Thursday, June 28th, 2018
VALERIE TARICO, - Raw Story
Stephan: Christofascism like all such fundamentalist movements is basically a nasty bit patriarchy justified by a grotesque distortion of whatever scripture that movement cites. Just as the Taliban is a sickness in Islam, so the christofascist cult is a sickness in Christianity. In both instances much of the thinking centers on children and women being chattel, like a chair, or a cow.
Why do the same people who fight against abortion argue that parents should have the right to hit their children and deny them medical care or education, as some conservative Republicans have done recently? How can someone oppose family planning because a pill or IUD might have the rare and unintendedconsequence of interfering with implantation, and then endorse beating a child, which might have the rare and unintended consequence of battering her to death?
These two positions fit together seamlessly only when we understand the Iron Age view of the child woven through the Bible and how that view has shaped the priorities and behavior of those who treat the Bible like the literally perfect Word of God.
A Modern View of Childhood
Modern secularists think of children as persons with rights based on their capacity to suffer and feel pleasure, to love and be loved, to be aware and self-aware, to have preferences and intentions that are expressed via decisions and actions, and to have dreams and goals that place a value on their own future. These capacities, which make human life uniquely precious, […]
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Thursday, June 28th, 2018
Stephan: As the United States developed as a technological nation Unions were what kept workers from being reduced to the status of powerless serfs. The people who employed those workers have always hated the power of collective bargaining, and have worked to castrate unions. The Supreme Court is now in play and the recent 5-4 decision concerning Unions shows clearly what the Trumplicans have in mind.
The U.S. Supreme Court Credit: Alex Wong/Newsmakers
The Supreme Court has delivered a potentially crushing blow to public-sector unions, ruling 5-4 today that they cannot collect fees from non-members. The ruling will likely diminish unions’ negotiating power and, with it, their political clout.
Why it matters: The public sector is one of the last bastions of labor’s strength — about 34% of government workers are unionized, compared with just 6.5% of the private sector. But this ruling could shrink those rolls significantly.
The details: The court struck down so-called “agency fees” that unions collect from non-members.
- Those fees can only be used for collective bargaining, not overtly political activity. The rationale is that everyone in a workplace benefits from union negotiations over things like salary and time off, so everyone should contribute.
- But critics say that because these unions are bargaining with the government, their bargaining is inherently political. The Supreme Court agreed with that position today.
Between the lines: The Read the Full Article
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Wednesday, June 27th, 2018
JAMES LAPORTA SPENCER ACKERMAN, - Daily Beast
Stephan: We are in very deep trouble in my opinion. There is so much scandal and corruption going on in the Trump Reich that much of what really matters is getting lost, or mis-appreciated. Donald Trump has taken over the military and turned it into a personal force. And he is using it for explicitly racist purposes which even the men and women who serve to carry out his policies are beginning to recognize, as this report spells out. They are appalled at what they are being asked to do. These are concentration camps.
And what alarms me, and I think should alarm you is that over a third of the country is very comfortable with what is happening. It is the same thing that happened in Germany, when the National Socialists came to power through a vote. Angry, fearful racists, took control when complacent Germans did not come together to oppose them. The Trump Reich now controls the Supreme Court, both houses of congress, the presidency, and the federal agencies.
The fate of America will turn on the November elections.
Illustration credit: The Daily Beast
Active-duty and retired U.S. military officers and enlisted personnel are expressing a sense of moral emergency over the Defense Department setting up detention camps for undocumented immigrants on military bases.
“It smacks of totalitarianism,” said Steve Kleinman, a retired Air Force colonel and military intelligence officer.
Raf Noboa, an Iraq War veteran and former Army sergeant, said he was astounded by the “enormous moral offense” the camps represent and which the military will be ordered to support.
“America’s military once liberated people from concentration camps,” Noboa told The Daily Beast. “It beggars the mind and our morality that it might be used to secure them.”
“I knew something bad was going to happen. I have always taken [President Trump]’s rhetoric at face value and right now, I’m not banking on the president having good will towards people of my nationality,” said an active-duty military officer of Mexican descent currently stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, one of the sites under consideration for the detention camps.
Following […]
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Wednesday, June 27th, 2018
Daniel Burke, Religion Editor - CNN
Stephan: When you read the accounts of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, it becomes clear how very strongly the Founders felt about creating a firewall between church and state. In 1797 the Treaty of Tripoli formally read to the senate twice was ratified unanimously without debate on 7 June 1797. President John Adams signed it. It contained the follow clause, "'The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." Culturally heavily influenced by Christianity to be sure, but there was no formal state religion.
The Founders either personally or through their families had direct experience with state religion and they saw all the evils that attended this linkage. Like so much of our history that seems to be forgotten. The christofascist cult has worked for years to influence state policy
We are now seeing the fruits of that labor.
On Tuesday, in upholding President Donald Trump’s travel ban, five Supreme Court justices ruled that his critical statements about Islam and Muslims, both as a candidate and as chief executive, don’t matter.
Outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday, protesters and members of Congress accused the justices of adopting a double standard: one set of rules for white Christians and another for Muslims and other religious minorities.
“It’s an obvious contradiction,” said Rep. André Carson of Indiana, a Democrat who’s one of two Muslims in Congress. “It’s absolutely apparent that there is a double standard.”
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Wednesday, June 27th, 2018
Jonathan Stempel, Dan Whitcomb, and Brendan O’Brien, - Reuters
Stephan: In the chaos of a failing democracy what we are seeing are individual officials in the system who still place integrity and American democracy first. Some are in agencies, some are judges, some are military. They stand out so starkly because the principal leaders, Trump, McConnell, and Ryan are so morally and ethically contemptible.
A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that U.S. immigration agents could no longer separate immigrant parents and children caught crossing the border from Mexico illegally, and must work to reunite those families that had been split up in custody.
United States District Court Judge Dana Sabraw granted the American Civil Liberties Union a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed over the family separations.
More than 2,300 migrant children were separated from their parents after the Trump administration began a “zero tolerance” policy in early May, seeking to prosecute all adults who crossed the border illegally, including those traveling with children.
The ACLU had sued on behalf of a mother and her then 6-year-old daughter, who were separated after arriving last November in the United States to seek asylum and escape religious persecution in Democratic Republic of Congo.
While they were reunited in March, the ACLU is pursuing class-action claims on behalf of other immigrants.
Trump issued an executive order to end the family separations on June 20, but the government has yet to reunite about 2,000 children with their parents.
Before the preliminary injunction ruling, the U.S. government urged Sabraw not to require that it stop separating and quickly reunite migrant families after […]
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