Politics and Christianity

It's a common perception that Republicans are more religious than Democrats. Certainly they make a bigger deal about injecting religion into politics. It turns out that the evidence supports this perception; more Republicans go to church regularly than Democrats, and more Democrats are not religious at all. And Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, are more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. Other religions (though not Mormons), and voters who are not religious, clearly favor Democrats.

So fair enough, Republicans are the more "Christian" party in that they appeal to Christian voters more than the Democratic Party does.

Well I have a problem with that. You see, I'm not a Christian, but I have read large portions of the Bible, and I went to church regularly while I was growing up and was raised based on the Christian values of my parents. I am familiar with Christianity, and if I could choose one word to describe the message of Christianity, that word is "compassion."

Well, does anyone believe that the Republican Party is the party of compassion? I wonder how some of the less fortunate people in this country, people who might benefit from some degree of caring from their fellow citizens, would see it. Do homeless people in America see the Republican Party as more compassionate? Do the unemployed? How about gays and lesbians, minorities, immigrants, people who have traditionally been discriminated against? How about people on death row, or in prison for non-violent drug offenses? Or a woman with an unwanted pregnancy? What about workers in minimum wage jobs?

Is it compassionate to be more inclined to go to war, to send our troops to kill and be killed? Is it Christian to carry a concealed firearm? Does it demonstrate caring for your fellow man if you only want to pay more taxes for a bigger military and less for anything that helps your fellow citizens? How about not caring about the environment, denying science so that you can leave the planet in worse shape for the next generation? Is that the decent thing to do?

The truth is, people who call themselves Christian in this country are more likely to support the political party that least represents Christianity.

I suppose there are various reasons for that, but I bet a big one is that a lot of Christians don't see Christianity as being largely about compassion. I suspect many of them would pick a different word to describe it if they could, maybe salvation. Maybe it's about saving my sorry ass and condemning everyone else. Sorry, but you don't know what the hell you are talking about. I have read the book. You got it wrong.

So they call themselves Christian, but they haven't learned the first lesson from their faith. I can't say that impresses me much. I guess I would say to them, OK, you're a Christian, but so what? Does that have any meaning? You call yourself a Christian, but you act like an Un-Christian jerk. Which of those two things do you think is most important?

Rolling Coal and the Politics of Hate

Rolling coal means modifying your diesel engine (usually on a pickup it seems) so that you can blow off a big cloud of black smoke when you want to. It's stupid, wasteful, bad for the environment, and a good symbol for the tendency of conservatives to do things just to piss off rational people everywhere.

Turns out though, maybe rolling coal isn't really meant to make environmentalists angry. It seems to be one of those things young men do that is meant to impress young women, like having a low rider that bounces up and down or a stereo that rattles windows in nearby houses. In other words, one of those things that probably doesn't impress young women at all, but instead it's really mostly a way to show off to other mentally-challenged guys like yourself, because guys are guys and there's something a little wrong with them.

Still, conservatives doing stuff just because liberals don't like it is a real thing. I know an actual personal example of something very close to rolling coal, in fact. No need to pick on this particular person by name, but let's say a senior citizen living by herself. She went and bought a Hummer, the huge kind that gets about eight miles per gallon, to drive her 90-pound self around in, and I swear a big part of the reason was that it was that it was her way of flipping a middle finger (and yes, senior or no, she would happily do that) at anyone who cared about the environment.

OK, easy enough to come up with a single story. Let's look at a few more public issues that demonstrate the politics of hate, or taking an irrational position just because you really don't want to be agreeable about anything.

Global Warming: What do you do if you just can't stand it that Al Gore was right, the planet is heating up, and it's a very bad thing? It turns out that what you do is, you pretend that you understand the field of climate science better than actual climate scientists, with all their elite PhD's and computer models and research. It's the modern-day equivalent of believing that the sun revolves around the Earth, just because you want it to. It takes a lot of anger to twist your mind into believing something so ridiculous.

Obamacare: I have written before about the Affordable Care Act, so I will just repeat this much: The United States has a terrible healthcare system, and the ACA is a step in the right direction that was designed by conservatives to appeal to conservatives. If it had come from a Republican President, it would have widespread support. But conservatives absolutely hate it, because they hate Democrats and they hate Obama, and because they are assholes. And speaking of...

Medicaid Expansion: Most Republican governors have refused to expand Medicaid in their states, even though it would cost them very little and would be a huge benefit for millions of their constituents collectively. And why is this? It is because they want so badly to reject anything initiated by Democrats and President Obama that they are willing to do the obviously wrong and morally deplorable thing because if people were helped by Obamacare, they might like it, and we can't have that.

Light bulbs: Republicans don't want to switch to more efficient light bulbs. Why? Because Democrats want to.

Guns: It isn't enough that one person can buy enough weapons to wipe out a small city. We need to have guns in restaurants, stores, bars, churches, schools, convents and daycares, or so it seems. Is any of this based on evidence, or is it just to annoy people who want to be safer? I have an idea: Let's allow guns at football games, lots of guns. According to gun enthusiasts, that would reduce the gun violence at games...

Bin Laden: When Osama bin Laden attacked the United States, almost everyone, even me, rallied behind President Bush and supported his actions. He squandered that eventually, but for a long time, he had the country's support. When the Obama administration caught and killed bin Laden, it took Republicans less than 24 hours to start complaining that Obama had not given Bush enough credit for it. If you want absolute proof positive that a lot of conservative assholes don't want to give President Obama any credit for anything, anywhere, ever, there it is.

The stimulus: Yes, we went from the worst economic crash since the depression to recovery, but it will always be the Failed Stimulus to Republicans because they cannot admit that their President failed and Obama succeeded, even though clearly that is the case.

Bowe Bergdahl: We brought a captured serviceman home from Afghanistan. Yay! No wait, booooo!

Unions: Some Southern states are so anti-union that they have told auto companies not to bring jobs to their states if they include union jobs. WE WILL NOT STAND FOR OUR CITIZENS HAVING GOOD JOBS WITH GOOD BENEFITS. Union-hating over common sense.

I know I seem inflexible and combative, but this is one big reason why. Republicans have made it extraordinarily clear that they don't want to work with Democrats, don't want to give Democrats any credit, will oppose anything Democrats want just because, and will push to the limit any conservative policy that liberals really don't like. Republicans are basically a reflection of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, taking the opposition view to everything Obama and Democrats do, whether it makes sense or not. You can't work with that.

Hobby Lobby

First, if you know anything about me, you can guess that I think the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision is bullshit. So good, now that's out of the way.

More and more, I look at Supreme Court decisions like this one -- 5 to 4 with the conservative justice and the 4 ultra-conservative justices on one side, and the four liberal justices on the other side -- as just political votes having little-to-nothing to do with law and everything to do with politics, just like some House subcommittee voting along party lines. Supreme Court decisions that are only backed by Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Alito, and Thomas have lost any sense of legitimacy. Like most politics these days, the solution -- the only solution -- is to get the Republicans out and replace them with Democrats.

Anyone who looks at this decision and thinks that the Affordable Care Act violates the Constitution, so the Supreme Court had to slap it down, is nuts. Five Republicans voted to change the law, and four Democrats voted to leave it alone. That's all.

Here is an interesting quote from the majority opinion:

This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, e.g., for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs.

So what is the legal difference between a religious objection to birth control versus a religious objection to vaccinations? Or even blood transfusions? It seems to me that the justices are saying that religious objections to birth control have a special status, as opposed to say, Jehovah's Witnesses objecting to blood transfusions, which may not be protected because, you know, that's just loony tunes. Only there isn't any good scientific, fact-based, rational reason why refusing to pay for insurance that covers your employees' birth control is any less loony than not wanting to pay for insurance for transfusions. It seems to me that the Supreme Court, or at least five Republicans who seem to care less and less about the Constitution and more and more about politics, decided to favor a particular religious belief with this ruling.

Really quite amazing.

It's funny, as the graphic above indicates, seeing the hypocrisy of Republicans over religion. They understand the problem. They are very aware of the tyranny of  imposing your religious beliefs on another person, as evidenced by the wailing and gnashing of the teeth on their side when they imagine that Sharia Law is taking over America, but they seem totally unaware that imposing Christianity on non-Christian Americans, or on Christians who don't share their particular views, is the same thing.

I have a bad tendency sometimes to think that people who disagree with me, on certain issues that seem obvious to me, are stupid. This is one of those issues.