This is, however, what the evangelical community is.
Separation of church and state was a principle designed to safeguard both the state, and the church. When your politics become your religion, and your religion your politics, it is corrosive to both.
I don’t mind people voting their religion, however they tend to hand pick only certain parts of the religion when they vote, and as a result are no better than anyone other one cause voter.
If you are going to vote pro-life 100% fine, but realize that guy you are voting for because he is pro-life is also pro-big business and anti-poor. That he is against health care and housing. Those are things your religion should find important as well.
Nope, I believe those fall under the “not my responsibility” banner, as so eloquently put by one such poster here.
See, that’s exactly what I mean. When your religion becomes your politics, it makes you a hypocrite. Rather than actually putting in the understanding, they let themselves be manipulated into supporting things that should be anathema.
Supporting authoritarians brutally murdering dissenters because arms deal money, amirite? What the fuck Robertson? This is the corrosive power of entwined secular and religious positions. Now you are espousing evil in the name of religion.
The evangelicals are the worst, and need to be stripped of all societal influence.
Your periodic reminder that if this is the case, you should be voting for candidates who support family planning clinics, sex education, and free birth control. If you’re not doing that, you’re not voting to reduce abortions, you’re voting to criminalize women who have sex (or get raped).
“If you’re pre-natal, you’re fine, if you’re pre-school, you’re fucked!”
An eye for an eye can make the right person a whole lot of money. - God (I think)
I hate the idea of abortion, but I realize that sometimes it necessary (and not just for rape or danger, but because people aren’t ready). I am in favor of anything that reduces that outcome, which is exactly all the things you mentioned.
If you are pro life, and it means a lot to you, put your money where your month is. Start giving money to orphanages, start adopting, or fostering kids. Take action.
The worst for me is that each of these self righteous assholes is the opposite of the example of Jesus, who hung out with the poor, the lepers, and prostitutes. He shamed those that thought they were better.
The modern GOP and Evengelicals are the money-changers at the temple. The guys who got Jesus, the pacifist son of God, so angry that he beat them up.
Two things correlate very well with abortion rates internationally:
Ergo, if your goal is to mitigate abortion, you should be fighting against poverty and for women to have equal treatment by society. The legal status of abortion has almost no correlation with its occurrence except where it functions to signal a society’s attitude toward women.
The problem is that’s not most evangelicals’ goal with respect to abortion legislation. They don’t see the law as a pragmatic tool used to shape a society for the common good. They see it as a reflection of a society’s underlying morality. I think this distinction lies at the heart of many political conflicts, particularly here in the U.S. To an evangelical, if the law says that abortion is legal, this functions as a tacit approval of abortion by society. To them, if abortion is wrong (for the record, I personally do not think it is), then it should be illegal, pragmatic concerns aside. It doesn’t matter how practical implementation of the law would be or if even if its likely effect would be to increase the undesired activity; the law reflects morals. This is why we have prohibition of drugs and laws governing what consenting adults do behind their bedroom doors. To a progressive like me, who sees the law pragmatically, those laws make no sense. But to a conservative, we have them because of what we think is right.
I mean it intuitively makes sense, even if the consequences are counterproductive. If you begin with the premise that abortion is murder, then it follows that abortion, like murder, should be criminalized. I think many pro-lifers would simply put other issues (like, how do we care for kids once they’re born?) in a separate category.
I mean, yeah, this is it.
Hey, doing the right thing is bad for job creators. Stop getting in the way of entrepreneurs by asking them to have morals!
Speaking of which:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/18/investing/dow-jones-stock-market-mnuchin/index.html
“Kushner is a hidden genius.”
Future GOP nominee for President, probably.
Pompeo’s advice per WaPo, that Trump should allow more time for Turkish and Saudi investigations to play out, doesn’t seem unreasonable to me, unless it’s just another delaying tactic to let Trump do nothing till the storm blows over.
Meanwhile,
First, by claiming (falsely) that the GOP tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy have nothing to do with the deficit but it’s all because of entitlements, McConnell was saying “Don’t blame us.” Democrats will continue to argue that Republicans are hypocrites for ballooning the deficit, but McConnell is giving the members of his party the argument they can use in response, that despite the fact that they control the entire government, it has nothing to do with them. It’s all because of the entitlement programs that are on auto-pilot, and they can’t do anything about it now. Not their problem.
That’s what they’ll say for the next two years. But it’s what comes after that’s truly repugnant. McConnell is making clear that once there’s a Democrat in the White House and “unified government” (at least of the GOP) is over, he and his Republican colleagues will go right back to saying the deficit is an urgent crisis, demanding steep cuts to domestic spending in order to address it.
The truth is that the deficit is not really a problem at all, or at least not much of one. But Republicans know well that it’s an effective tool of intimidation and manipulation, given the eternal desire among Democrats to be seen as fiscally responsible stewards of government.
That was in many ways the entire story of the budget during the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency: Democrats trying to be reasonable and responsible while Republicans gleefully pushed them around, in ways that hampered Obama’s ability to solve problems and improve the well-being of the American public. Republicans knew that the more successful Obama was at things such as bringing the country out of the Great Recession, the more he’d benefit politically and the worse it would be for them. So they did everything they could to sabotage him.
Sure, but my point stands. If you’re in favor of criminalizing abortion, and simultaneously think companies shouldn’t have to provide health insurance that covers birth control to their female employees, then your position is that women who have sex should go to jail.
Time for Democratic party line to start educating people on the realities of public vs. private debt. Every time someone makes an analogy where the government is supposed to act like a household’s budget, someone needs to be hopping in there to explain that households have a finite lifespan and their earners have to deal with the inevitable income decline in old age. Most households also carry significant debt. Governments can never lose their job (collecting taxes), get a raise almost every year (from population growth), never face long term income decline (only “business cycle” blips), and have significant control over the value of their debt.
He’s probably right. Trump just needs to stall until the next outrageous thing happens and people will forget. I say probably, though, because Khashoggi is an identifiable victim in the way that “prime minister of Lebanon” and “busload of children in Yemen” were not. People here have much more context for who he is, he was going in to get papers so he could get married, his fiancee is around and on the news, etc. It’s possible that’s enough to keep people engage until there’s a resolution.
So are we supposed to accept that the Saudis have a right to interrogate Khashoggi? I mean, even if some general took “kidnap and interrogate” to mean “murder with a saw”, it seems like “kidnap and interrogate” is an illegal and generally problematic order to be giving.
If someone gets murdered in an embassy, whose jurisdiction is it, anyway?
And that’s pretty much the Evangelical position, and most other fundamentalist Christian sects as well. (Not familiar enough with other faiths to speak for them, but I suspect it’s true elsewhere also.) Abstinence is the only way. Remember the Scarlet Letter? That’s their ideal society. In theory it applies to both men and women but in practice women are treated much more harshly. One of many reasons I got out of there pretty much as soon as I left my parent’s house.
So when abortion is a front and center issue, that’s just a symptom. The root cause is that they think God cares what goes on in everyone’s bedrooms, and legislating that is more important than whatever other bad stuff their politicians may do.
It’s too bad, because I like a lot of those people, and agree with many other aspects of the Christian faith. Still consider myself part of it, in fact. But the inability to get past “all extra marital sex is bad” and especially “gay is abomination” just kills association with the organized aspect for me.