When it comes to religious faith nowadays, an apt description might be what former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once wrote about pornography: “I know it when I see it.”
To tell you the truth, I’m not seeing much of it – faith, I mean -- when I look at some of the people and institutions who’ve demonized the Left, not just for its policy positions, but as a bunch of immoral, abhorrent folks who’re undermining the very fabric of our society and will lead our country down the road to ruin if we’re not stopped.
Don’t worry about waiting for Judgement Day, the judging has been going on for quite a while as far as these people are concerned.
Actually, the hypocrisy we’re seeing in some cases is downright obscene if you relate it to the stuff about God they told us as kids. And you can put so-called faith leaders and Republican politicians at the top of the list.
Are the actions of those who proclaim themselves the most faithful matching the faith they profess? To be fair, in a lot of cases, it does, but in too many cases it doesn’t. And too many times when it doesn’t people suffer because posturing and politics are being made the priority over doing the right thing.
So, I’m suggesting to God, you ought to take a look at some stuff that’s being done by people who walk around saying you’re on their side. I don’t know if you’d say they’re taking your name in vain, but they’re sure dirtying it up quite a bit.
Let’s look at a few examples.
A Hard No on Feeding Hungry Children
Republican governors in 15 states are rejecting a new federally funded program to give food assistance to eligible children during the summer, denying benefits to 8 million kids, the Washington Post reported.
The program begins in June and is expected to serve 21 million youths by providing $2.5 billion in relief across the country. Families with incomes below the poverty level who already get school lunches for a reduced price or free will receive $120 per child to buy food. So, you’re basically continuing to help children who already receive aid when school is in session.
Hunger in the United States is on the rise as pandemic aid programs have wound down and food costs have gone up, the Post reported. Food insecurity rates for households with children increased from 12.5 percent in 2021 to 17.3 percent in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
What do these idiot governors want them to do? Fast for three months?
The governors are giving various bullshit reasons for their cruelty. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who I’m sure is never hurting for something to eat, questioned spending the money “when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.” Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, another one who probably hasn’t missed too many meals, said, “I don’t believe in welfare.”
This is nothing new for the self-proclaimed party of God. Some members of the family values crowd apparently don’t have any problem with families struggling to feed their children.
Here’s the bottom line: helping people in need, including children, doesn’t jive with the GOP’s pro-rich, anti-poor-and-middle-class agenda. Programs that help people are just draining money that could be laundered to the rich and corporations thorough tax cuts.
To be fair, not all GOP governors are this heartless. On the positive side, 35 states, five U.S. territories, and four Native American tribes have indicated they’ll participate in the program. And, the summer food program was approved as part of a bipartisan budget agreement in 2022.
Still, humanity is the exception, not the norm, for the Republican Party, whose Godly street cred diminishes with each transparent ploy to shove aside those most in need of help in subservience to their rich donors.
You can read the Post’s article here.
Hate the Sin AND the Sinner
State legislatures have introduced more than 275 bills targeting LGBTQ rights for their 2024 sessions, the American Civil Liberties Union reported. This is after introducing more than 500 of them last year.
This is “signaling an increased focus on LGBTQ rights among conservative legislators in the new year,” The Hill reported. “The legislation targets issues including gender-affirming care for young people and adults, the ability of students to choose their gender in schools, transgender student athletes, and restrictions on LGBTQ speech.”
More than 200 of the 2024 bills are focused on education, including more than 30 targeting transgender athletes, 36 on school curriculums, and 38 regarding the forced outing of LGBTQ students to parents, according to an ACLU breakdown.
Nearly 120 include provisions limiting access to health care, mostly gendering-affirming surgeries for minors. Some bills include multiple anti-LGBTQ issues.
This is a prime example of where religious extremism and the Republican Party jump into bed and continue to consummate their fruitful relationship in pursuit of two of their main goals: For the Republicans it’s dividing and enflaming people to get support from voters who don’t benefit from their policies, and for the Holy folks it’s ratcheting up the hate they have for those whose lifestyle they don’t approve.
It's one thing to consider someone else’s actions a sin based on your religious beliefs. That’s fine. It’s another thing to try to punish them with laws that trample their rights and dignity, injure them, and possibly put them in danger.
Another example of this is with a bunch from my old stomping grounds: The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a gang I affectionately call The Pedophiles Who Haven’t Been Caught Yet.
The bishops are dead set against the Equality Act, which passed the House of Representatives but never got a vote in the then-GOP-controlled Senate. The bill would have prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation and identity.
See what I mean. It not enough for these guys to call the LGBTQ community sinners. They want to make sure they don’t have protections for things like public accommodations, housing, and employment.
Sure, we’ll hide the priest who fondles the kid, but if two consenting adults are doing something in their bedroom that we don’t like, or if some young person is struggling to come to grips with his or her identity, the hell (literally and figuratively) with them.
You can read the Hill story here.
A Pope-pourri of Papal Contempt
When Pope Francis announced that he was permitting priests to bless same-sex couples the heads began exploding up and down the halls and aisles of the Catholic Church.
A German cardinal ripped the idea as “blasphemy.” An Italian priest called the Pope “an anti-Pope-usurper,” with a “cadaverous gaze, into nothingness.” (I had to look up cadaverous. It means resembling a corpse.) An Italian archbishop called him a servant of Satan and announced a seminary to train priests to be free from the “deviations of Bergoglio.” (If you’re not up on your pope trivia, that was Pope Francis’s name before he got his latest job.)
The Washington Post reported about the mounting and ever-increasing viciousness of the criticism within the church. Yes, some of this pious bunch are hurling brickbats at the man that their Bible says is their faith leader.
This has been going on for a while. To be fair, not all church officials were critical of the idea. Still, some are ignoring the Pope’s advice, which seems kind of strange when its own doctrine says the pope is the heir of Saint Peter and possesses “supreme, full, immediate, and universal authority.”
Actually, it’s not that surprising for a group that seems to at times obsess more about sex than anything else.
John Carr, a former longtime lobbyist for the U.S. bishops conference (Yes, even bishops have lobbyists.), called the opposition to Francis “unpresented.” He also said something very noteworthy:
“It is strong, it is narrow, and it’s about power – ecclesiastical, economic, and political power. … This is a larger project to undermine his credibility,” Carr said.
And that’s the crux of it. The Catholic Church, which tells you it sits at the right hand of God and is a vessel for his word, has its share of backbiting, conniving, self-serving, calculating, hateful, hypocrites. Just like any other entity in the real world.
I wouldn’t worry too much about Pope Francis, though. There’re 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, and I would think not too many of them have their pants on fire that the Pope would try to present a welcoming church, even to those it considers sinners, instead of spewing the hateful condemnation of the more vocal clergy leaders.
And, as the Post said, the 87-year-old pope’s popularity “remains the envy of politicians in many countries.”
And Pope Francis has at least one thing he can hold over his critics. The infallible Supreme being they worship decided he deserved to be pope. Not them.
You can read the Post’s story here.
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The purpose of this exercise isn’t to question the power of faith, or to cast dispersions over those who truly exhibit it in their daily lives.
The hypocrisy of the fake Christians is unraveling our country more than any support of the LGBTQ community ever could. And, to tell you the truth, it gets a little aggravating when I hear
Right-wing “Christians” go on about how much better they are than me.
It’d be easier to take if they’d actually start acting like it.
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Thank you for reading my post. You can see more of my writing on my blog: Musings of a Nobody. Also, please check out my video blog: The 3:13 on Politics.