Did The North Lose The Civil War?

 Reading dispatches from The New Republic, it seems the South has gotten its revenge.

First, The GOP Is Rewriting What It Means to Be a Person:

The groups of people whose Fourteenth Amendment rights to be recognized as full humans are under attack from Republicans are deeply connected to one another. “It’s an error to read these things separate from one another,” Bridges said, adding that the obsession with mass deportations is connected to the desire to end birthright citizenship, which are both tied to wanting to revert to traditional gender and family norms, and that’s linked to the interest in giving rights to fertilized eggs. “All of these things are part of the same project,” she said. “This is about whiteness and patriarchy. It’s about creating the U.S. as a nation for white men.”

So who gets to be a citizen, or a person with equal rights? Not women or people capable of pregnancy, certainly not trans people or their affirming parents, and definitely not Black or brown people. In the Trump 2.0 era, we can expect to see escalating rhetoric that some people really aren’t people, they’re property—either of the state or of their family patriarch. So much for the dignity of equality.

The 14th Amendment was the second of what are called the Civil War Amendments. 

Southern segregationists jumped on private schools as the way to escape integration imposed through the 14th Amendment. Now, they have the ear of the federal judiciary.

Second, Why the Christian Right Demonizes Discourse 

This concept of heterodoxy isn’t simply that these works contain themes or ideas counter to Christian teaching; the central belief about ideas is that they are akin to demonic possession, much like the New Testament accounts we heard in Sunday school. This belief—that ideas themselves have a unique, uncontested power to infiltrate and corrupt our minds and souls—reflects the fundamentalist evangelical worldview, one deeply skeptical of intellectual engagement and critical thinking. Rather than the notion that ideas can be critically analyzed and either accepted or rejected, it held that dangerous ideas can indoctrinate and possess you if you are merely exposed to them. To read a book or discuss a theory, in this worldview, is not to exercise one’s intellectual faculties but to risk being overtaken by a seductive, malevolent force with no hope of resistance.

***

Today, through the decades-long marriage of evangelical Christianity and the political right, this intellectual skepticism is no longer confined to the pews. The evangelical distrust of intellectual inquiry has found a powerful ally in American right-wing politics, reshaping the nation’s cultural and educational landscape. The rise of Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority and its embrace by the Reagan campaign provided organizational structure to these fears, helping translate religious anxieties about intellectual corruption into political action. Building on the foundation laid during the Reagan administration, figures like Pat Robertson continued to leverage this partnership in the 1990s through organizations like the Christian Coalition of America.

They capitalized on fears of moral decline to mobilize voters and influence policy, solidifying evangelical influence within the Republican Party. This relationship deepened with the rise of culture wars, as issues like banning abortion, putting Christian prayer in schools, and limiting LGBTQ rights became rallying points for evangelical activism. Under George W. Bush, this alliance reached new heights with the establishment of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which provided federal funding to religious organizations for social services, and the emphasis on “compassionate conservatism,” which appealed to religious voters while advancing right-wing political goals.

This now firmly established connection between religious conservatives and the political structures of the right have created a feedback loop in which religious fears about moral corruption justify political intervention in education and culture, while political power gives religious leaders unprecedented influence over public institutions (all while they don’t pay taxes to the government). This dynamic reached new and absurd heights during the first Trump administration, when evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham and Paula White portrayed Trump as a divinely appointed leader against secular corruption and defender of Christian values, despite his well-known history of flamboyantly immoral personal conduct. The movement’s willingness to embrace such a morally compromised figure reveals that the real priority of the Christian right has always been the accrual and maintenance of its own political power and influence over the control of policy, information, and ideas—not moral virtue or devotion to God.

The following paragraph is what I have long called the-she-protests-too-much-defense:

This movement’s profound fear of intellectual engagement reveals a deep insecurity about its own beliefs—after all, truly robust ideas don’t require such elaborate protection—and, in fact, a profound respect for the power of ideas. You don’t construct elaborate systems of thought prevention unless you believe, on some level, that exposure to new, better ideas really could transform society. 

I agree that conservatism is a neurotic condition. Fascism is the refuge of the frightened.

As far as I am concerned, if you were born in America, then you are an American. Strange how it is the American Firsters do not share my view.

(That's sarcasm, folks, they see White Americans as True Americans. How many are, like Donald J. Trump, later-comers to America?)

The Evangelical problem can be solved in two ways.

1. Remind them that they are to treat others as they would have themselves treated; anything else is heretical to Christianity. Those holding they have a right to treat others as less than human are not Christians.
2. How come they do not baptize the fetuses they have fetishized?

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