Appeal to What, Now?

 

Breaking News: A second provocative flag linked to Jan. 6 was flown at a home of the Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. https://t.co/DCnJ1drXPR pic.twitter.com/MB3JN3TapZ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 22, 2024

Funny old thing about me, if you didn't know--I'm big on the separation of church and state. Once I realized the incompatibility of the first commandment and the first amendment, the idea that the ISA is, in any sense, a Christian or even biblically based nation flew out the window, and I realized that no person tries to present a government as divinely inspired without there being some real fuckery afoot.

Trump, a hedonist, a personification, in his way, of the deadly sins, is a "tool" in the vernacular, but has also been used by Christian Nationalists as a tool to get their feet in the door of the White House. Why? How? I suspect it's that his hands are dirty and theirs stay clean, while their agenda will fall into place under him because he simply is an authoritarian. They don't care "what's in his heart". 

He's a gift to them. A gift from heaven. He'll outlaw abortion and birth control and eradicate wokeness and restructure society back to where everyone knew their "place" in the great chain of being. Where's the catch?

This is a democracy, and most people here don't actually want that, is the catch. We were supposed to have done away with the idea of terrestrial kings who have a "divine right" to do anything. Let alone place religious tests on who participates in government or how laws should induce people to behave. The founders of the US were all too aware of European sectarianism and the dangers thereof, and were trying to manage a system that would accommodate an already diverse society.

And then we have people who call themselves originalists, who supposedly look at reviewing the constitution through an historical lens who seem to have forgotten this. Or rather--do not care, and use the term as a fig-leaf to offer up their own spurious interpretations.

I'm not surprised "Scalito" displayed a Christian nationalist banner, particularly one related to 1/6. Conservative grievance over "culture war" runs deep. Consider the case of Nikki Haley, who wants to be Reverend Hagee when she grows up and has just admitted she will be voting for Trump, even though she knows he is unfit. But he's her flavor, her brand of unfit. I'm neither mad nor disappointed. After all, she is supporting Trump of her own will--it's just what god wants, right?

That deep a level of cynicism is how the devil gets started, you know....

But where does that leave us with Scalia and his apparent ideological incompatibility with our system of government, the constitution, the reality that Trump isn't an opportunity for us to get our theocracy on? 

Nowhere? What do we have the numbers to do given how many Republicans are in office, and how many of them recognize the appeal to heaven is an appeal to their voting base?

We treat this coming election like exactly what it is--a battle over the soul of our democracy and what it stands for. I just don't see anything else.