GOP, Religious Right Wedded in Moral Rot

By JOHN YOUNG

How far we’ve come. From FDR’s fireside chats to grade-school tweets that light tiki torches.

From JFK’s selflessness to every man for himself.

From Barack Obama’s “Amazing Grace” to ... the man who in 2016 took the down escalator into our nation’s life.

He hardened America’s racial divides. He demeaned women. He has shown his chief devotion to be the spouting of lies.

History will record all of this. Whether impeached or not, Donald Trump and his amen chorus won’t escape the judgment that matters most.

His chief enablers: Republicans in Congress who swallowed the olive when the House made a simple statement that racism is what racism does.

Add the poohbahs of right-wing mega-religiosity.

The charlatan-in-chief has played them like a pipe organ. Talk about a boys choir.

Franklin Graham, you deserve never to question anyone’s integrity, anyone’s consistency, anyone’s fealty to Christian values.

Jerry Falwell Jr., we condemn you forever to explain why it is that when you preach about godly behavior, some can just play through (golf parlance there).

Robert Jeffress has a big congregation, preaching virtue at First Baptist Dallas. And he has emerged as a big hypocrite as Fox News’ go-to man to rationalize all things Trump. A new Texas Monthly profile of Jeffress shows him to be the definition of glib equivocation.

Given the opportunity to acknowledge Trump to be the racist most Americans know him to be, Jeffress shows he also knows it to be true, in so many words. How do we know? Because he does the playground thing Trump has mastered. He deflects.

“Racism comes in all shapes, all sizes, and, yes, colors,” Jeffress says.

Yes, but what about Trump’s colors?

What about Trump’s obliteration of most of the Ten Commandments? Consider the one – I think it’s No. 7 — about not bedding porn stars and playmates (while married), then paying off said porn stars and playmates (with campaign funds) so voters won’t know about it.

Jeffress sniffs that he and fellow evangelicals knew “they weren’t voting for an altar boy” in promoting their boy.

That just about gives us all a pass, Pastor. If not, why not?

Texas Monthly’s Michael J. Mooney describes these actions as an otherwise righteous man’s “Faustian bargain” — a deal with the devil, for those not into opera.

Sorry, but this gives them too much credit.

The Apostle Matthew was thinking of you, Robert Jeffress, when paraphrasing this from your maker: “It is useless for you to worship me when you teach rules made up by humans.”

It’s all politics, you see. Do you see?

It’s telling that Jeffress and others of his ilk have spoken out against the so-called Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt churches from being partisan vessels.

Shortly after taking office, Trump ordered the Treasury Department not to enforce that law.

If Graham, Falwell and Jeffress truly were men of God, they would denounce Trump’s pandering and say that politics is not their gig.

Unfortunately, they saddled this horse, and this is how they ride.

So, too, with the Republican Party.

Now Trump is pulling off the two-for-one task of sapping both the GOP and the Graham-Jeffress crowd of vital support.

Sure, Trump can fill an arena, and Franklin Graham can fill the Superdome. Outside those walls, though, people are fleeing.

Young Americans especially are disgusted by Trump. Check any poll you desire.

Jennifer Rubin — herself a conservative — writes in the Washington Post that the GOP is digging a hole for itself: “The moral cowardice” of Republicans in Washington, she warns, “is matched by the low opinion of their own voters.”

The same cowardice, one can clearly infer, is displayed by religious leaders who have hitched themselves to a role model from hell.

John Young is a longtime Texas newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2019

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