When we went to Los Angeles in 2019, one of my personal highlights was the trip to the Ronald Reagan library in Simi Valley. Reagan wasn’t perfect, but after the craphole that was the 1970s, it felt good to feel good about this country again. It felt good to talk about the things that make the idea of America almost magical–liberty and freedom (even when I use that freedom in ways you don’t like).
I even bought America socks because I love my country.
In my America, with limited exceptions, I may not like what you’re saying, but I will fight for your right to say it. In my America, people who don’t agree politically often balance each other out to keep us from careening off the cliff. We might fight each other vigorously, but when it matters, we’re the United States.
Unfortunately, at least vocal member of Congress doesn’t agree. With the freedom to disagree and the concept of the loyal opposition.
The first time Marjorie Taylor Greene popped off about a national divorce, I wrote it off as typical dumbassery and moved on to the next thing. She doubled down or her anti-American rhetoric yesterday.
Temperature of America:
Americans do not support the war in Ukraine at all and are very turned off with Washington for funding and pushing the war. We want peace.
And
Americans support a national divorce into red states and blue states with a small limited federal government.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Rep. Taylor Greene is telling us she wants to be free to believe what she wants and to live in a country where she’s free to make other people believe the same way. She’s saying the freedom to disagree with her is too big a distraction to be allowed. And since she’ll never gain that kind of power in the full United States, she wants a country of her own where she can pronounce what freedom means and crush those who think differently.
I’d like to think we’re not likely to divide the country any time soon. But I didn’t think a sitting president would incite his followers to storm the Capitol to prevent the certification of his election loss.
And for those followers, if a member of Congress doesn’t believe in a United States, why should they? Why should they not do what she can’t do, and take up weapons to create her vision?
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says you can’t hold office in this country if you’re a party to insurrection or rebellion. When you call for the dissolution of the country, how is that something different.
Marjorie Taylor Greene should be removed from Congress, but that won’t happen. If it did happen, it would be proof to her followers–who ironically call themselves patriots–that she’s right.
In my America, she couldn’t be further from right.
As the Asbury Revival nears the two-week mark, it’s starting to garner attention from the news and social media. While some welcome this movement, others are more critical–and they aren’t worried about being subtle about it. Many of the responses on social media are dismissive, almost to the point of condemning the revival and the people participating. The money spent driving there and the time spent praying could’ve been better spent serving the poor.
It’s the same criticism leveled at the $20 million He Gets Us ad campaign. When you’re spending that kind of money, the criticism is valid (though wrong, in my opinion). To level the same criticism at the money spent for a couple tanks of gas and a night or two in a motel seems a little excessive.
I dropped $40 on a Joe Klecko replica jersey and spent most of yesterday writing. Yes, that money and time could’ve been spent on social justice causes, but where’s the line?
Increasingly, there is no line. Context be damned, anything anyone does is worthy of condemnation if it hits you wrong.
This is hardly surprising when our political system is powered by condemnation. On the left, the He Gets Us campaign and anything like it has been condemned as merely attempts to “make fascism look benign.” Anything that can be used to portray people outside the tribe as oppressors is a moral requirement (including use of the word tribe).
Not content to let someone out-condemn them, the right’s gone all in, condemning not just the left, but members of the right who don’t think correctly as anything from communists to pedophiles.
I do it, too. Just drive in front of me at a speed less than I think’s appropriate (like 32 in a 60 or 3 in a parking lot), and I’ll unilaterally pronounce you unfit to live.
Brene Brown opposes this, using a Teddy Roosevelt quote to make her point:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
She believes in this so strongly that she’s used the quote in two books, including one (Daring Greatly) named based on the quote.
It’s easy to sit comfortably and throw verbal javelins at the people who try, but come up short. In our perches on our couches or behind our keyboards, we don’t have the experience of being overmatched and trying anyway, of dealing with shortages and disappointments, and the gremlins in our own minds that erode the will. All we know is that winners win and losers walk and coffee is for closers only.
It’s reasonable to criticize. It’s unreasonable to position a constant stream of condemnation as providing value. At best, it’s an exercise in intellectual masturbation. At worst, it’s deriving value by stealing it from the people who had to risk something to make things better.
Most people aren’t irredeemably bad. In our efforts to fit in and create the illusion of security, we’ve thrust that truth aside so we can fit in with our tribes, filled with good people who aren’t like those cretins over there.
Given the saturation of condemnation culture, we shouldn’t be even mildly surprised that we’re awash in mental health issues.
I know this puts me in the minority (perhaps even within my family), but I liked the Jesus ads during the Super Bowl. I know who funded them, but I’m concentrating on the message–and the message of the entire campaign seems to be a broad rebuke of judgmental, finger-wagging Christianity that starts with the assertion of the wagger’s goodness in front of the Lord.
I also know that the money could’ve been given to the poor, rather than spent marketing Jesus. You could say that about almost anything Christians and churches spend money on, from the facilities at my church–nice, but not opulent–all the way to the $40 I spent on a Joe Namath jersey. And you might be right. Matthew 25 is very direct about the cost of not helping those on the fringes. They involve wailing and gnashing of teeth.
In the context of a country within which elected members of Congress tout Christian Nationalism as patriotic and the Governor of Florida supports opening public meetings with Christian prayer, it’s not unreasonable to feel a little crowded by a Jesus commercial in the Super Bowl.
If you listen to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then the commercials don’t rebrand Jesus, they rebrand fascism to look benign. To call those ads fascist is a divisive overreach to score points with her base.
If nothing else, they arm people who don’t like Hobby Lobby with the metaphorical ammunition to go ask the manager of their local store how they rationalize the don’t hate ad with the owners’ policies.
Jesus is an amazing mirror. What we say about Jesus says more about us than about Him. I’ve been through some dark passages in my life and I’ve struggled to keep my humanity during those times. A Jesus who knows that struggle is something that comforts me. In spite of my blind spots, I work hard not to crap on people who are struggling.
As a well-to-do, straight, white Christian, maybe comfort is a luxury I should not be afforded, but darkness is darkness regardless of context. Comfort in times of darkness is something hard to extend when you don’t feel it yourself.
The Jesus ads don’t normalize hate. They aren’t there to give haters a free shot at you. They throw down the gauntlet in front of angry, self-righteous Christians. They’re necessary because of us. Because we do such a horrible job of conveying the message of love first. Scripture says that God loved us first, before we did a single thing to improve ourselves.
The same book of the Bible that may condemn me for my replica jersey also says to come to him when you’re burdened and He will give you rest. That’s the message of Jesus and the ads convey that message.
Right now, I’m in a dark place where I’m not good enough for anything. I need that rest. But I need to extend that to others, as well. Any ad that drives that point home is worth listening to.
Imagine a country where I could be sued for an insane amount of money for calling the governor of Florida God-Emperor DeSantis. Ron DeSantis is imagining this world, and he’s in favor of it. DeSantis isn’t officially running for President yet, but he’s courting the base by lending his voice to the effort to overturn the New York Times Company v. Sullivan decision, which requires that actual malice be shown in considering defamation lawsuits brought by public figures.
Without the protections of Sullivan, politicians (among others) could sue journalists, bloggers, and some idiot who calls DeSantis God-Emperor, effectively discouraging criticism of their actions. In a country where local media has been diminished by a lack of ad revenue, overturning or narrowing the Sullivan case would give elected officials free reign to proclaim their vision as absolute truth without any effective opposition from even a marginally objective third party.
DeSantis is also toying with the idea of obliterating the establishment clause by changing New College in Florida to a southern version of Hillsdale College, a privately run Christian school in Michigan. Eddie Speir, one of the new board members appointed by DeSantis, requested that every board meeting be opened with prayer–a request that was rejected (for now).
I don’t mind prayer. I regularly engage in it, but when your students include non-Christians and atheists, imposing prayer in official proceedings seems a little intimidating. How would you feel if you went to a college where official meetings started with a dedication to facts and science at the exclusion of invisible sky beings and magical thinking?
Meanwhile, librarians are facing death threats because of the contents of the books in their facilities. These aren’t just school libraries, but public libraries, as well. In a free society, someone offended by a book gets to determine whether you can check it out–whether you’re a student or an adult.
The message is clear: this is a nice little library you have here; it’d be a damn shame if something bad were to happen to it (or you) because you have books we don’t like.
When the purge is complete at libraries, will physical and virtual bookstores be next? If a kid can’t check out Gender Queer or How to be Anti-Racist at their library, but it can be delivered to their house within 24 hours, have you really accomplished anything?
All of these moves, and many others, have the approval of so-called patriots, who will fight to the death for your right to say something, as long as they agree with it (or Donald Trump says it).
Lest anyone on the right feel offended or singled out, the left is taking note of all these machinations. The people who compile lists of banned words and concepts would love nothing better than a country in which you could sue someone for several hundred million dollars–and have a shot at winning–for saying something they think offends a marginalized community.
When she first started running for Congress in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez banned media from community campaign events. That’s in a world where Sullivan functioned as case law. You don’t have to be a Trump-supporting conservative to see the advantage of bullying the media into not reporting bad things about you.
Gavin Newsom and George Gascon both claimed the recall efforts against them were carried out by white-supremacist racists, the only group who could oppose their policies. Imagine if they were able to threaten opponents with defamation lawsuits if they agitated for a recall.
Since conservatives want to ban books with degenerate sex, how about the book where two young women got their father drunk and raped him so they could make babies. Lot’s daughters did in the book of Genesis after God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, pretty much destroying all the sperm makers for miles around. If you give the government to ban books the power structure doesn’t like, don’t be shocked when the Bible hits that list.
And in the very definition of irony, among the books targeted by Moms for Liberty, the group of wholesome, freedom-loving American moms instigating library book bans is 1984, a book about the dangers of extreme censorship and thought control. Liberty, it seems, can only flourish when a small group controls what everyone else can consume.
Liberty requires suppression of this book that defends freedom of thought and expression. Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
The First Amendment is first for a reason. Free expression, especially when it pisses people off, is absolutely required for a free society. Without the ability for free expression, we’d still be subjects of the King.
The left has always wanted to limit expression when they don’t like the message, whether it be in sports team names, the use of pronouns, or innocuous words that might offend the one person in a thousand looking hard for a reason for offense. The right has seen what the left does and mimicked their behavior, then turned up their opposition to 11.
Somewhere along the line, both sides of the political divide determined that their delicate sensibilities should never be bruised, touched, or even breathed on.
There have been other societies in which free expression’s been eliminated. They tend to use labels like democratic republic or revolve around charismatic leaders pledging to take the country back from them.
It never ends well, but it typically starts with restrictions of expression.
We’re several steps down that road. Everyone’s so busy using their new found power to their own end that they don’t recognize the direction we’re going.
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