Random Politics Thread

[The Cat]

 

[ceecee]

AR Lawmakers Will Let Christian Healthcare Workers Deny Services to LGBTQ People | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Yesterday, the Republican-run Arkansas Senate passed a bill, SB 289, that would allow all healthcare workers to deny service to people if providing it violates their “conscience.” The bill previously passed in the State House, so this only awaits the signature of Governor Asa Hutchinson.

 

[Red Memories]

AR Lawmakers Will Let Christian Healthcare Workers Deny Services to LGBTQ People | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

..................................................................................................................
there's a certain rage I feel right now and I think Jesus is okay with it.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

Dominion Voting Systems sues Fox News for defamation - CNN

In before "BuT wE'Re aN oPiNiOn nEWs nEtWoRk"

I'm really curious to see if they go the same route as Carlson and Sidney Lawyerhack and argue - in court - that "everyone knows this is not a reliable source of information/no reasonable person believes it's the truth."

And then - like today, when the Fox reporter asked Jen Psaki why Biden didn't answer many Fox questions - she can tell them Fox gets excluded because their own lawyers argue in court they aren't a reliable news source.

 

[Lark]

AR Lawmakers Will Let Christian Healthcare Workers Deny Services to LGBTQ People | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

I'll be honest, if it involves simply swapping out one practitioner for another I'm absolutely fine with that. Absolutely. I also dont know why LGBT persons would not want someone who has a greater interest, experience or insight into their likely unique needs than someone not wishing to practice with them would have.

 

[Lark]

..................................................................................................................
there's a certain rage I feel right now and I think Jesus is okay with it.

I dont tend to think this should be the anti-christian sectarian issue that it is being mobilized to be.

Its unfortunate the whole discussion appeared to go in that direction, there is a valid discussion to be had as to how the heterosexual majority can accommodate the homosexual minority without supposing everyone will want to embrace homosexual norms, behaviour, needs as second only to their own or perhaps, by a strange logic, more important than their own.

I just tend to wonder who would engineer these antagonisms and divisions and seek to ramp them right the way up? What is not being discussed while this is the focus? What is gained by the constant culture war rather than some sort of diversity or pluralism being embraced instead?

 

[Red Herring]

America’s new religious war - Religious fervour is migrating into politics | United States | The Economist

This article sums up my thoughts during the last few years pretty well and overlaps with my obviously limited personal impressions...

America’s new religious war

Religious fervour is migrating into politics
The evangelical culture warriors of the right take on the Democrats’ new Puritans

To start the holiest week in the Christian calendar, Joe Biden is expected to attend Palm Sunday mass at Holy Trinity in Georgetown. He is the most religiously observant president since Jimmy Carter. Considering how organised religion is collapsing, this is yet another way in which his presidency is a throwback.

He presides over a country in which more people claim to have “no religion” than to be Catholic or evangelical Christian. Yet unlike European countries, America is not becoming clearly less devotional as its churches retreat. Even Americans who have abandoned churchgoing are likelier to say they pray and believe in God than German or British Christians. They have rejected the institutions of religion, in other words, but not the religious urge—including a yearning for moral certainty and communal identity—that churches and synagogues have traditionally catered to.

This is giving rise to a lot of heterodox thinking even within America’s shrunken congregations. Nearly a third of self-described Christians say they believe in reincarnation. Wilder ideas are rising among the unaffiliated, as the theologian Tara Isabella Burton has described in “Strange Rites”, a tour through the “wellness” cult, the “brutal atavism” of Jordan Peterson and the weird world of Harry Potter fandom. Politics looks increasingly like another such pseudo-religion. Righteous, moralistic, unforgiving and fervently adhered to, America’s national debate has taken on a religious complexion in both parties. A new academic paper notes that since 2018 American Twitter users have been likelier to identify themselves by partisan affiliation than religion; on that platform especially, it has been a seamless switch.


Some have hailed the displacement of religious fervour into the secular realm as proof of the “God-shaped hole”. This is a conviction, attributed to Blaise Pascal, a French polymath of the mid-17th century, that the religious impulse can never be quelled. Human history suggests he was on to something. But it also suggests outbursts of religiosity owe as much to their cultural, especially institutional, context as metaphysics. The contrasting ways in which Republicans and Democrats are practising the new religious-style politics underlines the truth of that.

The right might look more straightforwardly religious. Under Donald Trump, white evangelical Christians, a mainstay of the party for decades, became its most important group. But even if it includes some old-style values voters, this is no longer your father’s moral majority. Most white evangelicals backed Mr Trump—more zealously than they had any previous Republican—mainly for cultural reasons that had nothing to do with Christianity.

They were motivated far more by his immigration policies and racially infused law-and-order rhetoric than his judicial nominees. They have since shown little interest in Mr Biden’s faith. Or in his efforts to restore the civic religion—an age-old idea of America as a nation blessed by God and united in moral purpose—that Mr Trump disdained. Around a third of white evangelicals subscribe to the QAnon cult. This was apparent in the prominence of man-sized crosses and other Christian paraphernalia among the cultists who stormed the Capitol Building on January 6th.

This pseudo-religious makeover on the right was instigated by lapsed white evangelicals, who backed Mr Trump in the 2016 Republican primary when observant ones held back. Their continued self-identification as Christians, though they do not attend church, is often a proxy for ethno-nationalism. The same religious appropriation is evident, Tobias Cremer of Oxford University has shown, among Europe’s Christian nationalists, who often do not even believe in God. Yet on the American right, unlike Europe’s, it has received mainstream backing. Christian leaders, confusing the decline of their congregations with the cultural threat of liberalism, made common cause with Mr Trump and the pseudo-evangelicals. For partisan reasons, the rest of the Republican coalition followed them. The party has never been more avowedly Christian or more clearly out of line with gospel doctrines.

The situation on the left is roughly the opposite. The most avowedly secular Democrats—well-educated “woke” liberals—are also the likeliest to moralise. Their Puritanical racial and gender politics sit in a long tradition of progressive Utopianism, rooted in mainstream Protestantism. Barack Obama’s Messianic first presidential campaign was also in that vein. Yet these new Puritans of the left, though (or perhaps because) they are more secular than earlier progressives, are far more extreme.

Their view of social justice has no place for forgiveness or grace—as Alexi McCammond recently learned, when the 27-year-old’s editorship of Teen Vogue was cancelled because of some bigoted Tweets she sent as a teenager. It is also more focused on purity and atonement within the liberal tribe (as that example also suggests) than making society less discriminatory. A clue to that is the fact that the Democrats’ many African-American voters largely ignore such activism. They are more concerned to get better health care. Not coincidentally, many also still go to church.

Never mix, never worry
Woke liberalism is less prevalent than many conservatives claim. The Democrats would not have nominated the pious, grandfatherly Mr Biden otherwise. His pragmatic espousal of social justice is different in kind from the woke fringe. His appeals to America’s better angels therefore went down with white liberals almost as badly as they did with white evangelicals. Yet on the cultural questions that now define American politics the Puritanical left is often as influential as the zealous right.

No wonder political compromise has become impossible. Not since the 1850s, when New England’s Puritans embraced the abolitionist case and southern Baptists preached a divine justification for slavery to thwart them, have politics and religion been so destructively confused. It is not a reassuring parallel. ■



This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "The God-shaped hole"

 

[Lark]

America’s new religious war - Religious fervour is migrating into politics | United States | The Economist

This article sums up my thoughts during the last few years pretty well and overlaps with my obviously limited personal impressions...

I get so tired of the re-running of this particular long running serial...

Edit: This is like Aliens Vs. Predator, whoever wins we lose.

 

[The Cat]

AR Lawmakers Will Let Christian Healthcare Workers Deny Services to LGBTQ People | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Their own Holy Book condemns them for that. It also doesnt think theyre being very Christian. The right has really twisted their religion you'd think more of them would be upset about that.

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’

 

[ceecee]

I'll be honest, if it involves simply swapping out one practitioner for another I'm absolutely fine with that. Absolutely. I also dont know why LGBT persons would not want someone who has a greater interest, experience or insight into their likely unique needs than someone not wishing to practice with them would have.

Have you ever been to Arkansas? Rural Arkansas, where there are few, if any hospitals? If you are bleeding out and unconscious and your partner brings you to the hospital and the ER doc says - I don't like gays, you can die - which they will be able to do legally, I really don't think "swapping out" is an option. Oh there will be civil suits for those good Christian doctors that let patients die but criminal charges, nope. The GOP will do all they can to turn the US into a theocracy, one state at a time.

 

[The Cat]

imo its more a nationalistic plutocracy using theocratic elements in an attempt to keep more people in line who might otherwise have not gone against their own interests, but yeah, it's fairly alarming.

 

[Red Memories]

Minnesota court rules rape charge doesn't apply if the victim got willingly drunk

fuck Minnesota

 

[The Cat]

 

[ceecee]

Surprising absolutely no one yet the libs and the chuds still cheer this shit on.

Elite philanthropy mainly self-serving - The Academic Times

 

[Totenkindly]

Have you ever been to Arkansas? Rural Arkansas, where there are few, if any hospitals? If you are bleeding out and unconscious and your partner brings you to the hospital and the ER doc says - I don't like gays, you can die - which they will be able to do legally, I really don't think "swapping out" is an option. Oh there will be civil suits for those good Christian doctors that let patients die but criminal charges, nope. The GOP will do all they can to turn the US into a theocracy, one state at a time.

That is the big problem -- there are large areas of this country where you don't have OPTIONS to go somewhere else, especially for important and timely medical treatment. Kind of like all the shit about abortion clinics where they're like, "Oh, we didn't BAN them," no, they just made them so inaccessible that it's still the same outcome. ASide from the timely treatment, not everyone is able to travel a few hundred miles to get the treatments they need especially on a recurring basis, whether it's because they lack money or simply cannot afford to miss work.

There are a number of hospital chains attached to religions (such as Catholicism). So yeah.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Surprising absolutely no one yet the libs and the chuds still cheer this shit on.

Elite philanthropy mainly self-serving - The Academic Times

I haven't read the article yet, but I will say that I'm with the people who don't find anything heartwarming about those social media posts about someone whose life got saved because they found enough people to donate money to pay for their medical care. There are lots of countries where that kind of thing doesn't need to happen at all. If we made that happen here, that would be heartwarming and not depressing AF.

 

[Virtual ghost]

I haven't read the article yet, but I will say that I'm with the people who don't find anything heartwarming about those social media posts about someone whose life got saved because they found enough people to donate money to pay for their medical care. There are lots of countries where that kind of thing doesn't need to happen at all. If we made that happen here, that would be heartwarming and not depressing AF.

The healthcare as a human right or socialized medicine fundamentally in the bottom line basically is donating money to each other for the medical bills. The only difference is that the system can be dependent upon since it is formalized. Plus if it is set up in a right fashion it will save tons of money that goes to marketing, shareholders administration, offices for that etc. Plus it is a stress relief mechanism for everybody, since you can seek help regardless of what is going in your life. Here we treat it just as police or fire department, you give them a call and they have to fix the problem by duty.



In other words I am covered by such system from birth. Actually already my grand grand grandmother was covered like that, while I am not fully sure about how that actually worked if we look even further into the past. However in some form this should go even further back. Therefore it can evidently work if you put some effort into this.

 

[The Cat]

 

[ceecee]

If I were a rich US senator I would quite simply do everything my very considerable power to direct food and aid to desperate people after a natural disaster. Not hide in my house with an AR-15 ready to mow down my constituents if they get too close to my property line.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

Have you ever been to Arkansas? Rural Arkansas, where there are few, if any hospitals? If you are bleeding out and unconscious and your partner brings you to the hospital and the ER doc says - I don't like gays, you can die - which they will be able to do legally, I really don't think "swapping out" is an option. Oh there will be civil suits for those good Christian doctors that let patients die but criminal charges, nope. The GOP will do all they can to turn the US into a theocracy, one state at a time.

That is the big problem -- there are large areas of this country where you don't have OPTIONS to go somewhere else, especially for important and timely medical treatment. Kind of like all the shit about abortion clinics where they're like, "Oh, we didn't BAN them," no, they just made them so inaccessible that it's still the same outcome. ASide from the timely treatment, not everyone is able to travel a few hundred miles to get the treatments they need especially on a recurring basis, whether it's because they lack money or simply cannot afford to miss work.

There are a number of hospital chains attached to religions (such as Catholicism). So yeah.

I'm asking this because I don't know, but I assume it's the case: is it illegal to not hire someone based explicitly on their religion? In other words: would it be legal to deny qualified job candidates a healthcare placement based solely on affiliation with a religion that makes it likely they'd refuse service to certain individuals?

(Not that this is the straw that'd break the deal for me - the above explanations make the policy bad already. I'm just wondering.)