Things I’m Tired Of, Part II

Since I ran out of time to finish my list from Monday, I decided to break it up into parts. That and I know everyone is short on time and isn’t into reading super incredibly long posts all the time 🤣 So here it goes.

Things I’m Tired Of, Part II

3) Socialism Being Used as a Political Scare Tactic

I recently came across this quote on Facebook and decided to fact-check it-it appealed to my sensibility, but seemed too good to be true. I shared it on my Facebook with the following commentary:

In fact-checking this quote (it’s correct, btw), I learned something I didn’t know before. Namely, that Republicans have been using the word “socialism” as a scare tactic in their campaigns since the ‘30s.
Truman went on to say, “When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan “Down With Socialism” on the banner of his “great crusade,” that is really not what he means at all.
What he really means is, “Down with Progress — down with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,” and “down with Harry Truman’s fair Deal.” That is what he means.”
Truman’s speech, given from a train platform in 1952, was a “caustic rebuke of Republicans (and their presidential nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower), whom Truman characterized as having “opposed almost all our programs to help the economic life of the country” and “having blindly turned [their] back on the tradition of public action for the public good””
The moral of this history lesson seems to be that any time there is potential for great progress, there is an equal and opposite pushback from those who would prefer to keep things the same.
What I find interesting is that the same people who are so resistant to progress have benefited from the fight for change in the past-women’s suffrage, the civil rights era, and every other societal advancement between and since.
Of course there was also tremendous opposition to those movements, with politicians and preachers alike warning of impending doom if the status quo was disrupted.
The religious right actually emerged as a direct result of the racial integration of public schools following Brown vs. Board of Education-not from the passage of Roe vs. Wade as many now believe. While many Christian churches initially supported abortion rights, the same could not be said of civil rights for people of color.
Today, the population that still outwardly discriminates against women and black people is relatively small, probably because it is now mostly accepted that those viewpoints are misogynistic and bigoted.
Even as much progress has been made in that regard, however, we are still woefully neglecting to address other basic human rights-healthcare, to name the main one. The idea that someone should risk dying because they cannot afford their medication or cancer treatments, or to risk financial ruin in paying for them, is unconscionable in a country like ours.
Just as we have come to accept and expect that the elderly should be taken care of through Social Security and Medicare, hopefully someday soon we will all agree that everyone, regardless of their socioeconomic level or age, deserves to have some form of healthcare.
That is not socialism. It’s basic human rights. If you believe that the government has no place in healthcare, why would you believe capitalism does?
No one should be making their fortune off the fact that I have an autoimmune disease and require insulin to live.

For the record, I do not think that everything should be “free” as much of the conservative right has mistakenly been led to believe about all Democrats-most of us simply think that things like healthcare and college should be They must be forgetting the fact that the more formal education someone has, the affordable for anyone who is working full-time. In fact, as I pointed out to someone who replied to one of my comments a not long ago implying that Democrats lack a sense of personal responsibility, in reality it’s red states that receive the most welfare.

The most interesting thing about all of this, though, is not how preoccupied with socialism that Trump supporters are, but their insistence that Democrats do not understand that “free” healthcare or college would be paid for through our taxes. Every time one of them brings up the fact that nothing is actually “free” when it comes to government benefits, I want to say, “No shit, Sherlock.”

They must be forgetting the fact that the more formal education someone has, the more likely they are to lean Democratic. Therefore, to dismiss us all as naive or impressionable idiots who want “something for nothing” is really only doing a disservice to themselves, because I can promise you that most Democrats very well understand how much our tax system is tilted in favor of the rich and large corporations rather than benefiting middle-class workers. The majority of us would much rather see a greater percentage of our taxes go towards helping the average person rather than the top 1% or giant businesses who end up paying nothing as a result of the way the current system is set up.

I saw a meme yesterday that described the right’s-especially the older generation’s-often hypocritical relationship with socialism perfectly:

Although there’s often a disagreement about what actually constitutes socialism (and as with most schools of thought, it exists on a continuum), at its base is the idea that we should all benefit from the taxes we pay. One of the politicians that recently visited our local Democratic Party event put it this way (paraphrased):

The best example of socialism as it exists in our everyday lives is the city water system. The city owns the facilities that manage our water supply, and we pay them for the water we use as well as a fee for the maintenance of those facilities.
If the city was forced to compete with other businesses offering water services, you would have to choose which of those companies you wanted to provide your water when you moved to a new house. The problem arises when each company would be responsible for its own lines running to every house in town, the cost of which would be passed along to the consumers and their water bills would go up. Not to mention, it would be tremendously inefficient-and likely unprofitable for the companies involved.

There’s a great article on the various ways democratic socialism is already established in today’s society here.

Many of the critics of socialism give the example of the current state of Venezuela as a reason why socialism doesn’t work. However, in doing so they fail to acknowledge the other factors that led to economic collapse there, like corruption, poor management of the oil market and the creation of hyperinflation by printing more money to pay for everything. There’s a great exploration of how corruption, not socialism, was the chief correlative factor in the Venezuelan phenomenon here.

There is, however, a big difference between democratic socialism (where the people elect the leaders that manage the government as well as the policies that are involved) and socialist regimes like China, Cuba, and North Korea. More on that here:

I believe that the weaponizing of socialism to inspire fear in conservative voters has been quite effective, unfortunately. As I said in my previous post, almost every conversation with Trump’s supporters eventually devolves into one on socialism and/or abortion. I think they truly believe everything they’re being told in that regard, and therefore are truly afraid of the country ending up like Venezuela. Nevertheless, they seem to be forgetting the fact that the way our government is set up would never allow for that to happen simply as a result of providing affordable healthcare to the U.S. population.

The biggest threat to our democracy in my opinion is not socialism, but the level of corruption and violation of constitutional constructs that only the Trump administration has proven capable of. When the top government official in the country flouts all legal, legislative, and organizational frameworks to further his own interests and ideas (however flawed and inadvisable they may be), that is something to be worried about.

4) Conservative Christians Trying to Scare People into Voting for Trump

The other thing that has struck me lately more than usual is the constant barrage by conservatives in my news feed of memes and articles from the likes of Franklin Graham and James Dobson warning Christians that if they don’t vote, “we’ll” lose “our” country to socialist takeover. Apparently they’re forgetting that America does not belong exclusively to Christians-and that Christ himself was decidedly not American, nor does God “bless” America more than any other nation.

The hyperbole surrounding Christians and Trump is by no means new, of course. Evangelical Christians overwhelmingly voted in Trump’s favor in the 2016 elections (despite Trump’s obvious moral shortcomings) in a concerted effort to “save” Christianity in America.

Even after A couple of weeks ago, I read a
I’ve long maintained that the only “war” on Christians is coming from within-just because the general population no longer accepts the use of religion as an excuse to marginalize and vilify doesn’t mean that Christian beliefs are being “persecuted” at large. In fact, given the growing number of progressive Christians like myself, there is also a substantial movement to separate ourselves from those kinds of “Christians”-some of us actually give more weight to Jesus’ actual commands to love our neighbor (with no disclaimers attached) than to questionable Old Testament practices and laws.
Christianity Today, which is decidedly not a bastion of liberalism, Time article entitled, “ Donald Trump Is Cynically Using Pro-Life Evangelical Voters: I Questioned the Sincerity of Donald Trump’s Pro-Life Stance. The Response From My Fellow Evangelicals Was Troubling”. The author of the piece is a pro-life pastor himself, an adoptive parent and former Arkansas Republican candidate for Congress in 2018. Far from the typical conservative pro-life stance of outright bans and criminalization of abortion, however, he is of the same opinion I am: denounced Trump in December, a large number of conservative Christians remain behind the president, rooting at every public bow of his head and step toward reversing Roe v. Wade. As I wrote yesterday, I believe that the individual intentions behind this are fundamentally good; however, I’m also of the opinion that these single-issue voters are merely political pawns of a man who is only interested in himself.

Abortion rates are now lower than they were before the Supreme Court’s decision to make abortion legal nationally.
The best means of reducing abortion is expanding health coverage so that every woman can consult with her doctor about her medical needs. We also need effective, comprehensive sexual education and greater access to other methods of birth control.

He goes on to detail the insults and threats he received from his fellow Evangelical Christians, which ranged from calling him a “demon rat” (yep, I’ve gotten that one before) to condemning him to hell-after being struck down by God, nonetheless. Some even called his church, calling for him to be fired. He remarks that,

Like millions of other Americans, I grew up in the evangelical Christian subculture. We were taught that if we took a stand for what we believe, we would face opposition. Our pastors and leaders told us that nonbelievers in the world would mistreat us, insult us and even persecute us. Never would I have thought that what they warned us about wouldn’t actually be coming from the outside but from within.

He continues:

My concern is for an evangelical church in America that has normalized hatred in defense of President Trump.
I don’t understand how Christians can justify the name-calling, the insults and plain meanness. I don’t understand how they can so freely bear false witness against others. I don’t understand why they think following President Trump and loyalty to the Republican Party is of greater value than following Jesus and loyalty to his ethic of love.
The question I am left with is a paraphrase of Jesus, “What good is it if we gain the whole Supreme Court but lose our souls?”

That’s the ultimate crux for me. If, as Christians, our number one priority is to stand up for unborn life (and I don’t believe it is), why are so many people so willing to disregard every moral and ethical value outlined in Christianity in the process? In fact, the number of bombings, arsons, chemical attacks, and murders on abortion clinics and their providers should be proof enough of the harm that can come from that stance. Of course those are extreme examples of the disconnect I spoke of in my previous post (between saying you’ll do “anything” to protect innocent lives, while voting in favor of policies that do the opposite); however, from the comments I have seen on social media, too many people are willing to sacrifice the lives of others in the pursuit of saving unborn lives.

You might be saying, “Well I wouldn’t do (or vote for) something like that!”; however, the fact is that if many of the recent laws being proposed in Congress were to pass, you would be doing just that. In some states, restrictive laws have been passed (though not necessarily enacted due to legal challenges) by Republican congressmen and governors that do not provide exemptions for rape, incest, or mental illness (Alabama); criminalize abortion providers (in Alabama it would constitute a felony; in Texas, they could be eligible for the death penalty because it would be classified as murder); or simply make abortions illegal past the detection of a fetal “heartbeat” (Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri). The biggest problem with these bills is that they are being created out of misguided emotions and ignorance rather than scientific fact.

At six weeks of pregnancy, the point at which the “fetal heartbeat” cited in these bills can be detected, fetuses have not even formed hearts yet. The flickering that can be detected through ultrasound is “actually electrically-induced flickering of a portion of the fetal tissue that will become the heart as the embryo develops” states Dr. Ted Anderson, president of The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. According to a recent study published in the British Journal of the Royal Society Interface Focus, “the heart has four clearly defined chambers in the eighth week of pregnancy, but does not have fully organized muscle tissue until the 20th week.” Therefore, if the detection of an actual heartbeat is to be used as a guidepost in abortion laws, it should at least reflect the scientific realities of fetal development.

Of course, that’s not something that most legislators understand. Last year in Ohio, a bill was introduced that would require doctors to “ reimplant ectopic pregnancies” or face murder charges. The problem is that such a thing isn’t even medically possible, or even advisable. An ectopic pregnancy (when a fertilized egg implants outside of the uterus) can quickly become an emergency situation when it causes a woman’s fallopian tube to rupture, which can lead to internal bleeding and even death.

Given all of these factors, therefore, along with the simple fact that I don’t believe it’s any of our places to dictate what a woman should or shouldn’t be able to decide with her doctor in these situations, I do think that many more lives are or have the potential for being adversely affected by this misguided movement than are truly being “saved”.

And finally, even without pointing out the glaring hypocrisy evident in praising someone like Donald Trump as the modern-day savior of Christianity, I feel like too many believers are forgetting or simply disregarding the fact that Jesus told us that the greatest commandment after loving God is to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22: 36–40, NIV) in favor of warping Bible verses and Christian traditions to fit their own narrow worldviews.

As with universally applying the accusation of Democrats gunning for socialism, this way of believing and exhibiting those beliefs is intellectually lazy and spiritually duplicitous. Not only is it giving all Christians a bad name, but is also turning people away from the Christian church in droves…which is kind of the opposite of what we’re supposed to do.

I figured this was a good place to share the rest of my Trump/Christianity memes. If you’re offended by them, I would advise you to ask yourself why that is…because this is the way the rest of the world sees Evangelical Trump supporters.