God Is Now Trump’s Co-Conspirator
Bigotry, both racial and religious, is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
( ing Catholic) William Barr, the attorney general, gave last week at the University of Notre Dame Law School
If Barr’s speech is any indication, their strategy is to make God their boss’s co-conspirator.
Barr gave a fiery speech denouncing the threat to America posed by “militant secularists,”
whom he accused of conspiring to destroy the “traditional moral order,” blaming them for rising mental illness, drug dependency and violence.
Consider for a moment how inappropriate it is for Barr, of all people, to have given such a speech.
The Cons ution guarantees freedom of religion;
the nation’s chief law enforcement officer has no business denouncing those who exercise that freedom by choosing not to endorse any religion.
around a fifth of Americans say that they don’t consider themselves affiliated with any religion,
roughly the same number who consider themselves Catholic
he didn’t just declare that secularism is bad;
he declared that the damage it does is intentional:
“This is not decay. It is organized destruction.”
If that kind of talk doesn’t scare you, it should;
it’s the language of witch hunts and pogroms.
that secularism is responsible for violence happens to be empirically verifiable nonsense.
with a large rise in the number of religiously unaffiliated and growing social liberalism on issues like same-sex marriage;
it has also seen a dramatic decline in violent crime.
European nations are far less religious than we are;
they also have much lower homicide rates, and
rarely experience the mass shootings that have become almost routine here.
Barr ... is sounding remarkably like America’s most unhinged religious zealots,
the kind of people who insist that we keep experiencing mass murder because schools teach the theory of evolution.
Guns don’t kill people — Darwin kills people!
this outburst of God-talk is surely a response to the way the walls are closing in on Trump,
the high likelihood that he will be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Trump’s response to his predicament has been to ramp up the ugliness in an effort to rally his base.
who makes up Trump’s base?
It’s reallyevangelical working-class whites who are staying with Trump
despite growing evidence of his malfeasance and unsuitability for high office.
his truly enthusiastic support comes from religious leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr., who have their own ethical issues,
but have called on their followers to “render to God and Trump.”
Trump is instead taking shelter behind bigotry — racial, of course, but now religious as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/o...rr-speech.html