Week in Review: The Supreme Court gave more gifts to the Christian Right
Week in Review: The Supreme Court gave more gifts to the Christian Right
The Roe bombshell, a horrible Christian response to assault, an actual religious schism, and more!
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Two bits of personal news: I’ll be speaking at BAHACON 2022 this August alongside Seth Andrews, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Gretta Vosper, and others! It’s hosted by the Bluewater, Atheist, Humanist, Agnostics in Ontario, Canada. You can find all the details right here.
Also, if you’re a paid subscriber to this newsletter or a $5/month subscriber on my Patreon page, I will be hosting (the first of what will hopefully be monthly) “office hours” soon where people can drop in on a private Zoom chat to talk to each other and ask me questions. I’ll send details out soon!I thought we’d be talking about one Supreme Court case. And then we very quickly shifted to a very different story with much larger consequences. I don’t need to rehash the Roe v. Wade leak story at this point, but if the Alito document resembles the final outcome, all we can really hope for is that the backlash is strong enough from the left to overcome a faith-based, poorly argued decision that represents the will of a minority of the country.
Overturning Roe may very well backfire. It could galvanize Americans to vote for Democrats in the midterms so they maintain or expand their majorities. It could also force conservative Christians to defend cruelty against women instead of acting like martyrs who save fetuses. Instead of merely opposing abortion, conservatives would have to defend the idea of forcing women to give birth in cases of rape and incest. They would have to explain why women should be forced to endure the horrors of an ectopic pregnancy. They would have to explain how they plan to care for the babies that will be born in the worst circumstances imaginable.
Their arguments against abortion rights have always been weak, but arguing for forced birth is much more difficult than “defending the unborn.”Keep in mind that the country overwhelmingly supports abortion rights, as a new Pew Research survey found. (It was conducted before we learned about the leaked opinion.) White evangelicals, as usual, are lagging behind everyone else when it comes to compassion.
Also interesting? Only 2% of Americans with no religious affiliation say abortion should be illegal in *all* cases… while 77% of white evangelicals believe it should be legal in at least *some* situations.
And this is telling: 79% of atheists say women should have more say than men when it comes to abortion laws. Only 37% of white evangelicals feel the same way.
Which is all to say that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe, we will have a Court dominated by nominees of presidents who lost the popular vote pushing an unpopular opinion on a majority of the country all because one powerful-but-shrinking religious denomination that itself is divided on abortion issues got them onto the bench.
The other Court story this week involved a (unanimous) decision that Boston could not say no to flying a Christian flag outside City Hall. This was a case where atheist groups argued the city should be allowed to say no to a religious flag (to prevent anyone from thinking the government was endorsing religion) while the ACLU said if there was a public forum to put up a flag, the city couldn’t reject anyone on the basis of religion. The Court sided with the ACLU… and the guy who runs a Christian Nationalist group.
The ball is now in Boston’s court. Will they close the public forum entirely (which would be fine), or will they allow all applicants? They haven’t said what they’ll do yet.
Right on cue, The Satanic Temple applied to have their flag erected during "Satanic Appreciation Week" on July 23-29. If that plan works, then… um… thank you, Christians?
The Satanic Temple replies to the Supreme Court ruling that found Boston violated First Amendment rights by refusing to fly Christian flag at City Hall Plaza:
They’re not alone. Atheist activist Chaz Stevens asked to raise his own unique flag next month:
Atheist activist Chaz Stevens (@TheTweetOfJab) has asked the city of Boston to fly his church's flag outside City Hall, following a similar request from Satanists. This week's SCOTUS ruling opened the floodgates, and city officials are still weighing changes to their policy.
… But he soon got a response saying Boston had temporarily suspended the flying of any outside groups’ flags (presumably while they figure out their next steps).
Stevens says he will file a lawsuit over this.
There is one other possibly interesting note in that flag case. Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the opinion, spent a lot of time delineating between government speech and private speech. Boston thought their flagpole represented government speech, but Breyer basically said that by making it a public forum, Boston no longer had any grounds to discriminate in what went up the flagpole. That’s interesting because the Court recently heard the case of a Christian football coach who was told he couldn’t pray at midfield after games…
That oral argument involved a discussion about whether that coach, Joe Kennedy, was engaging in public or private speech. The church/state crowd argued that a football coach, surrounded by students, praying on the field after the final whistle, was obviously still on the clock as a public employee… while Kennedy claimed it was private speech.
By siding with Boston in the flag case, then perhaps that makes it easier for the Court to dismiss Kennedy’s case as an example of an illegal government promotion of religion.
Speaking of the football coach, the New York Times’ podcast The Daily royally butchered its coverage of the case in some major ways. A listener who’s paid no attention to the controversy would come away thinking Kennedy was discriminated against when the facts tell a very different story. It was an extremely disappointing episode from an otherwise excellent podcast.Three women who worked at a church-run daycare facility in Alabama were arrested on charges of child abuse. There may be anywhere from seven to eleven victims, all younger than the age of two. They were only discovered after a potential employee began shadowing the workers, found their methods disturbing, and alerted the head of the facility, who then got in touch with law enforcement.
A public school science teacher in Oklahoma allegedly berated a student for putting a non-Christian item on her classroom "prayer wall." Which raises a very important question: Why the hell is there a prayer wall in the classroom at all. The teacher apparently told the student that she had to intervene as a “good Christian.”
Kirk Cameron has a new movie to promote… all about how horrible public schools are. Because there’s nothing conservative Christians hate more than well-educated citizens.
Actor Kirk Cameron on his new movie ‘Home School Awakening:’ “We’ve become grossly aware of the inaccurate and immoral things that the public school system has been teaching our children .. The public school system has been public enemy number one.”In Cameron’s case, "inaccurate and immoral" refers to literature, science, and history.
For all the Republican talk about “groomers” on the left, which has no basis in reality, a 26-year-old conservative Christian pastor told a 14-year-old girl that she was “betrothed” to him. That soon led to sexual abuse. The victim, who’s now in her 40s, recently filed charges against that pastor, Robert Fenton, and he was finally charged with a crime this week. He lives in Australia, however, so it’s an open question of whether he’ll be extradited in order to face a judge.
In case you missed it — and everyone missed it —a major religious schism became official this week. After years of threatening to split away, the anti-gay faction of the United Methodist Church became the “Global Methodist Church” on May 1. Because bigotry, to them, was more important than unity.
What should a Christian college with an enforceable morality code do if a student reports sexual assault? You would hope they overlook everything that may have created the situation (like alcohol, drugs, or temptation) even if it broke school rules and focus solely on the assault. Because that’s what sensible people would do.
That’s not what happened at Visible Music College in Memphis, Tennessee.
When a senior at the faith-based school, Mara Louk, told officials there about being sexually assaulted, they questioned her assailant… but because police didn’t charge him with a crime, they didn’t take any action. Making matters worse, that man informed them that Mara had slept with her ex-boyfriend. (She denies that.)
Ultimately, the school punished Mara. Just her. Not the guy.In a video that went viral this week, a student at Grace Christian Academy in Tennessee can be seen wearing a white hood and yelling a racist slur.
NEW: GRACE CHRISTIAN ACADEMY @gcarams in KNOXVILLE says it’s taking “appropriate disciplinary steps” after a video of students we’re told are baseball players on campus wearing a kkk hood & being wildly racist 👇🏽 (Trigger warning ⚠️ h/t @TruthForGCAnow ) wvlt.tv/2022/05/05/vid…The school has promised "swift action." They allegedly expelled several students already. But will they bother to address any of the underlying problems?
Evangelical Christians have fought against the accurate and comprehensive teaching of our racist past, writing it off as part of some “liberal agenda” that promotes “Critical Race Theory” or “wokeness” or [insert any other term conservatives use to dismiss facing the truth about our history].
There will inevitably people who say this isn’t “Christian” behavior. Those people are wrong. This is precisely the sort of behavior that occurs in Christian settings because too many right-wing pastors, politicians, and parents refuse to condemn these racist attacks with the seriousness they deserve and refuse to educate themselves and their kids about the reality of discrimination.
If they don’t take it seriously, no wonder their kids don’t either. No amount of lip service from Republicans or conservative Christian leaders makes up for the fact that their policy positions allow this kind of bigotry to thrive in their circles.This almost seems quaint given all the other news, but Christian megachurch pastor Blake Bergstrom of ONE Church in Peachtree City, Georgia spread the lie that Democrats in California and Colorado were passing legislation legalizing the murder of babies.
Pastor Blake Bergstrom of One Church in Georgia repeats the lies that there’s a law in Colorado that allows parents to “murder a baby” seven days after it’s born and that in California they’re making a law that would allow parents to kill their baby 30 days after it’s born.If that sounds like a lie, that’s because it is. The legislation would simply protect women if their babies die soon after birth for pregnancy-related reasons. It would prevent those mothers from suffering a second tragedy. None of that seems to matter to the Christians in this church.
Bergstrom decided spreading a lie in the name of Jesus was more important than telling his congregation the truth. That’s what people like him do, from the pulpit and in the congregation. To my knowledge, no one associated with the church has apologized yet.
This is not some fringe figure spreading conspiracies. This is a mainstream evangelical megachurch pastor.While we’re on the subject, Robert Morris of Gateway Church in Texas told his congregation how to vote, which is forbidden for tax-exempt churches. But as we all know by now, rules don’t apply to Christians and no one at the IRS will ever hold them accountable.
If this caption sounds awful, just wait till you hear how Jesus comes into the conversation:
Blaming a Black woman who’s not even on the Court yet seems… on point for this guy.
The thing about the most fringe right-wing Christians is that they’re always honest about their side’s horrible intentions:
Here’s a palate cleanser for you: Listen to Nebraska State Sen. Megan Hunt talk about why she stood up for abortion rights (and succeeded!) even when it seemed futile in a very conservative legislature.
How’s preacher Gene Kim doing these days, you ask? The same. Always the same.
Fundamentalist Christian grandmother Lori Alexander, a.k.a. The Transformed Wife, had a slew of horrible tweets:
A Christian says conservatives should start acting on "healthcare, paid family leave and childcare"... only to get rebuked by a fundamentalist who doesn't want the government to help anybody. People like her are telling on themselves.
And now for your weekly dose of fundie insanity:
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this wildly antisemitic rant from Christian hate-preacher Jonathan Shelley.Christian hate-preacher Aaron Thompson says teachers who teach "the filth of sodomy" should be "shot in the back of the head" by a government official. He then clarifies that if any Christian acts on this, "they didn't get that idea from me."This week in Atheist Bible Study? Leviticus 27, the FINAL CHAPTER of this book. We learn about the value of human life... which is shockingly more than zero. We also learn about animals, property, and cold hard cash. Because this is, after all, a religion.
I spoke with my co-host Jessica Greiff about many of the stories in this newsletter during this week’s podcast:
Finally, for all the Christians who oppose student debt forgiveness…
That’s it for this week! Stay safe. Get vaccinated. Get boosted. Please become a full subscriber or share this with someone who may enjoy it. It would mean a lot to me :)