Where people use religion to brand their hatred as love

Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections spelled out that Speaker Mike Johnson has his job (and Republicans have a majority in the House) due to gerrymandering.

The math is striking. Republicans hold just a five-seat majority in the House—and courts have ruled that at least six congressional districts that were in effect for the 2022 midterms in five states broke laws that ban discrimination against minority groups or prohibit drawing districts for partisan advantage

. Those five states are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio. While some of these states are facing legal remedies to add a black majority (and likely Democratic) district Republicans in North Carolina just passed a new map shifting four seats hard to the right. The rest of the article discusses how we got into this mess. Kerry Eleveld, working from polling data from Kos Civiqs, reported that approval of Congressional Republicans is 60 points underwater – 12% approve, 72% disapprove. Congressional Democrats are only 26 points underwater – 32% to 55%. When asked which party is more trusted to tell the truth the results were Democrats 37%, Republicans 26%, and neither 34%. Yeah, a third of voters don’t trust either party. In a pundit roundup for Kos, Chitown Kev quoted Charles Blow of the New York Times. Blow is from the same area of the country as Johnson and knows the type.

He is from a part of the country where your nemesis will smile at you and promise to pray for you, where people will quickly submit that they “love the sinner but hate the sin,” where one hand can hold a Bible while the other holds a shackle. He is from a place where people use religion to brand their hatred as love so that they act on it cheerfully and without guilt. He is what many have feared: an example of second-wave Trumpism — politicians rising in Trump’s wake who come with the same policy priorities and ideological proclivities, but in a far more congenial and urbane package, propelled by something more than personal grievance. Trumpism is a religion developed to serve a man. What happens when it evolves into a pillar of an established creed and is viewed as a way to serve God?

Charles Jay of the Kos community started with a review of what Jesus thought of rich people. An example:

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money (Matthew 6:24).

From there Jay turned to Jesse Duplantis, a prosperity gospel preacher in New Orleans, who asked believers to send him donations so he can buy another $54 million personal jet. Duplantis thinks if Jesus were around today he’d give up his donkey and fly around the world to preach. I’ll summarize Jay’s quote from the Harvard Divinity School’s definition of the prosperity gospel. It is frequently associated with evangelical Christianity. It “emphasizes believers’ abilities to transcend poverty and/or illness through devotion and positive confession.” It affirms “the religious and spiritual legitimacy of wealth accumulation,” equates financial success with moral soundness, and material blessings are earned from God. When preached to the poor it can be predatory and manipulative. It seems Duplantis is saying give me your money and God will give you money. Then compare it to the Bible verse above. This bad theology is becoming more popular in the midst of the Great Dechurching – 40 million members have stopped attending church in the last 25 years. Some Republicans, including Johnson, have latched onto this bad theology, which allows them to shift the war on poverty to a war on the poor – they’re poor because of insufficient faith. Many prosperity gospel preachers are non-denominational. And many critics of this theology come from mainstream denominations – including Southern Baptists. Laura Clawson of Kos looked at an article by Tim Alberta of The Atlantic that gushes over Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of him either. Between the gush Alberta insist Biden is a weak candidate – which seems to be news to Democrats, likely a reason no one else is running against Biden. I think Clawson understands the real reason for the article:

It’s about the media’s urge to juice the horse-race angle of any election that seems like a foregone conclusion.

It’s about the media thinking social hierarchy terms. They’re interested in who is winning and who is losing and assume we are also interested. If necessary they’ll make up a story. Hunter of Kos reviewed the campaign of DeathSantis. The short description is the more people get to know him the less they like him. As for the rest of the Republican field:

Haley and the others are simply around, making no solid case for themselves while refusing to take Trump on out of fear of his possible violence-baiting response. If Trump’s supposed competitors aren't willing to make the case that 91 felony counts ought to disqualify someone from a second go at public office, then what purpose do they serve?

I’ve written only a little about the Israel/Hamas war. I guess I’m waiting for a few more stories worth writing about and then put them together. I haven’t seen many stories yet – my regular news source Daily Kos has not been covering the war, unlike the war in Ukraine – though I’ve heard a few on NPR. So I know Israel now has troops in Gaza and I think I heard Israel bombed an ambulance convoy because they claimed Hamas was using the convoy as a shield. The whole situation is a mess! I guess I no longer want to wait to include an article in a larger story, especially since this one is 11 days old. In another pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted an opinion piece in Haaretz:

If at first Netanyahu's efforts were to weaken the state institutions in order to sabotage criminal proceedings against him, by January 2023 he moved to dismantle them altogether, reducing them to such a low level of functionality that Israel, in many aspects, began to resemble a failed state. Why did he do this? He believed that he was betrayed by the state itself – as some would put it – the "deep-state". So according to his logic, it was not only necessary to take control of its institutions, but essentially, destroy them. A key tool in this operation was his move to appoint loyalists with minimal qualifications – if any. The dysfunctionality has been evident to all, most clearly seen first with the unrestrained deadly rampage of criminal gangs in the Israel’s Arab towns and cities and unchecked violence by West Bank settlers towards Palestinians.

I add that the nasty guy and many Republicans feel the same way about the US government and want to act against it in the same way. Rob Rogers tweeted a cartoon appropriate for this war. A woman is standing in the rubble. She is holding one child and another is hiding behind her. She’s looking up at several bombs labeled “For: Hamas, From: Israel” coming over her. To the side an Israeli soldier says, “Relax... We’re not aiming at you!” A third pundit roundup, a second by Greg Dworkin, quoted a tweet by Jonathan Martin from just before Johnson was elected as speaker:

A sage Dem texts, basically: Repubs are gonna elevate a speaker who tried to overthrow the election and backs an abortion ban - the two issues we won on in 2022 “What are they thinking?”

And down in the comments is a meme tweeted by Anonymous and created by Noah Garfinkel:

The “Guns don’t kill people” people sure seem to think a book can make you gay.

A couple more cartoons. Michael de Adder of the Halifax Chronicle Herald tweeted one titled “Pro-Life in America.” It shows a street that has gun shops and only gun shops and down a side alley is the entrance to an abortion clinic. A cartoon by Jay Wamsted shows a teacher throwing down the chalk on his way out the door. On the board he had written a story problem, “If an unappreciated $39,000-a-year math teacher leaves at 11:30 a.m. for a $90,000-a-year job in the private sector, and travels 52 miles at 88 miles per hour, what time will he arrive?”