Voting for values

By now, everyone with any kind of access to news has heard about the latest horrid thing to come to light about Donald Trump -- that he condones, that he actually bragged about, sexual assault.  That he was entitled to that kind of behavior "because he's a star."

What you may not be aware of is that despite this, many (not all, as you'll see later) of Trump's supporters on the Religious Right have continued in their support of Donald Trump's candidacy.  Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, said:

My personal support for Donald Trump has never been based upon shared values, it is based upon shared concerns about issues such as: justices on the Supreme Court that ignore the constitution, America’s continued vulnerability to Islamic terrorists and the systematic attack on religious liberty that we’ve seen in the last 7 1/2 years.

Ralph Reed, of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, agreed:

Voters of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom, create jobs, and oppose the Iran nuclear deal. Ten-year-old tapes of private conversation with a television talk show host rank very low on their hierarchy of concerns.

Let me make this plain.  These are men who are adamant in their protection of human embryos, but who would have as their commander-in-chief a man who would without batting an eyelash participate in sexual assault against our daughters, our sisters, our mothers.  These are men who are virulent in their condemnation of loving expression between two people of the same sex in a committed long-term relationship, but think that a man "grabbing a woman by the pussy" is no big deal.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some of Trump's supporters, not to mention Trump himself, have dismissed this as "lewd locker room talk," and state that "all men talk this way."  The second half is horseshit -- I know plenty of men who speak about women in the terms of the highest respect, and always treat them the same way.  And make no mistake about it; this is not lewd.  "Lewd" is talking to your guy friends about how your girlfriend performs in bed.  It's not nice, it's very likely a breach of privacy, and it's one more example of the objectification of women in our culture.

But that is not what this is.  This is condoning, and in fact suggesting that he has participated in, rape.  This is using your social dominance to commit assault upon a person in a weaker power position simply because you can.

Then there are the people who say, "Well, Bill Clinton did the same thing!"  Perhaps he did, but that is entirely irrelevant, for two reasons.  (1)  Did you condone Bill Clinton's behavior when he was accused of sexual impropriety?  As I recall, he was impeached because of it, to the raucous applause of nearly every Republican in the country.  (2)  Bill Clinton is not currently running for president.

And if you needed a deeper layer of bullshit, just today I've seen more than once posts that said, "If what Donald Trump said was so bad, why did Fifty Shades of Grey sell millions of copies?"  Which is a level of "I don't get it" that is truly mind-boggling.  So as before, let me explain this nice and slowly:

This is not about sex.  This about consent.  Fifty Shades of Grey, from all I've heard -- I haven't read it, and have no intention to -- was a poorly-written hash of a book.  But it was about sexual exploration between two consenting adults.  If you don't see the difference between the subject of this book and what Donald Trump is saying, you are either hopelessly stupid or willfully blind.

As I said earlier, however, there are people on the right who have refused to sell their souls to see this man in the Oval Office, and I find this tremendously heartening.  Just yesterday, an evangelical friend of mine posted an article in The Washington Post by Collin Hansen, editorial director for the Gospel Coalition, who had the following to say:

Trump can maintain nearly all his evangelical support in the voting booth despite unrepentant lying and cheating.  But these same leaders still insist on a traditional, biblical ethic when it comes to views on same-sex marriage in evangelical ministries... 

To the older evangelicals planning to vote for Trump:.. You can say we’re electing a commander in chief and not a Sunday school teacher.  You can say that God often raises up pagan leaders to deliver his people from their enemies.  But no one is fooled by your arguments. 

They can see you will apparently excuse anything in a Republican nominee...  And they will conclude that they don’t really need to listen to you when it comes to "traditional, biblical ethics."

Which is exactly correct.  Hansen and I may not agree on a lot, philosophically, but he at least is clear about what values and ethics are.  And he sees Trump for what he is -- a narcissistic compulsive liar who will do anything, say anything, to achieve whatever position of power he currently wants.

A lot of people don't like Hillary Clinton.  I'm fine with that.  She was far from my first choice, too.  But it is appalling that because of that you would cast your vote for a man who talks about sexual assault upon a stranger as blithely as most of us talk about what to have for dinner.  And this makes one thing crystal clear:

If you vote for Trump, you have no right to claim that you are a "values voter."

The vegan apocalypse

It struck me today how odd it is that in so many religions, it seems like it's not so much that the believers agree with god, it's that god agrees with the believers.

It's entirely possible that this impression comes from my position as an outsider.  But really: my general sense is that the people who are so vehemently against gay marriage (for example) would still be against it even if they weren't religious.  They are using their religion as justification for their bigotry, not honestly and open-mindedly trying to figure out what their religion demands.  Otherwise, you'd think they'd run into "judge not, lest ye be judged" and "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" at least as often as they read "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination."

All of which makes it seem to me, as you might expect, very much that man created god in his own image rather than the other way around.  Hard to explain otherwise that our deities share our pettiness, bias, jealousy, rage, and tribalism.

What brings all this to mind is a site I ran across yesterday that would be funny if it weren't so earnest.  Called God, Justice, Vegan Earth 2019, the site tells us that god isn't so much concerned about sex (which, frankly, seems to be an obsession with your typical Judaeo-Christian god) as he is with food.  We are told, in appalling detail, that we all have to become vegans right away...

... or we're gonna be slaughtered.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I thought, at first, that this might be some kind of a joke site, but I don't think it is.  They seem awfully serious about the whole thing:

Two conditions should be met then you will survive.  You will live and inherit the whole Earth to own, rule and use.  All other humans will be killed.  This is a clean restart.
1- Faith in God
2- Vegan

So given my status as an atheist, and the fact that I think that a rare t-bone steak with a glass of fine red wine is one of the truly awesome things in life, I'm pretty much screwed both ways.  We're even given a timetable, presumably so we can have a chance to mend our ways:

19 Jun 2018-All butchers globally will be killed(1)
15 Aug 2018-All hunters will be killed(2)
11 Sep 2018-Los Angels [sic] 380 Decapitation(3)
23 Sep 2018 -Speech on Mt. Sinai
11 Oct 2018-The Judgment Day

The numbers apparently stand for the "three miracles" that the adherents to this religion think are going to happen.  I was going to say something about how massive genocide hardly counts as a miracle, but then I thought about some of the stories from the Old Testament, with god directing the Israelites to hack their way across Palestine, killing everyone in their way, and I thought, "well, at least there's precedent."

At the end of the page, we're given another dire message:

This is not a business.  Our associates never advertise or sell any product and never ask for donation.
 This is an organization to UNITE and prepare all Vegans to establish the Vegan Earth.

WARNING 

God believer Vegans (only) will own the Earth in 2019.
Estimated survival number after genocide of 2018 is very low.  Learn.  Be among them.
Fill the Churches, Mosques and Temples and learn faith for God and become Vegan.
Both conditions should apply or you will be killed.

So that sounds pretty unequivocal.

We're also told that we can download a free pdf of the book The Vegan Earth: Judgment Day, which will supersede the Torah, the Qu'ran, and the Bible.   It was, the site tells us, written by god and Moses, which is a pretty powerful co-authorship.

But honestly: doesn't it sound to you like this site was put together by someone who already was a vegan, and who thought everyone else should be, too, and decided that the message would sound a lot more authoritative if it was the word of god?   We can chuckle, and shake our heads about how silly the website is -- but how is it really any different than Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, claiming that Christians need to strike back against the gay rights movement because people with "biblical views on the sin of homosexuality" are facing "totalitarianism" comparable to Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the Stalinist regime in the USSR in the1950s?

Both are fact-free rancor and vitriol, from people who want to give their own ugly invective legitimacy by putting it in the mouth of god.  The only difference is that the homophobes are more common, better organized, and richer than the über-vegans. But the message is essentially the same: believe what I believe, because god says so.  And if you don't, you're hell-bound.  We may even expedite your delivery there.

I find the whole thing repellant, and it's not to be wondered at that I'd just as soon be the master of my own moral code, and let others do the same.  For me, starting with the general rule "don't be an asshole" covers a lot of ground, and that includes the biblical dictum -- right from the mouth of Jesus, in fact, in Matthew 7:1-3 -- that we're better off not judging others at all, given that we've all got flaws.  For me, that includes not really giving a rat's ass what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom, as long as no one gets hurt; nor interfering with anyone's taste in food, music, books, art, or clothing, just as I'd prefer that people keep their nose out of my tastes thereof.

But that's apparently not enough of a guiding principle for some people, leading to the kind of thing you hear from bitter, humorless individuals like Tony Perkins, not to mention the various Muslim mullahs still recommending stoning, whipping, and hanging for such "sins" as sex outside of marriage, and declaring fatwas against writers, bloggers, musicians, and actors for "insulting Islam."

The whole thing makes me realize that in a lot of ways, we haven't really come that far from the Bronze Age, the days when the Lord God said unto his people such things as we find in 1 Samuel 15: "This is what the Lord Almighty says: 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.  Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.  Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'"

And such things, apparently, still saith the lord, lo up unto this very day.