by Scott Gilbert |
The leader of the Christian fascist movement sits in the White House. With most of the focus on Trump, Mike Pence and the religious right do not get much press. Yet, they are instrumental in what is happening in the White House and how domestic and foreign policy is dictated. They are advancing a program of Christian supremacy and patriarchy, with the Bible taken literally and everything that means – women losing the right to control their own bodies, LGBT people back in the closet and their lives under threat, the end of the separation of church and state, secular public education attacked, science denied and ignorance run rampant. Already, some of these goals have been hammered into place.
On May 8th, 2019, Mike Pence made a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal think tank with a massive influence on the country’s judiciary. The five pro-fascist justices on the Supreme Court are all members of the Federalist Society. The following excerpts from Pence’s speech reveal a lot about the determination of the Christian fascists to enact and enforce Christian theocratic laws for a generation to come.
This President has actually appointed more than 100 men and women to our federal courts, including more circuit court judges than any President in American history. And they are all conservatives who are committed to the principles enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.
And that doesn’t even count the two judges that this President chose for the Supreme Court of the United States. … the two men that he appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States are extraordinary conservatives who will uphold the God-given liberties enshrined our Constitution. America and our Constitution are better today with Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the highest court in the land.
Today, leading liberals mock the First Amendment freedoms of millions of Americans across the country. They reject the right to life, many arguing for late-term abortion and even some defending infanticide.
Under the guise of what’s known as the Green New Deal and Medicare for all, liberals are fighting for more regulation and government control of our daily lives. And increasingly, every day, we see Democrats at the national level and around the country advocate a failed economic system that impoverished hundreds of millions around the world and robbed the liberty of generations.
It’s not going to be enough for us just to win the next election; we have to win the next generation.
The Supreme Court has already begun the process of legalizing this Christian fascist agenda, most notably in its use of “hostility to religion” for sanctioning discrimination against LGBT people, and since Pence’s speech in May, it is now over 150 Trump appointees who have ascended to the federal courts. This program is closely tied to white supremacy in this country, but it’s also worth noting that their views of women ominously echo the Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) program in Nazi Germany where women were deemed breeders for the Third Reich, and homosexuals were among the first to be taken to concentration camps.
In 1987, during the rise of the Christian Right, Richard Fenn, theologian and professor at Princeton University, wrote in In Dreams of Glory: The Sources of Apocalyptic Terror, “…[the Christian Right] will continue to make it legitimate to believe in the end as a time when there will be no non-Christians or infidels … Silent complicity with apocalyptic rhetoric soon becomes collusion with plans for religiously inspired genocide.
We cannot underestimate what these Christian Fascists have been planning for the last 40 years, starting with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Terry Heaton recently wrote a book called, The Gospel of Self: How Jesus Joined the GOP. Mr. Heaton was a former right-hand man of Pat Robertson and one of the key players of the religious right. He discusses why the Christian nationalists and fundamentalists support Donald Trump. They see Trump, Pence, and their regime as a means of overturning the U.S. Constitution and its rules separating church and state, with the ultimate goal of creating a Christian theocracy.
Even if Trump is impeached and removed through Congress, which is not likely without a mass movement of sustained, non-violent protest, this is what would be left in place. No! We don’t want any kind of fascist America, and now more than ever, we need people in the streets shouting one unifying demand: Trump AND Pence must get #OutNow!