Texas is trying to ban the use of its roads by people seeking care outside the state — and even dispatching right-wing vigilante groups to chase them.

By Jim Hightower | –

( Otherwords.org ) – Here’s our big word of the day: extraterritoriality. It expresses a sketchy legal theory asserting that rulers in one state have a right to enforce their laws in another state.

Its most prominent was in the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required officials in Northern anti-slave states to capture and return escaped slaves to their plantation “owners” in the South, thus applying Southern slave laws in Northern jurisdictions. This abomination was finally repealed in 1864.

Katie Couric Video: “”I was forced to carry my child full term”: Texas abortion plaintiff”

But 160 years later, here comes another faction of right-wing zealots trying to revive the slave-law concept of extraterritoriality — this time applying it to any and all American women who dare to make their own reproductive health decisions.

I’m ashamed to say that this repressive use of the doctrine is being led by my state’s misogynistic governor, Greg Abbott, and our corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton. These two tyrannical men have already saddled Texas women with the most draconian abortion ban in the country, including piously forbidding abortion in cases of rape and incest.

For women to exercise their inherent right to control their own bodies, they’re forced to travel to nearby states. But Texas’s brutal extremists bark that “we’ll ban that, too!” They’ve pushed a flagrantly unconstitutional scheme to outlaw the use of public roads to drive out-of-state for care. And they’ve even sanctioned right-wing vigilantes to follow suspected medical travelers to doctors beyond our borders.

And, going full-tilt totalitarian, the Abbott-Paxton posse has demanded that out-of-state-care groups hand over the names and addresses of Texas women they’ve helped outside of Texas.

Talk about government overreach! Big Brother isn’t just watching… he’s stalking you. To oppose this brutish repression — and to keep it from coming to your state — contact RewireNewsGroup.com/abortion.

Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Via Otherwords.org

Idaho woman traveled to Oregon to terminate pregnancy with fatal fetal anomalies   

 

Kelcie Moseley-Morris

Kelcie Moseley-Morris is a reporter for the Idaho Capital Sun. She is an award-winning journalist who has covered many topics across Idaho since 2011. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Idaho and a master’s degree in public administration from Boise State University. Moseley-Morris started her journalism career at the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, followed by the Lewiston Tribune and the Idaho Press.

 

Via Iowa Capital Dispatch

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Yet, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton argued that the breach was an “insurrection.” The Republican supermajority is concealing, behind this red herring that they are now now Trumpians, resorting to racist scapegoating to score political points.

The expulsions may conflict with the SCOTUS precedent, established when the court reversed the decision of the Georgia state assembly to expel Julian Bond for endorsing a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee statement charging the United States with contravening international law in Vietnam.  The expulsion also violates the Home Rule Amendment, Article XI, Section 9 of the Tennessee Constitution.

Justin Jones (Nashville), Justin Pearson (Memphis) and Gloria Johnson (Knoxville) knowingly violated the rules of decorum and expected to be sanctioned, proportional to their offenses. They used their standing to articulate the depth of outrage towards those lawmakers who ignore the consequences of the gun violence epidemic, and profit from it. In an act of brazen partisan retribution, Jones was ousted by a vote of 72-25, while Pearson went down 69-26 vote. Johnson was sanctioned, but not expelled, which she attributed to racism, as the speeches by Republicans had strong racist overtones.  

            The three state reps joined protesters outside the Capitol on March 30, demanding that lawmakers pass gun-control legislation. Then they brought the House session to a halt, shouting, “No action, no peace,” as Pearson spoke on the floor through a megaphone and chanted “Enough is enough!” about gun violence.”  Jones held a sign that read, “Protect kids, not guns.” Republicans reacted with their usual echo chamber about using a tragedy to score political points, and the “now is not the time” refrain. Pearson and Jones were told, “Don’t elevate yourself above the victims of the tragedy, whose bodies aren’t even yet in the ground.”   So, this is also about the stranglehold the NRA has on the Republican Party, as it has gained strength from voter suppression and gerrymandering nationwide.

            Rural white Republicans are trying to override the will of the voters in three urban districts, and to further erode Democratic representation. They’re punishing their colleagues and three cities over objections to their refusal to enact effective gun legislation after the Nashville shootings and using this charade to avoid a gun control bill.

Inadvertently, Republicans have catapulted the state reps to national prominence, and elicited a forceful backlash of objection and ridicule from a broad political spectrum, including some National Republican leaders. Objectors include Congressional Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), who represents urban Memphis, and served 24 years in the State Senate. If we put together his various statements on the issue, they go like this: “As a former state Senator and current Member of Congress, I understand the need for compliance with rules in a legislative body. But   . . . expelling Members Justin Pearson, Gloria Johnson and Justin Jones will result in the disenfranchisement of their constituents in Memphis, Knoxville and Nashville who voted for them, and result in the unnecessary expense of primary and general elections. . . the heightened emotions prompted by the horrific Covenant School shootings should be a mitigating factor in any disciplinary response. . . The three Democratic Members did violate the rules of decorum, however I believe expulsion to be too extreme a consequence. The passion that motivated the breach of decorum, should mitigate any discipline.”

The Tennessee ACLU said, “Trying to expel three lawmakers without due process for amplifying the voices of their constituents in a peaceful, non-violent manner undermines democracy . . . Instead of rushing to expel members for expressing their ethical convictions about crucial social issues, House leadership should turn to solving the real challenges facing our state.”

This is the rawest form of election interference, a racist, unconstitutional, extra-legislative power play, which dictates to hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans that they can’t choose Reps. Jones and Pearson, their duly elected state legislators. Over 200,000 voters are disenfranchised by this action. Victor Ashe, a former Knoxville mayor, state legislator and an ambassador under the Bush administration said, “The violations of House rules, don’t rise even remotely to the level of expulsion.” But party elder statesmen such as Ashe don’t hold sway in Trump’s party; his ownership was confirmed by the ugly language and implications of these actions. But the legal reaction has yet to unfold.

The Minnesota Reformer BUFFALO — A flag hanging from a telephone pole marked the turnoff to the Land of Promise.

It was unseasonably warm for late October, but three dozen Minnesotans chose to spend their Saturday here, at a church on the north side of Beebe Lake.

Inside a building, church mixed with politics. At the front of the room an American flag was draped over a pulpit, next to which the Rev. Dale Witherington led the day-long retreat, donning a black and white T-shirt that said “I am not one of the sheep.”

Witherington is leader of Restore Minnesota, a ministry that aims to “restore righteousness in Minnesota through spiritual and civic transformation based on the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

He was leading a workshop for “community action teams” that are committed to stamping out the voter fraud they are certain caused Republicans to lose the presidency in 2020, even if prominent Republicans like William Barr and a bevy of Republican-appointed judges don’t agree.

First, Witherington led the group in prayer.

“Lord we know that for most of these folks — and especially right now coming up to election — for most of these folks it is geared on government and politics,” he said. “We know it’s so much more than that. But that’s at the heart of what’s going on in our nation. And if any part of our culture right now needs a fresh breath of God, it is our federal, state and local governments.”

Witherington is a state chaplain, leading Bible studies and providing “spiritual counsel” to lawmakers. He is also state director of the Minnesota Prayer Caucus, an affiliate of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, a nonprofit that defends Judeo-Christian faith and prayer in government. He did not respond to a request for comments.

He opposes abortion and LGBTQ rights and has said there’s no line between church and state. And he’s been working hand-in-hand with the state Republican Party. He and Lukas Severson, Minnesota “election integrity director” for the Republican National Committee, have held multiple trainings for election judges, which is what Minnesota calls party-nominated people who work at the polls. Witherington says they teach the poll workers “what to look for” during the election.

He’s also on a weekly call with a national group led by Cleta Mitchell, a Republican election lawyer who tried to help former President Donald Trump flip the Georgia election results in 2020.

Republicans have long relied on the religious right as foot soldiers, and now conservative Christians have been put to work on the GOP’s latest political push — scrutinizing election administration and putting more of their own in polling places on Election Day. They say they’re merely restoring trust in elections. Democrats and experts in election administration say that dangerously flirts with intimidation of election judges and volunteers who make up the massive, decentralized system of American elections.

Polls show white evangelical Christians have been Trump’s staunchest supporters after he helped deliver their long-sought reversal of Roe v. Wade and seemed to relish in culture war fights with the nation’s coastal elites. Many believe him when he says the election was stolen — contrary to all evidence. And they’re willing to step forward and do whatever it takes to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

‘Going into the heart of the beast’ — Minneapolis

Recordings of Republican training sessions show Witherington and other election deniers are playing prominent roles prepping GOP volunteers to watch the polls on Election Day.

In an Oct. 24 Zoom training obtained by the Reformer, Severson of the RNC said his focus was recruiting “poll challengers” — commonly called poll watchers in other states — to monitor polling sites on Election Day and report fraud or suspicious activities.

The Republican Party wasn’t allowed to use poll watchers for decades after a lawsuit and consent decree following intimidating tactics in the 1981 New Jersey governor’s race — such as stationing off-duty cops at polling places in minority neighborhoods. The consent decree was lifted in 2017, and the party is now rebuilding its poll watching operation, focusing on key states, Severson said on the call.

The RNC built “one of the largest, well-trained election integrity operations” in its history to restore faith in elections after 2020, he said.

Severson told participants he’s focused on getting poll challengers in the 1st and 2nd congressional districts — the state’s most competitive, in southern Minnesota and the east and south metro, respectively.

Election judges are nominated by the political parties, but in heavily Democratic or Republican areas, parties struggle to get enough poll workers, so Severson wants to get poll challengers in those places.

Severson told volunteers to call the GOP hotline if they’re restricted, the polls open late, ballot tabulators aren’t working, ballots are mishandled or voters are improperly assisted.

He referred questions from the Reformer to a GOP spokeswoman, who did not answer them.

Republican strategist Jonathan Aanestad told people on the Zoom to report any problems to the party rather than arguing with election workers, because election workers might call the police if anyone is disruptive, and “We don’t want a black eye in the press.”

Aanestad founded Minnesota Election Integrity Solutions, a nonprofit that he says has recruited and trained numerous election judges. He said on the Zoom they’ve been recruiting election judges since the spring of 2021, and are “well covered” except in the 4th and 5th congressional districts (St. Paul and Minneapolis, respectively).

Aanestad said research by Rick Weible — whom he said is “head of our forensics team” — keeps leading back to the Twin Cities.

“We think that’s where the problems are,” Aanestad said.

Weible is the former mayor of St. Bonifacius who has been traveling the state, posting YouTube videos falsely claiming election fraud and pushing for changes to election procedures, hardware and software.

(In a Friday interview, Aanestad distanced himself from Weible, saying now he only consults for his group.)

Witherington, the minister, mentioned that he would be working as a poll worker in Minneapolis.

“You’re going into the heart of the beast huh Dale?” Aanestad said.

“I’m ready to do that,” Witherington replied.

“You’re gonna be packin’ I hope,” Aanestad said.

Aanestad said in the interview that he was being flippant about Witherington arming himself but said it’s been difficult to get election judges to staff Minneapolis precincts because of perceptions of crime.

Aanestad boasted on the Zoom about convincing numerous county boards to scuttle ballot drop boxes after lobbying in 25 counties.

Then he said drop boxes will be “all over Minneapolis,” despite their best efforts.

(Minneapolis has never had unstaffed ballot drop boxes, only staffed dropoff sites. Drop boxes are one of many bogeymen among election conspiracy theorists, and eliminating them is part of a nationwide push to make it harder to vote.)

In an interview, Aanestad said he was referring to ballot dropoff sites.

He said his group’s work is separate from the RNC push, noting his is a 501(c)(3) organization. That type of nonprofit risks losing its tax-exempt status if it engages in political activity or endorses candidates.

While he’s worked with the Republicans on the Zoom call, he said, “We don’t align with any of them.”

“We’re very much non-religious, non-partisan,” Aanestad said.

‘We are not just a bunch of Christians doing political stuff’

In addition to training people to work the polls, Witherington has been rubbing shoulders with Republican candidates.

Witherington appeared with GOP nominee for governor Scott Jensen after a teacher licensing hearing, and with secretary of state nominee Kim Crockett at a mid-October “freedom rally” sponsored by the “Minnesota Election Protection Team.”

At the request of Severson, Witherington recently was recently recruiting 15 to 20 volunteers to work in the GOP “war room” on Election Day, to receive “incident report” calls from election judges across the state.

Witherington said while serving as state chaplain — in which he’s supposed to be nonpartisan — on the last night of the 2013 legislative session, three bills caught his attention — they dealt with same-sex marriage, a tax increase and unionizing in-home child care, he said on a podcast in August.

“They were attacks against the family,” he said.

While he prefaced his podcast comments by saying, “I don’t come here as Republican or Democrat,” he went on to say the Democratic Party has been “the socialist party,” called the teachers’ union “evil,” and said Democrats “don’t care about the constitution.”

He disagreed with Secretary of State Steve Simon’s assessment that Minnesota is “the envy of the nation” for its voting record: “We’re not the envy of the nation — we’re the scum of the nation,” he said. “Things are headed in the wrong direction unless we flip the state.”

And he intends to help flip it.

At the Buffalo retreat, Witherington said he first had a “vision” in 2013, but it wasn’t until the riots over George Floyd’s Minneapolis police killing that his vision began to come to fruition in Brainerd, with a group of “Christian, constitutional conservatives.”

He found fertile ground: Right-wing activists have been hounding Crow Wing County officials for about a year with voter fraud claims, echoing Trump and his allies’ false claims that election fraud is rampant — even though Trump won the county by 30 points in 2020.

The Brainerd meeting grew into 11 “community action teams,” with a goal of eventually having one in all 87 counties, and perhaps expanding it nationwide, Witherington told the group. He said they had an event that week with right-wing celebrity Charlie Kirk, who founded the youth organization Turning Point USA and has gained notoriety for spreading false claims about the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and voter fraud.

Restore Minnesota is “primarily an educational ministry,” he said.

“We are not just a bunch of Christians doing political stuff and throwing the name Christian on the site just so we make it look good,” Witherington said. “We are being driven to change our culture by the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that includes every sphere of our culture, including governors.”

He has little to fear in making such statements.

Federal law bans political activity by churches and nonprofits, and violations risk their tax-exempt status, but the IRS rarely enforces the law. ProPublica recently reported it could only find one case in which political activity prompted the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of a church in nearly 70 years.

In one of the rare cases in which the IRS audited a church — a Minnesota church that supported former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann — a federal judge ended up dismissing the case, ProPublica recently reported. After that, the IRS suspended investigations into churches’ political activity for five years.

Deena Winter has covered local and state government in four states over the past three decades, with stints at the Bismarck Tribune in North Dakota, as a correspondent for the Denver Post, city hall reporter in Lincoln, Nebraska, and regional editor for Southwest News in the western Minneapolis suburbs. Before joining the staff of the Reformer in 2021 she was a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. She and her husband have a daughter, son, and very grand child. In her spare time, she likes to play tennis, jog, garden and attempt to check out all the best restaurants in the metro area.

Via The Minnesota Reformer

“03:30:52 SPECIAL GUEST: Professor Juan Cole in conversation with Professor Adnan Husain
Professor Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Since 2002, he has written and edited Informed Comment (juancole.com).
On today’s show:
Professor Cole draws a comparison between Iran’s theocracy and theocrats within the GOP like Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
American theocrats, he says, have no problem controlling our bodies.
Iran has no nuclear weapons program he says, and the CIA says so.
Solar power is gaining momentum in America, quicker than you think.”

SPECIAL GUEST: Professor Juan Cole

( Minnesota Reformer) – WAUKESHA, WISCONSIN – Former President Donald Trump listens as Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels speaks to guests during a rally. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.

Republican candidates who claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump have been nominated for governor in four critical swing states, raising concerns that if elected they could try to sway election results in 2024 and beyond.

In Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Republican primary voters elected a candidate who has denied the results of the 2020 election and believes that voter fraud influenced the results. GOP voters also nominated an election-denying candidate in Maryland, though he has less chance of winning in a blue state.

Many more Republican gubernatorial candidates have questioned whether the 2020 election was legitimate or refused to say that President Joe Biden was the rightful winner. But these five are more vocal election deniers, who would be willing to call for audits or move to decertify results.

If they win in November, they will have less of a direct impact on elections than the six election deniers who are running for secretary of state, a position that’s the chief election official in most states. But the governors’ impact could still be significant.

They will sign or veto legislation governing the administration of elections, which could affect which voters are able to cast ballots and how much financial support counties get to administer elections. Governors can also issue executive orders concerning election administration in emergency situations. And in Pennsylvania, the governor gets to appoint the secretary of state, giving that governor immense power over elections.

Currently, state law determines whether governors play a part in the certification of electoral votes, but in every state, governors are then supposed to transmit those votes to Congress.

If Congress were to pass a bill to modernize the Electoral Count Act to reform how electoral votes are counted, governors could be empowered to select their state’s presidential electors in a new way.

The current proposal, introduced by a bipartisan group of senators, requires that at least six days before the Electoral College meets, each governor must submit a “certificate of ascertainment” identifying their state’s presidential electors, and that document would be “conclusive.”

The provision is included to prevent states from submitting more than one slate of electors, as seven states did in 2020 when Trump supporters submitted fake electors.

If a rogue, election-denying governor chose to certify the electors with fewer votes, the certification would then go to state and federal courts, who would have the final say.

Marc Elias, an elections lawyer who has worked for Democratic campaigns and elected officials, has expressed concerns that the reform bill gives too much power to potentially election-denying governors.

“One would hope that a federal court would overturn the results in a particular state if the ‘Big Lie’ governor, for instance, certified the presidential candidate who received fewer lawful votes than the candidate who actually won,” he wrote for Democracy Docket, a progressive voting advocacy group he started. “But nothing in this law assures that or even expresses that preference over the conclusiveness of the governor’s certification.”

But Rick Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, said that’s a misunderstanding of the bill.

He said currently, governors have too much discretion when it comes to transmitting the document certifying the state’s electors. “The concern there is a governor who comes up with reasons to refuse to send the result that the state has already certified as the proper result of the election,” he said.

Several of the GOP candidates for governor say that in 2020, they would not have transmitted their state’s certified electors.

But the Electoral Count Reform Act would protect against that possibility by adding judicial review. Pildes also said that a simple tweak, making it clear that the results of the judicial review would preempt the governor’s decision, could make that even clearer and has been supported by senators.

Under “the Reform Act bill, Congress is binding itself to the position that it should accept the certificate from the governor unless the federal court orders that certificate to be modified, and in that case, Congress should accept the certificate as it’s required to be modified by the federal court,” Pildes said.

Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat, and Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, who sponsored the legislation, have said they expect to pass it before the end of the year. That would mean it could be enacted before the 2024 presidential election cycle and before Democrats potentially lose the U.S. House in the midterm election.

Here are the five GOP candidates for governor who have said they would not have certified Biden as the winner of the 2020 election or who say the 2020 election was rigged:

Arizona

Kari Lake, a former news anchor, is a staunch supporter of Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 election. The GOP nominee in Arizona is also endorsed by Trump and has suggested that she won’t accept the results of her upcoming election if she loses.

“If we don’t win, there’s some cheating going on. And we already know that,” she said just hours before polls closed on primary day.

After she won the race, she told reporters: “We out-voted the fraud, we didn’t listen to what the fake news had to say.”

Lake said during an Arizona Republican debate in June that she would not have certified Biden’s victory in Arizona.

In the same debate, she called the election corrupt and said — with no evidence — that 34,000 ballots “were counted two, three, and four times” in Arizona and that 200,000 ballots were trafficked by mules. “He lost the election, and shouldn’t be in the White House,” she said about Biden.

Pennsylvania

Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano will face Democrat Josh Shapiro in November in Pennsylvania. Mastriano is an extreme supporter of Trump’s Big Lie.

The nominee was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and helped thousands of others come to the event by bus. He says he left before the riot began, but video contradicts his claim and shows him passing through police lines.

The House Jan. 6 committee has subpoenaed Mastriano for information about how he participated in events that led to the insurrection.

Mastriano has also surrounded himself with other election deniers. In June, he hired election denier and former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis to be a senior adviser on his campaign.

After the 2020 election, Mastriano led a state Senate hearing in which Ellis and Trump campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani testified and shared false information about fraud in the election.

In Pennsylvania, the governor appoints the secretary of state. Though Mastriano has not publicly named the person he plans to select, he has hinted at his pick in interviews with far-right radio and TV programs. Mastriano has said he would appoint someone who would dramatically reform elections.

“I saw better elections in Afghanistan than in Pennsylvania,” Mastriano, an Army veteran, said while campaigning.

He has vowed that his pick for the state’s top election official would require everyone to “re-register” to vote, a requirement that would violate the National Voter Registration Act. And according to election experts consulted by Bolts magazine, a secretary of state under Mastriano could try to refuse to certify election results from Democratic-leaning counties.

Mastriano is also a user of Gab, an online platform for hate speech

Michigan

Tudor Dixon, a conservative commentator, is endorsed by Trump and recently dodged the question when asked if she still believes Trump won the 2020 election. But on numerous occasions since 2020, the Michigan GOP nominee has supported Trump’s claims that fraud cost him the election.

In a debate in May, Dixon unequivocally answered “yes” when asked if she believes Trump legitimately won the 2020 election in Michigan.

And in a November tweet reply to Trump, she wrote: “Steal an election then hide behind calls for unity and leftists lap it up.”

In an interview in November 2021, Dixon blamed Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for “not running the election the way she should have” and “in a way that was rife for fraud.” She then said that Benson provided the opportunity for Joe Biden to tilt the election so he could win.

Wisconsin

Tim Michels, a millionaire construction executive and the most recent election denier to win a GOP primary, is also supported by Trump, although he has distanced himself from the former president in recent months and has been more hesitant to say he believes the 2020 election was stolen.

During a debate in July, Michels said that if elected, he would not prioritize decertifying the 2020 election results.

But he’s tried to appeal to all GOP primary voters, also saying he would consider signing legislation that came to his desk from the GOP-controlled Assembly to decertify the results. He said he would “need to see the details” before making a decision on decertification. Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes.

It’s not the only time Michels has gone back and forth on his support for the former president. He also said in a debate that he wouldn’t endorse Trump if he ran for president in 2024, but then reversed course in a later campaign event.

Maryland

Republicans in Maryland elected attorney and state delegate Dan Cox in the June primary over a candidate supported by the state party establishment and current Republican Gov. Larry Hogan.

Cox has been endorsed by Trump and organized buses and attended the rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

“I am co-hosting two buses to the Million MAGA March/Rally with the Frederick County Conservative Club in support of President Trump @realDonaldTrump on January 6, 2021 to #StoptheSteal,” he wrote on Twitter on Jan. 1, 2021.

Later that day, he tweeted: “Pence is a traitor.”

After the election, in December 2020, he wrote on Facebook that Trump should seize voting machines. He also called for an audit of the 2020 election in Maryland, even though he wasn’t able to cite any credible evidence of fraud.

Cox has continued to deny the results of the 2020 election, writing on his social media platforms in June that the election was “the GREAT HEIST of 2020.”Hogan has called Cox a “QAnon whack job.”

Via Minnesota Reformer

Alito posed as a defender of religious freedom, but what he seemed to mean by that was the religious people who are bigoted against gays shouldn’t have to serve gay people. This is, by the way, the same argument that bigoted white evangelicals deployed against desegregation — they didn’t think they should be made to serve people with the mark of Cain and that their bigotry was inherent in their religion. If Alito’s notion of religious freedom prevails and is reinforced, you have to wonder whether we don’t go back to Jim Crow Apartheid.

de Vogue explains,

“In 2021, the court said that Philadelphia violated the First Amendment when it froze the contract of a Catholic foster agency that refused to work with same-sex couples as potential foster parents because the agency believes that marriage should be between a man and woman. Alito wrote separately to complain that the court hadn’t gone far enough in its opinion and should have made it much more difficult for the government to enforce laws that burden some individuals’ religious beliefs.”

Alito went on to say, that he saw a challenge in convincing “people that religious liberty is worth defending if they don’t think that religion is a good thing that deserves protection.”

Alito’s pose as a mere beleagured defender of “religious liberty” attempts to conceal his role as a reactionary attempting to carve out civil rights exceptions for the religious that allow them to injure the rights of other Americans on the basis of their faith. That isn’t religious liberty, it is religious license, and the Founding Fathers tried to get rid of religious license with the Establishment Clause.

Ironically, even as Alito has managed to impose 20th century Roman Catholic dogma on all Americans, striking down any right to privacy or for women to control their own bodies, he is puzzled as to why anyone would be hostile to his agenda. Jewish Americans have pointed out that he has taken away their rabbinical right to an abortion and given control of Jewish women’s lives in the Red states over to right wing Christians.

That isn’t religious liberty. It is the tyranny of a religious majority.

As for the place of religion in American life, it is rapidly declining. The US was unusual in the period between the end of WW II and about 1990, among industrialized democracies, in having very high rates of self-reported belief in God and church membership and attendance.

On the order of 40% of French did not believe in God in the late 20th and early 21st century. The figure today is a majority, 51%.

In contrast, until the 1990s only 2% of Americans said that the had no religion, and even in the 1990s that figure only rose to 8%.

This year, Gallup found that religious “nones,” people who say they don’t believe in God or have no religion, are up to 19%. Only 81% of Americans now believe in God, by Gallup’s projection.

But get this: 11% of Americans don’t think that the God they believe in hears prayers or intervenes in the world. I.e. they hold that he is not what the theologians would call “provident.” Then another 28% believe in God and think he hears their prayers, but they also don’t think he intervenes in this world.

Thomas Jefferson’s Deism has won! Only 40% of Americans, a minority, believe in a God who hears prayers and answers them!

Historian Bradley C. Thompson wrote, “This much can be said with confidence: when Jefferson wrote of “Nature’s God” he almost certainly meant the impersonal, far-removed, deist God that set the world in motion according to the laws that were meant to govern in his absence. The Declaration’s God is not the God of the Old Testament (nor is it even the God of the New Testament) but is Nature’s God.”

This decline of religion is in part generational. Alito is 72 and his was the generation when only 2% did not believe in God.

Among young adults in the US, according to Gallup, 32% do not believe in God.

Self-identified liberals are even less religious than the Millennials and Gen Z. Only 62% of them say they believe in God.

It isn’t clear what has driven this stampede away from the church. But sociologists have some ideas.

Patricia Wittberg notes that “young adult Catholic women are now less observant in their attendance, less orthodox in their beliefs, and less likely to remain Catholic than young adult Catholic males.” She notes that it has been suggested that they are alienated by a male-dominated church hierarchy. I don’t think she’s giving enough weight to the Church’s anti-abortion, anti-birth control stances, which directly and negatively affect young women.

I confidently predict a further outflow of young American women from the church in the wake of Alito’s Dobbs decision, because he has made it crystal clear that elderly religious Catholic males are not the friends of young women.

Many youth were also raised by Baby-Boomer parents who themselves were open-minded about religion and perhaps not very observant.

A 2019 poll found that fully 37% of American Catholics are considering leaving the church over the priest pedophilia scandals.

It has been suggested that many younger Americans have dissociated themselves from their parents’ church because churches have tended to be homophobic and hostile to gay rights, whereas acceptance of gays is at 72% among US youth. You hate to hear your pastor or priest badmouth your LBGTQ friends.

If Alito, Thomas and other religious conservatives overturn gay marriage rights, they will be further driving young people away from religion.

Then, the COVID-19 pandemic has cut church attendance in half, and many pastors think the congregations are never coming back. Donations are way off in consequence, as well.

So, Alito is being disingenuous in representing himself as merely fighting for religious “liberty.” He is fighting to let religious people refuse to serve the rest of us and to allow them to dictate our behavior according to their theology. Most ironically of all, Alito may single-handedly have killed off religion in the United States in the coming generation by associating religion with the end of women’s rights.

A devastating yearlong investigation into the executive committee of the largest conservative evangelical denomination in the U.S., the Southern Baptist Convention, has documented widespread claims of sex abuse including accusations of rape, cover-ups and gross mistreatment of women seeking justice.

In 2019 the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News partnered on a series of investigative reports on sexual misconduct by Southern Baptists with formal church roles. Subsequently, the annual meeting of the SBC held in June 2021 voted to authorize an investigations firm, Guidepost Solutions, to conduct an independent probe of its executive committee and its handling of sex abuse. The report and the list of alleged offenders has recently been made public.

I am a scholar of evangelicalism, gender and American culture, and over several years of my research I have seen how deeply ingrained aspects of conservative white evangelicalism force women to stay silent. In researching my two books, “Evangelical Christian Women” and “Building God’s Kingdom,” I found how structures of patriarchy force women to stay silent.

These deeply ingrained aspects of conservative white evangelicalism include “complementarianism,” or the patriarchal view that God gives authority to men and requires submission from women, and purity culture, an extreme version of sexual abstinence.

Purity culture

The SBC’s “True Love Waits,” a premarital abstinence campaign for teens launched in 1992, was an important component of the rise of purity culture. It was best known for the purity rings that girls wore as part of a pledge to their virginity to God and family.

More than merely the value of forgoing sex until marriage, purity culture centers sexual purity as a primary measure of the value of young women, who need to remain “pure” to attract a godly man in marriage. Sex education is virtually nonexistent, and dating is traded for “courtship” leading to marriage, under the authority of the girl’s father.

As author Linda Kay Klein writes in her book “Pure,” women are taught that they are responsible not only for their own purity, but for the purity of the males around them. Women are also made to believe that they are responsible if men are led to sin by what women wear. Additionally, they can be blamed for being inadequately submissive and for speaking up when they should be quiet. Women raised with these teachings also report experiencing tremendous fear and shame around issues of gender, sex and marriage.

The rhetoric of purity culture can be traced directly to the racist origins of the Southern Baptist Convention. The defense of slavery was the very foundation upon which the denomination was built, and the protection of the “purity of white womanhood” was a the justification for the perpetuation of white supremacy that outlived slavery.

How survivors described the abuse

Credibly accused men were protected by the SBC, while the women who dared to speak up were called sluts, adulteresses, Jezebels and even agents of Satan. For example, the report details the story of one woman whose abuse was mischaracterized by the SBC’s Baptist Press as a consensual affair and she was harassed online and called an adulteress. She ultimately lost her job at a Southern Baptist organization.

The report, which the former SBC leader Russell Moore calls “apocalyptic,” details harassment, insults and attacks on social media, some of which came from Baptist leaders to whom the women had been taught God required them to revere and submit. For example, the executive staff member at the center of handling abuse accusations, Augie Boto, characterized the survivors seeking justice as doing the work of Satan.

Survivor after survivor described their treatment at the hands of their own leaders as worse than their initial assaults. One survivor told investigators that when she provided details of her sexual abuse as a child among other things, one Executive Committee (EC) member “turn(ed) his back to her while she was speaking … and another EC member chortl(ed).”

“I ask you to try to imagine what it’s like to speak about something so painful to a room in which men disrespect you in such a way. … to speak about this horrific trauma of having my pastor repeatedly rape me as a child, only to have religious leaders behave in this way,” she said.

Shaming and silencing women

When victims are permitted to tell their stories to people in authority, it is likely to be an all-male committee including perhaps friends of the accused.

In such a hearing women – who because of purity culture practices have often been taught to always be modest and quiet in mixed company and may have had little to no sex education – are asked to detail what they often say is the most painful experience of their lives. Purity culture creates in women a strong sense of shame surrounding their bodies, their own sexuality, and sex in general. When they exhibit evidence of that shame it is taken as an admission that they share responsibility for the abuse.

Like their forebears before them who mobilized the mythic purity of white womanhood to shore up their power, today’s leaders at the center of this report remain male and overwhelmingly white. They use the language of purity culture to shame and silence women seeking justice while, at the same time, leading the charge in the fight against coming to terms with racism.

Can there be real reform?

The chairman of the SBC executive committee, Rolland Slade, and interim President and CEO Willie McLaurin said in a statement, in response to the report: “We are grieved by the findings of this investigation. We are committed to doing all we can to prevent future instances of sexual abuse in churches, to improve our response and our care, to remove reporting roadblocks.” Other Baptists too have expressed shock and anger at the revelations.

The Guidepost Solutions report concludes with a series of strategies such as forming an independent committee to oversee reforms, including providing resources for prevention and reporting of abuse. As helpful as these strategies may be, they don’t address how the underlying culture of the SBC continues to maintain the structures of white patriarchy.

Julie Ingersoll, Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.