Since we couldn’t have a Saturday Soother, Wrongo wants to complain a bit today. But first, it was a bad week for cartoons. Here are the best:
It’s clear that many Americans can’t hold two thoughts simultaneously:
Biden sees through the turkey:
Complaint #1: We’re faced with a choice between our aging president and his aging contender for the job. Biden did quite well in his meeting with China’s president Xi. He seemingly met all of the American objectives for the meeting. In the press conference afterwards, he looked in command, walking across a minefield of questions, even with the gotcha question about whether Xi was a dictator, without any missteps.
But the press still talks about how old Biden looks. From Kevin Drum: (brackets by Wrongo)
“…having now listened to a number of Biden’s recent speaking gigs, there’s really no question that this [his age] is solely about his physical appearance. Cognitively, Biden is perfectly normal. The worst he ever does is the occasional verbal flub, a longtime Biden habit. Agree with him or not, he says what he means to say….He thinks Xi Jinping is a dictator and has repeated this [even] through the grimaces of his Secretary of State.”
Contrast that with Trump who doesn’t appear to be as old, but can barely remember who the president is, or how many world wars we’ve had. America will either elect a charade of an active former president with a deteriorating mind, or we can keep an active president with a strong mind but obvious physical limitations.
Which would you rather have?
Complaint #2: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box, he told Americans on Tuesday that our time-honored concept of separation of church and state, a founding principle of the country is a “misunderstanding”, that what the founders really wanted was to stop government interfering with religion, not the other way around:
“The separation of church and state is a misnomer….People misunderstand it. Of course, it comes from a phrase that was in a letter that Jefferson wrote. It’s not in the Constitution.”
Johnson was referring to Jefferson’s 1802 letters to the Danbury Baptists Association of Connecticut. In the letters, Jefferson makes clear that the founding fathers subscribed to a powerful separation of church and state, which they enshrined in the establishment clause of the First Amendment (even Johnson knows while the Amendments are technically “not” part of the Constitution, they really are).
It’s no surprise that the same people that believe the Constitution should be strictly interpreted are also trying to force an interpretation of it that allows them to make the bible integral to it. Integration of religion into politics has historically been something that fascists and authoritarians have used to get what they wanted.
Rolling Stone says that Johnson has:
“…a flag hanging outside his office that leads into a universe of right-wing religious extremism…”
More:
“The flag is white with a simple evergreen tree in the center and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven” at the top….this flag was a Revolutionary War banner, commissioned by George Washington as a naval flag for the colony turned state of Massachusetts.”
The quote “An Appeal to Heaven” was taken from John Locke. In the past decade, this flag has come to symbolize a die-hard vision of a hegemonically Christian America. Still more:
“…if you look closely at the…videos and pictures of the Capitol insurrection, Appeal to Heaven flags are everywhere. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of them…[in]…the crowd…”
An example from Jan. 6:
Rolling Stone has spent months researching this corner of Christianity known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). They use the same flag hanging outside Johnson’s office, and it’s a key part of their symbology.
The NAR was formed in the 1990s around an evangelical seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner. This is a nondenominational network that believes they are the vanguard of a Christian revolution. In the mid-2000s, these NAR networks embraced a theological paradigm called the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a prophecy that divides society into seven arenas — religion, family, government, education, arts and entertainment, media, and business.
The “Mandate,” as they understand it, is for Christians to “take dominion” and “conquer” all seven of these sectors and have Christian influence flow down into the rest of society.
Follow along for another minute: One of Wagner’s key disciples is Dutch Sheets. In 2013, Sheets was given an Appeal to Heaven flag. A friend told him that, because it predated the Stars and Stripes, it was the flag that “had flown over our nation at its birthing.” Sheets saw the flag as a symbol of the spiritual warfare-driven Christian nationalist revolution he hoped to bring about in American politics.
Sheets endorsed Trump’s candidacy and over the course of the 2016 campaign, the Appeal to Heaven flag and the NAR’s vision of a Christianity-dominated America became entwined with Trump.
Why does Johnson fly this symbol of Christian warfare at the House Speaker’s office when it is clear that the spiritual-warfare appropriation of it connotes an aggressive form of Christian nationalism. The Rolling Stone closes by saying:
“It is simply untenable to think that Johnson is unaware of what the Appeal to Heaven flag signals today. It represents an aggressive, spiritual-warfare style of Christian nationalism, and Johnson is a legal insurrectionist who has deeply tied himself into networks of Christian extremists whose rhetoric, leadership, and warfare theology fueled a literal insurrection.”
We The People cannot let the Mike Johnsons of the world take over our country.
When theocrats and fascists tell us who they are, believe them.
In a purely academic discussion, I would agree that the separation of church and state was not in the constitution. Still the founders may have been christian in the general sense, they were men of the enlightenment and deists for the most part. One of the more pious members was John Adams who was a universalist by the end of his life. And following English law, our founders believed that the constitution would evolve as judges interpreted it. Hamilton believed that for sure and it was the way law was practiced. Oddly, conservatives seem completely happy when judges push the constitution in a way that favors what conservatives want. An example is with corporate power where corporations, originally individually chartered by a state legislature to serve a purpose – often related to infrastructure, have now been seen to have rights that were originally personal – like the right to give money to candidates and participate in an election. And the list of enumerated power of Congress is now an albatross.