“I wonder if Trump knows you can commit a state crime in Georgia by telephone from DC, and you can’t pardon yourself or your henchmen on state charges.” – Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
“In any other conceivable moment in US history, this tape would result in the leadership of both parties demanding the immediate resignation of the President of the United States.” – Carl Bernstein
“The evidence is on tape. The next attorney general should move forward, if for no other reason, to deter further attempts at such reprehensible conduct. I would suggest impeachment as well, which could include a ban on holding office in the future” – Jennifer Rubin / Washington Post
“University of Georgia Law Professor Anthony Michael Kreis told Politico reporters Allie Bice, Kyle Cheney, Anita Kumar, and Zach Montellaro that it is against the law in Georgia for anyone to “solicit” or “request” election fraud. “There’s just no way that… he has not violated this law,” Kreis said. Michael R. Bromwich, former inspector general of the Department of Justice, tweeted that “unless there are portions of the tape that somehow negate criminal intent,” Trump’s “best defense would be insanity.”
They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.
By RANDALL BALMER
One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.
This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.
Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.
But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
***
Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.
***
So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.
In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero. Continue reading “The Real Origins of the Religious Right”→
Recent rules changes lock into place weaker environmental, workplace safety, and labor standards, and escalate the assault on legal immigration.
In the frantic scramble toward November 3, there’s a huge amount of Noise distorting the Signal. There are the flashback-inducing idiotic “lock her up!” chants at Trump rallies, this time aimed at Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer—who was recently the target of a kidnapping plot hatched by pro-Trump militia members. And there’s Trump’s chilling response, “Lock ’em all up,” the “all” presumably being everyone in the political arena who doesn’t fall into lockstep with Trump’s worldview. There’s Steve Bannon urging Trump’s “troops to back him up” and protect whatever “victory” an embattled No. 45 may try to declare before all the votes are counted. And there’s Rudy Giuliani, who continues to disseminate whatever propaganda tidbits the Russian intelligence agencies care to send his way.
Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to filter out all this Noise. For, if anything, the closer we get to the election, the faster the pace of real change in the political arena will be. The Trump administration is doubling down on its assault on America’s regulatory infrastructure. The New York Times recently reported on a crescendo of rules changes that lock into place weaker environmental, workplace safety, and transportation protections; that eviscerate labor standards; and that escalate Trump’s assault on the legal immigration process.
While it’s standard operating procedure for vulnerable incumbents to try to secure their agenda while they still can, this administration has taken that practice to an extreme. It is essentially bypassing the public-comments period required for major alterations to existing regulations and rapidly implementing fundamental regulatory changes without adequately studying their likely impact.
Men in power might sympathize with women’s issues, but Kamala Harris knows them by heart.
By Monica Hesse | Washington Post
In the week before the country potentially elects its first female vice president, I’ve been trying to write a sweeping essay about progress and trailblazers and glass-breakers and what it all means. But what I keep thinking about is this: At some point in Kamala Harris’s life, someone has instructed her to carry her keys like a weapon when she walks to her car. Someone has said, Get them out of your purse even before you leave the grocery store. Arrange them between your fingers, and if someone attacks you, aim for the face
How do I know this? Because this is Woman 101. It’s the first page of the instruction manual teaching us how we’ll need to navigate the world. I have never met a woman who hasn’t heard this piece of advice. And I doubt that in 232 years of male leadership there’s ever been a sitting president or vice president who has.
I keep thinking about how, at some point in Kamala Harris’s life, she has painstakingly reviewed her office wardrobe with the understanding that the difference between “slut” and “feminazi” is a few inches of worsted-wool hemline. At some point, she has approached a stranger in a public bathroom because the Tampax machine is broken again, and she has said, I’m so sorry, but do you have — and then she didn’t have to finish the question because women in bathrooms know that there is only one end to that question.
After a drawn-out vote count, many global leaders were quick to respond to Joe Biden’s election victory, with most sending congratulations and vowing to work with him.
Leaders from around the world continued to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden on Sunday, though several officials have remained silent.
In Europe, where many hope Mr. Biden will reverse some of the decisions of the Trump administration, leaders in Germany, France and Italy as well as the secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization applauded Mr. Biden’s win. [ . . . ]
Pas De Merde 