not in the person at whom one gazes but resides rather in one's own eyesight. I believe there is a Bible verse about that.

This, too, is a significant point. It's not just that one sentence is phrased in a crass manner. This is a proposal that if we could examine others' naked bodies then we could make an authoritative answer about how we think they should behave, and this wrong-headed idea opens the heart of how and why a social construct does what it does. Reality: It is never appropriate to order strangers stripped naked so that you can determine what gender you think they are or tell them what they should do about their gender. Because of this social agreement, we do not use information about strangers' apparent physical sex to tell them what bathroom they should enter. Instead, we let each person decide for themselves. The person who enters the bathroom is the person who decides, in that moment, where they best fit — men's or women's room. We allow the social construct of gender to perform its function. The social construct operates more gently than a forced visual or tactile inspection of someone's anatomy. The social construct works reliably well; people sort themselves into genders that are, on the whole, reasonable for them, and there are not problems in public bathrooms caused by the gender self-selection. So it is a non-starter for this book to attempt to shut down the idea of gender identity as a social construct and to attempt to dismiss it as non-scientific or anti-scientific. In fact, we can demonstrate how the social construct works. We can also, via thought experiment, see that a more "scientific" approach (if it involves treating people as specimens to be examined and classified) would likely produce social conflict and negative feelings and furthermore that it is not obvious what problem it would be intended to solve or what purpose it would serve.

We might ask if it is a "religious belief" to acknowledge and respect anything anyone says about their identity. Someone might claim to be Christian, left-handed, straight, introverted, to have grown up in a certain cultural background, to prefer apples over pears, and so forth. Normally we wouldn't call such claims "religious"; after all, no appeal to God is made. And while these identities may involve social constructs, the issue I care more about at this moment revolves around simply believing what people say about themselves and trusting that you will all be happier if you respect each other. This objection — that the topic of "religious beliefs" or "social constructs" isn't specific to gender, but is really much broader, and that the author's argument (via the character of Goatee man) seems to break down when it is broadened — is never considered in the book.

Another way of phrasing this: Is the belief that "gender identity is a religious belief" itself a religious belief? This is a meta-question, but it's not purely academic. It is important and needs to be central to considering this book's arguments. Goatee man is using the label "religious" to mean scientifically unproven and/or adhered to for no particular reason; he is using it, it seems, to partially devalue the beliefs he labels "religious," maintaining that religious claims carry little or no weight with someone who simply chooses not to believe in them. So we need to pay attention to whether there is a regress of things we don't have to believe. Goatee man says "gender identity is a religious belief." But why should I believe that? Is he making a scientific claim with those words, or a claim that all rational people are bound to accept? And if his claim about gender identity (that no one else should be socially obligated to acknowledge or respect one's asserted gender identity) is true, then why doesn't it apply to other asserted identities such as the ones I mentioned earlier? Goatee man is using the accusation of "religion" to justify not listening to certain bracketed beliefs of Ponytail man. Goatee man needs to consider the possibility that someone will put brackets around some of his sentences (specifically, the things Goatee man says about Ponytail man), label Goatee man's pronouncements "religious," and then not listen to him. This is a real problem for a book that amounts to a sort of manifesto predicated on waving one's hand and thereby dismissing other people's frameworks and worldviews as nonsense. Someone is going to try waving their hand to dismiss the entire manifesto as nonsense. The manifesto has to be ready for that. It has to have a response. It doesn't. It is a "religious" manifesto, to use its own language against it. And it is weakly religious, to use its own assessment standard against it, as long as it remains unconscious of its own religious nature. That is to say, it would be more robust if it were at least aware that it doesn't have rational support for its position.

If you go back far enough to investigate the foundation of any belief, you find that, at some point, you don't really have and can't get justification. That's because, if you go back far enough, you must question your standards for justification. There's no way to justify the method by which you justify other things. Everyone has to start somewhere. We pick our starting line and move on from there. Regarding sex and gender, one has to observe that some people actually do modify their bodies and/or choose gender roles other than that which their parents or the rest of society has assigned to them. Then a question presents itself: Should these people's choices and self-identity be respected and affirmed or disrespected and denied? Should we allow people to tell us what gender they are, or should we tell them what gender we want them to be? There may not be a way to fully and solidly justify one's approach here, but there are some good reasons to prefer the first approach; they are the same general reasons why acknowledgment and respect are usually better than their alternatives. More specifically in this case, the first approach allows everyone to use a public bathroom without argument or fuss because each person worries about himself/herself/themselves, pees, and ignores the rest of the world, while the second approach involves multiple people trying to manage one person's behavior in contradictory ways with complicated arguments within a very short timeline because the people who are arguing (especially the one who's being argued at) have to pee, and the argument can easily be construed as harassment of, incite assault against, and cause social damage for the gender-variant person who is the most vulnerable person and the only intended target in this situation. That may not be a full justification for choosing the first approach, but it's certainly a decent reason. I'm saying it's unfair to accuse the first approach of being unconsciously "religious" (insofar as it lacks justification) and to praise the second approach as being more "scientific." Both may lack some kind of ultimate justification. Supporters of each may have varying degrees of awareness of that. The author's defense of the second approach, unfortunately, seems unconscious of the second approach's own frailty, limits, and risks. He is not fully owning the underlying agendas and consequences of deliberately disrespecting other people's gender identity. Those agendas and consequences, in my view, have little to do with science.

Goatee man complains that "you decided that with gender — and only with gender — magical words can overrule physical reality itself. What gives you the right to make that declaration? Who do you think you are? God?" There are a couple problems here. First, Ponytail man didn't initially say that gender is the only example of this kind of social construct. That's a straw man trap that Goatee man set for him, a coercive Socratic interrogation to which he succumbed far too quickly and easily. The claim that Goatee man makes here — that allies of transgender people treat gender identity as a social construct like no other social construct — may not be true. Considering gender identity as a unique type of social construct is not, in fact, essential to the concept or behavior of respecting transgender people. Ponytail man outwardly agreed with Goatee man's accusation, basically saying sure, OK, gender is unique among all social constructs, but Ponytail man is a poor advocate for his position. Second, everyone uses labels and constructs, and that doesn't mean we think we are God. Making clear, strong assertions should not result in a charge of hubris. (After all, from a scientific perspective, it's preferable for a hypothesis to be worded clearly so that it can be confirmed or disproven. It actually can be less arrogant to make a firm declaration because in doing so you are leaving yourself vulnerable to being disproven, rather than equivocating and hedging your bets.) Ponytail man makes hardly any coherent declarations and is drooling on himself, and Goatee man still accuses him of hubris. This is unfair as an interpersonal matter between the two fictional characters, and more significantly from the philosophical perspective it does not amount to a persuasive argument in favor of Goatee man's position nor, indeed, a persuasive argument about anything.

It is hopefully apparent by now, but remains important to explicitly point out, that no transgender characters were allowed to speak for themselves in this book. That would violate Goatee man's ethic of goatee-splaining. Of course, if there had been a transgender character representation in the story, it would simply be the author Stephen Measure's idea of a transgender person, so that would hardly amount to real transgender people speaking for themselves. It would, however, be a step toward the acknowledgment that transgender people's voices ought to be considered in philosophical or political arguments about them. If one is uncomfortable writing a transgender character, one probably shouldn't be writing a story that argues how such people should be interpreted and treated in real life, either.

Nor does it take atheists seriously. Setting the Goatee man/Ponytail man debate in a Pastafarian (atheist) gathering hall, and having the fictional atheist leadership in the room behave ridiculously and side with the obviously useless Ponytail man, is just a dig against atheism within the context of the story. This story proves nothing about real atheists' beliefs or reasoning capabilities.

To wrap up: This isn't a serious book. In the positive sense of "unserious," the tone is playful. In the negative sense of "unserious," it's impossible for me to entertain the author's arguments. If this were an essay, it would fail. Dressing it up as a story doesn't save it.

By now, I have surely expended more than three dollars' worth of effort in analyzing these problems, in addition to having spent my literal three dollars. (Someone now is likely imagining that he wants to strip my wallet out of my pants and have a look before he believes me about what I've spent.) I don't know if I've proven, or at least been persuasive about, my points. After all, I'm surprised I had to make these points in the first place; they seem blazingly obvious to me. But, at the very least, I think I've demonstrated that I can respond to an argument without "dehumanizing" the author, so perhaps I shall not wind up on the third topic section of his website. I did indeed point out that one sentence was phrased in a way that might be interpreted as a bit violent, but this was not an attempt to place a blanket label of bad-personness on the author, but simply a call-out of one concrete instance of writing/argumentation. If he wishes to maintain (as he does on his website) that it is fair game for him to criticize others' behaviors of which he disapproves, then he should grant that it is fair game for me to criticize his behavior in writing this book. If he does not even see himself as dehumanizing other people when he tells them what he thinks they really are, then he should have no reason to think that I am dehumanizing him when I tell him what I hear when he tells me what he thinks I really am. I am not even telling him what I think he is. I am telling him how I hear and interpret his words about me. That is not dehumanization of him. That is telling him how to avoid injuring or offending others.

It might, you know, be considered a low blow — but certainly not a dehumanizing blow — to mention that I spotted four instances of the noun "identity" as a typo for the intended verb "identify." It is not enough to rely on automatic spellcheck; writers should hire a transgender human whose eyes can see what their own eyes might not. I tend to identify (not identity) typos when I read. If the writer is going to strip me down and say, hey, I see a Transsexual where I expected to see a Female and it makes me unhappy, then I reserve the right to reply that, yes, I, too, see a 't' where I expected an 'f' and it is similarly disconcerting. If I am supposed to pretend not to notice typos in the very words I paid three dollars to read, then I expect that other people will keep their judgmental eyes out of my pants into which, by the way, they haven't paid me bubkis to look. Anyway, in case I haven't made it clear, it wasn't the recurring typo that irked me about the book. It was everything else.

Saturday, October 6, 2018

On the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh

Peter Beinart wrote in The Atlantic on Sept. 27, 2018: "It’s remarkable: The more women accuse of Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, the more committed to his confirmation conservatives become." It's illogical, he pointed out, since

even if you consider these newer allegations less credible than the initial charge by Christine Blasey Ford, how can they make you more committed to Kavanaugh’s nomination? Assign a percentage chance that Swetnick’s accusations are true, a percentage chance that Ramirez’s charges are true, and a percentage chance that Ford’s allegations are true. Taken together, the additional charges make it more — not less — likely that Kavanaugh committed sexual misdeeds.

The answer to this puzzle is Trumpism. Trumpism, at its core, is a rebellion against changes in American society that undermine traditional hierarchies. It’s based on the belief that these changes, rather than promoting fairness for historically oppressed groups, actually promote 'political correctness': the oppression of white, native-born Christian men.

One of the Republican fears, as Beinart explains, is that Kavanaugh's confirmation is a sort of litmus test for whether and how men still hold power. If Kavanaugh has to answer for the accusations against him, many more men may be knocked off their pedestals, too — and Republicans simply will not let that happen. Republicans also fear that liberals are winning the culture wars and that "conservatives are now called bigots for opposing gay marriage — for retaining a view that was mainstream and bipartisan not long ago." If accusations against Kavanaugh are the beginning of a new standard, it explains "why the new charges are making many conservatives more devoted to Kavanaugh, not less." Each new allegation is an opportunity to surrender, which would make future battles more difficult; they prefer to hold their ground each time. He said:

Liberals fear that if they lose the Kavanaugh fight, minorities, women, and the poor will lose basic rights. Conservatives, by contrast, fear a kind of cultural delegitimization — a liberal rewriting of America’s moral code so that conservatives are forever deemed too sexist or racist to hold jobs like associate justice of the Supreme Court.

Rachel Reilich wrote on Sept. 28, 2018:

I believe Dr. Ford visibly struggles to hide her feelings because she needs to protect herself: she is, at heart, a person in pain.

In contrast, Judge Kavanaugh, has little trouble blubbering on the stand. He is not someone defined by pain, but rather someone who’s had a bad couple weeks. His primary emotion, revealed through gritted teeth and mottled cheeks, is anger. Not pain. Rage. That classic defense against shame.


During Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-MN, asked Brett Kavanaugh if he had ever blacked out after drinking alcohol. He didn't answer the question, and twice tried to turn the question back at her.

"Was there ever a time when you drank so much that you couldn't remember what happened or part of what happened the night before?"
"[hemming and hawing] Now, I remember what happened and — I think you've probably had beers, Senator? and, so —"
"So you're saying there's never been a case where you drank so much that you didn't remember what happened the night before or part of what happened?"
"It's — you're asking about, yeah, blackout, I don't know — have you?"
"Could you answer the question, Judge? I just — so, you, that's not happened? Is that your answer?"
"Yeah, and I'm curious if you have."
"I have no drinking problem, Judge."
"Yeah, nor do I."

Robert Post, the former dean of Yale Law School where Kavanaugh received his law degree, said that Kavanaugh has been "a casual acquaintance" of his for a decade and that he listened to Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing "with something approaching unbelief."

With calculation and skill, Kavanaugh stoked the fires of partisan rage and male entitlement. He had apparently concluded that the only way he could rally Republican support was by painting himself as the victim of a political hit job. He therefore offered a witches’ brew of vicious unfounded charges, alleging that Democratic members of the Senate Judicial Committee were pursuing a vendetta on behalf of the Clintons. If we expect judges to reach conclusions based solely on reliable evidence, Kavanaugh’s savage and bitter attack demonstrated exactly the opposite sensibility.

I was shell-shocked. This was not the Brett Kavanaugh I thought I knew. Having come so close to confirmation, Kavanaugh apparently cared more about his promotion than about preserving the dignity of the Supreme Court he aspired to join.

Post added: "For as long as Kavanaugh sits on the court, he will remain a symbol of partisan anger...No one who felt the force of that anger could possibly believe that Kavanaugh might actually be a detached and impartial judge." Indeed: "His very presence will undermine the court’s claim to legitimacy; it will damage the nation’s commitment to the rule of law."

Kavanaugh's performance at his own confirmation hearings generated 83 ethics complaints, which "a specially appointed federal panel of judges" decided they had to dismiss all the complaints because, "while the complaints 'are serious,' there is no existing authority that allows lower court judges to investigate or discipline Supreme Court justices." In other words, they didn't believe they actually had the authority to do the thing they were appointed to do. "That is, in part, because the Supreme Court was established by the Constitution, while the lower courts were established by Congress. Some reformers have long urged Congress to enact a code of conduct for the Supreme Court and to put in place some sort of disciplinary mechanism short of impeachment."

The following January, Democrats introduced the "For the People Act" which would have instructed the creation of a code of conduct (albeit an unenforceable one). It passed the Democratic-controlled House along party lines and did not come to a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate.


The satirical magazine The Onion joked that, for many men, the Kavanaugh hearing has "dredged up painful denial-related memories, [and] experts urged the U.S. populace Monday to be extra sensitive to those men who are currently being forced to relive the trauma of wanting a thing but not automatically getting that thing."


The vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee to confirm Kavanaugh can be viewed here.

Immediately after Sen. Susan Collins delivered a speech explaining why she would vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Mark Joseph Stern wrote for Slate:

"The Republican senator declared herself undecided until the last possible minute, but it now appears that this very public ambivalence was a charade. Collins’ address started as a bad-faith attack on Democrats, then transformed into an astoundingly naïve defense of Kavanaugh’s jurisprudence. It concluded with a condescending sop to Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault, suggesting that she’d misidentified her alleged assailant. The speech might as well have been written by Mitch McConnell and Ed Whelan. It was an embarrassment and a travesty."

Stern made the following key points in his article.

He explained that "the Judicial Crisis Network, a dark-money group funded largely by a single anonymous donor" which previously spent $7 million to oppose Obama's Supreme Court pick Merrick Garland (who was never confirmed) and $10 million to support Trump's pick Neil Gorsuch (who was confirmed), just spent $12 million to support Kavanaugh. The liberal organization Demand Justice, by contrast, spent only $5 million to oppose Kavanaugh. Thus, he says, Sen. Collins was "hypocritical" to complain about the political opposition to Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh ruled that religious employers could limit their employees' access to contraception (Priests for Life v. HHS). Collins presented this ruling as a political compromise, which Stern believes to be an inaccurate description, as it delivered to religious conservatives "everything they wanted." Kavanaugh also sided with the Trump administration said that a judge's permission wasn't enough to allow an undocumented minor in federal custody to have an abortion (Garza v. Hargan), indicating that he may not follow precedent on abortion rights.

Some Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices, like David Souter, have supported Roe v. Wade. But that, Stern explains, is exactly "why the Republican legal establishment’s refrain is 'No More Souters.' It’s why the Federalist Society created a network of conservative lawyers unified by their opposition to Roe. It’s why Donald Trump, who campaigned on overturning Roe, outsourced judicial nominations to the Federalist Society. And it’s why Kavanaugh, a Federalist Society loyalist, was selected for this seat." Sen. Collins' expressed hope that Kavanaugh will be one of the Republican appointees who supports Roe is thus disingenuous.

WATCH: Kavanaugh's statement in late September 2018 responding to accusations of sexual assault, described by some as a "tantrum."

WATCH: Collins' speech on Oct. 5, 2018 saying that she will vote to confirm him.


Brandi Miller, a campus minister and justice program director, published an opinion column on Oct. 7 that said:

This has been a week of tantrums. The last 10 days have been a picture of what it looks and feels like when white men in positions of power feel themselves threatened by a loss of the authority they feel entitled to....The past few days (years, really) may symbolize a battle lost for people who are hoping to dismantle white supremacy (and its commitment to patriarchy) and move toward a reality where the rights of women and nonbinary folks, people of color and people at the intersections matter. It seems that the more angry and petulant that powerful white men become, the more they get what they want....When the vision of white-male-dominated America is thwarted or threatened in any way, the backlash is nothing short of desperate and infantile. They’ll do whatever it takes to maintain control over their way of life, even if it means putting unqualified and equally petulant people in positions of power. CNN’s Van Jones called this phenomenon 'whitelash.'

A Boston Globe editorial on Oct. 7, following Kavanaugh's confirmation, said that "the ugliness of the last two weeks will be litigated again in the midterm elections Nov. 6. Democrats and Republicans are spinning very different narratives about what just happened in Washington, and voters will, in a sense, be asked to pick which reflect the values of Americans." It added: "The [Republican] party has convinced itself that it’s tapping into a national unease with the #metoo movement, a fear that it has become, as they say, a witch hunt. It cannot have been an accident that the party trotted out Susan Collins, the political heir of Margaret Chase Smith, to defend Kavanaugh in her climactic speech Friday afternoon, as if to liken the allegations to McCarthyism."


2022 update: when the Supreme Court's draft decision on abortion, one that would overturn Roe v. Wade if it were finalized, was leaked, Susan Collins released a statement in what appears to me to be feigned surprise: "If this...is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office."

In a June 24, 2022 statmeent, Collins said the SCOTUS's overturning of Roe was "inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me..."

Monday, September 17, 2018

U.S. on trial for responsibility for climate change: 'Juliana v. United States'

On Oct. 29, "a judge in Oregon will begin hearing a case brought against the United States government on behalf of 21 young people, supported by the non-profit organization Our Children’s Trust, who allege that the authorities’ active contributions to the climate crisis violate their constitutional rights," as Peter Singer wrote for Project Syndicate in 2018.

Singer said:

"The first climate litigation to win a positive decision was Urgenda Foundation v. The State of Netherlands, in which a Dutch court ruled, in 2015, that the government must ensure that the country’s emissions are cut by one quarter within five years. In response, the Dutch government did step up its actions to reduce emissions, but it also appealed the judgment. In October, The Hague Court of Appeals will deliver its verdict on that appeal.

Important as Urgenda has been, Juliana v. United States is by far the most significant climate case to date.

* * *

If we take the view that every person on this planet is entitled to an equal share of the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb our greenhouse-gas emissions, then the US is emitting 3.5 times its fair share. ... Moreover, the principle of equal per capita emissions is generous to the old industrialized countries, because it ignores their historical responsibility for the past emissions that have led to the situation we face today."

On Monday, Oct. 29, groups will rally in support of the youth plaintiffs at federal courthouses around the United States. (Example: Moakley courthouse in Boston) They are using the hashtags
#YouthVGov
#TrialoftheCentury
#JusticeforEachGeneration

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Evangelicals disappointed in Trump's character

President Trump is perhaps the least demonstrably Christian U.S. president ever. When he and First Lady Melania Trump attended the funeral service for George H. W. Bush on Dec. 5, 2018, they did not recite the Apostle's Creed that was printed in the program. Seated next to them, Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton recited the prayer.

But how do contemporary Christians perceive him?

It can be tricky to pin down what evangelicals think of Trump, in part because it's an impermanent demographic based on self-identification.

It is well known that 81% of self-identified white evangelicals told exit pollsters they voted for Trump in 2016. However, as Napp Nazworth points out, this self-identified group may not correlate to the people who actually attend church or the people who don't vote. There may be many churchgoing Americans who aren't active voters but nevertheless don't like Trump.

The most often cited number when it comes to evangelical support for Trump is "81%," which is likely what Falwell had in mind. But that number comes with many caveats: 1) it only includes white evangelicals, 2) it only includes self-identified evangelicals, which means non-churchgoers and people who don't hold evangelical beliefs could be included, 3) non-voters were not polled and so their numbers are not included in the denominator, and 4) it was based upon exit polls, which are among the least reliable polls.

It's important to note the decline in Christian influence in the United States. Many commentators have suggested that Christians are making a kind of "deal" with the man who happens to have gained power, someone who — just perhaps — they otherwise would not have admired.

Nina Burleigh wrote for Newsweek on April 16, 2018 that white evangelicals have experienced a sharp demographic decline over the last decade. Burleigh attributes this to their children "leaving the faith in droves over its anti-LGBT and anti-science positions"; today, 92 percent of white evangelicals are over age 30. "During the 2016 primary season, white evangelicals were largely divided in their opinion of Trump...But once Republicans nominated him, his favorability among white evangelicals jumped to 61 percent in September 2016...Now, according to a poll conducted in late March [2018], after the Stormy Daniels story was widely discussed, support has risen to a record 75 percent." This suggests that this demographic is substantially unconcerned "by his lawyer’s hush money to Stormy Daniels," "revelations that the married President had a year-long affair with an adult film actress after First Lady Melania gave birth to their son Barron," and "shady business deals". After all, as Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels wrote in Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, "A great many of his supporters were thrilled to hear white Christian America forcefully defended against its perceived enemies. Those were their identities. He was their hero. Whether he got the facts right did not matter."

Angie Maxwell wrote in the Washington Post in July 2019 that the Republican Party's late 20th-century "Southern strategy" has "finally come to fruition, and it is still working today. The GOP’s partisan conversion of Southern white evangelicals is so complete that no longer must a Republican candidate hold authentic religious beliefs to secure their support. Nowhere is this clearer than in Southern white evangelical support for Donald Trump. Indeed, only 38 percent of white evangelicals living in the South identified Trump as a Christian, but 84 percent of them still voted for him."

White evangelicals "went from being the least likely to the most likely to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality had nothing to do with public service," an article in the New York Times said in June 2018, referencing a September 2017 article in the paper.

As an example of how Trump merges his lifelong interpersonal habits with his policy: On December 13, 2019, reporter Bob Woodward interviewed Trump, who said he instantly had a good feeling about North Korea's dictator Kim Jong Un. Trump said, as Woodward quoted him in his book Rage: "You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it's all going to happen. It doesn't take you 10 minutes, and it doesn't take you six weeks. It's like, whoa. Okay. You know? It takes somewhat less than a second."

John Pavlovitz wrote a searing indictment of the inconsistency of Trump's evangelical supporters. In January 2018, he wrote an open letter addressed to "White Evangelicals," berating them:

For eight years [during the Obama administration] they watched you relentlessly demonize a black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity.

* * *

you never once suggested that God placed him where he was,
you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family,
you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities,
you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance,
you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy,
your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership,
your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him,
you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure.

* * *

And yet you give carte blanche to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth — that the mind boggles.

* * *

They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities.
They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus.
They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself.
They see that all you’re really interested in doing, is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it.
They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus — not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth.

Ross Douthat wrote for the New York Times in September 2018 that a new survey by the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins for the Voter Study Group found that whether a Trump voter attends church predicted their views on race. Among Trump voters who never go to church, only half had positive feelings about Black people, and a quarter said their own whiteness was "very important" to their identity. Among Trump voters who frequently go to church, 71 percent had positive feelings about Black people, and only 9 percent said their own whiteness was "very important" to their identity. While the religious and secular groups in the survey had similar incomes, the secular people were "less likely to have college degrees, less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced; they’re also less civically engaged, less satisfied with their neighborhoods and communities, and less trusting and optimistic in general." (Emily Ekins wrote a separate article about it, concluding that "encouraging conservatives to disengage from religion...may in fact make it even harder for left and right to meet in a more compassionate middle.") But why did the churchgoing people vote for Trump, if they disagree with him about race? It seems they made "a pragmatic bet that his policies on abortion and religious liberty were worth living with his Caligulan personal life and racial demagoguery." Early Christianity made such a bet with the Roman emperor Constantine. However, with Trump, it's "the reverse sort of situation: A Christian community trying to make the best of its decline, and allying with a leader whose core appeal depends upon and possibly furthers the de-Christianization of conservatism....it’s hard to see how it can reverse de-Christianization, and easy to see how it might accelerate it."

Others have a different interpretation. Neil J. Young, author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics, notes the study's conclusion that "religious participation may serve a moderating function in our politics" [emphasis mine] and he clarifies that he believes that "white evangelicals are no moderating force. They are the core of our extremist president’s support." [emphasis mine] Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, an Episcopalian, and an openly gay man running as a Democratic candidate for President in 2020, said in an April 2019 television interview that evangelicals' "hypocrisy is unbelievable" when it comes to their support for Trump.

Paula White, the "spiritual adviser" to Trump, who said a prayer at his inauguration and who formed a White House evangelical advisory council, "has ratcheted up support among evangelicals for the president’s hard-line immigration policies and used her Facebook following of more than 3 million to champion the idea that God has blessed Trump’s plans," according to the Washington Post. When challenged with the proposition that Jesus was a refugee, she once answered, that Jesus had done nothing illegal. "If he had broke the law, then he would have been sinful and he would not have been our Messiah." (Other Christians have challenged this interpretation, as Jesus was, famously, executed.) When she spoke at the rally in June 2019 at which he announced his reelection campaign, she told the crowd, "let every demonic network who has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus!” she prayed. She added: "I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy from the enemy — every strategy — and he will fulfill his calling and his destiny."

Whether or not conservatism today is stripping Christianity of its religious content, it is giving it power, and this does reverse the decline of the influence of Christian institutions. Katherine Stewart, author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children wrote in a May 2018 op-ed for the New York Times:

"There is a story going around, on both the left and the right, that America’s 'true believers' are a declining force and are now conducting desperate, defensive maneuvers in a secularizing society. But that is not how the leaders of the Christian Nationalist movement see it — because it is not true. They played a key role in putting President Trump in power. They are protecting him now, as they giddily collect their winnings in legislatures and in the courts. Why should they doubt that they can pull off the same trick again?

What Christian nationalists know — and many of us have yet to learn — is that you don’t need a majority to hijack a modern democracy. You just need a sizable minority, marinating in its grievances, willing to act as a bloc, and impervious to correction by fact or argument. Make this group feel good about itself by making other people feel bad about themselves, and dominion may well be in reach."


Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, planned ten "campaign-style rallies" throughout California in late May and early June 2018 in advance of that state's primary election. The goal is to turn out the evangelical vote. Other kinds of Christians are not receiving the same outreach to attend these rallies, "a tactic that plays directly into the growing separatist sentiment among many white evangelicals," according to Neil J. Young, author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics. Of this attempt to stoke "white evangelical resentment and outrage," Young wrote: "Such a dark and alarmist vision might seem to contradict the hopeful joy evangelicals claim their faith provides, but it aligns perfectly with the cynical and conspiratorial worldview Trump has brought to the center of American politics. As such, white evangelicals’ support for Trump doesn’t expose their hypocrisy, as plenty have contended, so much as it plainly reveals their heart." On 13 June, even Graham told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Trump's policy of separating would-be immigrant families at the border is "disgraceful, it’s terrible to see families ripped apart and I don’t support that one bit." He stopped short, however, of holding Trump accountable: "I blame the politicians for the last 20, 30 years that have allowed this to escalate to where it is today."

(Franklin Graham later complained about the ten Republican congresspeople who voted to impeach Trump for incitement to insurrection in 2021. He said they must have betrayed him for "thirty pieces of silver" — i.e., he couldn't imagine they had cast their votes on principle — though he said one must "wonder" what the material reward was.)

Whether Christian power is seen to be declining or rising, many see the new administration as an opportunity to advance a theocratic-leaning political agenda.

This was how it worked on an institutional level. Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, in conversation with Andrew Keen, published May 18, 2020 on the "Keen On" on LitHub (recording: 5:30–6:30)

I think that the relationship between the leadership of the Council for National Policy and Donald Trump is as purely transactional as you’re going to get in politics. There was a deal cut in fairly stark terms in 2016, in June, where the conservatives from the fundamentalists and these business interests came to Trump and said, 'You don’t have any campaign organization. You don’t have a war chest. You don’t have people on the ground. We’ve got all of those. We’ve got campaign in a box. What we want from you is the right to nominate your federal judges. We want our guy, Mike Pence, as your running mate. We want to write the social platforms for the Republican National Convention.' And the deal was struck, and both sides have honored them. So I think it’s the ultimate quid pro quo.

The deal has also been internalized on an individual, personal level by many people. The theologian Roger E. Olson wrote for Patheos in August 2018 in "Is Trump “Our Cyrus?"

Here I’m not talking about those evangelical Christians who, among others, voted for Trump in order to vote against Hilary Clinton as the “lesser of two evils.” I’m talking about the many evangelical Christians who are now lionize Trump as a kind of new national messiah—not on a par with Jesus Christ but...on a par with whom?

A growing common answer is "He’s our Cyrus.'

* * *

During his approximately thirty year reign he [Cyrus] released the Hebrew people in exile to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple that was destroyed earlier by the Babylonians....the Hebrew people did not consider Cyrus one of them, of course, but a powerful ally — and one raised up by God to deliver them from exile and bondage."

Olson issues a warning: "I strongly suspect that he [Trump] is manipulating his conservative Christian 'base' and would turn on them in a moment if it suited his agenda to be powerful."

Is it hypocritical? Well, yes. Kathleen Parker on Aug. 31, 2018 in the Washington Post decried "the utter hypocrisy of allowing such a foul-mouthed, race-baiting misogynist to occupy the Oval Office after many of these same paragons of virtue impeached Bill Clinton for lying about his irresponsible affair with an intern." But it can be politically expedient to ignore the personal failings of one's own candidate. James Traub wrote in the Atlantic on July 18, 2018:

Elected Democrats lined up to denounce President Bill Clinton’s private behavior during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, though none deemed it worthy of impeachment. Donald Trump’s vastly more outrageous behavior has provoked far less opprobrium from his own party. Republicans aren’t less decent than Democrats; rather, they have come to see political struggle in such apocalyptic terms that no merely personal form of shameful behavior can compete with the political stakes. Thus Christian conservatives hold their tongue rather than jeopardize their chances of getting a Supreme Court justice who will overturn Roe v. Wade. The party of personal morality thus becomes the party of indifference to personal morality.

On another front, where Christians are trying to consolidate political power, it isn't exclusively white Christians who are doing so.

Katherine Stewart profiled Jim Domen for the New York Times on June 20, 2018. Domen (who considers himself a "former homosexual") founded Church United and has led it since 2014. It is "a multiethnic group of pastors from a variety of traditions — including Pentecostal and Catholic clergy members" with a mission of “helping pastors transform California at the government and church level.” Domen supports Trump, saying that he has “done more for the Church than many Christian presidents have.” Church United's work to "politicize pastors," as Stewart put it, "started with six affiliated pastors in 2014. The group now counts approximately 500 member pastors."

Some people feel torn.

An example of a middle-of-the-road position is given by Rev. Samuel Rodríguez, who serves at a church in Sacramento, Calif. and who has had private conversations with Trump in the White House. He publicly condemned Trump for his misogynistic, crude comments on the Access Hollywood tape and is also fighting Trump's immigration agenda, but he is willing to work with Trump overall. In May 2018, Rodríguez told BBC World:

"Trump ha hecho más por el movimiento evangélico que cualquier otro presidente desde la época de Ronald Reagan. Se puede medir. Hay 20 puntos que uno puede decir claramente: aquí firmó una orden ejecutiva, aquí firmó una ley, aquí avanzó..."

* * *

"El movimiento latino evangélico no está casado con Donald Trump. Tampoco estaba casado con Obama. Estamos casados con una agenda que va mucho más allá de la personalidad."

Independently of whatever "deal" may be struck here, what do evangelicals feel about Trump's character?Many are disappointed. Molly Wicker wrote for the New York Times on May 19, 2017:

"Evangelical voters have long demanded that politicians exemplify Christian character and morality in the public sector. In Donald Trump, however, evangelicals were confronted with a candidate who pledged allegiance to conservative ideals, but embodied none of them.
* * *
Claire Waugh, a senior from Woodbridge, Va., told me that she refused in November to have a Trump vote on her conscience, and that she hates to see the country being "led by a man who spews vitriol against anyone who is unlike him, a man who tries to invoke God’s name when he is acting utterly ungodly.""

Some Christians think that theology, not secular politics, is the way forward.

David Kuo, who worked for the George W. Bush administration, wrote in his 2006 memoir Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction when he was facing a terminal illness (pp. 262-263):

"We Christians need a short fast from politics.

We need to eschew politics to focus more on practicing compassion. We need to spend more time studying Jesus and less time trying to get people elected. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year in support of conservative Christian advocacy groups such as the Family Research Council, Eagle Forum, and the panoply of similar groups, let's give that money to charities and groups that are arguably closer to Jesus' heart. And we Christians should spend less time arguing with those on the other side and more time communing with them."

More recently, Daniel Burke wrote for CNN on 13 June 2018 about the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting in Dallas that "a small but significant slice" of the 10,000 participants objected to the planned address by Vice President Mike Pence. Younger people seemed more concerned with evangelizing the message of Jesus (what they call "The Great Commission") than with aligning themselves with the Republican Party. Garrett Kell, a pastor, said alignment with the Republican Party was also strategically fraught as it could affect the Southern Baptists' interracial and international relations. (The Southern Baptists formed as a pro-slavery splinter group in 1845, and Pew's 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study found that the Southern Baptists remain 85 percent white.) Pence did address the Convention that day, and Burke followed up, saying that "much of Pence's speech was dedicated to praising the accomplishments of his boss, President Donald Trump." He added: "The denomination's executive committee will consider a motion to cease inviting elected officials to speak at national conventions."

Jonathan Merritt, writing for The Atlantic on 16 June, said that the crowd at the annual meeting was significantly younger than he remembered from his childhood. He quoted Baylor University history professor Barry Hankins as saying that this demographic change "has thrust the group into the middle of an identity crisis". They elected 45-year-old J.D. Greear as the president of the Southern Baptists who has promised to make an effort to proportionately represent women and people of color in leadership roles. The denomination addresses public policy through its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which opposes President Trump, and Greear said that inviting Pence to speak "sent a terribly mixed signal" about whether the Southern Baptists stood for religion or politics. At least some Southern Baptists, Merritt said, "appear to recognize that tethering themselves to Donald Trump...places the moral credibility of the Southern Baptist Convention at risk." Furthermore, although "Southern Baptists have criticized more liberal denominations for their declines," they, too, are experiencing the same decline; they have lost 1 million members in the past 15 years. Tying themselves to conservative politics is therefore, many conclude, not the answer to reversing this trend.

Michael Gerson, a white evangelical conservative, noted the demographic decline in an August 2019 op-ed for the Washington Post, pointing out that a quarter of Americans over age 65 are white evangelical Protestants, but only 8 percent of Americans ages 18-29 have that identity. Gerson said it is a "scandal" that white evangelicals are not in a state of "panic" about this decline." Gerson said that evangelical support of "religious liberty" legislation reflects "a larger anxiety about lost social standing." He argues that evangelicals should reemphasize their "religious calling," as they did "in late-18th-century and early-19th-century Britain, or mid-19th-century America," rather than continuing to behave "like another political interest group."

In her article "The Religious Right Has It All Wrong. Trump is a 'Test,' Not Their Savior," Cynthia Dagnal-Myron said she believes that Jesus is "asking Christians, through Trump, to follow His lead repeatedly," — note that the capitalized "His" refers to Jesus, not Trump — by having Trump break every law in The Book to see if we're paying attention."

Carol Kuruvilla wrote for Huffington Post in April 2019:

"In a 2011 poll from PRRI and the Religion News Service, 60% of white evangelicals surveyed said that a public official who 'commits an immoral act in their personal life” cannot still “behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.' But in October 2016, right after The Washington Post published an 'Access Hollywood' recording of Trump making lewd comments about sexual assault, the number of white evangelicals who weren’t willing to give politicians a pass for immoral behavior dropped to 20%. ...white evangelicals were even less likely in late 2018 to connect politicians’ private and public lives in this way. Only 16.5% said they believed privately immoral behavior translates to unethical professional conduct."

In the most recent study, people did not seem to be responding based on principle as much as they seemed to be responding to a particular politician. When white evangelicals had Bill Clinton in mind, they were four-and-a-half times more likely to say that privately immoral behavior was relevant to public life than when they had Donald Trump in mind.

In May 2019, the Jim Bakker show offered viewers the chance to buy a coin with the faces of Cyrus and Trump for a $45 donation. On the show, Lance Wallnau described Trump as "a Cyrus to navigate through the storm" of American politics. He described the coin as "a point of contact" to use in prayer.

There is also faith-based activism on the left, and, of this, Laura E. Alexander wrote in August 2019:

"...there’s always been progressive Christian activism in the United States.

I have studied religious thought and action around migrants and refugees for some time – including analyzing the New Sanctuary Movement, a network of churches that offers refuge to undocumented immigrants and advocates for immigration reform.

* * *

Talk of an emerging “religious left” is ahistoric. American Christianity has always had its liberal strains, with pastors and parishioners protesting state-sponsored injustices like slavery, segregation, the Vietnam War and mass deportation.

But the high profile, religiously based moral outrage at Trump’s immigration policies does seem to be spurring some long-overdue rethinking of what it means to be Christian in America."

A Fox News poll conducted October 6-8, 2019 found that, among white evangelicals, 71% of approved of the job Trump is doing. Only 44% had confidence in Congress and only 26% approved of the job Congress is doing. These white evangelicals had favorable opinions of Trump (70%), Pence (64%), the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani (46%), the Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (21%), Adam Schiff (17%), Bill Barr (34%), Mitch McConnell (37%), Hillary Clinton (24%), the Democratic Party (24%), the Republican Party (63%). And 57% of them were at least somewhat troubled by the situation surrounding Trump's scandal with the Ukrainian president. 73% were concerned about Trump's allegations against Joe Biden in that scandal. While 28% of white evangelicals said that Trump should be impeached and then removed from office, 64% said that he should not be impeached at all. 38% of them said it is, in general, appropriate for a president to ask foreign countries to investigate their political rivals. 34% said they believe Trump feels it is more important to do what is best for him as an individual rather than what is best for the country.

That 71% approval rating among white evangelicals represents a decline from "the 81 percent that backed him over Hillary Clinton in 2016," Eugene Scott wrote in the Washington Post, and it is possible that Trump's military decision that enabled violence against Christians in Syria will cause him to lose more Christian support among American voters.

In October 2019, the Public Religion Research Institute found that, as reported by Relevant Magazine, "75 percent of white evangelicals say they approve of him and, what’s more, 31 percent of that group say there’s 'almost nothing' Trump could do to lose their support." By contrast, "86 percent of black Protestants disapprove of Trump, 67 percent of which say there’s almost nothing Trump could do at this point to change their minds," and a majority of black Protestants, Hispanic Protestants, and Catholics believe that he encourages white supremacists.

A majority of white evangelicals (60%) think that Trump is morally upstanding, a Pew survey found in early 2020. "The evangelical assessment," an NPR article explained, "does come with some reservations. Only about 15% of white evangelicals, for example, say 'morally upstanding' describes Trump 'very well,' while another 45% say the term applies to Trump 'fairly well.'" (Here, they differ from the American population as a whole, two-thirds of which say that "morally upstanding" does not describe Trump.) Furthermore, in the NPR summary: "Almost two-thirds of white evangelicals see Trump as at least 'somewhat religious,' despite his profanity, his sporadic church attendance, and his evident unfamiliarity with the Bible."

Between April and June 2020, white evangelicals' approval of Trump's performance dropped from 78% to 72% in a Pew survey, and yet 82% of them still said they would vote for Trump over Biden. (Pew found that 77% of white evangelicals voted for Trump over Clinton in 2016.)

Other polls had more drastic results. Over two months (March-May 2020), white evangelicals' support for Trump dropped from 77% to 62%. (PRRI survey) "Militant white masculinity has always been at the center of family-values evangelicalism," Kristin Kobes du Mez wrote. "They denigrated feminism, pacifism, and political correctness, and championed war, law enforcement, the military, and the Second Amendment in order to promote a culture where men could exercise their God-given, testosterone-driven authority." That is why, Kobes du Mez argues, one of his biggest problems for his image in the summer of 2020 has been "his West Point commencement address was derailed by his halting descent down a ramp and apparent difficulty in lifting a glass of water to his lips." Any hint of weakness, physical or otherwise, damages his standing with the "family values" crowd.


On the other hand, though, people who approve of Trump may be more likely to declare themselves evangelical essentially on his behalf. From 2016–2020, Ryan Burge wrote in the New York Times, "there was no significant decline in the share of white Americans who identify as evangelical Christians. Instead, the report found the opposite: During Donald Trump’s presidency, the number of white Americans who started identifying as evangelical actually grew." This is based on a 2021 report from the Pew Center. However, Burge writes: "The number of self-identified evangelicals has likely not increased over the last few years because evangelicals have been effective at spreading the Gospel and bringing new converts to the church." Instead: "millions of Americans are being drawn to the evangelical label because of its association with the G.O.P." In recent years, the share of evangelicals who say they rarely attend church has grown, and the non-churchgoing evangelicals are simultaneously becoming more likely to say they are politically conservative. It also appears that non-Christians — for example, Muslims — are adopting the label "evangelical" because they think it means "very religiously engaged and very politically conservative." So the label "evangelical," as a self-descriptor, is changing to mean politically conservative and also some kind of religious, whether that is cultural Christianity or another religion. The result is that "more and more Americans are conflating evangelicalism with Republicanism — and melding two forces to create a movement that is not entirely about politics or religion but power."


Many white evangelical Christian voters, says Jennifer Rubin in November 2021,

essentially see politics as a great battle between White, Christian America and the multiracial, religiously diverse reality of 21st century America. They want someone to help them win that existential fight. Government [in their view] is there not to produce legislative fixes to real-world problems but to engage their enemies on behalf of White Christianity. ... The fixation with defining the United States as a White Christian nation is on full display nightly on Fox News, where replacement theory — not abortion or gay rights — drives so much more of the conversation.

Katherine Stewart said in May 2022 that some Christian nationalism "overlaps with the Great Replacement theory and demographic paranoia in general," although among Latino Christian nationslists, "the argument is not that a preferred racial group is being replaced but that a preferred religious and cultural value system (with supposed economic implications) is under threat.” Stewart prefers to call it "religious nationalism": "a reactionary, authoritarian ideology that centers its grievances on a narrative of lost national greatness and believes in the indispensability of the 'right' religion in recovering that lost greatness."


Kathleen Belew writes:

White-power extremism reveals that the core of this ideology is not the victims it attacks, but rather the thing it attempts to preserve — and the mechanism that transfigures this ideology into racial violence. It imagines that a conspiracy of elites, usually imagined as Jewish “globalists,” are deliberately working to eradicate both white people and white culture. This is why white nationalism is so often virulently antisemitic, and also why it feeds on deep distrust of the media, education, science and other arbiters of expertise.

Although, a distinction is added in this January 2021 academic article by Ruth Braunstein "identifies two ideal-typical versions of this [Christian nationalist] narrative: the white Christian nation and the colorblind Judeo-Christian nation."


From a New York Times story by Ben Smith:

Though Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, "wrote in 2016 that Mr. Trump was 'the Great Evangelical Embarrassment,'" nevertheless in 2020 he supported Trump "because Democrats are 'antagonistic to biblical Christianity' on issues like abortion and transgender rights."

By contrast, Marvin Olasky, the editor of the Christian magazine World since 1994, has continued to oppose Trump. He wrote that he "deplored the 'Flight 93' approach — a reference to the hijacked flight on 9/11 where passengers banded together to storm the cockpit — that he sees among many conservatives, who, he says, believe they must use any means necessary to keep America from being destroyed by liberals." He submitted his resignation in November 2021 because he disagrees with the magazine's direction toward American political conservatism. He plans to produce the annual Roe v. Wade issue in early 2022 and then leave.

As Thomas Zimmer explained ("Do Americans Value Democracy?", Substack, Democracy Americana, November 19, 2023):

"Trump’s appealed to the Right in 2016 precisely because he made it clear he wouldn’t be bound by the rules. That’s exactly what reactionary intellectual/pundit Michael Anton captured so precisely in his infamous “Flight 93” essay, published shortly before the 2016 election, in which he made the case for Donald Trump by presenting the Democrats as a fundamental threat to America, akin to the terrorists of 9/11: Anton called on the Right to embrace Trumpism because Trump would be willing to go much further to stop this “Un-American” threat than any of the “ordinary” Republicans who were “merely reactive,” who would keep playing by the rules of the game, and for whom Anton had nothing but contempt. Since Trump, in this interpretation, wasn’t constrained by norms, traditions, or precedents, he alone could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to fight back against the “wholesale cultural and political change” – to “charge the cockpit,” in Anton’s crude analogy, like the passengers of Flight 93 on 9/11. What the American Values Survey is picking up here is how the “Flight 93” mentality is taking over not just the rightwing intellectual sphere, where it’s been hegemonic for a while, but ever larger parts of the Republican Party and its voters as well. It is now “Flight 93” politics, all the time."

A Trump speech in October 2023:

"'On Day One, I will immediately restore and expand the 'Trump travel ban,'' he pledged to the cheering crowd.

* * *

Then Trump again expanded his rhetoric.

“I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants,” he said, reading from the teleprompter. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel,” he continued, apparently ad-libbing, “if you don’t like our religion — which a lot of them don’t — if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in. Right?”

The crowd cheered enthusiastically. Trump vamped: “We don’t want you! Get out of here! You’re fired!”

* * *

This is all Trump is getting at. “Our religion” — the religion of those in the room at his event — is right-wing, often evangelical Christianity. In 2020, the density of White Christians in a county was a very good indicator of whom voters in the county supported.

* * *

Parsing Trump's comments is excessive, of course; as stipulated, we know what he means. He means that certain categories of people are inherently dangerous and unacceptable ... He is saying, once again, that he will defend American Christians against perceived threats — threats that might be framed in vague religious terms but which are not fundamentally religious...

He is telling those Americans — White Christian conservatives — that he will make them the focus of America’s protective power."

Trump pledges to turn away those who don’t like ‘our religion’ (gift link), Philip Bump, Washington Post, October 24, 2023


In 2009, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life asked Americans whether it was ever justifiable to torture suspected terrorists during interrogation, and respondents were 50% more likely to say yes if they were white evangelicals than if they were "religiously unaffiliated."

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