Mass shootings & police shootings are not separate issues

Rachel Martin of NPR spoke to Beth Allison Barr about her new book The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. The link is to highlights of the discussion, though there is also the 7 minute audio of the whole thing. The book began with the realization that what the Bible was saying women were supposed to do (Barr had been teaching about women in the early church) did not match what her Southern Baptist congregation was saying what women were supposed to do. What the church was telling her was straightforward: submit to your man. She went to the church elders to allow them to present her reasoning why women should be allowed to teach Sunday School. She was denied. I’ve heard the about complementarianism as a reason why same sex couples should not be legal and not raise children. The reason was that men and women were different and complementary. To thrive a child needs the firmness of a father and the nurturing of a mother. Of course, that’s bunk. Men can be nurturing and women can be firm. Barr explained complementarianism in an opposite sex marriage:

In the evangelical understanding, complementarianism is this idea that women are created differently from men. And that difference means that women cannot be leaders, that they cannot have authority over men, and that within the marriage relationship they are called to always be under the spiritual authority, the headship of their husbands. So complementarianism is that women are divinely created to be under masculine authority.

Barr explained that the current patriarchal thinking comes from taking a handful of verses from St. Paul and interpreting the rest of the Bible through them. But that obscures that God is always depicted as fighting patriarchy and raising up women into leadership. Even those verses from St. Paul are taken out of context. There is also the doctrine of inerrancy, only a hundred years old, that one must believe the Bible literally – or as men in the early 20th century read it. That made patriarchy part of the Gospel.

If you look throughout the New Testament, when Jesus tells somebody they are of great faith, it's women. And so women are not only recognized by Jesus in a way that their patriarchal society would not have done so, but they are also given the spiritual authority of being recognized as those who see Jesus and understand Jesus for who he is.

Ben Franklin tweeted:

As it becomes clearer and clearer what happened on January 6th, you must ask yourself why the ringleaders of the attack continue to walk. This is not how a serious country responds to a coup attempt. Something is very wrong, no excuses.

Editing the Gray Lady is a bot that highlights the changes on the main page of the New York Times and tweets the differences. This is an example of how a headline can change how we interpret a story. The example is the recent fatal shooting of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Corner, Minnesota, north of Minneapolis. Headline: Officer Near Minneapolis Kills Motorist, and a Crowd Confronts the Police. Became: Officer Near Minneapolis Shoots Motorist, Who Dies, and a Crowd Confronts the Police. And became: Minnesota Officer Shoots Driver, Protesters Clash With Police. They seem to get more and more vague. The second one implies the death wasn’t because he was shot. The third implies he didn’t die. There was a mass shooting in Indianapolis last night. Emily Hauser tweeted:

I'm begging you to start seeing that mass shootings (Indianapolis, Boulder, Atlanta) & police shootings (Duante Wright, Adam Toledo) are different sides of the same gun violence epidemic. Each reflects *many* terrible truths about this country, but one of those truths is that we're awash with guns & marinated in gun culture, itself steeped in toxic masculinity that demands violence from & in response to men. Violence as power - the greater the violence, the greater the power. Add easily accessed lethal force & death is a foregone conclusion. We know we have more privately-owned guns (>400m) than citizens - but that doesn't include firearms carried by law enforcement, who live in the same culture *and* are elevated & empowered by the state to be violent. Mass shootings & police shootings are not separate issues.

The mass shootings, the police shootings, and the gun culture are all aspects of supremacy. Supremacists have become far more willing to act. Supremacists always act through violence. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. Sargent wrote about Jason Watts, a local GOP committee treasurer, who never voted for the nasty guy.

Watts lamented the GOP’s lockstep loyalty to Trump, because “this undertone of hatred, this fealty at all costs, it’s going to damage us.” ... In so many ways, this story captures our times. But not in a told-you-so kind of manner. Instead, it points to how difficult it may prove to move past the wounds that Trump has inflicted on this nation, and how the eager complicity of many Republicans continues to make them all the worse.

At a meeting where Watts defended himself few wore masks. Later Watts tested positive for the virus. John Stoehr and his Editorial Board explaining politics in plain English tweeted a thread. Washington reporters used to get under the skin of Democrats by laundering right-wing propaganda. They’re baffled because it isn’t working anymore. Reporters feel the dread that they’re on the outside looking in, that Democrats know something. What Democrats know: The GOP doesn’t have policies to offer. They want a country the rest of us don’t want to live in. They’ve lost a feel for what the whole country wants.

Moreover, policies like green energy, which were unpopular the last time they had unified control of the government, are now popular. If the president is acting like he doesn’t need the Republicans, it’s because he doesn’t need the Republicans. And because he doesn’t, the president really is redefining what “bipartisanship” means. Let me put this another way. The Republican Party is the anti-government party. It has been for decades. During the Trump era, however, the party crossed a moral threshold many GOP voters would not. The Republicans became the party of treason. It literally acquitted the former president’s attempt to overthrow the United States government. At the same time, a vast majority of Americans, all living under the smog of the covid pandemic, realize government action was the only way out of the emergency. They couldn’t turn to the Republicans a) because the former president was most responsible for allowing the emergency to become the worst among rich counties and b) because they were the party of anti-government before they became the party of treason. The Republicans turned their backs on the whole of the country when the whole of the country most needed the government to take action. The primary consequence of this, I contend, has been to make government action popular all by itself, regardless of any particular policy.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary. One example:

The industry hit hardest by Covid? Novelty hand buzzers. —Conan O'Brien