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Oklahoma will have its primaries today, which means right-wing Christian Nationalist pastor Jackson Lahmeyer could finally be the Republican nominee for Congress (after a failed previous attempt). But despite an endorsement from Donald Trump, the campaign may have just suffered a major blow after a woman who worked for his campaign said that Lahmeyer—a married father of five—had been sexting her for months… at least until his wife found out.

A quick recap: Lahmeyer is pastor of the internet-friendly Sheridan.Church, based in Tulsa and the founder of “Pastors for Trump,” which was organized to get conservative Christians to support Trump’s 2024 campaign.

The MAGA base loves him because he’s a massive conspiracy theorist. He has said Black Lives Matter was founded by “witchcraft-practicing lesbians,” signed vaccine exemption forms for anyone who became an online member of his church, claimed Dr. Anthony Fauci was a “mass-murdering Luciferian,” said January 6 was an “inside job” by the FBI, claimed that Alex Jones “did nothing wrong,” and fully embraces QAnon… even though he’s been accused of Satanism by other QAnon conspiracists.

He also seeks the “eradication” of Islam from the country and thinks Black women like Jasmine Crockett are guilty of acting “like a GHETTO fool in Congress.”

Soon after Trump nominated Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin to take over Kristi Noem’s job as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, there was a flurry of replacements and newly vacant seats, including the one Lahmeyer is now angling for in the House.

Oklahoma’s 1st Congressional District is a fairly red district where all the real competition occurs in the GOP primary. The Cook Political Report currently rates it a solid Republican district, meaning Democrats don’t stand a chance. But Lahmeyer has the one thing no one else in his race does: The Trump Stamp of Approval.

That endorsement is what led Caitlin Simmons Key, a former Miss Oklahoma USA and a fundraiser for Lahmeyer's campaign, to post about why she was also supporting him:

… Today, Jackson Lahmeyer received President Donald Trump’s endorsement, and regardless of where anyone lands politically, that is a huge moment in this race.

I support Jackson because I actually KNOW him. I know his family. I see the conversations people don’t see, the work people don’t see, and the heart behind all of it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years working around politics, it’s this: politics can be ugly… but not every person in politics is.

There are good people trying to do good things, and Jackson is one of them.

She actually KNEW him. She knew his family. She knows he’s a good guy trying to do good things.

And she knew this because the two of them had been texting for months in a way that any white evangelical pastor would say crossed every boundary. She told her story to the right-wing Daily Mail—with the screenshots of their messages to back it up—adding that she remained on Lahmeyer’s payroll even after his wife found the messages.

She says the two of them didn’t have sex. But their text messages were never supposed to be made public because it was clear he would have gone further if he thought he could get away with it, even inviting her to his hotel room. She said no because he was still married to his wife.

‘Eventually the conversations crossed the line of probably what most people would consider appropriate for a married man and a single woman,’ she said.

…

He sent a selfie from his room at a Hyatt Place and floated a 'late invite.' She declined. Key says she was the one urging realism about his marriage. 'And at some point- if u need to get divorced. Then ok,' she texted him. His reply: 'Not right now tho lol.'

…

She put it to him bluntly: ‘U r in love with me and we don’t even have sex.’

‘Well... hahah,’ he replied. ‘I’m a fan of you how about that lol.’

‘Nobody knew how close we were,’ says Key. ‘Not one person on the planet besides me and him.’

When his wife found Lahmeyer’s texts, she was predictably furious—and lashed out against… Key. As if this were a one-sided interaction.

‘How dare you,’ Kendra wrote on May 9. ‘Don’t you ever contact my husband again. He told me everything.’

Key denied it. ‘I am not romantically involved with him. At all. If he feels differently towards me, that is nothing I have control of. I am dating someone!’

‘You are a liar,’ Kendra replied. ‘So just stop. You are out of our lives, don’t ever contact my husband again. Do you understand? Im not kidding. It was romantic, I saw it.’

…

'You are a home wrecking whore. Did you enjoy ruining our family?' Lahmeyer's wife Kendra wrote to Key on May 9: 'He has 5 kids.'

It’s not clear how much, if any, responsibility she puts on Lahmeyer himself, even though he apparently told Key to delete their messages (she didn’t). Did his wife know Key was still on the payroll, presumably so she wouldn’t go running to a British tabloid about their relationship?

In another interaction between the two, he told her she was “super thin and very cute” before leaving Mar-a-Lago to go to a strip club. As conservative Christians do. (Don’t worry, though. He said no to the offer of cocaine.)

Her response was incredible:

Her reply now reads as prophecy: ‘Jackson if u become congressman & if ever got caught u would be headlines.’ Then, one word: ‘Pastor.’

Yes. There would be lots of headlines. Because when you have a right-wing MAGA preacher who promotes “family values” and Trump, the inevitable hypocrisy is bound to be a major part of the campaign. It’s just a matter of which flavor. (Just ask Mark Robinson.) Is Lahmeyer a Christian who wants to help the “least of these” while persecuting refugees? Someone who promises fiscal responsibility while allowing Trump and his family to practically rob the Treasury? Someone who champions “pro-life” policies while opposing programs that keep people healthy and alive? Or a pastor who denounces same-sex relationships while trying to score himself a mistress?

I don’t normally care about these MAGA cultists’ private lives when it doesn’t affect anything else. Former Oklahoma official Ryan Walters recently got divorced. It wasn’t a scandal. There was no evidence of hypocrisy (other than the hypocrisy of an evangelical getting divorced at all despite pushing for covenant marriages). So it wasn’t a story. This, on the other hand, is a secret Lahmeyer didn’t want anyone to know about.

When the story was published Sunday night, Lahmeyer responded by blaming the messenger. He didn’t deny the texts. He just called the story “distorted”—without going into any details about what the Daily Mail purportedly exaggerated—and suggested the story may have been “paid for.” There’s no evidence of that. He also claimed he handled the matter privately and that his wife “may” have more to say soon.

Notice he doesn’t say the story is a lie.

And then his church canceled its Sunday service. Because Jesus can wait if the alternative is being in the spotlight after a story like this breaks.

Will any of this matter in today’s primary? Probably not. Lahmeyer’s base consists of white evangelical voters and they don’t actually give a shit if their most prominent pastors break their own moral codes. They’ll just chalk it up to sin and then celebrate whenever the pastor gets around to his forgiveness tour. Only Democrats are ever held to any standards these days. It’s the Christian Way™.

It should matter, though, because Lahmeyer has built his entire public career around judging other people’s morality. Yet here’s evidence of him violating his own supposed standards and what’s his response? Denial and deflection.

You know how all of these people would react if a Democrat did anything like this. They would spend months treating it as proof of moral corruption. But because Lahmeyer is a Republican, the rules don’t matter. His supporters on Facebook are already calling it a distraction or a lie.

That’s the hypocrisy at the heart of Christian Nationalism.

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Anti-abortion laws are ruining lives, even in blue states that aim to protect women’s rights. And a new lawsuit is a perfect example of that. It involves the traumatic episode experienced by 28-year-old Harmonie Perrone, an Illinois woman who had an ectopic pregnancy (where the fertilized egg implants inside the fallopian tube).

Perrone had been pregnant before—and had suffered ectopic pregnancies before. In fact, the first time that happened, she required surgery and lost her right fallopian tube. The second time it happened, she was treated with methotrexate, which stopped the egg from dividing, effectively inducing an abortion without the need for surgery.

When she became pregnant this time, she knew there was a possibility that something similar could happen, so when symptoms began to appear, she knew exactly what had to happen: She needed the methotrexate and she needed it fast.

Unfortunately, her local hospital, Advocate Good Shepherd, was a religious hospital with abortion rules similar to Catholic hospitals where anything involving contraception or abortion is forbidden. That meant treating ectopic pregnancies was even more of a hassle. Simply put, these kinds of faith-based hospitals don’t generally allow abortions unless there’s literally no other option. In this case, the only way they were going to give her the drug was if her fallopian tube was moments away from rupturing (and putting her life in danger).

She didn’t know that.

When she was admitted into the emergency room, she explained her situation and that she needed methotrexate immediately to avoid surgery. After confirming her situation through blood tests and an ultrasound, the ER staff told her they still couldn’t take action. They needed to consult an on-call OB/GYN “specialist.”

As a lawsuit later explained:

An hour later—and four hours into her ER visit at Advocate Good Shepherd—ER staff returned and told Ms. Perrone they had consulted with the on-call OB/GYN who was a “specialist.” They assured Ms. Perrone she would be fine and that she did not need surgery. They told Ms. Perrone they had made an appointment for her to visit the specialist the next day. Ms. Perrone again asked for methotrexate but was told that the emergency room could not prescribe the medication and she would need to talk to the specialist OB/GYN the next day.

When you have an ectopic pregnancy, it needs to be treated immediately. The longer you delay treatment, the riskier everything becomes. But she visited that specialist, Dr. Dympna Coll, the next day. (The lawsuit says there were ads for Botox on the wall, which didn’t exactly scream professional...)

After more tests, and another explanation of her medical history, Coll told Perrone she would still not prescribe methotrexate. The lawsuit then chronicles snippets of what Coll told Perrone:

“We have to weigh the pros and cons of the life of the baby and the life of the mother.”

“There is a 1% chance that there is a baby in there.”

“I cannot in good faith intervene at this time.”

“I will only intervene if your tube is rupturing.”

“You are not going to bully me into giving you methotrexate.”

“We do not do abortions here. You will have to go somewhere else.”

At one point, Coll cited Illinois law, presumably one that says doctors don’t have to perform abortions if they have a personal objection to it. But that law requires doctors to then send patients to someone who will perform the procedure. Coll didn’t do that.

Another Illinois law is supposed to prevent situations like this too:

The Illinois Hospital Emergency Service Act explicitly identifies ectopic pregnancy as an acute medical condition that requires stabilizing care. If the facility is unable to provide that care, the law requires immediate transfer. A separate law in Illinois, called the Health Care Right of Conscience Act, does not apply in the context of emergency medical care, said Allison Siebeneck, director of the Women’s and Reproductive Rights Project at the ACLU of Illinois, which is supporting Perrone’s lawsuit.

“A hospital under federal law as well as state law has to both screen the patient and either stabilize them or to transfer them. This is what makes sense in an emergency. You can’t just say: ‘OK, bye,’” [Amplify Legal litigation director Molly] Duane said.

All of this was bizarre, partly because Coll is a board certified OB/GYN. She should know the risks involved with an ectopic pregnancy. But her own notes from their meeting weren’t in line with the field’s knowledge:

Then, instead of treating Perrone, she sent her to another location. A Catholic location. Mercy Health. Which wasn’t even a hospital and refused to help her.

At that point, they started driving to Northwestern Medicine Huntley, 30 minutes away, and Perrone didn’t think she would make it:

As they left the second Mercy facility, one thought kept going through Ms. Perrone’s mind: “This is it, I am going to die.”

She was quickly admitted and soon after given the methotrexate. It had been a day and a half since the symptoms began. Far too long given the risks. “For the successful treatment of ectopic pregnancy, every hour counts,” the lawsuit noted.

That’s when Perrone posted about her predicament on social media, where she usually focuses on beauty products. She talked about Dr. Coll and Advocate Good Shepherd and how it wasn’t until she went to Northwestern that she was properly treated. She opened up the video by (accurately) saying, “There is a war against women’s bodies and let me tell you my experience.”

@catlife669Honestly, it is so scary to be a woman in 2025 in America. Your religious beliefs should never come before my life or giving me life saving treatment. That’s just crazy to me. I can’t believe that this specialist try to convince me that it was a state law that she couldn’t intervene to save my life, but I go over to a hospital. That’s not practicing their religious beliefs before life-saving treatment and they can give me the treatment immediately because they understand it’s life-saving treatment not an abortion. This is just sick. I have honestly never been so afraid to die in my life, and I really did think I was gonna die. I felt like I kept hitting walls and nobody cared about my life or my choice for my body. ##abortionishealthcare##womenshealth##ectopicpregnancy##storytime

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(She didn’t name-check Dr. Coll in that video, though she confirmed Coll’s involvement in the comment thread.)

Days after that video, however, Perrone felt sudden severe pain and knew the drug hadn’t completely fixed the problem. She and her husband returned to Northwestern and the same doctor told her there were two options, both involving surgery. The doctor could remove the ectopic pregnancy without further damage, but if things were too far along, and her life was in danger, they would have to remove her other fallopian tube, removing the possibility of any future pregnancies.

They went through with the surgery… but because the tube was in danger of rupturing any moment, the doctor had to remove it to save Perrone’s life. It was devastating for her—but at least she was alive. What bothered her was how all of this could have been avoided if the pregnancy was treated sooner.

So she posted a new video. This time, she named Coll directly in it.

@catlife669I don’t even have words for what I’m feeling. I don’t know if I’m more sad because I don’t have a choice to conceive naturally anymore or if I’m mad because I beg that doctor to listen to me and she blatantly ignored me and denied me treatment that could’ve saved my fertility. ##abortions##proabortion##abortionishealthcare

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“Had Dr. Coll intervened on Oct 9th when I showed up to the hospital, most likely I would still have my tube. And if she wouldn’t have dicked me around on Friday Oct 10th, maybe I would still have my tube. Maybe she could have given me methotrexate or even intervened surgically to save my tube. But because she could not in good faith practice that, I had to go forty minutes away from the hospital that I was currently at, and wait hours and hours, which with ectopic pregnancy, every single hour counts.”

After all this occurred, Perrone was getting ready to file a malpractice lawsuit against those responsible for her inability to have children in the future. But then something truly astonishing happened:

As Perrone began working with the lawyers on the lawsuit, she received a knock on the door – Coll was suing her for defamation.

“Not only has she lost her ability to have children without IVF, but she’s now being sued for speaking out about that experience,” Duane said.

The doctor whose inaction could have killed Perrone was suing her for talking about what she lived through. Coll demanded those two videos be taken down and a new one be posted in which Perrone retracted her statements.

Perrone not only refused that, her legal team pointed out “inconsistencies between Dr. Coll’s account of events and Ms. Perrone’s medical records and memory.”

In December, Coll formally filed her defamation lawsuit anyway, citing in part how the videos “prompted negative commentary, a cascade of adverse online Google reviews, and resulted in numerous existing patients contacting Dr. Coll and her staff expressing concern about the TikTok’s [sic].” Perrone has since asked a court to dismiss that lawsuit.

But now she’s fighting back in her own way. She’s filing her own lawsuit against Coll and Advocate Good Shepherd for violating Illinois law by not treating her immediately and for medical negligence. She points out that she’s not only dealing with infertility because of what they did, but medical expenses for the care they didn’t actually provide, and future expenses for potential IVF treatment.

All of this is a reminder of how faith-based and Catholic hospitals and anti-abortion extremism can affect you no matter where you live. It’s not like anyone lacked all the information here. Perrone had an ectopic pregnancy and knew the risks. The medical tests confirmed her hunches. Everyone knew what needed to be done; what the religious hospitals and doctors couldn’t pull the trigger on was how serious things needed to be before they helped someone. They were willing to put her life in danger. Thank goodness she didn’t let that happen.

But even though the medical literature was clear about the risks and even though Illinois law was clear about a hospital’s obligations, and even though the doctor she begged for help from was a board-certified OB/GYN, none of it mattered because of faith-based ideology that treats abortion as if it’s some sort of sin.

That’s the ugly reality of what happens when the Catholic Church or any religious system has any control over healthcare. They could have helped her the moment she walked through their doors. Instead, because of their lack of intervention, Perrone is unable to get naturally pregnant again. The damage has already been done.

There is a broader lesson to take away from all this, too: Anti-abortion extremism doesn’t stop at elective abortions. It inevitably affects miscarriages, emergency medicine, and even treatment for ectopic pregnancies when there’s literally no viable fetus to save and where any delay can cost a woman her life. The people who pretend to care about women and families are responsible for this woman not being able to have a larger family. And their negligence was completely unnecessary. If they treated Perrone by prioritizing her health, this whole disaster could have been avoided.

Update: I have corrected the article to reflect that Advocate Good Shepherd is not a Catholic hospital, but a faith-based one. My apologies for the error.

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The Congressional Freethought Caucus just added another member: Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX). But this one comes with an expiration date.

Doggett first entered Congress in 1995 after a long stint in the Texas Senate (1973-1985) and the Texas Supreme Court (1989-1994). After Republicans further gerrymandered their state last year, and after those maps were upheld in court, Doggett announced he’d retire once his term ended rather than run in a primary battle against fellow Rep. Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Doggett was also the first House Democrat to call on President Joe Biden to step down from his re-election bid after his disastrous debate in 2024. He sits on the House Ways and Means committee, where he chairs the subcommittee on Health. He’s also a member of both the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Congressional Equality Caucus.

Like most of his colleagues in the CFC, Doggett is religious. The Pew Research Center, in their 2025 roundup, listed him as a Methodist. Still, he supports church/state separation and pledges to protect freedom of religion for everyone (including the non-religious).

The caucus now includes a record 36 members, all of whom are Democrats.

In case you need a refresher, the CFC was first announced in 2018 by Rep. Jared Huffman, currently the only openly Humanist member of Congress.

The 36 members now include:

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) (Co-cha)
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) (Co-chair)
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI)
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA)
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN)
Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA)
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)
Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL)
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.)
Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA)
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA)
Rep. Julia Brownley (D-CA)
Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-CA)
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)
Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX)
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA)
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL)
Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT)
Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX)
Rep. Laura Friedman (D-CA)
Rep. Andrea Salinas (D-OR)
Rep. Emily Randall (D-WA)
Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ)
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY)
Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA)
Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL)
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR)
Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA)
Rep. Kelly Morrison (D-MN)
Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE)
Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA)
Rep. Herb Conaway (D-NJ)
Rep. Val Hoyle (D-OR)
Rep. Gil Cisneros (D-CA)
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX)

(Eric Swalwell was a member of the CFC until his recent resignation.)

To be clear, this isn’t an “atheist club” for Congress, as some critics have suggested. This is just a group of lawmakers dedicated to promoting reason-based public policy, keeping church and state separate, opposing discrimination against non-religious people, and championing freedom of thought around the world. There’s really no reason anyone should be against this. That’s why there’s nothing hypocritical about the fact that nearly every member of the Caucus is religious.

The hope is that the membership continues growing—making the Caucus more influential—while the stigma of being an atheist (or even being associated with non-religiosity) decreases across the country. Those two things are more closely linked than we might imagine. Keep in mind that the Congressional Prayer Caucus, which typically promotes a version of conservative Christianity, is much larger and has members from both major parties. By that metric, the Freethought Caucus has a long way to go.

As I’ve said before, perhaps the most shocking thing about the Caucus is that, based on the relative lack of media interest, people don’t seem to care who the members are… which is to say, no one—not even in right-wing media—thinks it’s a big deal for sitting House members to align with a group defending atheists.

That also means none of these lawmakers believes the Caucus will be a concern for them during the second Trump administration. That may come as a shock to anyone who remembers a time when aligning (even remotely) with atheism was considered one of the biggest taboos in politics.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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In a bizarre lawsuit recently filed by the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom, the group claims that high school student Kallie Keeler was sexually assaulted during a competitive wrestling match.

You probably already know where this is going: Keeler’s opponent was a trans girl, so they’re arguing that allowing transgender athletes to compete is literally harmful for everyone else.

But a sexual assault allegation should certainly be taken seriously regardless of the circumstances.

What makes this lawsuit ridiculous, though, is that ADF includes video of the match taken by Keeler’s mother (who was unaware of the opponent or any alleged assault until later)… and it doesn’t show any sort of misconduct.

You might think the assault would be glaringly visible in the recording. Yet according to multiple wrestling experts I spoke to, there’s nothing abnormal taking place during the match. It’s a clean fight with a clear victor. There may be a little clumsiness with the moves—these are high schoolers, after all—but nothing you wouldn’t see in a a fight between two cisgender individuals.

The 74-page lawsuit—filed against the Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association, state officials, the school district, Keeler’s coach, and everyone else in the orbit of high school athletics in Washington—says a number of things occurred during that match… most of which you can’t see in that video.

Here’s how it opens:

Lies hurt people—in this case, girls. Enforcing the lie that boys can be girls, Washington lets boys take girls’ sports and privacy, and, in this case, sexually assault a girl during her own wrestling match—as her mother watched in disbelief.

In the video, her mother is… just reacting like most parents would. She’s laughing. She’s urging her daughter to make certain moves and expressing frustration when her daughter appears to be losing. If you’ve ever been around youth sports, this is what you would call “normal behavior.” What the mother doesn’t do is hint that anything is out of the ordinary.

The lawsuit goes on to describe the assault (misgendering the other athlete all the way through):

… during the match, the male athlete sexually assaulted K.M.K., shoving his fingers through her spandex clothing, digitally penetrating her vagina, and holding the position for several seconds. Visibly distressed, K.M.K. shouted to her mother, who was videorecording the match, that the opponent’s fingers are “in my c***hie!”

To stop this, K.M.K. allowed the male wrestler to pin her. Shortly afterward, she found out the athlete was male—and felt violated all over again.

Having watched the video in question, I’m not seeing any of that. But maybe it’s because I’m not well-versed in wrestling. So yesterday, I spoke to a number of wrestlers, wrestling coaches, and parents with kids who wrestle to see if they saw anything unusual happening in that video.

Did they see what the lawsuit describes as “not a legal move”?

The responses were unanimous: Nope!

One former wrestler and coach told me the move near the end was a typical Ball and Chain Tilt, adding that moves like it were “perfectly legal” in these kinds of matches.

Another wrestler with years of experience said “I do not see any sexual assault whatsoever. Every move being executed I was taught as well.”

Another: “There's a leg lift on a turn that was high on the thigh, but it was pretty clearly just an exhausted wrestler using poor technique.”

Another person—a female wrestling coach and former competitor herself—put it this way:

"Oil checking" is the joke term when a finger ends up between the cheeks… and it does happen on accident, especially when you're attempting to lift the opponents leg from around the thigh to step through and turn them (which is a very common technique). But when I watched the match nothing seemed malicious or intentional. I'll also point out that no one said anything to the ref, or went to the officials table after the match to make a complaint, which is typically what you do if you have a problem as serious as they're claiming.

But the facts have never gotten in the way of a good culture war narrative, so let’s talk about the rest of the lawsuit. The gist of it is that Keeler was a high school sophomore when this match took place in December of 2025. The way the tournament worked, whoever won this particular match would take 3rd place and the loser would take 4th. The lawsuit says Keeler felt “physical discomfort” in the match to the point that she allowed herself to lose so it would end. Which is basically how wrestling works.

And then, in true Riley Gaines fashion, the lawsuit explained how taking 4th place instead of 3rd was devastating for Keeler:

If K.M.K. had placed third in the tournament, she would have been honored at any awards ceremonies at the end of the tournament, where, if held, she would have stood on a podium and she would have received a medal on a ribbon for her neck.

Instead, the male athlete was entitled to be honored at any awards ceremonies, the male athlete was entitled to take K.M.K.’s podium spot, and the male athlete was entitled to receive K.M.K.’s medal on a ribbon for his neck.

Nothing sounds as desperate as a lawsuit insisting someone else took the Not Even Second Place Medal that you were owed. (Apparently, no one’s even considering the possibility that a cisgender wrestler could also have beaten Keeler.)

Keeler said nothing about the incident to her mother afterwards, something the lawsuit attributes to “the feeling of shock and violation.”

At one point, during the alleged assault, the lawsuit quotes the mother as saying to someone off-camera, “I don’t know what she said or why her face looked like that.” It makes it sound like the mother is concerned about the assault she’s witnessing. In the actual video, though, around the 2:13 mark, the mom is laughing through that comment.

After the match, another team’s coach apparently came up to the family and let them know the opponent was a trans girl. This was news to them. The lawsuit insists they were going to report the assault before that revelation—uh-huh, sure—but they “then resolved to report both the assault and the lack of notice that she was wrestling a male.”

To simplify details that go on for several pages, they said they reported the incident to her coach and the district but nothing was done… probably because there was no evidence of wrong-doing in that video. She just lost a match.

So instead, Keeler told her story to right-wing propagandist (or, as they described her, “local journalist”) Brandi Kruse, who jumped on it and made it go viral in anti-LGBTQ circles and, by extension, the Trump administration.

Even after the unwanted publicity, the WIAA took no action—probably because, again, the moves in the match were legal in the sport. And just last week, Pierce County prosecutors chose not to file criminal charges in the incident because—AGAIN!—”it's clear that any potential charges could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

There’s an open investigation by the school district that has not yet been resolved, which has only led conservatives to complain more, implying that this is all part of some giant conspiracy against Keeler… even though all the facts provided by the lawsuit are consistent with my theory that Keeler lost a wrestling match, blamed everyone except herself for how she did, and received criticism and cold shoulders from damn near everyone in her circles, including some of her teammates.

It’s yet another instance of mediocre athletes using trans people as scapegoats for their own shortcomings. There is a legitimate discussion to be had about what the proper procedures should be when it comes to student athletes with different hormone levels, but just using what the ADF has provided, it seems like this lawsuit would never have been filed if Keeler won the match or lost to a cisgender opponent.

When you look at what they’re demanding, you can tell this is scorched earth all the way with special princess protections demanded for Keeler herself:

The lawsuit seeks to preclude transgender athletes from competing with or against Keeler in sports; declare ineligible any athletes transgender athletes from competing in sports with or against Keeler; require the district to provide notice and opt-out rights to Brown when her daughter is to compete against transgender athletes in girls sports; correct all records where Keeler lost to a transgender athlete.

The lawsuit further asks that Keeler is given the chance to participate in sports without academic penalty or eligibility penalty and restore her lost athletic eligibility. It also seeks to require all defendants named to provide training to all relevant employees to avoid similar situations in the future.

The lawsuit also seeks an award for damages to be determined at trial.

Imagine asking a jury to correct the record so that you can boast about not taking first or even second place at a regular season high school wrestling tournament that (let’s be honest) no one else would ever care about.

There’s nothing wrong with being a mediocre athlete, of course. By definition, most people who compete are! The problem is using your mediocrity as a launching pad to harass trans people out of youth sports entirely, which is what conservatives have been eagerly doing for years now with help from the highest levels of government. (Anti-trans bigot JK Rowling has already spread this particular story.)

Here’s something interesting, though. When ADF’s president Kristen Waggoner tweeted about this lawsuit, she got a lot of responses from people who didn’t want to see trans athletes in sports but were still critical of the lawsuit. Like this person who said “you’re claiming a perfectly normal half-nelson pinning attempt was sexual assault - because her opponent was trans?”

That person wasn’t alone:

When even people who are generally anti-trans are telling ADF there’s nothing to see here, you would think they’d get the hint. But that doesn’t help with fundraising, so we get this lawsuit instead. The same physical contact that would be considered routine, legal, and unremarkable between two cisgender wrestlers is now being described by ADF as criminal sexual assault because conservatives have decided the mere presence of a trans girl changes the rules. It’s a horribly dangerous precedent. If every loss to a transgender opponent can be reframed as oppression—despite, in this case, video evidence that nothing criminal occurred—these people won’t stop until they’ve bullied every trans person out of existence.

The goal is ultimately to manufacture outrage. Because it’s not really about wrestling (which is why the ADF isn’t citing experts in the sport). It’s not even about a fourth-place finish, which Keeler may have earned in other ways. The bigots are always desperate for stories that make trans people appear threatening, predatory, or dangerous. Even if they have to use a relatively meaningless high school wrestling match to gin up material for a massive federal lawsuit and media campaign (complete with glamour shots of the family).

If advocacy groups like ADF can successfully convince the public that ordinary athletic contact automatically constitutes unfair competition—or assault!—whenever a trans athlete is involved, then there’s no need to have a debate about fairness in sports. That’s a debate they would lose because it still allows trans people to compete in certain situations. They don’t want that. This is about dehumanization, pure and simple.

That’s why stories like this deserve scrutiny beyond the headlines. They reveal how far some right-wing zealots will go to erase trans people from public life.

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I make a lot of posts on here about elected officials at the state and federal level, but it’s always worth remembering that most elected offices are at the local level, held by people in your community, and those are the seats that have the most direct impact on your life.

Several years ago, a friend of mine, Neil Polzin, decided to make that leap.

I first met Neil when we served on the board of the Secular Student Alliance decades ago, but his activism didn’t stop there. He was an Eagle Scout, yet when he lost his job at a Boy Scout-affiliated summer camp because he was openly non-religious, he decided to go public about that discrimination and drew attention to the cause. He also served as Board Chair of Camp Quest and Director of Camp Omni, two summer camps that cater to children of non-religious parents. He’s also just a really decent guy with fantastic values.

After the 2016 election of Donald Trump, Neil knew he wanted to get more involved in politics, especially because his local city council in Covina, California was led by conservative Christians. So he started speaking up at public meetings. He challenged any constitutional lapses he witnessed. He soon ran for a council position… and lost. But he learned from his mistakes. And in 2022, when he saw an opening to become City Treasurer, he ran for that office—against a two-term Republican—and won.

He’s now had four years to fight for taxpayers in his city and urge fiscal responsibility all around. I would argue he’s an island of sanity in an ocean full of conservative bullshit, making his role even more vital. He decided to run for another term this year, and his election took place the same day other major offices in California had their primaries.

This time around, though, the people who opposed him tried to make religion a central issue in the campaign... even though religion has nothing to do with the actual office Neil holds. And they did it through an outside PAC and a local church.

The outside PAC decided to create a scandal where none existed.

Last year, there was a local controversy because a Christian church had rented meeting space in a school district. That alone is legal and fine, as long as the church abides by the district’s rules. But there was reason to believe they weren’t. They were leaving storage items in the building, accessing the building outside their stated rental times, violating fire codes by blocking access to alarms and exits, and attempting to get other visitors to the school building to attend their services. All of that violated their contract.

Neil, as a private citizen, communicated his concerns with district officials over the course of several months, asking for public records and urging the district to follow its own policies.

He even mentioned that he would happily pay the rental costs for any LGBTQ-inclusive organization that wanted to take advantage of the district’s apparently lax policies.

Turns out The Satanic Temple was very interested in launching an After School Satan club in the district.

So in another email to district officials last April, Neil took a more passive aggressive approach, serving as a mediator of sorts between district officials and The Satanic Temple leadership.

I told them [The Satanic Temple] of how accommodating you are to rental groups, and my offer to sponsor and pick up the costs for an inclusive group to use rental space. The Satanic Temple is very interested in starting to use the facility to meet right away, including the same ability to display banners and other promotional materials on campus during their rental that I have documented you allowing for other rental groups.

…

Please keep me in the loop on the best ways to make payment on the hours requested once they are booked. Again I will happily pick up the costs for the Multi purpose room on Saturday evenings. Or any of the surrounding classrooms on Sunday mornings.

Beautiful. Chef’s kiss. Love it.

It was a perfectly generous, non-controversial thing to do since school districts that allow outside groups to rent space can’t discriminate on the basis of religion.

But more to the point: None of this had anything to do with his government job. (I will also remind you that The Satanic Temple doesn’t believe in Satan, nor do they indoctrinate students. The clubs are just ways for kids to enjoy art and science and crafts.)

But some right-wing “Women Against Abuse PAC” soon sent out mailers to voters attempting to link Neil with those evil evil Satanists. (I’ve redacted personal information in the image below.)

That mailer, which took his emails completely out of context, said Neil “demands” this club open in the district, which he wasn’t doing. It said he offered to pay for Satanists to “recruit our kids at local high school,” which is not how the group works at all. (The critics must be thinking of Christians.) It also included a random image of an older man and younger boy with red horns (?!?)…

Just ridiculous stuff. Neil later posted the full exchange between him and district officials on his campaign site for anyone who wanted the complete picture.

But it didn’t stop there.

The other side of the mailer suggested he was following teenage girls he didn’t know on Instagram. The mailer highlighted words a “concerned parent” expressed at a city council meeting: “Disturbing” and “inappropriate.”

Neil had an explanation for that, too: When he launched his re-election campaign, his team did some basic social media work:

Early in the campaign, volunteers helping set up the account were instructed to follow people already engaged with accounts related to Covina politics and community organizations. As the account grew, Instagram also recommended additional local accounts connected through mutual follows and engagement, including activity around the February 9th “Good Company” video, which received well over 100,000 views. Some of those suggested accounts were followed as part of that early effort to build local visibility.

At no point did anyone target minors, nor was there any inappropriate intent or behavior involved. This was about Instagram follow requests, not communication and not physically following anyone. The account has only been used for campaign purposes, and messages are limited to normal campaign activity, such as coordinating yard sign delivery.

Instagram does not publicly identify accounts by age, and many accounts do not clearly identify who operates them or include a photo. After the concern was raised, I reviewed the account activity and invited anyone with specific concerns to contact me directly so accounts could be removed or blocked if needed.

Teen account protections also limit unsolicited interactions with minors, and there is no evidence of inappropriate communication from the account. I have also since removed all other admins from the page, leaving only myself to avoid any future mistake or oversight.

What is being portrayed as something sinister has a straightforward explanation rooted in how social media campaigns commonly build local visibility and connections when starting a new account.

So… nothing nefarious at all. For what it’s worth, I get similar recommendations to follow accounts on Instagram and TikTok — it’s virtually impossible to vet everyone on the other side, and if you’re a campaign just looking for engagement with like-minded people, it’s easier to click follow on everyone who’s recommended to you.

It wasn’t just the mailer that was a concern though. There was a local church giving a boost to his opponent, TJ Nass.

During a service at the Hearts On Fire Church back in March, the pastor brought Nass onstage so that everyone was aware he was running for office and deserving of prayer. The pastor implied that church members should vote for him, in direct violation of the (currently toothless) Johnson Amendment.

That pastor later said during his sermon, “We’re praying this brother [TJ Nass] gets voted into office as the county treasurer—be a blessing, be used by God.”

These are local races where a few hundred votes could sway everything, so there was serious concern about how that mailer and the church endorsement would affect the race. Even though Neil, as Treasurer, was doing an excellent job by all measures.

Yet despite all those attempts to sway the vote in the other direction, Neil won his re-election bid.

He didn’t just eke out a win either; he got more votes and a wider margin of victory than he did in 2022. The race hasn’t been officially called yet, but this lead appears to be insurmountable when you factor in how many votes might be outstanding.

Neil declared (unofficial) victory a few days after the election ended.

I asked him yesterday how he felt about overcoming those obstacles. He noted that the same debates we see about Christian Nationalism on a larger scale are also present in local politics but the reason he didn’t fall victim to those right-wing attacks was because he had a personal contact with many of his voters.

And when those voters saw the mailer, the PAC’s strategy backfired.

I was ‘lucky’ that it was a people powered campaign, and by that point I had already knocked on thousands of doors. Having those 1:1 conversations does make it harder for someone to take a mailer like that at face value.

What is clear is that it also activated a lot of people. Ballots started hitting mailboxes in the first couple days of May, around May 1st and 2nd. The mailer landed the following weekend, the day before Mother’s Day. The week after that was the busiest week for yard sign requests that we had all election long. The following campaign canvasses were also our biggest. I heard from a lot of people that they knew a local race was happening, but seeing something that over the top made them pay closer attention. Between the tone of the attack and the lengths the PAC went to in order to hide its funders and supporters, it became clear to many voters which side they wanted to support.

… Now that the dust is clearing on the vote count, it also appears those extra efforts made a real difference. Based on the Covina election records I have going back decades, this appears to be the largest vote total ever received by a candidate in any Covina race.

It’s really an incredible victory—and hopefully a launching point for other candidates in the future. There are numerous stories of religion infiltrating Covina politics that I didn’t mention in this piece, but they won’t change unless better people get voted in. Neil is a shining example of how that can happen.

After this election, though, there is still a lot of debt to pay off, so if you’d like to help Neil out, you can contribute to the campaign here.

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The small town of Battle Ground, Washington—just north of Portland, Oregon—is rapidly becoming a place run by Christians, for Christians, and the speed of its transformation is downright frightening.

And if you’re thinking that sounds a lot like Moscow, Idaho, where Christian Nationalist theocrat Doug Wilson has built himself a mini-empire centered around his Christ Church, that’s because he’s directly linked to the people now doing the same thing in Battle Ground.

Back in March, Camden Spiller, the owner of the electrical equipment company Maddox Industrial Transformer, explained in a local newspaper the three main reasons why he and his brother were investing so heavily in the town:

The first is that this is our home. And we hope to help make Battle Ground an even better place to live, work and raise a family.

…

Secondly, investing in our hometown helps us retain great employees and leaders here at home, because strong local businesses and amenities make it easier for people to build their lives and careers in Battle Ground.

The third, and most personal, reason we choose to invest in Battle Ground is rooted in our faith. One of the most influential Bible verses in my life comes from the book of Jeremiah: “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you.”

Whether or not you share our faith, our community is strengthened when we each, in our own ways, seek the peace and prosperity of the place we share.

For us, that place is Battle Ground.

That was… ominous. Maddox is expected to make about $1 billion in revenue by 2027. That sort of money in a town of about 20,000 people could give Spiller and his family unfathomable power to impose Christianity upon everyone there. Even if they can’t legally force it, they can make clear that only Christians like them are welcome in the community.

And that’s what’s been happening.

In April, reporter Erik Neumann of Oregon Public Broadcasting wrote a lengthy article connecting many of these dots. He noted that Maddox (the company) had invested in “at least 30 properties” in the community. While some see that as a step forward—it’s revitalizing parts of the town!—it’s also a way to make sure the company has control over the town’s success. That also means, however, that other company owners are now unable to truly push back if anything Maddox does is bad for the town:

OPB contacted a dozen residents, public officials and business owners in buildings owned by Spiller or near Spiller acquisitions. Some, like the city manager, felt positive about the changes. Others were mixed.

Several declined to discuss the recent purchases. Two said they needed to remain neutral on the subject. Three said they didn’t want to speak publicly about the changes that were connected to Spiller and Maddox.

“I don’t want any part of it,” one business owner said when asked for an interview about Maddox’s recent property acquisitions. “They’re a $1 billion company. They push on me and I disappear.”

Just to give you an example of what that looks like in practice, the company opened up Al & Ernie’s Bakery, a place that’s “founded on Christian values” and which quietly pushes faith on you from the moment you place an order:

Customers waiting for orders there receive buzzers that cite a Bible passage: “Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.”

It’s also closed on Sundays, naturally. So is the local taphouse.

That may seem innocuous, but that’s what they’re doing with a bakery. Now imagine what could happen if Spiller and his allies were to take over local government. Would the officials be able to say no to projects Spiller wanted to develop even if they were bad for the community? Would they use their power to pass religious proclamations?

Guess what? These concerns are already playing out:

In January, Eric Overholser, a production operations manager at Maddox, was elected mayor after serving as a city councilor since 2023. Deputy Mayor Aimee Vaile is married to a Maddox employee. Another Maddox employee was recently elected to the local school board.

One of the buildings that Spiller is creating will soon be home to a pastor named C.R. Wiley, a leader in the ultra-conservative Presbyterian Church in America, who has religious and professional ties to… you guessed it. Doug Wilson.

The church pastor for whom Spiller is building a new chapel has spoken about the importance of “governing unbelievers.” That pastor, C.R. Wiley, has ties to a prominent self-described Christian nationalist in Moscow, Idaho, who wants his faith to shape how that town is run and who has endorsed turning the Ten Commandments into civic law.

In 2023, OPB notes, Wiley co-hosted a podcast called The Battle Ground Project in which he and his colleague talked about what they hoped the town would become, and they weren’t subtle about their intentions.

[Co-host and Maddox development manager Max] Booth and Wiley described the show as “an experiment in Christian localism,” a term that refers to promoting Christian values in a person’s local sphere of influence, whether that’s politics, work or recreation. They discussed business and politics in Battle Ground on the show and posted episodes online.

Shortly after OPB began investigating this story, the episodes were removed from podcast feeds.

That can’t be good news…

The podcast wasn’t the only place Wiley discussed the future of Battle Ground. That same year, he delivered a lecture called “Building culture in hostile territory” at a religious conference. He said the church (arguably with the help of Spiller) was creating all the spaces you’d want to go and hang out with friends outside of your home and work. So a local bakery would “double as a Bible study location after hours.” Same with a local cigar shop.

“We want owned space,” Wiley said. “We want to be the people who have a very strong say, significant say, in how things are done and how the business is conducted.”

…

“What we, as Presbyterians and people who belong to the reformed tradition, bring to the larger church, are the resources of a public theology that helps us to govern unbelievers,” Wiley said during the talk.

There used to be a bar in the area—Main Street Bar—but when the owner wanted to sell, Maddox took it over and made sure it wasn’t a bar anymore:

A Main Street Bar Facebook post stated that the building — originally a movie theater before it became a bar of many names — “has a bright future but no longer a bar.”

“We’re going to keep the barbershop as it is, and then reconcept the bar,” Booth said. “It likely won’t be a bar again, but it will be something public-facing, serving the community.”

They’re not hiding their intentions even if they’re trying to hide the podcast.

This is now spilling over into the city council, where recent draft proclamations have condemned “Antifa-associated” violence and supported ICE. They’ve also promoted invocation prayers (which would inevitably be Christian-dominated)… while the council has rejected proclamations honoring Pride month and the Transgender Day of Visibility.

They’re being shady about it too:

Earlier this month [in May], the mayor approved another proclamation marking May 7 as a national day of prayer, and the council is considering adding a religious invocation to the start of its bimonthly meetings.

During Monday night’s meeting, one dissenting councilor warned that the seven-member body could be wading into murky legal territory as it considers instituting a prayer invocation at the start of city meetings.

“Just for the record, four of you do not want to let the public know our legal implications of adding prayer to this meeting,” said Councilor Troy McCoy after members voted not to publicly share past legal advice from city attorneys after the issue came up last year.

For what it’s worth, a local resident told me she submitted a Day of Reason proclamation for the city council to pass and they approved it. They’ll make the announcement in mid-July. But that doesn’t negate all the pro-Christian things this same council is pushing.

One concern is that residents will be oblivious to what’s happening until it’s too late, while the people who are tapped in to local politics—and able to make decisions—are already part of the Christian base. That’s why local activists have been raising to sound the alarms so that more people speak out against this Christian takeover fueled by religious extremism and a bottomless pit of money.

In case it’s not clear why this is all so concerning, just remember what Doug Wilson stands for and then realize his people are the ones taking over this town.

Wilson has openly admitted his theocratic fantasies about Moscow, Idaho: “I’d like to see the town be a Christian town. I’d like to see the state be a Christian state. I’d like to see the nation be a Christian nation. I’d like to see the world be a Christian world.”

He described women as nothing more than “the kind of people that people come out of.” He said they should be submissive to their husbands and—importantly—in his ideal world, women wouldn’t be allowed to vote. One of Wilson’s fellow pastors said on camera that he supported repealing the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

Wilson believes abortion and homosexuality should be criminalized. He has said sodomy is “worse than slavery,” that abortion is “as great an evil as slavery,” and that slavery was a net positive because it “produced in the South a genuine affection between the races.”

Wilson protects abusers over the abused.

Wilson doesn’t believe Muslims, Hindus, or even “liberal” Christians should be allowed to hold office. (It’s safe to say that extends to atheists, too.)

That’s the mindset now creeping into Battle Ground. And it’s easy to miss because it’s not like they’re waving a Christian flag as they do it. They’re advancing Christian Nationalism through real estate purchases, business investments, school board races, city council seats, and community institutions. The strategy is to become so deeply embedded in everyday life that opposition feels futile.

People defending the Spillers will inevitably point to the new businesses, renovated buildings, and economic growth in support of what they’re doing. But prosperity by itself doesn’t undo the breakdown of pluralism. A town can have thriving businesses while becoming hostile to anyone who doesn’t fit a preferred religious mold. What’s the point of economic development if it doesn’t serve the entire community?

That’s why residents can’t afford to shrug this off. The people driving these changes are openly discussing the need to “govern unbelievers.” They are following a model pioneered by Wilson, a man whose vision for society includes subordinating women, criminalizing LGBTQ people, excluding religious minorities from public life, and blurring the line between church and state until it effectively disappears.

If residents believe their community should belong equally to Christians, non-Christians, and everyone in between, then they should speak up now, run for office soon, and push back aggressively while there’s still a town left to protect.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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The Republican front-runner in the race to be Maine’s next governor is a man who believes he can personally talk women out having abortions, that transgender people don’t exist, that kids use kitty litter in classrooms because they think they are cats, and who believes his views are justified because of the mythological story of Noah’s Ark.

The primary elections for Maine are taking place today and Bobby Charles is currently the front-runner among Republicans according to pretty much every poll. Charles sat for an interview recently with the Christian Civic League of Maine and just went all-out on his delusions while speaking with the group’s leader Nick Adolphsen.

When it comes to abortion, for example, Charles insisted he would have an “open-door” policy as governor, where women who were considering the procedure would have the thrill of listening to him talk them out of it for 30 minutes by reminding them they were not giving birth to giraffes.

I want to leave my door wide open as governor to any young woman who is pregnant and is considering—under pressure from mothers or anyone else—is considering an abortion.

You spend half an hour with me, you will understand the incredible gift, the miracle that God has given to you. That you will understand for the first time how special you are and how important it is that you embrace this.

You know, so many people they have an abortion, they’re never able to have a child again. And that one piece of their life is missing forever. Okay? Never mind, they wrestle with the guilt of having taken a life and they struggle with this for… I mean, you know, as some will say, they just simply define life away and so pretend that they’re not guilty of it. But the reality is, it leaves a scar on the soul, okay?

And so, that having been said, one thing I will do is leave my door wide open…

…

… You either truly believe that this is a child… I say to people, just so you know, it’s not gonna be a giraffe. It’s not going to be a zebra that you bear. It’s going to be a little boy or a little girl—and it will be a boy or a girl, okay?

He had to sneak in that little bit of transphobia at the very end there...

Needless to say, the vast majority of people who have abortions don’t regret them (in fact, it’s far more damaging to their mental health to be denied one) and aren’t affected if they choose to have children later in life. The opportunity to have their pregnancy mansplained to them by a Republican governor is not a selling point to any sane person. As if they’re too dumb to realize they’re giving birth to a human.

At no point did Charles explain how this lecture would go over with a pre-teen rape victim, or a woman who knows far more than he does about her body, or anyone who doesn’t feel like the governor needs to be personally involved in her medical decisions.

Later in the interview, he went after transgender identities, falsely claiming that acknowledging their existence went against biology, citing Noah’s Ark in defense of his bigotry, and perpetuating the debunked lie that schoolchildren have kitty litter boxes in their classrooms because they identify as cats.

… Our school system has been hijacked by leftists who think—and that’s why we’re number 50 in the country—by leftists who think that teaching activism, crazy words like ”gender affirmation” and “transition”… Oh, look, go back to the medical literature. I’m not being, I’m not being—you know, they say “You’re an ideologue” or “You’re racist” or you’re this or you’re that—No, I’m being very factual.

We know the Bible has a very clear understanding. Noah didn’t take 27 genders of animals. He just took two, as far as I remember. And… that’s true. But then there’s the biology. Right now there now we’re denying genetics and biology...

…

… You know, you’ve got kids now that apparently think that they’re cats and dogs and we are accommodating that. That’s garbage. What do you do, by the way, when you get to be 20, and you break it to them, “Actually, you’re not a cat, and you will have to go to work, and, uh, we’re going to not do this kitty litter crap anymore,” right?

The only people who believe teachers are teaching “activism” or encouraging kids to be transgender are people who have no idea what happens in public schools. (This particular exchange came after Adolphsen falsely claimed public school teachers in Maine were helping children “socially transition their gender without notifying parents.” Charles said he would issue a flurry of executive orders on Day One as governor to end things like that.)

It’s hilarious that Charles’ comments about Noah’s Ark were preceded by “I’m being very factual.” If we’re talking about facts, though, Noah did not take two genders of each kind of animal on the ark. In fact, he took zero genders of animals on the ark. Because it never happened. Neither did the inevitable inbreeding that would result from having one family, and only one family, survive a global genocide, which is something else Charles believes as fact.

For a guy who thinks kids have wacky beliefs, here’s a grown-ass adult treating the Noah’s Ark myth like it’s literal history. (One critic online noted, while referring to the age of Noah, “I've never met a 900 year old person… but I've met plenty of Trans people.”)

And, of course, that right-wing talking point about how some kids think they’re “furries” and want litter boxes in the classroom is a complete lie. In instances where litter boxes are in schools, it’s for emergency purposes like in the case of a school shooting threat where students aren’t allowed to leave their classrooms.

As The Advocate points out, Charles may have felt comfortable saying all of this because he knew which audience he was speaking to:

The anti-LGBTQ+ views were being voiced to a friendly audience in Adolphsen, whose organization has lobbied state officials to apply a “Biblical approach” to government and has advocated for barring gender-affirming care for youth while allowing conversion therapy in the state.

For a man who claims to care about the facts, Charles should be aware that—to quote The Advocate—national groups like the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics “have continued to support gender-affirming care for minors.”

This is the man who is on the verge of being the Republican nominee for governor. Because a deranged religious lunatic like him is the best person that the party can find throughout the state.

It’s not just that he’s wrong about a handful of controversial but important issues. It’s that he’s offering voters a platform built entirely on misinformation and bigotry. Women who are pregnant don’t need a lecture from him. The existence of trans people isn’t a political debate; it’s just reality. And the fact that he’s repeating hoaxes that only exist on disturbing right-wing corners of the internet should be a warning that this man doesn’t know how to obtain accurate information.

You can watch the full interview here:

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Jadon MacCormack, the only Republican candidate for a State House seat from Connecticut’s 50th District, is a regular Christian shit-poster who routinely brags about how much he hates LGBTQ people.

Just last week, to mark the beginning of Pride Month, he wished everyone a “Happy Straight Month”:

As your State Representative, I, Jadon MacCormack, would stand firmly against the Transgender and LGBT movement that has for too long corrupted our families, undermined parental authority, and eroded the foundational values of our society. This ideology promotes confusion over clarity, prioritizes feelings over biological reality, and seeks to redefine the natural order of marriage, family, and human identity in ways that directly contradict God-given rights and common sense.

I will fight relentlessly in the state legislature to protect our children from premature medical interventions, indoctrination in schools, and the normalization of perverse ideologies that threaten the innocence of the next generation.

For him, it was a tame post. In 2025, when the Supreme Court hinted that it’d be open to overturning the Obergefell ruling that made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, MacCormack said it’d be better off if gay people were hanged. Because Bible.

That post rivals some of his other disturbing ones. Like the one where he endorsed Holocaust denial…

… or supported the view that we should “make being a homo illegal again”…

… or this one promoting his album of Gospel music. (Watch the video. I dare you.)

That’s who the Republican Party has chosen to be their standard bearer in a District that they have a very real chance of winning. District 50 has been represented by Democrat Pat Boyd since 2017, but that hasn’t always been automatic. While Boyd ran unopposed in 2020 and 2024, he won with only 53% of the vote in 2022, 57% of the vote in 2018, and 55% of the vote in 2016.

In other words, if Republicans ran a halfway-decent candidate, they might have a shot at flipping this district.

The problem is that, in Connecticut, Republicans don’t have much of a bench. In fact, after their nominating convention in May, they had no candidates for 31 (out of 151) House seats… and some of the districts were ceded over to the only person who offered to run. That’s how MacCormack became the sole Republican option for this district. There was no vetting; the 23-year-old homeschooled bigot was just the dude who raised his hand.

It was only after he became the default nominee that everyone realized how much of a religious extremist he was. And now Republicans are scrambling to fix the mess they created before MacCormack’s candidacy drags down the rest of their already pathetic ticket. After people saw the noose image and the Happy Straight Pride post, the Connecticut Republican Party issued a formal condemnation of him, saying MacCormack “crossed a line that should never be crossed by anyone seeking public office.”

Mr. MacCormack is entitled to his personal opinions, but those opinions are not representative of the Connecticut Republican Party. His statements do not reflect our values, our principles, or our approach to public service. Republicans can and should engage in vigorous debate on public policy without resorting to language that demonizes entire groups of people or invokes historical acts of persecution.

Given the nature of these comments and the poor judgment they demonstrate, I believe Mr. MacCormack has disqualified himself from serving as a standard-bearer for the Republican Party and as a representative for all the people of the 50th House District. Accordingly, I am calling on him to immediately withdraw his candidacy and step aside.

While that statement is important, it’s laughable coming from a party that openly embraces Donald Trump, a man whose racism, sexism, and outright bigotry toward immigrants and women and non-Christians and everyone who dares to ask him a non-softball question is so glaringly evident.

What’s the line that MacCormack crossed that Trump doesn’t cross every day?

Plus, this is the same party where a congressman just tweeted “Homosexuality has no place in America” (before deleting it and blaming a staffer). Anti-LGBTQ hate is quite literally what they stand for. MacCormack isn’t some anomaly; he’s the sort of bigot the Party has been embracing as its base for years. If you’re Republican, you should be used to people like this.

That’s the argument that Connecticut Democrats are making as they aim to tie MacCormack to every other GOP candidate who will appear on November’s ballot.

That includes MacCormack’s opponent, Pat Boyd, who spiked the ball as soon as he realized the political gift he’d been given: “I am deeply embarrassed that our region is drawing statewide, and potentially national, attention for all the wrong reasons. The nomination of a major party candidate who chooses to divide our towns, spread hate, and insult our neighbors is completely tone-deaf to the decent people from all political backgrounds who live here.”

Other Democrats also jumped on the action:

“The hateful comments made repeatedly by this Republican candidate for public office are unacceptable and completely out of step with Connecticut values,” Gov. Ned Lamont said. “Connecticut is a state that welcomes people, respects differences and believes everyone deserves to be treated with dignity. Hate and discrimination have no home here, and I will continue to stand with the LGBTQ+ community to ensure our state remains a place where everyone feels safe, welcome and respected.”

US Congressman Joe Courtney, a Democrat, also released a statement on the controversy.

“The recent comments, and history of similar rhetoric, made by a candidate seeking state office in northeast Connecticut are reprehensible in every way and have no place in our public discourse,” Courtney said. “While I’m glad to see a number of Republican elected officials and party leaders condemn the statement, it is worth remembering that the Republican party gave this candidate their endorsement less than two weeks earlier.”

For the Republican Party’s part, they’re scrambling to avoid a larger headache. The deadline for all candidates to appear on November’s ballot is Tuesday. And they only began recruiting an alternative option to MacCormack on Friday.

With time running short, the next step is that Republicans have already started to collect about 240 signatures by 4 p.m. on Tuesday, June 9, in order to force a primary, House Republican Leader Vince Candelora said Friday. The candidate is Anthony J. Emilio of Pomfret, a Republican small business owner who has run previously for the board of selectmen, school board, and board of assessment appeals over the past 15 years. His wife, Martha, is currently serving a four-year term on the town’s Board of Selectmen.

Republicans started collecting signatures Friday in the hopes of reaching their goal by Sunday with volunteers from the House, Senate, and state party.

Even if Emilio gets all the necessary signatures, though, because of the way Connecticut’s election laws work, both he and MacCormack would go to a primary in August. [UPDATE: I have corrected this paragraph. The earlier version said both would be on the ballot in November, but that’s incorrect.]

MacCormack says he fully intends to stay in the race: “I will never withdraw.”

It’s also worth noting that his X/Twitter post history includes a LOT of shares of New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist preachers, like Steven Anderson and Jonathan Shelley. Anderson has previously celebrated the deaths of murdered LGBTQ people and called on the government to execute gay people with a firing squad. His sermons have been so outrageously awful that 34 countries won’t allow him to step foot within their borders. I spoke with two of their more popular preachers a couple of summers agin. I also reached out to Shelley to see if he had any thoughts on MacCormack; he didn’t respond.

MacCormack says he’s not a New IFB member himself. He’s more of an old school IFB guy. But the tactics and dehumanizing anti-LGBTQ rhetoric are basically the same.

Regardless of how much the state’s Republican Party is trying to distance themselves from this guy, they’re going to find it impossible to do so because even if they claim his views don’t represent their positions, the fact is MacCormack felt perfectly at home within the Republican Party. Hell, he took a selfie with the GOP’s chosen candidate for governor, Ryan Fazio, calling him a “friend.”

It wasn’t just a selfie either. At one point, after MacCormack announced he’d be running in District 50, a man said he lived in that area and was represented by Pat Boyd.

“Not for long,” joked Fazio, referring to MacCormack’s campaign.

The Republican Party may not like MacCormack dragging them down, but they’ve done nothing to push bigots away from them. If anything, they’ve embraced bigotry and cruelty from the top of the ticket all the way down to local elections. You can’t run away from anti-LGBTQ rhetoric when you’re actively spreading lies about trans people and celebrating a Supreme Court that’s hell-bent on reversing civil rights progress made by LGBTQ people.

I attempted to contact MacCormack himself to chat about his positions, but he also did not respond to a request for comment.

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Four FBI intelligence analysts as well as a supervisory analyst were fired by Director Kash Patel on Friday on the grounds that they wrote up a memo that conservatives insisted targeted Catholics.

That memo was one of more eye-popping examples included in a report by Trump’s sham “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.” It was first mentioned in a detailed 2023 report by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee—titled “The FBI’s breach of religious freedom: The weaponization of law enforcement against Catholic Americans”—which said the analysts painted “certain ‘radical-traditionalist Catholics’ (RTCs) as violent extremists and proposed opportunities for the FBI to infiltrate Catholic churches as a form of ‘threat mitigation.’”

But a closer look at what those analysts actually did shows that religious animus had nothing to do with this. They were just trying to protect the country from a potential attack.

Here’s what happened, according to former Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.

Beginning in 2019, the FBI began tracking a(n unnamed) man who advocated civil war and the assassination of politicians… and then purchased semi-automatic weapons and ammo. He was then arrested for other reasons, but in jail, his online threats grew even worse. He would make phone calls to family members during which he talked about the need to “build guns, explosives, and other forms of weaponry and store them in [his] room without fear of the law finding out about it.” He also said he needed to “make total war against the Satanic occultist government and the Zionist devil worshiping bankers who control it.”

He completed his sentence in June of 2021, and once he was released, there was reason to believe this guy wanted to put his violent rhetoric into action—specifically against “pro-choice, Jewish, and LGBTQ individuals.”

Because of his status as a convicted felon and due to his plea agreement, however, he couldn’t actually purchase any weapons to carry out his planned attacks. But he did have social media accounts in which he posted Nazi symbols, talked about killing police officers, “ganging up on and beating” racial/religious minorities, carry out a mass shooting as a “school for special needs children,” etc.

In early 2022, the guy began attending a church that’s not formally affiliated with the Catholic Church but pushed “traditional Catholic theology and liturgy.” He also described himself on social media as “‘Fascist and Catholic’ and a ‘[radical-traditional (rad-trad)] Catholic clerical fascist.’” Even worse, it appeared that he was recruiting members in that church to carry out an attack.

He even made comments to members of the church saying he was going to commit violence and suggested he was building a pressure cooker bomb. (These members were not on board with any of this.)

At that point, the FBI office in Richmond send an undercover agent to the church to interact with the man and find out how serious these threats were. The answer? Very. It led the office to declare the man to be their “highest priority domestic terrorism subject.”

The man kept taking steps indicating he was going to kill people. He even purchased equipment that would let him lock the doors of commercial buildings, preventing hostages from exiting. He also bought a truck and posted a video on social media saying that was his final step before the attack.

On November 12, 2022, investigators obtained a search warrant for his home and found all kinds of disturbing stuff: ammo, a 3D printer, lock-picking devices, “multiple Molotov cocktail-type improvised incendiary devices.”

They felt like they had enough to work with here and arrested him. Crisis averted. (In June of 2023, the man was indicted in federal court and pleaded guilty.)

But part of building their case meant talking with people who may have communicated with him during his planning process. So FBI agents interviewed the church’s priest, choir director, and other members. It seemed that all of them knew exactly why the FBI wanted to speak to them.

It was that guy, wasn’t it?

They cited his “unusual” and “concerning” behavior and racism. The FBI considered reaching out to nearby churches just to let religious leaders know what potential warning signs to look out for, and to give them a way to reach out to the FBI if they saw anything suspicious.

The point is: The church wasn’t the problem. It was just that one guy.

When two FBI analysts—both with decades of experience—began drafting a memo about all this (called a Domain Analysis), noting potential areas of concern for the future, one possibility was the link between the man’s extremism and his faith. But even that possibility was dismissed by the very same analyst, who pointed out that this guy was already on the FBI’s radar before he ever joined this church.

Still, if he was recruiting members for an assault through this church, perhaps there was reason to investigate further—if for no other reason than to help churches like theirs identify potential threats in the future.

Why did their memo include language like “rad-trad Catholic clerical fascist” and “radical-traditionalist Catholic”? Both analysts said those were the words the man himself used and that phrasing was common in his corner of the internet. They never defined it, though, which became an issue later on.

In fact, when the analysts did more research, they learned there were two other men on the FBI’s radar—through their offices in Portland and Milwaukee—who had similar extremist ideologies and a connection to the same kind of church. That’s what led to the publication of a report suggesting the link.

That report even included a legal caveat saying they were not infringing upon anyone’s First Amendment freedoms to practice their faith and they weren’t monitoring anyone in this church solely because of their religious beliefs:

Potential criminality exhibited by certain members of a group referenced herein does not negate nor is it a comment on the constitutional rights of the group itself or its members to exercise their rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The FBI does not investigate, collect, or maintain information on U.S. persons solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment.

The analysts hoped to create a different, more simplified, version of the report that could be shared with others within the FBI—beyond their own office—so they enlisted the help of additional analysts in drafting it.

But the FBI never got around to that.

The original draft report—never meant to be seen by the public—was somehow leaked to right-wing media outlets, and conservatives began running with the story that the FBI, under the Biden administration, was targeting Catholic churches.

That was a lie. There was no anti-Christian bias here. It was a valid documentation of a potentially dangerous phenomenon. It wasn’t even against the Catholic Church, but rather a potentially extremist sect calling itself Catholic.

To ignore that possibility would have been malpractice on the FBI’s part. But right-wing websites were quick to claim the FBI was targeting Catholics who preferred a “Traditional Latin Mass.” (That was one of many descriptors of those churches.) They were misinterpreting everything those analysts had said, but true to form, conservatives began spreading those lies to feed their claims of religious persecution.

When word about this leak got back to the FBI, then-director Christopher Wray rescinded the original document, saying it “failed to adhere to FBI standards.” The agency also “formally admonish[ed] the employees involved.” Former Attorney General Merrick Garland also said he was “appalled” by the memo, but he dismissed any claims that there was discrimination against Catholics.

Conservatives used those actions to insist the FBI was trying to cover up for the religious persecution they were trying to get away with... AND WOULD HAVE, if not for the whistleblower who shared the original document.

But as the Inspector General later explained, that wasn’t the case. Documents like these go through layers of editing and there was no evidence of any malicious intent against a religious group. Just because this memo didn’t meet expectations, it didn’t mean anyone did anything wrong.

The [FBI Inspection Division (or INSD)] report found that although there was no evidence of malicious intent or an improper purpose, the [Richmond Virginia Domain Perspective or DP] failed to adhere to analytic tradecraft standards and evinced errors in professional judgment, including that it lacked sufficient evidence or articulable support for a relationship between [Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists or RMVEs] and so-called [Radical Traditionalist Catholic or RTC] ideology; incorrectly conflated the subjects’ religious views with their RMVE activities, creating the appearance that the FBI had inappropriately considered religious beliefs and affiliation as a basis for conducting investigative activity; and reflected a lack of training and awareness concerning proper domestic terrorism terminology. As a result, the INSD report concluded that the employees involved in drafting, editing, and reviewing the Richmond DP failed to adhere to FBI standards. The INSD report also examined the approval process for the Richmond DP, concluding that it was insufficient, and the circumstances surrounding its removal from FBI systems following the disclosure of the document into the public domain. Based on the results of the FBI’s Strategic Review, the FBI instituted a number of corrective actions, including enhancing approval requirements for intelligence products involving a sensitive investigative matter and formally admonishing the employees involved in the Richmond DP.

That wasn’t how everyone took it, though.

Wray, who was appointed by Trump during his first administration, said the memo “violated the agency’s policies on conducting investigations based on religious affiliation,” which was a ridiculous reason to dismiss a memo that necessitated the mention of a guy’s religious affiliation.

Whether or not you agree with the FBI’s assessment on the memo, though, it appeared that they handled it all internally. The report never should have seen the light of day for reasons they explained and the analysts were, fairly or not, admonished. That sounds like the government working as it should.

It didn’t matter to right-wing propagandists. They ran with the lie, as they so often do. The GOP-led Judiciary Committee, run by Rep. Jim Jordan, said in its report that this proved the “FBI abused its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans as potential domestic terrorists”: “The documents received pursuant to the Committee’s subpoena show that the FBI singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential domestic terrorists.”

That’s not accurate.

But now, Republicans have successfully run everyone involved in this investigation out of the FBI.

Several FBI analysts tied to the creation of a 2023 memo warning of a potential threat from Catholic “violent extremists” were fired Friday, according to their lawyer, the latest wave of terminations under the leadership of its director Kash Patel.

The fired employees included four intelligence analysts and a supervisory analyst. The FBI declined to comment.

“This action is manifestly unjust, completely unsupported by the facts, and subverts standard FBI policy and procedure,” their lawyer, David Laufman, said in a statement. “These individuals deserved far better for the exceptional and faithful public service they rendered to protect our country.”

The lawyer, of course, is correct. There’s no indication of any anti-religious bigotry on the part of the analysts. They successfully prevented a domestic terrorist attack, and this is the reward they get. Their only mistake, if anything, involved the technical elements of producing a report based on their findings. Substantively, however, they didn’t do anything wrong.

The Trump administration is so dead-set on pretending they’re saving the country that they’re quite literally firing the very people who keep the country safe.

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In 2023, the Poland bus company PKS Gdynia announced that it would officially end bus route 666 to the city of Hel, halting one of the truly great marketing opportunities for that city.

But that bus route has just been resurrected.

A quick reminder of what happened in 2023: The bus company issued a notice that Route 666 would be renumbered 669.

Why would they do that? It appeared that the link between the town name and the bus number was creating more problems for the company than it was worth, especially given that this was a coincidence to begin with. In recent years, they were getting a lot of complaints from Christians. One conservative Catholic website even lamented the “malicious” route number, saying that it “strikes at the Christian order of the Polish state and its foundations, and hence… at the good of all of us.” As if the numbering was done specifically to persecute Christians.

That theory was later confirmed. While the company offered no public explanation of their decision, one official told a local news outlet that religious complaints were the basis for the shift:

… Marcin Szwaczyk, who oversees PKS Gdynia’s route planning, confirmed that such complaints were indeed behind the firm’s decision.

“For years, we have received objections from opponents of this number,” he told local news service Trojmiasto.pl. “So we changed it from 666 to 669, [which is] less controversial and less conspicuous.”

However, he revealed that, in the two days since the change was announced, the firm has been inundated with complaints “from the other side” by those who want the old 666 back.

As for the city itself, Hel is a (very real) town on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea. It’s so popular with tourists that one enthusiast noted, “Hel is like paradise on earth.” The fact that, since 2006, the “666 to Hel” had been a real journey you could take undoubtedly boosted the local economy. (Just think of the shirts!) The fact that it’s a seaside resort town only made everything better.

Such numbering isn’t even all that unique. In 2017, Finnair flight 666 flew to Helsinki on Friday the 13th, leading to all kinds of headlines about Flight 666 to HEL on the unluckiest day of the year. When you place unwarranted importance on certain numbers or places, you shouldn’t be surprised when coincidences occur.

But here’s the good news.

A private German-owned bus company called FlixBus has now launched a new seasonal route from Krakow to Hel, and you better believe they’re using Route 666 to do it. And just for good measure, the full route with all the stops takes 13 hours to complete.

A representative of FlixBus, Aleksander Kalenik, confirmed to broadcaster TVN that “the number 666 was deliberately chosen as a marketing communication element, intended to increase the visibility of the connection on the popular holiday route to Hel”.

He added that the company had, before making its decision, conducted analysis of passenger reactions and potential reputational damage, but found that the response was mainly positive or neutral.

Hey, would you look at that? Most people didn’t think anything of it because why should they?! It was just religious zealots who freaked out over it.

FlixBus is fully leaning into the joy of all this:

[FlixBus Eastern Europe managing director Michał] Leman dismissed the controversy surrounding the route.

“It’s vacations. Let’s have fun, let’s do some jokes about the thing,” he told CBS News on Monday. “I don’t think that there is anything bad in that.”

The route will run once a day during the summer season. Tickets are under $30 (USD) for anyone curious enough to go on the Highway to Hel. From what I can gather, the inaugural trip will take place on June 25 and the final one will run on August 29.

(via Notes from Poland. Portions of this article were published earlier)

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Update: The memos I posted below have finally been confirmed.

The Department of Defense/War, under Secretary Pete Hegseth, has just pared down the list of recognized religious labels in the military to a mere 31, making it harder for service members to use the proper identification. A decade ago, as part of a larger mission to be more welcoming to people outside traditional faiths, the list of labels had expanded to well over 200.

It’s yet another example of the Trump administration just doing away with useful information as part of their irrational war on “wokeness.”

Here’s why this is important even if you’re not in the military yourself: One of the strengths of our military is that it brings together people from a variety of backgrounds who are working together for a common cause. In theory, it’s supposed to be merit-based; it’s not dependent on your family’s name or your religious background.

One of the ways the military can accommodate people who had previously felt left out of the system is by simply allowing soldiers to more accurately describe their beliefs. Why? Because, for example, a military chaplain who only knows you’re “Christian” isn’t going to be as helpful as one who knows you’re “Southern Baptist.” Similarly, someone who has “No religion” is very different from someone who’s explicitly “atheist.” More information is good for everybody involved.

(Also, if you knew the military had a sizable population of Humanists, it might make it easier to hire Humanist chaplains, something that still hasn’t happened.)

It’s also important because there are benefits to being associated with a religious group. Since religious beliefs must be accommodated, the same rationale that allows Christians in the military to gather for Bible study can be used by Humanists to meet up and talk about philosophy. They can all have time off to attend worship services regardless of what that looks like. If there are enough people with a particular label, they may be able to have a dedicated space to gather. And, of course, if you die in combat, you can be assured you’ll be treated in accordance with your beliefs instead of some generically Christian one.

Before 2014, there were a limited number of “faith codes” you could use to describe yourself. They included “Muslim, Hindu, Wiccan, Jewish, Buddhist, or one of more than 100 Christian denominations.” But non-religious soldiers could only choose from “atheist” or “no religious preference.”

After 2014, the list was expanded to include “Humanist.” A hard-fought win that was years in the making!

In 2017, the list was expanded again to include even more specific non-religious categories like “Heathen,” “Deism,” “No Preference,” and “No Religion.”

Again, the goal was accuracy. There was finally an understanding that the spectrum of non-religious thought wasn’t as simple as saying “I’m not.” Much like there are many denominations of Christianity, each of which has meaning for people who belong to those groups, there are non-religious people who believe “Humanist” or “Deist” or “Agnostic” more accurately describes who they are and what they believe.

That’s where we were at after 2017. The military has always treated faith like it’s a net positive for good soldiers but they were finally using language that was less overtly Christian. And they were finally more open to the diversity of thought in an increasingly non-religious country.

But Hegseth is now blowing up that progress like it’s a harmless fishing boat in the Caribbean.

Hegseth, a Christian Nationalist who wants to turn the military into crusaders for Christ, posted a video last December saying the list of faiths and beliefs would be “simplified” to get rid of all that diversity.

That’s why today at my direction, we are also simplifying the faith and belief coding system. In recent years, it ballooned to over 200 overly complex faith and belief codes. An overwhelming majority of the military population only uses six codes. Eleven are not used by anyone. We’re going to streamline it and move it to a new list of religious affiliation codes so that our chaplains can actually use it to minister better to the flock.

He said he would “streamline” the list of military religious affiliation codes. But how would that help chaplains “minister better to the flock”? If anything, as I said earlier, having less specific information to work with would make their jobs harder. Republicans want to eliminate an expansion of religious codes that took over a decade to approve for the simple reason that they can’t handle complexity of thought.

It’s stupidity for the sake of stupidity.

Hegseth doesn’t understand the military and he refuses to listen to the people who have spent their lives in it, so his only solution is to destroy what others have carefully crafted. Instead of deferring to military leaders, Hegseth is imposing his idiotic will because he always assumes he knows best. It’s the kind of unearned arrogance that defines the modern Republican Party.

Anyway, for months now, I’ve been asking the Department of Defense/War to send me the updated list, but they kept telling me they had no updates. The list hadn’t changed despite Hegseth’s claims. I thought (hoped?) that perhaps he just forgot about it.

Alas. Last week, I was tipped off that the list had indeed been changed, though the DoD didn’t respond to my request for the official memo saying so. All I’ve been able to get access to is the first page of the memo which doesn’t include the full list:

Yesterday, however, Military.com (an independent site) said the list was updated and would go into effect within two months:

… The changes were iterated in a May 20, 2026, memorandum issued by the Under Secretary of War and signed by Anthony Tata, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness of the United States, and obtained by Military.com.

This latest revision to the faith codes comes at the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to the Tata-signed memo, done to “streamline the DoW collection of religious preferences collection for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy.” It calls for the previously instituted faith and belief codes to be revised within a 60-day period from the issuance of the memorandum.

“The new list will provide chaplains with clear, readily available information that will better enable them to anticipate the religious support needs of service members and to provide religious support activities that align with service members’ personal faith and practices,” Tata wrote.

All of that is bullshit. It doesn’t make chaplains’ jobs any easier when they have less useful information about what service members believe.

Let’s be blunt: This is being done to erase and push out military personnel who are not Christian or a member of one of the larger religious denominations (that even Hegseth can’t ignore).

According to the memo, which I’m still trying to obtain, the new list of 31 codes includes Agnostic, Baha’i, Buddhist, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Hindu, Islam (Muslim), Judaism (Jewish), No Religion, Other Religions, Sikh, and 21 different flavors of Christianity.

This is the purported list:

What’s gone? Humanist. Heathen. Deist. Pagan. Wiccan. Atheist. And literally dozens upon dozens of smaller religious groups.

Think about what this means: If you’re an atheist, like I am, the only sensible category would be “No Religion.” What about people who no longer buy into organized religion but still think there’s a Higher Power somewhere up there? They would also be listed under “No Religion.” What about people who never think about religion at all? “No Religion.”

It’s a catch-all term that erases open atheists from the military by lumping them in with people who don’t share their views at all.

This isn’t helpful for Christians either, because there’s far more diversity under the broader Christian umbrella than the 21 options listed here. There are progressive Baptists and very conservative Southern Baptists. The United Methodist Church recently underwent a massive schism but the list doesn’t recognize that. If you belong to a non-denominational megachurch, are you “Christian - Non-denominational” or “Christian - Evangelical”?

There are also very different kinds of Jewish people just as there are different sects of Islam.

None of it matters to Hegseth.

There’s no rhyme or reason for this list to be shrunk, but we’re doing it anyway because Hegseth wants to destroy the military from the inside by making it less welcoming for the type of people he doesn’t like: minorities of any stripe.

As one anonymous chaplain told Military.com:

“There’s a lot of faith groups out there that I particularly don’t have an interest in, but there are service members who are sending their sons and daughters into the military, and they’re expecting pastoral care for their sons and daughters as needed—and I don’t think they’re going to get it.

“All it takes is the chaplain to say, ‘Well, I don’t see them on this list. I don’t know how I can help you. Maybe go off the installation and see if you can find anybody who can work with you. Goodbye.’ And that’s it. That’s not the American way.”

To put this another way, the National Cemetery Administration (under the Department of Veterans Affairs) has over 80 “emblems of belief” that they can put on the headstones of dead service members.

That means, when it comes to the military, our government is more interested in your religious affiliation when you’re dead than when you’re alive.

Nick Fish, president of American Atheists, said this move by Hegseth was “entirely unsurprising”:

As much as Hegseth wants to push the lie that the U.S. is a Christian Nation, repeating a lie doesn’t make it true. This is a nation with hundreds of faith and belief systems and our military reflects that simple fact. That Hegseth apparently believes numbers larger than 30 are just too complicated to handle says a lot about his management of the Pentagon.

If reports are accurate, his decision to remove the atheist designation makes it clear this has nothing to do with “streamlining” anything. The exclusion of millions of Americans and countless members of our military sends a message about who counts as a “real” American to Hegseth and the extremists aligned with him.

No matter how hard White Christian Nationalists like Hegseth try, they will never succeed in writing us out of our history or in silencing us. Atheist soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and guardians are patriots committed to protecting our nation and our Constitution. It’s a shame we can’t say the same thing about Hegseth.

This unnecessary change is all the more infuriating because it solves a problem that doesn’t exist while creating a bunch of new ones. No service members were harmed because the military allowed people to identify themselves accurately. No chaplain was overwhelmed because there were too many religious categories. If anything, the expanded list was a small but meaningful acknowledgment that the people serving this country come from a wide range of backgrounds and deserve to be treated accordingly.

No one would ever say a doctor is better served by having fewer options to diagnose you. Yet that’s effectively the logic Hegseth is applying here. And this hits hardest on the very groups that have spent years fighting for recognition, like Humanists. Their inclusion on the earlier list reflected the reality that America’s military is more diverse than we give it credit for, not less. Hegseth has been on a mission to downplay that diversity, ejecting people who don’t fit his vision of what the military ought to look like and preventing minorities from receiving earned promotions. As if pretending diversity doesn’t exist will magically make it all go away.

This move doesn’t save money. It doesn’t improve readiness. It doesn’t strengthen unit cohesion. It doesn’t help chaplains. It doesn’t make the military more effective in any measurable way. All that will happen is that thousands of service members will be less accurately represented in the system.

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A Christian employee at the Los Angeles Department of Public Works is suing the department and L.A. County because they refused to give him a religious accommodation to work from home during Pride Month, which he requested because he didn’t want to look at the “Pride Progress Flag” outside the building.

Who knew you could find a snowflake in Los Angeles in the summer?

The Senior Civil Engineer, Eric Batman (yes, that’s his real name), said in a lawsuit filed this past March that he’s been working at the Public Works department for decades and he also has very strong beliefs about gay people. He can’t stop thinking about gay people. His sincerely held religious beliefs revolve extensively around his obsession with what gay people do in the bedroom.

In 2023, the County’s Board of Supervisors passed a motion saying Pride flags would be flown at all County departments in June in honor of Pride Month, something they continued to do in the years since. And all of it bothered Batman because acknowledging the reality that LGBTQ exist and shouldn’t be ashamed of that is something his religion doesn’t allow.

So he asked his superiors if he could work from home the entire month. In 2023, they didn’t mind because his office was under construction anyway. In 2024, he made a similar request, saying that walking past the Pride flag “would negatively impact my ability perform my work and would result in a hostile work environment.”

How would it affect his ability to do his work? He didn’t say. I have no clue how looking at a flag impacts anyone’s ability to oversee the county’s “flood control and stormwater capture facilities,” as Batman does.

How would it result in a hostile work environment? No one knows. It’s not like colleagues were treating him any differently.

Batman went on to say he needed to avoid the flag in order to “not have to deal with the undue additional mental stresses associated with the image presented by the pride flag.” Because Pride Month is all about honoring the sacrifices made by conservative Christians who have to co-exist with other people.

A County official said he could always use a different entrance. And because he said he was dealing with “mental stresses,” the official sent him a brochure to help him file the paperwork so he could get “confidential professional help at no cost.” (That may have been something the official had to send him since he cited having mental health issues.) But whatever he decided to do, his accommodation wasn’t going to be approved because this was clearly an unreasonable request.

That meant he had to work in the office in June and this forced him to “violate his sincerely held religious beliefs.”

How? WHO THE HELL KNOWS. But that is what he later said in the lawsuit.

In 2025, he made another request to work from home in June. This time, he explained in detail why the flag was offensive to him.

For example, the flag has different colors on it, which everyone knows is anti-Christian.

The flag has six colored stripes which stand for various expressions of sexuality that are sinful according to my religion. Being forced to participate in the County’s celebration of sinful sexuality by working under this flag and being forced to look at it in order to come to work violates my religious beliefs.

Again, those stripes do not require anyone to do anything. It’s like seeing a menorah; if that’s not your thing, you don’t have to worry about it. It’s not like everyone who passes by the flag has to perform at least three gay acts during work hours.

He also said Muslim employees were allowed to work from home during Ramadan, therefore he should be allowed to do it to avoid a flag. He also included a long list of Bible verses so that his superiors knew he was truly delusional.

This argument was somehow not convincing to anyone. The County offered to give him a more convenient parking space in June so he could avoid the main entrance and the flag. But he rejected that option so that he could keep whining about being persecuted. In fact, he claimed he was being told to use “separate but equal” facilities.

All of this, he says, has caused irreparable harm… even though he’s continued to work at the facility with no real change.

When the lawsuit was filed in March, Batman was represented by the right-wing group Liberty Counsel (the Kim Davis people), and almost immediately, they blew everything out of proportion in order to fundraise off of this.

Like this email in which they claimed the County was “declaring [Batman’s] Christian beliefs to be a mental illness.”

The County did not say Christianity was a “mental illness.” Batman said he was struggling with “mental stresses” and the County sent him resources to deal with it, as they should have.

Liberty Counsel lied about that, because their Christian faith teaches them lying is perfectly fine if it helps you con gullible people out of their money.

Days later, perhaps realizing they were onto something, they said Batman was being told to attend a “Soviet-style ‘reeducation camp’”…

Because I hate myself and get all of Liberty Counsel’s fundraising emails, I can tell you that, since March 19, I’ve received six separate emails demanding more money so that the group can fight those Los Angeles liberals who think Christians are mentally ill. Seriously. One of the email headlines? “LA to Christians: You’re mentally ill.” (That’s not what they said.)

There’s been no further movement on this case. No response from the County yet. No judge’s ruling. Which means Liberty Counsel will keep acting like this is a pressing issue.

But let’s be clear: A flag that’s up for a month, with a message that boils down to “inclusion,” isn’t infringing upon anyone’s religious beliefs. It’s not telling Christians they’re not welcome in the building. It’s not promoting one religion over another. It’s not promoting LGBTQ people over straight, cisgender people. It’s merely acknowledging the struggles that certain people have had to deal with and reminding them they, too, are a part of this community. (Even if they’re not truly welcome as they are in Batman’s bigoted church.)

The irony is impossible to ignore here. The reason we even honor Pride Month is because LGBTQ people have spent decades being told to hide who they are in part to avoid offending religious conservatives and their sensibilities. They’ve lost jobs, been rejected by their families, been kicked out of their churches, and been targeted by politicians eager to score points by turning them into villains. Yet Batman wants a court to believe he’s the real victim because he had to walk past a rainbow-colored flag on his way to work. A flag that—let’s be honest—no one really pays that much attention to in the first place. This isn’t persecution. This is a Christian man looking for a reason to be angry.

If your faith is endangered by fabric, maybe your God’s not as powerful as you imagine.

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Connecticut lawmakers recently passed a perfectly sensible bill to protect children who are homeschooled.

Naturally, Republicans are furious.

House Bill 5468 (now called Public Act No. 26-37) basically does two things: It requires all families to submit a form explaining how their kids will be educated (e.g. public school, private school, homeschooling, etc), and it says parents who want to homeschool their kids must not be “under investigation by the Department of Children and Families for an allegation of abuse or neglect.” If an adult in that home is under investigation, the approval for homeschooling will not be granted. (Students who are already being homeschooled will automatically be allowed to continue—or “grandfathered” in.)

It’s honestly the bare minimum a state should do to make sure students who are being homeschooled are in a safe environment. The same kind of background check, it must be said, also applies to public school teachers already.

That’s necessary given that there are documented situations where parents have removed their kids from public schools—and from any sort of adult oversight—only to abuse or neglect those children. (There was a disturbing case of that in Waterbury last year that inspired lawmakers to make these changes.) While most homeschooling parents have good intentions and aren’t abusive in any way, the question is whether there’s a way to protect kids in situations where they’re not in the presence of any other adults who are looking out for their best interests:

Sarah Eagan, executive director of the Center for Children’s Advocacy and the state’s former child advocate, said the issue is not homeschooling itself.

“The issue of concern in Connecticut, and what we know for a fact, is that there are families, and they’re not one-offs, that have used the pretense of homeschooling [and] the lack of any framework in our school districts to follow up, to hide their children from public view and abuse and neglect them. That is not a theory. It is not a possibility. It has happened over and over and over again,” Eagan said.

…

She referenced a report from the Office of the Child Advocate, where they did a random sample of several hundred children who were withdrawn from school under the stated purpose of homeschooling, and she said their findings proved to be concerning.

“More than 30% of those children had been chronically absent from school,” Eagan said. “About 8% of those children lived in families with multiple reports of child abuse or neglect, and most alarming, 30 of those children in the random sample were in homes where caregivers are on the central registry for child abuse or neglect.”

The fact is that once Connecticut parents say they’re homeschooling their kids, there’s no way for the government to check up on them… unless there’s a formal report of suspicion of abuse or neglect. If those kids are shielded from view, though, how would anyone know there’s reason to be concerned? This new law simply requires a background check on the parents. It doesn’t prevent abuse, but it could make sure the worst case scenarios are avoided.

So why are conservatives so upset about this? Why did every Republican vote against this bill at every stage?

Why did one right-wing commentator call it “Orwellian”? Why did a hate-group leader say it was an example of “the Left’s total disregard for the rights, responsibility, and authority that God has given to parents”? Why did one Republican lawmaker claim this bill would “destroy your way of life”? Why did the Wall Street Journal opinion page title an essay “Connecticut Goes After Homeschoolers”?

Because they see any kind of regulation on homeschooling as an attack on their religious freedom. Or their own freedom. Or the start of a slippery slope that takes away their right to miseducate their children through religious indoctrination if they so choose.

The CT Homeschool Network, which describes itself as a watchdog for homeschool freedom and privacy, called the legislation “wholly irresponsible” in a statement and argued homeschooling families are being used as “the scapegoat” for failures within DCF.

…

Sen. Rob Sampson (R) delivered a powerful closing statement: “Parents are not subjects—they are citizens—and they do not need the permission of this state government or anyone in this room to educate their own children.”

Such a broad attack on parental rights is blatantly unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the primacy of parents over the state when it comes to child-rearing decisions. If the proposal becomes law, parents should challenge it in court, where it deserves to be struck down.

These are ridiculous arguments, of course, because the bill isn’t targeting homeschoolers so much as it’s giving homeschooled kids a layer of protection that’s already available to the ones who attend public school. Nor is this bill preventing parents from homeschooling their kids. Nor is it treating every homeschooling parent “as a potential threat simply because some parents do wrong.”

At public schools, teachers and social workers are mandated reporters who can see if a child comes to school bruised or tells them they’re not being fed or are being abused. It doesn’t mean kids can’t slip through the cracks but there’s at least a system in place to help those they can catch. That system disappears when kids are homeschooled without oversight.

At this point, though, it’s not surprising that the same conservatives who have turned a blind eye to the Epstein Files and Donald Trump’s involvement in that scandal aren’t interested in making sure children are safe.

Just look at how Jim Mason, the president of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), argued against the bill back in April:

Connecticut lawmakers are considering a bill that would subject every family to a background check by the Department of Children and Families before beginning to homeschool.

Not after evidence of abuse. Not in response to a specific concern. But as a condition of carrying out a basic responsibility of parenthood—in this case choosing the best education method for your child. In effect, the state must clear you before you may begin to teach your own child.

The problem with his logic is that, if kids are shielded from the public, no one will see any evidence of abuse. No one can raise any specific concerns. Instead of supporting basic minimal oversight that would actually make it easier for homeschooling to be defined by decent parents, groups like HSLDA want to make it easier for abusers to get away with anything they want.

You can’t say “every case of child abuse is devastating and morally urgent,” as Mason does, while opposing legislation designed to prevent that abuse.

Mason also claims this law is in response to “the rare but real examples of abuse” but unfairly applies to everyone. But that’s how laws work! Some people drive recklessly, and that’s why we have traffic laws that apply to all drivers. To the argument that the law is “treating every parent as a potential criminal rather than respecting the presumption of innocence,” yes, that’s also how laws work! When I’m driving on the highway, a cop might be pointing a radar gun in my direction. Is it because I’m breaking the law? No! It’s because all drivers must, by definition, be treated as if they’re “potential criminals”; that’s not a problem unless you’re breaking the law.

It’s not like Mason is offering any solution that would weed out abusive parents—because, ultimately, he doesn’t give a shit if kids are abused as long as there are no regulations on homeschooling whatsoever. He’s willing to sacrifice kids in exchange for no regulations.

Mason also says students in public schools have been abused, too.

If lawmakers truly believed this level of government monitoring was necessary to protect children, they would apply the same standard to every family in Connecticut, including those with children in public schools, where abuse by teachers and staff has occurred for decades. They do not, because such sweeping surveillance would rightly be viewed as an outrageous violation of parental rights and personal liberty.

That’s bullshit. The reason we know about those stories is because there’s oversight. No one’s saying public schools are perfect. A teacher can pass a background check and still be abusive. But at least those people who commit a crime are caught and prevented from teaching again. The same can’t be said of parents who hide their kids away from public view.

It doesn’t matter how many stories there are about homeschooling-gone-wrong because groups like this are hell-bent on staying off the grid as much as possible, falsely believing that any kind of government intervention is inherently evil.

This is not new. Republican lawmakers are beholden to their Christian base and lobbying groups like HSLDA which put “parents’ rights” over the well-being of children.

Keep in mind we’re not even talking about the merits (or lack thereof) of homeschooling itself. That’s irrelevant to this story, but we’ve seen a similar response on that front, too. The Christian homeschooling advocates are unbothered and unmoved by stories from formerly homeschooled kids who say they weren’t prepared for life outside their home—and that their peers from public schools were leaps and bounds ahead of them, academically and emotionally, when they met them in college.

Homeschooling can work. There are religious and secular parents who do it very well. But there’s no way to tell if it’s working unless there’s a system in place to verify it. We’ve seen religious communities fail at this time and time again. By opposing any and all forms of regulation, groups like HSLDA have allowed abusive behavior, both physical and educational, to remain hidden from public view. It’s grossly irresponsible.

Thank goodness Democrats in Connecticut were willing to do something about it, because Republicans never will.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about Ark Encounter, the Noah’s Ark “replica” in Williamstown, Kentucky, but it’s about to celebrate its 10-year anniversary this July, so it seems like a good time to remind everyone how big of a disaster this whole thing has been—and not just because of the fake “science” it presents to children and gullible adults.

Even if you haven’t paid much attention to it for a while, watchdogs have been tracking its failures for years now.

Just consider the massive government investments.

When Creationist Ken Ham and his team at Answers in Genesis were looking for a location for their $100+ million attraction, they pitched it as a way to create jobs. One projection (from the state) said Ark Encounter was “expected to annually generate… a minimum of 3,000 new full-time equivalent jobs.”

Unfortunately, those jobs turned out to be available only for people who agreed to Answers in Genesis’ fundamentalist Christian worldview. Even wannabe janitors had to agree the Earth was only 6,000 years old and gay marriage was an abomination.

Besides that, the city of Williamstown, which desperately wanted to be the home of the Ark, offered Ham’s team $62 million in junk bonds if they built the “Ark” in their backyard. Grant County, which Williamstown is in, gave Ham’s team 98 acres of land for $1. (That’s not a typo. Just a single dollar.)

They also said that, over a 30-year period, 75% of Ark Encounter’s real estate taxes would go toward repayment of the interest-free loan. So instead of that money going to the city and the citizens, it would be used to repay those bonds.

Also, 2% of all employees’ paychecks would go back to Ark Encounter to help them pay off the loans, so neither the government nor the employees were getting everything they deserved.

Why would a city and county do all this? Because they hoped that the attraction would be so popular, it would increase tourism, liven up what was in many ways a dying town, create well-paying jobs, and be good for all surrounding businesses.

The state of Kentucky even promised Ark Encounter a tax incentive worth up to $18.25 million over the next decade based on attendance and sales. (Lawsuits to stop that, due to the discriminatory hiring, were unsuccessful.)

All of these numbers were based on expectations that Ark Encounter would draw in a certain number of tourists each year. And the Creationists—who should never be taken seriously when it comes to large numbers—offered the best-case and worst-case scenarios in a 2013 “feasibility report.” They assured everyone that they would bring in between 1.2 million and 2 million visitors in the first full year of business.

Ken Ham openly bragged about this on the website for Ark Encounter at the time.

That same report assumed a 4% increase in attendance every year over the next decade—a number that could rise to 10% after they expanded. By their math—and Creationists are truly numerical wizards—the money line would always be going up and to the right.

If you do the math, and if Year 1 brought in the “estimated average” of 1,600,000 visitors, then by Year 9, they were expected to have 2,590,984 visitors.

The people who were best known for shrinking large numbers were now artificially inflating them.

But they got the investments they wanted, anyway. Ark Encounter opened in July of 2016. And because it’s a private attraction, the expectation was that the public would never really get to see what the attendance numbers were. Sure, the local government would have to keep track of whether their loans were paid off, but it wasn’t clear if we’d ever have access to real data about Ark Encounter’s finances.

And then something wonderful happened.

The city of Williamstown imposed a $0.50-per-ticket “safety fee” on all tickets sold at Ark Encounter. That money was meant to offset the city’s costs for all the additional police cars and fire trucks that would be needed. (Even if visitors to the Ark were rarely in peril, you needed those resources on hand in case of emergencies.) While Ken Ham fought this at first, he eventually gave up and began paying it a year after Ark Encounter opened.

And because those safety fees were a public record, it wouldn’t be difficult to figure out how many tickets were being sold each month. Ever since that data became available, local paleontologist Dan Phelps has been regularly filing public record requests to get access to those numbers, allowing us to calculate monthly ticket sales at Ark Encounter.

Have I been keeping track of those numbers in an easy-to-read spreadsheet for several years now?

Hell yeah I have.

Here’s what I can tell you about attendance:

The attendance has never even come close to hitting that estimated average of 1.6 million visitors. Even when you factor out the year COVID shut these parks down, things have just gone downhill. Righting America’s William Trollinger put together this helpful analysis (counting numbers between July of one year and June of the following year):

And here are the actual attendance numbers:

• Year 1(JY 2016-JE 2017): est. 800,000 (50% of projected attendance)

• Year 2 (JY 2017-JE 2018): 865,761 (52% of projected attendance)

• Year 3 (JY 2018-JE 2019): 875,882 (51% of projected attendance)

• Year 4 (JY 2019-JE 2021): 841,772 (44% of projected attendance)

  • Given the impact of COVID on Ark attendance, I left out March 2020-February 2021

• Year 5 (JY 2021-JE 2022): 775,731 (39% of projected attendance)

• Year 6 (JY 2022-JE 2023): 782,660 (36% of projected attendance)

• Year 7 (JY 2023-JE 2024): 764,258 (34% of projected attendance)

• Year 8 (JY 2024-JE 2025): 682,101 (27% of projected attendance)

• Year 9 (JY 2025-JE 2026): 664, 813 (26% of projected attendance)

  • For May-June 2026 I used the attendance numbers from May-June 2025. If history is any guide, this may serve to overestimate Year 9 attendance.

However you want to parse the numbers, the takeaways here are that attendance keeps falling and Ark Encounter has never even come close to the “worst-case scenario” of 1.2 million visitors. You can’t blame that on COVID either.

Because they’re not hitting the projected attendance numbers, it means the city isn’t attracting tourists in the volume they had hoped, which is bad news for local stores, hotels, and even schools that rely on property taxes.

Williamstown officials took a misguided gamble on this Creationist attraction and the city has paid the price for it. The sales tax rebate (worth $1.825 million/year for ten years) from the state should be on the verge of expiring, which is bad news for Answers in Genesis. Add to that a faltering economy, high gas prices, and the simple fact that this “museum” isn’t worth seeing more than once (even if you’re going there to mock it!) because it’s not like the underlying details ever change, and the future looks pretty damn bad for the Creationists behind it.

Thoughts and prayers.

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A Christian “prophet” has just invented a new way for someone to receive God’s blessings: physically eating the Bible.

During a February event at “The ROCK,” a non-denominational megachurch in Parkersburg, West Virginia, Kevin Leal ripped a page out of a Bible and then told a teenager to eat it.

The segment was first brought to my attention by the Christian website Protestia.

… Is there a teenager that has a paper Bible here? Not your phone, but it’s a paper—it’s a Bible?

… [To an aide: Turn to the Book of Proverbs for me.] You won’t believe what I’m about to do. But it happened 15 years ago in Brazil… [Rips out page]. Eat it. When you eat this, the power of God is going to go inside of you. Go ahead. Take your time.

… Swallow it! The power of God’s coming on ya! The power of God’s coming on ya! The power of God’s coming on ya! Swallow it! You want some water? Give him my water.

… Father, mark him for the rest of his life. For wisdom is coming over your whole body right now. Raise the music up. It’s coming on. Just receive it right now, son. This is a life-changing anointing just happening to you. I see you with houses before other people have houses.

Usually, when people rip pages out of the Bible and destroy them, Christians consider it blasphemy, but who knew that it was acceptable during a supposed anointing? And who could have guessed Catholics won this particular battle when they decided to go with a bland wafer instead?

Obviously, this is all bullshit, but it’s a reminder of how religious leaders can convince gullible people to do damn near anything in the name of God. Leal brought this kid up in front of the audience before demanding he do something completely embarrassing. There was pressure and coercion—and emotional manipulation, too. Notice how Leal literally called for the music to get louder. The full clip also shows the audience being told to cheer this on with cries of “Wisdom to build.”

I don’t blame the kid for going along with it; it was arguably more embarrassing to say no in that situation. But we can absolutely blame the adults for playing along with this charade.

This was a stupid stunt. There’s no shortage of stupid stunts when it comes to so-called “prophets” trying to prove God is working His magic in the church. The best thing we can say about this stunt is that it didn’t involve rubbing spit on someone’s face or any kind of animal cruelty. It was a relatively harmless form of batshittery. Hell, it’s not even the worst thing a religious leader has ever done involving a child’s mouth.

Maybe you’re wondering where this idea even came from.

Lucky for you, we have that answer. A few minutes before Leal told that child to swallow, The ROCK pastor David Chisholm told that same kid he had a dream about him, involving the teenager sitting at a table and devouring the Bible:

… I saw you sitting at a table—a dinner table—knife, fork, spoon, and laying in front of you was a Bible. And it was open to the Book of Proverbs.

And I seen you reach down and you took Chapter 1, and you tore it out, and you crumpled it up, and you put it in your mouth, and you chewed it, and you swallowed it.

And then you went to Chapter 2. You tore it out of the Bible, you crumpled it up, put it in your mouth and swallowed it.

And I’m giving you a command: Every day, for the next several years in your development, you eat at least one chapter of the Book of Proverbs, the Book of Ecclesiastes, and the Book of Psalms, in at least 10 different translations. Find 10 different versions. And eat a chapter a day, because you’re gonna have to have the wisdom of God to do this call that God’s got on your life.

I did that when I was young. I read the Book of Proverbs, I devoured it. And, you know, when I was 26, I had 70-year-old men sitting at my desk for counsel, saying, “Why am I in front of you? You should be in front of me.” Amen? Amen? Deal? Book of Proverbs every day.

That’s… weird. But at least it’s just a metaphor. Chisholm was clearly telling the kid to read certain parts of the Bible regularly.

But Leal then took his language and just ran with it. Because when Fundies say you have to take the Bible literally, you have to take the Bible literally.

As one commenter said in response, that kid’s a day away from having the Holy Shits.

While people are rightly mocking this whole charade, let’s remember the real problem: This church is conditioning young people to believe what religious leaders say no matter how idiotic or harmful it may be. To them, obedience must always override their own instincts, dignity, or common sense. If you can train young people to do that, you’re creating an environment where every other form of spiritual abuse can also flourish.

So, yes, we can laugh at this spectacle. But we should also condemn it because no ethical person should be relying on a public pressure campaign to convince a child to do something this idiotic. It’s a perfect snapshot of performative Christianity: manipulative, exploitative, and desperate. And deeply, deeply unhealthy.

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The Republican front-runner in the race to be Colorado’s governor is Victor Marx, a man who seemingly came out of nowhere to jump past the rest of the field. But his background as a Christian ministry leader is coming under close scrutiny given the apparent lies he’s been telling voters about it.

Marx is a MAGA cultist with a massive social media following who’s never run for public office before, but with a boost from conspiracy theorist Rep. Lauren Boebert and a history of serving in the Marine Corps and working as a former assistant to now-dead anti-LGBTQ bigot James Dobson at Focus on the Family, he was the sort of candidate conservatives could rally behind:

Marx is the founder of the All Things Possible ministry, a nonprofit organization based in Colorado Springs that funds projects against child exploitation. He is a first-time candidate and is endorsed by Boebert. He has raised nearly $620,000 since announcing his candidacy at the start of the year.

“Colorado does not need another politician,” he said “We need a leader.”

“Businesses are leaving (the state), families are suffering and leaving, and when we’re letting criminals out but keeping a grandmother who is a Gold Star mom in prison — that’s got to stop,” he said.

(He was referring to convicted felon and election denier Tina Peters, who was later granted clemency by the Democratic Gov. Jared Polis for reasons that defy all logic.)

The thing about a relatively unknown candidate, though, is that it raises the possibility that digging into his past could unveil surprises. Sometimes that takes investigative journalists truly probing into someone’s life. Sometimes it just takes asking basic questions about someone’s biography.

Marx wasn’t even ready for those basic questions.

Consider the biography that appeared on his campaign website after it launched:

Victor is not a career politician—he is a Marine, a humanitarian, and a problem solver. He founded All Things Possible Ministries, which has helped more than 45,000 women and children recover from abuse, trafficking, and violence. He has led over 150 high-risk humanitarian missions across the globe to rescue the vulnerable and partnered with law enforcement through a task force of retired intelligence and cyber experts to track predators and protect children. In Colorado Springs, he built a training and retreat center serving veterans, law enforcement, and first responders. Through these efforts, Victor has earned the trust of sheriffs, military leaders, and government officials because he knows how to unite people, cut through bureaucracy, and deliver results.

In 2024, he repeated a similar claim when promoting his book, saying he wrote it “after 130+ missions to rescue women & children from terror & abuse.”

This past February, he said in a campaign newsletter that his team “rescued 43 children from the grips of evil predators.” No further details were offered.

He also said in a 2015 interview about his ministry that, as a seven-year-old child, his abusive stepfather made him kill another man, an event that (obviously) traumatized him but also helped shape who he is today in terms of what he hopes to stop for future generations.

These days, Marx isn’t the sort of person to sit for interviews that aren’t with propaganda outlets, so it was an interesting choice that he sat for an in-depth conversation with Kyle Clark of 9NEWS, a reporter with an excellent track record (and a decent dude). It came ahead of a scheduled debate between the Republican candidates for governor.

Clark asked Marx if he could verify a lot of the stories he’s been sharing—the hundred-plus missions, and thousands of rescues, and if he’s killed any more people—and things went off the rails quickly.

Like that 45,000 rescues number, which has since been pulled from the campaign website:

CLARK: One claim that you make as central to your life story and your accomplishments, to me, stands out above all of the others. And it’s about saving women and children... Your campaign website falsely claimed that you had rescued more than 45,000 women and children, and that claim has since been taken down. How many women and children have you rescued from captivity and abuse?

MARX: Well, regarding the 45,000, is that the number you’re making reference to? Never did I ever say that I rescued 45,000 women and children. And I mean, I’ve been doing this for years. Our ministry website never claimed that. Our current campaign website doesn’t say it. I think what happened, the best that we can see, is an independent contractor put together our first, you know, website for the campaign, and then that individual inadvertently put “rescued.” And it was corrected as soon as we knew.

CLARK: So, mistakes happen. I understand that. How many women and children have you rescued?

MARX: We’ve never publicly given the number out for security reasons. And we don’t have a need to. I would say it’s more than one and less than a bunch. Our desire is to protect those that we have in our current network that’s in place, so there’s no benefit from us.

CLARK: Giving a number would put people in danger?

MARX: Yes.

CLARK: How does the number put people in danger?

MARX: Um, I think if those that we’ve disrupted, nefarious characters and organizations, had the number, it would put us and our network at much greater risk than we are now.

That answer obviously makes no sense whatsoever. It also doesn’t explain where the number came from in the first place.

Clark rightly pointed out that if it’s dangerous to tell people about how many victims the ministry is rescuing, why tell people that they saved “43 children from the grips of evil predators” earlier this year? That was a reference to a rescue by U.S. Marshals, but in their press release announcing the accomplishment, the government listed 25 agencies and groups that helped them do it. Marx’s group wasn’t on the list.

CLARK: You certainly do use specific rescue numbers though when you feel that it suits your purposes. You wrote in February of this year, “Just last month, our team rescued 43 children from the grips of evil predators.” Where did that rescue of 43 children happen?

MARX: In the U.S., and that was by, through, and with law enforcement, through a special operations that we do with Protecting Children’s Innocence.

CLARK: Are you referring to Operation Northern Lights in Florida?

MARX: Yes.

CLARK: Okay. So the U.S. Marshals named 25 partner agencies, including two rescue ministries, that were involved in that operation. They said nothing about you and your ministry. But you’re claiming credit for those 43 rescues. They didn’t even mention you.

MARX: Yeah, not credit. Participation [is] what we do.

CLARK: You said “our team rescued 43 children,” and the marshals who ran that operation named 25 partners and never said a word about you.

MARX: Does that mean we didn’t help them?

CLARK: No, I’m just curious why you think that is.

MARX: Uh, we don’t require that we be listed or named in any operations.

The idea that a ministry that raises money from touting its success didn’t want credit for a major success is incomprehensible. It suggests that, at best, Marx’s group has a very very tangential connection to something he later pretended to take full credit for.

What about the “130+ missions to rescue women & children from terror & abuse”?

Marx didn’t even appear to know what Clark was talking about:

CLARK: You said that you’ve performed more than 130 “missions to rescue women and children from terror and abuse.” Is what you said factually true? That you have performed more than 130 missions to rescue women and children from terror?

MARX: Where do you cite that?

CLARK: Uh, you said that on X on August 12th of 2024.

MARX: That’s not something I believe I would ever say.

CLARK: Your full quote was, “I wrote this book, Dangerous Gentleman, after 130+ missions to rescue women and children from terror and abuse.” So that’s not true what you wrote?

MARX: I wouldn’t… That doesn’t sound accurate… that I would specify how many missions…

Ooof.

At this point, we’re not even 10 minutes into the interview. Clark makes clear that, as with any politician, he just wants a way to confirm the numbers being put out by the campaign, but the only material “supporting” Marx’s claims come from Marx himself. There’s no way to talk to survivors they’ve supposedly rescued or officials who can verify his group’s involvement. Marx seems shocked that, for once, people aren’t taking his claims at face value. Which is the sort of thing that happens when you’re not speaking to people inside your Christian echo chamber.

Clark later asked a question that should have been a gimme.

Regarding the man Marx supposedly killed at age seven, has he ever killed anyone else?

The answer was not “No.”

CLARK: Your claim that your abusive stepfather forced you to kill a man when you were seven years old. Is that the only person you’ve ever killed?

MARX: Well, I would say as a, as a child, yes, I mean, without question. But I’ve been in other situations where, you know, possibly people or persons died, as a result of me defending myself and other countries… There’s no count on that, and I… there’s no photos or… But that was something, as a kid, without a, without a doubt. Yeah.

CLARK: Do you think that you’ve killed people as an adult?

MARX: Does it matter?

CLARK: Yeah, I’d say so.

MARX: Why?

CLARK: Killing somebody is a pretty weighty thing.

MARX: If someone’s trying to kill you or you’re in combat?

CLARK: It’s still… it’s still a weighty thing to take somebody else’s life. I mean, it could be self-defense, it could be justified, but it’s still a weighty thing. So I’m just asking you, how many people have you killed?

MARX: Well, if I did, I wouldn’t be telling a reporter.

All he had to do was say he may have (or has) killed people in war, but his hesitation in saying something that could have been simple raises more questions than answers.

(Gov. Polis took the opportunity to dunk on Marx for that response: “I have killed zero people, and you can take that to the bank.”)

Clark brought up a different claim that Marx once “called in a US military airstrike that killed 70 ISIS fighters,” which a civilian can’t do. Marx refused to elaborate on that.

What about a claim that he caught child traffickers at the U.S.-Mexico border and “made them pay a price”? He said his ministry was working with the National Guard and the border patrol… but couldn’t detail his group’s actual involvement.

My favorite exchange, though, was when Clark asked Marx to simply explain the idea of exorcisms, which is something Marx has discussed multiple times in front of Christian audiences. But whenever you have to explain religious nonsense to a secular audience, you come face-to-face with the reality that nothing you’re saying makes any sense. And you could see Marx grappling with that realization in real time:

CLARK: You perform exorcisms, commanding demons to come out of people. Can you explain to me how that works?

MARX: When you say I perform exorcisms…

CLARK: Yeah, you described yourself as a “reluctant exorcist,” right?

MARX: Yeah…

CLARK: Describe to me how your exorcisms work when you command demons out.

MARX: Well, that’s a joke, the way I say that, but as a follower of Christ and someone who’s very familiar with evil that’s been both forced upon me as a kid and then seeing the effects of it in humans’ lives, I believe the word of God that I can pray for people and see people set free from—whether it’s demonic oppression, I never call it possession. I believe there’s levels of demonization where people are suffering because of evil.

CLARK: But could you explain to folks who have never witnessed this, don’t understand how it works. I’ve heard you describe it a number of times. You’ve got the two angels with the swords. You’ve got the circle of judgment. And you command the demons out of someone. Can you explain to folks how that works so they can hear you describe it?

MARX: Well, I don’t command the demons to come out of someone. I think of them as assignments, or attachments, to people. And we identify the demon, like Jesus did, we ask what their name is, and then we give them commands, and they very frequently and typically will answer through the person’s mind. They’ll tell us what they hear, and then we destroy them, banish them, to perfect judgment from Christ.

CLARK: You also perform these exorcisms by phone. Are those just as effective?

MARX: They are.

I love the genre of questions where Christians running for office are asked to explain their most basic beliefs. They always come off looking like delusional fools—two angels with the swords! The circle of judgment!—and even though Marx sidesteps the question at first, his eventual answer doesn’t make him sound any more rational. The fact that all of this can be done over the phone is comically hilarious and shows just how much of a scam the whole idea is.

Clark wasn’t asking those questions, though, to mock Christianity. He was asking because Marx sold exorcisms as part of a larger $99 “spiritual warfare” guide (no longer available on his website) and in a film called “The Unseen War” (still available). But he insisted he doesn’t charge for the service. But it’s certainly part of a larger package of religious bullshit that he definitely does sell to those who can afford it.

Clark’s final question, after all this: “Do you understand why so many of your critics think you're a con man?”

Marx’s response: “No.”

It’s just an incredible interview because it shows what happens when a religious zealot with a history of selling exaggerations to build himself up attempts to break free of the Christian bubble by seeking higher office, only to be confronted with basic questions that Christians themselves rarely, if ever, dare to ask people in a position of spiritual authority.

Whether it’ll make any different in the GOP primary election on June 30 is up for debate. Though the lies and evasion seen in this interview aren’t limited to questions about his biography. There have been plenty of serious questions raised about campaign finance and his team’s inability to file a report that makes any sense.

The contribution side contained so many errors that the campaign requested to “un-file” and replace the filing altogether. The secretary of state permitted it — despite calling the request “not a common practice.”

The refiled version corrected hundreds of address errors while materially altering contribution totals by adding nearly $3,000 in previously unreported contributions.

But more than $35,000 in excess contributions from 56 different donors apparently still haven’t been returned — despite the campaign’s assurances they’d comply with state law — including one donor who totaled $5,000 across five donations, more than three times Colorado’s $1,450 donation limit.

There’s a very good chance Marx could be the next Republican nominee for governor, but everything that’s come out about him shows you exactly why he has no business running a ministry, much less running a state. He lives in a bubble where money can always be raised by lying or exaggerating about your life. More than that, his responses suggest he’s not used to having to defend his own biography.

If he can’t be trusted to own up to things he currently believes, how the hell can he be trusted to look after people he actively thinks are evil? After all, plenty of Christians think LGBTQ people are possessed by demons or that opposition to Christian Nationalism is a form of spiritual warfare that must be defeated.

There was one interesting postscript to all this from commentator Ross Kaminsky:

Although I did not see it myself and can’t find it now, I’m told that the first social media post from the Marx team about the interview was that it was tough but fair. It seems that the negative reaction to Marx (in the comments to the post) was more than they could handle, though, and the post was deleted and replaced with one that claimed “selective editing.” It is true that the full 29-minute interview was edited down to something like 7 or 8 minutes for the air but I think if you watch the entire thing (at the top of this note), you won’t find any part of it in which Marx comes across as being truthful. Seriously, none of it. A body language expert would have a field day.

If Marx ends up being the nominee, it could be the greatest gift Democrats could have asked for. A Republican gubernatorial candidate debate is scheduled for June 2, hosted by 9NEWS. There seems to be speculation that Marx will skip it, but he hasn’t confirmed that.

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About a month ago, when the White House’s ridiculously named “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” released its final report summarizing all the ways Christians are persecuted in America, I wrote about how the whole thing was a joke because there were no serious examples of persecution in it.

But in case you didn’t read that article, don’t worry! Christian Nationalists are already releasing a documentary based on the report’s findings.

It’s called “By Dawn’s Early Light” and it’s yet another attempt to link the founding of the country to the fictional attacks on Christianity today.

On February 6, 2025, Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 14202, establishing a federal task force to identify and address anti-Christian bias within government agencies. By Dawn’s Early Light examines the origins, findings, and actions of this Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, presenting its work as a modern effort to confront perceived threats to religious liberty. Through interviews, historical context, and investigative storytelling, the film explores both the challenges identified and the measures proposed to strengthen protections—framing the effort as part of an ongoing pursuit to ensure that the freedoms fought for in earlier generations endure into the future.

The trailer alone looks like a grotesque distortion of “God’s Not Dead,” which was already a grotesque distortion of reality. (I’m not even joking. In this version, Kevin Sorbo’s wife makes an appearance.)

That movie was famous for exaggerating something that never happens in a classroom: A professor openly mocking a Christian student for his beliefs until eventually (spoiler!) the professor embraces Jesus. This film takes snippets from the Task Force’s final report and blows them out of proportion the same way.

Here’s how the right-wing ACLJ describes one of those incidents:

One of the featured stories in the film centers on the ACLJ’s landmark federal lawsuit against the Smithsonian Institution after Catholic students attending the March for Life were told they could not enter the National Air and Space Museum while wearing “Rosary PRO-LIFE” hats. Security officers mocked the students, spewed profanity at minors, and informed them that the First Amendment “does not apply here.”

The ACLJ took the case to federal court.

The result was one of the largest publicly reported settlements against the federal government in a First Amendment case.

Let’s suppose all of that is true. That means, at worst, this example of outrageous persecution involved some security guards who didn’t understand that people are allowed to wear clothing that features religious or political speech. When the Smithsonian settled the case, they specifically admitted no fault and said their goal was “avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigation.”

That’s apparently the sort of “anti-Christian bias” that’s strong enough to make it in the film. It’s no different than if Jeff Bezos whined about “anti-billionaire” discrimination because people made fun of his dumb yacht.

If there were serious examples of government bias against Christians, they might have had a compelling movie. But because that’s not a real problem in our society, they don’t. It’s the same reason Christian “victories” in the Supreme Court tend to involve situations like a baker having to sell a cake for a same-sex wedding or a public high school coach demanding a special right to pray in the middle of a football field where everyone can see him because it won’t count if he prays silently or privately.

Imagine watching a documentary about how tough it is to be a white male in America, and you probably have a sense of what this move will be.

There are people who are systemically, repeatedly, and currently persecuted by the government. They’re not the white guys and they’re not Christians. But some Catholic students were told by a couple of misguided cops not to wear their anti-abortion hats at a federal museum this one time... so it’s the same thing, really.

And because Trump’s Cabinet doesn’t have real work to do, nearly all of them sit down for interviews in this piece of propaganda:

The film was screened at the Kennedy Center earlier this month, but it’ll be released online on May 31. And then, because there’s no actual story worth listening to here, it’ll be quickly forgotten by the following week.

Christians in America aren’t going to jail because of their beliefs. They aren’t banned from seeking public office. They dominate Congress, the Supreme Court, state legislatures, local governments, and virtually every major institution of political power. Christians have it so damn good that Trump literally created a federal task force devoted exclusively to protecting the Christian majority from the tyranny of not getting every single thing they ever want (something no genuinely oppressed group would ever receive from the most powerful government on Earth).

And yet these people still want audiences to believe Christians need to huddle together as part of some underground resistance movement because some museum guard made rude comments one day.

There’s a reason movies like this keep getting made. It’s not because Christians are persecuted, but rather because Christian Nationalism requires a permanent sense of victimhood. If you can convince ignorant people they’re always under attack, that makes it much easier to dominate public life. Taking over school boards isn’t an act of aggression; it’s necessary defense against Christian persecution! Posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms isn’t about pushing faith on others; it’s reminding the country about our religious origins! They’re going to keep pretending Christians are victims of persecution until they’ve erased church-state separation entirely.

But if you examine any of this below surface level—something the conservative Christian crowd never does—you realize how thin the premise is.

The people who claim to be persecuted by the government held the film’s premiere at the Kennedy Center, which the government, staffed almost entirely by conservative Christians, took over. That alone should prove they have no basis for the film.

It’s no surprise they’re doing this, though. More Americans are rejecting the idea that Christianity deserves special treatment from the government, and when you think religious neutrality amounts to oppression, you’ll do anything to pretend you’re victims.

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A lawyer who was punished for alerting a Catholic school that they had an alleged predator on staff is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn that decision. New details show that other people, not just him, were aware of the predator’s history and alerted the school about it.

It’s a complicated story but one that will rightly infuriate you.

In December of 2021, attorney Richard Trahant discovered that a chaplain at a private Catholic school—Brother Martin High School in New Orleans, Louisiana—had previously been accused of sexual misconduct.

Trahant contacted the school and informed them of what he had just learned. Within days, that chaplain, Paul Hart, announced his “retirement.” He and the archdiocese both announced that he was stepping down because of cancer.

And then that lawyer was fined $400,000 for warning people about the predator priest.

I repeat: The attorney—not the priest and not the school and not the Catholic Church—was fined $400,000 for alerting people about Hart’s past actions.

Earlier this year, a federal appeals court upheld that decision to punish the whistleblower.

The allegations against Rev. Paul Hart

Paul Hart began working for the Archdiocese of New Orleans in 1989. At some point during his tenure there, when he was in his late 30s, he met a 17-year-old girl who attended Mount Carmel Academy and was a member of a youth group at his church. Things took a disturbing turn after that:

By 1990, he was allegedly spending his personal time with the student, and began kissing her, groping her chest, and at least once engaging in what church investigators described a “dry sex”—which involves people simulating intercourse with their clothes on—while in the rectory, the sources said.

As criminal as that was, the girl didn’t tell anyone what happened at that time. She later said she didn’t understand just how inappropriate his actions were.

By 2012, however, that same girl had grown up and had children of her own. She even sent them to a Catholic school in the same archdiocese. But she soon found out that Paul Hart, who had moved around quite a bit during his career, was now back at their church and in close proximity to her kids. Knowing now how egregious Hart’s behavior had been, she told the archdiocese what happened to her years earlier.

The woman filed a complaint with the archdiocese, accusing Hart of grooming her before pursuing sexual contact she now realized was inappropriate. In a church investigation, Hart denied initiating what happened but admitted contact, which he could not say did not cause him to ejaculate.

The Church’s investigation didn’t go anywhere. They said Hart broke the Catholic Church’s rules about celibacy, as if that was the real issue, but didn’t commit child sexual abuse because canon law at the time said the age of adulthood was 16. (That was raised to 18 in 2002, but investigators were going by Church rules that were in place in the 1990s.)

The end result was that Hart remained a priest within the diocese. He wasn’t fired. He wasn’t even seriously in trouble. Because he had not abused a “minor,” his name never appeared on any list of priests accused of such behavior.

The Archdiocese of New Orleans filed for bankruptcy

In May of 2020, the Archdiocese of New Orleans filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Faced with the high costs of child sex abuse lawsuits and the huge financial hit from the pandemic, there was no other choice. The filing put a temporary stop to the lawsuits and began a process to figure out the archdiocese’s assets and liabilities. That process, however, involved sharing details about internal investigations.

That’s when attorney Richard Trahant (pronounced TRAY-hant) entered the story.

He represented some of the victims of sexual abuse and was part of a committee investigating the archdiocese. In that position, he saw the paperwork documenting the allegations against Hart. He also knew that Hart was currently working at Brother Martin High School. While that’s an all-boys school, girls are in the building for some extracurricular activities, so Trahant felt obligated to let the school know they had an alleged predator in their midst.

Trahant’s cousin also happened to be the principal of that school, which led to this exchange over text:

Trahant: Is [priest] still the chaplain at [high school]?

Principal: Yes

Trahant: You and I need to get together soon.

Principal: Sh*t

Trahant: Indeed.

Principal: You beat me to the text. That’s an ominous question coming from you.

Within days after the school learned about Hart, they released a statement announcing his sudden retirement. Both sides claimed Hart was stepping down “due to his ongoing battle with brain cancer.” Obviously the goal was to keep the allegations quiet.

But when the Times-Picayune wrote about Hart’s departure, reporter Ramon Antonio Vargas had the real scoop: Hart’s retirement was announced right after the school discovered the allegations of abuse against him.

The chaplain at Brother Martin High School abruptly left his post earlier this month, just days after the school was notified of allegations that he kissed and fondled a Mount Carmel Academy senior in 1990 while serving at another local Catholic institution, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation.

How was Vargas able to connect those dots?! The archdiocese clearly didn’t want anyone to know the real reason Hart was being let go, but Vargas seemed to have inside information.

Why the lawyer was fined for reporting the priest

It wasn’t until several months later when we finally learned the backstory. In a piece for the Guardian, written by none other than Ramon Antonio Vargas, he explained how he got a major tip from… attorney Richard Trahant.

It turned out that when Trahant alerted Brother Martin High School about Hart, he also emailed Vargas “advising him to ‘keep’ Hart on his ‘radar’, without saying why.”

Vargas began digging and it soon led to the scoop mentioned earlier, connecting Hart’s retirement with what seemed to be the actual reason for his departure.

When that story came out in late 2022, the judge in charge of the archdiocese’s bankruptcy proceedings, Meredith Grabill, realized that the only way a reporter could have learned any of those details was if someone working on the case leaked the information. That would have been a problem since all the documents were classified.

Grabill called for an investigation. While Vargas says he didn’t rat out his source(s), and openly told the investigators “Trahant did not provide any information in the piece,” Grabill said Trahant’s warning to the high school and his email telling Vargas to keep tabs on Hart violated the confidentiality agreement. So she punished him:

Grabill immediately removed from the clergy abuse claimants committee Trahant, two attorneys with whom he frequently collaborates and a number of clients. On Tuesday, she added the $400,000 fine against Trahant, saying the amount was derived from the cost of the leak investigation.

A $400,000 fine for warning a school about an alleged sex predator on their payroll.

Trahant said at the time he was appealing the decision. He also said in a publicly available deposition during the leak investigation that he acted like any mandated reporter: When he learned about wrongdoing, he reported it to relevant parties in order to protect potential victims.

“I don’t believe I violated the [confidentiality] order” by alerting a school about a cleric who had previously engaged in misconduct with a teen, the attorney said.

“I’m going to do something about it 10 out of 10 times.”

The bottom line is that Trahant did exactly what the Church should’ve done a long time ago. He took action when he realized there was a problem. But because his actions supposedly violated the letter of the law when it came to these bankruptcy hearings, he now faced this staggering fine.

The archdiocese practically gloated about all this:

“The wisdom of the judge’s ruling speaks for itself.”

The wisdom! You could practically feel the condescension in that statement.

Whatever the legal situation here, Trahant deserved a medal for what he did, not a fine. When the morally correct option stands in direct opposition to the law, you have to respect those who choose the former path. It may be a messed up situation, but everyone was better off because Trahant spoke up.

If the Catholic Church actually gave a damn about any of these victims, it would be first in line offering to pay Trahant’s fine on his behalf. He did them a favor by giving them information that led to the dismissal of a child sex predator.

Just because the law may have been on the Church’s side didn’t mean the Church should bask in victory. Their response showed how little they cared about the people they hurt.

That fine was later upheld

In January, Trahant’s attempt to overturn that decision failed. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision to fine him $400,000.

Trahant tried to argue he wasn’t given due process, that the bankruptcy court lacked jurisdiction over the matter, and that they abused their discretion by punishing him. The Appeals Court, for legal reasons irrelevant here, dismissed all of those arguments, finding that Trahant violated his confidentiality agreement.

Despite that, Trahant still maintained he would do it all over again to protect kids, telling reporters, “I did what I had to do to keep a child predator away from children,”

The aftermath

That brings us to where we’re at right now. Earlier this month, Trahant asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the decision using the same basic arguments he made to the Fifth Circuit.

But there’s another twist, and it comes from none other than reporter Ramon Antonio Vargas. When Trahant was fined $400,000, the judge who issued it, Meredith Grabill, placed nearly all the information about the fine under seal, meaning it couldn’t be accessed by the public.

Vargas was able to get his hands on all of it.

But the Guardian has now obtained the entire case file, thousands of pages long, through a public records request made with New Orleans state prosecutors who collected it while securing the guilty plea of another priest charged with rape and kidnapping.

A review of the record provides the case’s clearest view yet – and establishes that Hart’s history was more stained than previously known.

…

Trahant, meanwhile, has long argued that the information which ended Hart’s Brother Martin tenure was actually disclosed by New Orleans’ then archbishop, Gregory Aymond – since retired – and associates, all subject to the same confidentiality order Grabill says that Trahant violated.

In short, the archdiocese knew that Hart was a predator and admitted as much to various school officials, violating the same agreement that Trahant—and only Trahant—was punished for.

When the Archdiocese stationed Hart inside the Catholic school, it was only after a “board advising Aymond on clergy abuse cases recommended that the archbishop remove Hart from ministry.” But after the school’s principal got the head’s up from Trahant via text message, he and other administration members began asking archdiocese officials if they knew anything about Hart that might be problematic.

Of course they knew. More importantly, they openly admitted things that Trahant merely hinted at.

The Brother Martin officials would say in depositions that Aymond and a lay volunteer adviser, Lee Eagan, shared specifics of the 2012 complaint against Hart. One suggested the archbishop disclosed the name of the complainant, which was confidential, though the official couldn’t remember it, according to a deposition.

Another Brother Martin official described learning from Aymond of “a boundary violation … that involved a 17-year-old female. The … behavior was not appropriate in that it was something that Father Paul, as a priest, should not have done. But the archbishop made it clear to me that it was not anything that was ever criminal.”

Nonetheless, had Brother Martin known that about Hart beforehand, it would not have accepted him as chaplain, multiple school officials said while being deposed.

The school forced out Hart only because of confidential details they learned from the archdiocese. They didn’t get rid of Hart because Trahant expressed his concern. Yet only Trahant was punished for violating a confidentiality agreement.

Former Archbishop Aymond said in a deposition that he never shared confidential information with school officials. That, it turns out, was a lie.

That’s why Trahant believes he shouldn’t be punished:

[Trahant] contends, among other things, that Aymond effectively waived confidentiality about Hart when he spoke extensively to Brother Martin officials. Trahant has also said he was within his rights to tell a reporter to keep a priest on his radar without sharing anything else.

Trahant’s 6 May request for a chance to appeal to the US supreme court says he deserves to defend his “good name, reputation, honor and integrity” from “judicial action taken without notice and an opportunity to be heard”.

While all that’s happening, the archdiocese is in chaos. Aymond retired earlier this year shortly after “the archdiocese and its insurers agreed to pay about $305m to roughly 600 abuse survivors ensnared in the bankruptcy.” Dozens of those survivors are clients of Trahant.

The entire case has just been a huge series of systemic failures. The Catholic Church chose self-protection over accountability and the well-being of minors. The bankruptcy proceedings just became another tool for the Church to bury the truth and punish someone who took the moral high ground.

If there’s anything we can take away from this situation, it’s that we need more people like Richard Trahant. He did what the Church repeatedly fights against: He treated credible allegations as an urgent danger, not just some administrative inconvenience. He warned a school. He indirectly tipped off a journalist. But what we now know is that the archdiocese itself confirmed the very things Trahant alluded to. There’s no logic that says he should be punished for violating a confidentiality agreement when the Catholic Church went even further. Trahant’s moral clarity and personal courage stands in contrast to the values that the Church likes to think it instills in people but never actually does.

All of this sends a chilling message to whistleblowers: When it comes to legal priorities, a policy of secrecy always overrides the idea of child safety. The Church and the courts have made it clear that speaking up to protect kids could ruin you financially, but silence will always be rewarded.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

…

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The good news is that Oklahoma recently became the 17th state (along with Washington, D.C.) to ban child marriage.

The bad news? It wasn’t unanimous. In fact, 36 Republicans in the State House voted against the legislation, reminding everyone that they’re perfectly fine with adults forcing themselves upon children who aren’t legally old enough to make decisions for themselves.

Their excuses were downright embarrassing.

Senate Bill 504 shouldn’t have been controversial. All it did was remove the underage exceptions to the law about how marriage can only occur between legal adults. From now on, it won’t matter if your parents (or other authorities) agree to it or if you’re pregnant. No marriage until you’re 18. Simple. That’s a big deal because children are sometimes pressured by their parents to marry early or they feel forced into marriage because of teenage pregnancy. Plenty of adults enter into marriages that don’t pan out, but it’s perfectly rational to say a decision that important should only be made by adults.

Taking an impregnated middle- or high-schooler and pressuring her into getting married to her classmate—at an age when both of them barely understand how their own bodies work—isn’t a love story. It’s Purity Culture run amok. They didn’t have much of a childhood. They barely had time to develop crushes. They probably haven’t gone through a break-up. Why should we assume they have the maturity to understand their options as wedded adults?

Let’s not pretend they can easily end the marriage either. The sort of Christians who advocate for child marriage also condemn divorce regardless of the reason. So child marriage is very much about trapping people into relationships before they’re old enough to know any better.

That’s why this wasn’t merely symbolic legislation. According to the advocacy group Unchained At Last, “nearly 315,000 children as young as 10 were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2021—mostly girls wed to adult men.”

But that didn’t stop a number of Republican legislators from making a series of bizarre arguments against the bill.

State Rep. Justin Humphrey argued that this law was getting in the way of parental rights… and causing abortions.

Representative, you know I love ya. But you think that you know better than parents? Do you think the government should make decisions for parents over family? You think we have that authority?

… Let’s take a situation where a girl was already pregnant. She’s already done that. Do you think that that person who is pregnant, who is not allowed to get married, is much more likely to have an abortion? So if we’re worried about abortion, don’t you think we’re actually causing that?

It’s quite literally the government’s job to create and enforce sensible regulations. And considering how shitty many parents can be, some basic restrictions like not being allowed to enter your children into marriages when they’re barely old enough to think for themselves should not cramp anyone’s lifestyle.

Also, why the hell would not letting children marry lead to more abortions? Those are two separate things that don’t have anything to do with each other. If this bill preventing underage marriage leads you to have an abortion, it’s because you were going to get one regardless.

State Rep. Derrick Hildebrant argued that this bill contradicted the Bible. And we can’t have that happening, can we?! He added that this bill was destroying potential families.

Mr. Speaker, how about Hebrews 13:4: “Let marriage be held in honor among all.” Does “among all” mean now only those who are 18 and older? Or is marriage honorable except in every case that this bill removes?

… How about pregnancy? “Pregnancy can pressure minors into marriage!” If a young couple is expecting a child, both families support the marriage, should the law then forbid them from forming a stable home? I think not.

He got the last three words right.

Who the hell cares what the Bible says, much less a cherry picked verse? By his logic, parents should be allowed to force kids into marriage at any age. Hell, why not perform the ceremony when they’re fresh out of the womb?

And if your idea of a “stable” family involves 16-year-old children and any possible babies they’re having, probably with no direct means of support, your brain is broken. (Keep in mind many of these conservative Christians believe a same-sex couple with solid careers, nice home, and adopted children are inherently unstable.)

Humphrey, an elected representative in the government, later returned to argue that government is always the problem and no one should listen to them. And then he claimed this was about imposing Socialism upon the masses. (He also referred to himself in the third person, which is just plain weird.)

I just wanna ask everybody, What the Humphrey is this all about?! Guys, there’s one thing I know. It’s when government shows up and says they’re there to help, you know what I’m gonna do? I‘m gonna run. ‘Cause I’ll guarantee you they seldom help…

… A lot of people have said this is about pedophilia. This bill has nothing to do with pedophilia! This bill has absolutely nothing to do… because we have… we have bills that protect that. This bill has been on the books for a long long time!

… You know what Socialism looks like? It’s when the government comes in and tells you what you gonna do. Socialism is when they go after the family. That’s what we’ve seen going on in other states. That’s what we see this state trying to become. It’s an attack on the family. And guess what? I see this as an attack on the family. We are a Republican state. We’re a red state. But we’re a red state with blue regulations. It is time we shut down the blue regulations and we take it back. Right here is where we need to plant the flag. Right here is where we say government can’t come in and tell me what I can and cannot do with my family.

Leave it to Republicans to argue that government can’t help… when they’re the ones in control of the government. Ronald Reagan was wrong to say it. So is Humphrey. And if he thinks government is this useless, he should resign since he’s quite literally preventing it from helping people. You only need to look at the Democratic Socialism of Zohran Mamdani in New York City to see all the ways government can actually work for people instead of being an obstacle to everything.

State Rep. Jim Olsen then made the point that the biblical Mary was underage. (That’s it. That was his whole point.)

Let me throw another thing for us to think about: How old was Mary when she married Joseph?

… Does that mean we should normally have people getting married under 18? No. No it doesn’t. But it does point out that it might not be wise to say that there shall be no exceptions!

See?! If you prevent child marriage, you could be interfering with future imaginary virgin births! (I’m not sure referencing a non-consensual pregnancy is the mic drop moment he seems to think it is.)

It’s incredible, in a way, that most of their Republican colleagues didn’t buy these unconvincing arguments. The final vote for the bill in the House was 51-36 (after the Senate had already unanimously approved it). Governor Kevin Stitt chose not to sign it or veto it, perhaps fearing backlash from conservative Christians, but because of the overwhelming numbers here, it didn’t make a difference.

But that still led to incredible headlines like this one from Oklahoma Watch:

Great branding for Republicans, truly.

The party that doesn’t give a damn about the Epstein files doesn’t care about child marriage either, because their Christian God taught them pedophilia isn’t always a bad idea.

“I think they’re really stretching,” [Democratic Rep. Cyndi] Munson said when asked about representatives’ response to the arguments on the House floor. “Marriage should wait until adulthood. And we don’t want to exploit children, especially young girls getting married, and having parents have a say over that.”

The irony is that this bill wouldn’t have passed without the backing of the majority of Republicans in the state legislature, yet the takeaway is that dozens of conservatives wanted to protect the possibility of child rape more than they wanted to give up control of when people can get married.

The new law will go into effect on November 1.

And as the Freedom From Religion Foundation Action Fund points out, if Oklahoma can pull this off, why can’t everyone else?

There is no religious right to marry a child. There is no parental right to shackle a child into an abusive marriage. There is no judicial discretion worth preserving if the result is a child spouse who cannot enter a shelter, sign a lease, hire a lawyer, file for divorce or safely escape.

The solution is simple: Minors cannot marry, no exceptions.

Not 17 with a permission slip. Not 16 with a judge’s nod. Not younger with a pregnancy excuse. Not “emancipated” on paper while still blocked from the basic tools of escape.

If Oklahoma can do it, so can California and every other holdout.

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Here’s an amusing dilemma for politicians everywhere: As more Americans ditch organized religion, campaign firms are finding it harder and more expensive to reach large blocs of voters in a single swoop.

This is excellent news for those of us who care about having an informed electorate instead of one dominated by gullible religious rubes who fall for bottom-of-the-barrel candidates who manage to get elected just by talking about how much they love God.

All of this is according to the campaign firm TriStrategies, as relayed to Axios, which ran the headline “Campaigns pay the price for America’s secular shift”:

Campaigns spent about $1.40 per nonreligious voter versus roughly 45 cents per religiously affiliated voter in 2024, Sisto Abeyta, a Democratic consultant with the Nevada-based firm TriStrategies, tells Axios.

• Candidates can reach through existing mailing lists or megachurch coffee shops, Abeyta said. Nonreligious voters, however, have to be sought.

• “For religious voters, all I have to do is send a mailer and say I believe in God and apple pie,” Abeyta said. “For nonreligious voters, I need to send a list of issues with links so they can verify and be ready for questions. It’s time-consuming and costs more.”

They make it sound like it’s a bad thing to tell voters where candidates actually stand on the issues. Yes, it’s more expensive to do that at first, at least if you’re not used to it, but the alternative is cheap religious bullshit that ruins our country. It’s morbidly funny how Abeyta seems to openly long for the good old days when campaigns could just tell megachurches their candidates love God and be done with it. But now they have to (gasp) do the work of actually informing voters what these candidates believe about various issues because those damn non-religious voters dig into the details unlike churchgoers who aren’t interested in facts.

That says a lot about how easy it is to manipulate religious people.

Honestly, you should be ashamed of your faith if this is how a campaign firm talks about you.

But it’s also not a permanent problem because reaching non-religious voters isn’t all that different from reaching all voters, especially these days as people become more isolated and less likely to be part of any civic/social/in-person groups. You just have to know how information spreads.

Voters respond to candidates who articulate clear priorities, defend their positions under scrutiny, and communicate like actual human beings instead of focus-grouped robots. That’s why politicians like Zohran Mamdani were able to generate enormous organic support online: people understood what he was fighting for, and supporters became unpaid amplifiers for his message. The amount of earned media he received was every campaign manager’s dream.

Or you can just pander to us for once. Steven Emmert, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, offered that simple solution:

Emmert argues that secular voters are often highly engaged and quick to respond when candidates simply acknowledge them.

That could be as easy as just saying that, if elected, you will represent people who are religious and non-religious.

But in the long term, the best (and eventually cheapest) way to reach non-religious voters is to have candidates who actually stand for church/state separation, and (actual) religious freedom, and against Christian Nationalism. You know, principles that most decent people can rally behind.

If your campaign can’t survive without hiding behind generic references to God and patriotism, the problem isn’t the cost of reaching secular voters. It’s that your candidate has nothing compelling to say. If all you care about is God, you shouldn’t be running for public office, period. That may have worked in the past, but thank goodness more of the country is less interested in thoughtless candidates like that.

If anything, we’re worth the investment. Non-religious voters are deeply interested in politics, according to a Pew Research Center analysis from 2024. (“Nones” as a whole are, by nature, wishy-washy, but that’s true about everything in their lives.) If you ever did get explicitly non-religious voters activated, they would be just as committed—if not more committed—than religious voters when it comes to voting and caring about politics.

Keep in mind that 38% of younger voters (the under-30 crowd) are not affiliated with any organized religion, and over a third of Democratic-leaning voters are non-religious. So what if it costs a little more to find us? We’re your base. You need us.

The party that can unite non-religious voters under an umbrella of decent principles is in the best position for the future—and Democrats have the advantage if they ever cared to capitalize on it.

Not being able to reach out to a megachurch mailing list doesn’t mean you can’t reach voters in a cost-effective way. It just means you have to focus on actual ideas instead of putting the word “God” over pictures of your candidate and assuming that’ll do the trick. And if that’s too difficult to do, maybe your candidate shouldn’t have been running in the first place.

While I understand that campaigns cost money and campaign firms always want to stretch their dollars, no one should be praying for more races like that of Sen. Tommy Tuberville, where religion, football, and MAGA cultism are enough to convince Republicans to vote against their best interests.

The fact is it’s not that hard to court non-religious voters. All you have to do is put substance over symbolism. We want candidates who can defend their positions under scrutiny and who can articulate how their ideas will improve our lives. We don’t want vague moral platitudes and idiotic culture wars. Campaign firms should be thrilled that secular voters ask questions and expect receipts because, if they have good candidates, it shouldn’t be hard to deliver on those expectations.

All we’re losing here is a cynical shortcut that never should have had a place in American politics.

Politicians, especially Republicans, have long relied on churches as voting blocs because they know those voters don’t ask tough questions or demand results. It doesn’t take a lot to appeal to religious zealots—the right code-words, an endorsement from the pastor, or some vague appeals to God do the trick. And we’ve all suffered because of that kind of ignorance.

The fact that fewer Americans are willing to treat religion as a substitute for virtue is a huge step in the right direction.

Candidates should have to persuade people and survive fact-checking, skepticism, and follow-up questions. If campaigns are frustrated that they’ll have to do a little more work or spend a little more money to satisfy those boxes, too damn bad. The real scandal here is how so many campaigns have become dependent on voters who demand so little in return.