Voter suppression is a theological offense

Today was pleasant enough I did my walking outside. The temps may have gotten up to 40F. Rain starts tonight. Sometime overnight it switches to snow. By the time the snow stops Thursday evening (something like 40 hours later) we might get 8-14 inches of snow in the Detroit area. Though I haven’t done so yet I’m pretty sure I’ll be canceling tomorrow evening’s rehearsal. This is the time in Michigan to just stay home for a couple days. Which is why I and a lot of other people were grocery shopping today. I reported the nasty guy has called on his supporters to violently take to the streets if he is taken to jail. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported the threat has one immediate aspect – Fani Willis, the District Attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, is investigating the call from the nasty guy to the Georgia Secretary of State in which the nasty guy asked the SoS to find another 11,780 votes. Willis has asked the FBI for improved security because a grand jury to investigate the nasty guy will soon be impaneled. Christopher Reeves of Kos wrote that Republicans are also actively encouraging this violence and thus enabling evil. He included a video of Mike Detmer, candidate of the Michigan state Senate, calling on citizens to show up armed to polling place and be prepared to lock and load. Yikes! I had mentioned Republicans dangling a reform of the Electoral College Act in front of Democrats as a way to say, see we did voting reform! Georgia Logothetes, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Grace Panetta of Business Insider who sees a loophole in the reforms. Those reforms deal with what Congress and the Vice President are to do when the count happens.

However, the suggested changes to the law would do little to constrain the power of state and local governments. By overseeing vote counting and certifying election results before they are sent to Congress for ratification, these levels of government arguably have as much power, if not more, than Congress and a sitting president to steal an election.

Rebekah Sager of Kos looked at a health disparity between black and white people.

Black Americans experience kidney failure almost four times as often as white Americans, are less likely to receive referrals to specialists, and are significantly less likely to receive kidney transplants than white patients.

Sager doesn’t get into why more black people are on dialysis. She does get into why they are less likely to get referrals to specialists. There is a test to tell the level of kidney function. When that test is given to black people a racial adjustment is made. Sager traced that adjustment to the mistaken belief that black people are more muscular. That belief is a holdover from slavery – the price of a black man was based on the size his muscles. Black people are still suffering from slavery. Kos of Kos has been writing his Anti-Vaxx Chronicles since the end of August, over to 230 stories of people who very publicly declared opposition to getting the vaccine, then dying of COVID. I stopped reading them rather quickly – the stories were too bleak and predictable. Kos got a bit of pushback. Is the schadenfreude of these stories worth the pain of those left behind? Even Kos knows the grind of putting out these stories every day. It gets wearying. So yesterday he listed why he still prepares them and why he thinks they’re important. This is my condensation of his points: * Statistics are too sanitary. We need to see the real people who died. * We need to see how awful COVID can be. * We need to examine where these anti-vaxx memes come from. He includes an example for this point. * If we learn their lies we can debunk them and push back against this avalanche of BS. * There is a human toll. We may not mourn the stupid people who refused to be vaccinated. But there are over 100,000 COVID orphans out there. That detail has prompted people to get vaccinated. * Kos is definitely not on the front lines of the battle – doctors, nurses, and hospital staff are. If these stories can reduce their workload, that’s all to the good. Back to one of those old browser tabs. A few days before the anniversary of the Capitol attack Adrian Florido of NPR talked to Rev. Jim Wallis who is chair of the Faith and Justice Center at Georgetown University. I’ve known about Wallis a long time. He’s one of the good guys. Wallis was horrified in seeing Christian symbols carried by the attackers and hear them say Christian prayers. A basic Christian teaching is that humans are created in the image of God. Racism is an assault on the image of God. It’s a sacrilege. Black slaves, and black people now, are made equally in the image of God. Do you believe that or not? Voter suppression, denying the vote because of the color of their skin, is throwing away the image of God. Voter suppression is a theological offense. Wallis asks his students if they’ve heard racism preached as a sin from their home church’s pulpit. Black student always hear this. White students never. If racism is a violation of the image of God then all churches should be preach voter rights. This should be a test for churches. Wallis doesn’t like the divide between liberal and conservative pastors. He said “Don’t go left. Don't go right. Go deeper.” The Bible should apply to both. Genesis 1:26 says that humans are in the image of God. Galatians 3:28 says humans aren’t classified, there is neither slave nor free. Verses like this should be central to the theology of both liberal and conservative churches.