Judge Frank Johnson distinct from Amy Coney Barrett; Implications for SC Graham and Bama Tuberville Senate Races and SEC Football

    Judge Frank Johnson the Lincoln Republican of the Civil Rights era in Alabama believed in Constitution as a Living Breathing Document. He was a Baptist who also saw Scripture in a similar way, was not a literalist thus the similarities in his faith and Constitutional interpretations.

   Amy Coney Barrett is a Catholic Fundamentalist to the right of Pope Francis and for certain Dorothy Day in her perspectives on the Law and a Just Society. Read Day's grand daughter Kate Hennessy biography of Day and let me know if you see much in common with Day's faith and that of ACB.

     Let's get straight to the point. Had ACB been the deciding Judge in Montgomery in March of 1965, Martin Luther King and John Lewis would still be at the base of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma waiting on legal authority to walk on to Glory in Montgomery.

   I would not like to be a Trustee of Auburn or Alabama, Clemson and University of South Carolina to explain the implications, historical and present to the mostly black football players and their extended families who make the SEC football engine run this Railroad job of Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and Trump.

   As I explained in my previous blog, Sizzlin Lindsey, abortion politics as perfected by the right wing of the GOP the last forty years--see recent book Reconsidering Reagan and the Atwater Memo in Stuart Stevens It Was All a Lie--Abortion politics and their sister gun rights of the dark money distortions of the Second Amendment by the NRA are the step child of Race Baiting. That's the ugly truth Lindsey Graham and Tuberville are running on.

     Trump calls people who challenge him on this matter or kneeling SOBS. I asked Trevor Lawrence June 13 at the Clemson BLM march how he came down on the twitter Dustup between Trump and Drew Brees of late spring this year. He said he sided with Brees and his former Clemson QB Deshaun Watson against Trump on the matter saying folks should be free without bullying from the President of the United States to express themselves on such delicate matters.

    Furman's Jessica Taylor of the Cook Political Report just last week explained how tight the Senate Race is in South Carolina and What's at Stake. Josh Moon, Kyle Whitmire and and Joey Kennedy have done likewise in Alabama dismissing Tuberville as nothing more than a Know Nothing, incidentally the conclusion of Harold Bloom in his 1993 American Religion about fundamentalists in the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.

    People in Alabama who knew Harper and Alice Lee; folks like Wayne Flynt and his disciple Mark Wilson of the Auburn Democracy Project, know only the miserably educated could justify a vote for Tuberville in the wake of her legacy. In the October issue of the Alabama Review, Mobile native, long time reporter and columnist for the Charlotte Observer, great admirer of Will Campbell, now retired back in Alabama, Frye Galliard,  has a review of Emory's Joe Crespino book Atticus;  A Book Tommy Tuberville nor anybody in his camp and inner circles I doubt have read because I follow them on facebook and cant see anything of any significance they have considered in the last five years, and that includes Lt Gov Will Ainsworth.

    Just last week at Good Faith Media, Amanda Hiley spelled out what these science deniers bode for public education in Alabama.

    So there it is, in SC and Alabama and of course Georgia too, a test of what passes for Christian integrity and discernment and a modicum of coming to terms with religious political history of the region.

Sizzling Lindsey

   Lindsey Graham picked up the decibels a little in his opening questions this morning to Amy Coney Barrett, her six children and her sisters. I wonder how many of them have read Kate Hennessy's biography of her Grandmother Dorothy Day. The Pope said Day is one of four Great Americans in his Rushmore, M Lking, Abraham Lincoln and maybe Walt Whitman was the fourth. How many of Amy's family know the life of Dot Day, Mother of One Child, Tamar, and know it well. Amy's colleague at Notre Dame says Whitman with Lincoln and Emily Dickinson unlike the fundamentalist juggernaut of mid 1800's America, became the new theologians who were about to get the United States past it's impasse.

   But I digress  This will not be a perfect history lesson as the font keeps changing, but will be a shout out to Upstate SC media to get off their hiney's and start pursuing some questions that matter given Upstate Lindsey one of their own has the national attention....And this is going up right away so come back to it. As you know Mitch McConnell, the gravedigger of American democracy is up to a railroad job and Lindsey is in on it so time for My Friend Four, the Greenville News, Spartanburg Herald Journal and FBC Spartanburg of Trey Gowdy to engage this discussion. And of course David Wilkins, friend of the Riley Inst at Furman, the Bush family and former chair of Clemson trustees where Trevor Lawrence and Darrien Rencher came down on the side of Drew Brees in his late May dustup with Donald Trump.

     So it looks like Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence and Darrien Rencher are not voting for Trump nor Lindsey Graham and if they lived in Alabama they would be voting with Nick Saban against tommy Tuberville and if they wandered up to Rainsville Alabama home of Jeremy Pruitt of the Tenn Vols they would have a few questions there.

   My friend Randall Balmer of Dartmouth has written extensively about how the politics of race became the politics of Abortion. He has said while researching the paper of the fundamentalist Catholic Paul Weyrich, of the camp of Amy Coney safe to say, it was as if Weyrich's papers began to SIZZLE as it dawned on Weyrich he could network with Jerry Falwell embraced by the fundamentalists in the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and replace race baiting with the mendacity of the politics of the anti abortion movement. Google Stansell, Holy War, New Republic and read the concluding paragraphs.

     So whether it has dawned on the righteous Amy Coney with her adopted children of color or not, she is being played by Dark forces that my friends at Good Faith Media dot org, religion dispatches, the Divinity School at Duke, religion departments at Wofford, Furman and Baylor and other humanities faculty have warned. And they are joined by Balmer at Dartmouth, Nathan Hatch, formerly at Notre Dame now president of Wake Forest and the above mentioned Noll.

    See John Pierce two pieces on the politics of abortion in the last month at Good Faith Media, and google the politics of abortion at Liberty University at religion dispatches....I know John Pierce. He is from Ringold Ga and a grad of Berry College in Rome Ga, not exactly what you would call sterling AOC credentials.

     See Lee Atwater's Nword memo at the opening of Stuart Stevens it Was all a Lie. Go to Judson Bookstore on Mainstreet Greenville SC in the building where they had the trial for the lynching of Willie Earle that got the attention of Rebecca West and Later Furman's Schaefer Kendrick and look at page 9 of Robert Jones White Too Long and he will spell it out for you.

    So in 1990 at a Furman symposium taking a look at Willie Earle, Kendrick said most of Greenville's so called "better people' were for the most part struck mute about their silence and complicity in the Willie Earle verdict. 

    So now how are the "better People" of Christ Church, the Clemson trustee board, Westminster Prez, Buncombe Street UMC, the law offices downtown and on Wade Hampton, the Destination City Peeps in the mayors office, David Wilkins and his friends at the Greenville Country Club; how are they gonna vote in Chanticleer and elsewhere as Lindsey Graham presides over this railroad Job helping Trump and Mitch McConnell dig deeper the grave of American Democracy?

    Also see Joe Crespino's Strom Thurmond's America. Jill Lepore's These Truths, Jon Meacham on the Soul of America and Harold Bloom in the American Religion on Lindsey Graham and his know nothing Fundamentalists in the SBC.

     One salient point that registered with me over the weekend. Strom Thurmond led the fight during the 70s to deport John Lennon. Unforgivable.!!!!!

  

Waylon Jennings and the Apophatic

    The Heifner boys of Nashville--their father used to write Sunday school literature for Southern Baptists before the fundamentalists took over--brought my attention to a column today by our mutual friend John Pierce of Ringgold, Georgia. Pierce is somebody I do know from Ringgold, he and a 13 year old girl named Pearl that showed up at the Open Door Home in Rome Ga in the fall of 81.

     Pearl sang the song to me and a former Miss Alabama contestant and won that days do you know this song contest.

    Back to Pierce and the Nashville Revenants. You can read JP's effort at Goodfaithmedia.org and it is worth the search. He brings up a hero of all of us, Will D. Campbell and if you don't know Will then you aint much of a Babdist.

    Will was a friend of Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, a Pentecostal preacher's daughter. So JP's musings meshed well with my reading in the last few days of two reviews of Marilynne Robinson latest novel Jack, the third in the Gilead Trilogy. The New Yorker is more of a profile with two pages on her special relationship with Obama, two of ten. It's ending on the Garden of Eden, the Fall is Marneyesque with a Barbara Brown Taylor Snake serpent twist.

    But it is the New York Review of books exegesis I would focus on if Miss Chadwick had assigned Robinson for me to write up in the Advanced English class at Gaffney High. I like new words even if I rarely use them well in the flow of things, as they seem to stick out like when my Dad tried to say Pierre Trudeau at Bethany Baptist in Gaffney in 74.

   I remember Billy pronounced it Purr Tru doo.

    So apophatic is the word of the day. Joins diapason and defenestration in my showoff vocabulary.

    Here is how nybooks gets to apophatic. The rest is up to you to read Pierce on Will and Waylon. I think it will be self evident as far as words can take us:

         Since both characters are literary, Robinson floods the book with quotations and allusions. They discuss Hamlet, he compares himself to Raskolnikov, he frequently cites his favorite Frost poem (“I have been one acquainted with the night”), he recommends William Carlos Williams’s Paterson to her, and the air is thick with quotations from Milton and Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and Thoreau and Paul Dunbar, as well as the Bible and Thomas Traherne and old hymns. This makes for a heavily loaded text, unlike Housekeeping or Lila, which beautifully stay within the eloquent, unliterary language of their female narrators. More like Ames in Gilead, Jack often sounds like a theologian or a philosopher; phrases like “homiletical legerdemain” or “the garments of misfeasance” drop easily into his mind:

A metaphysics is a great help in rationalizing scruple-driven behavior.

He would abandon all casuistry, surrender all thought of greater and lesser where transgressions were concerned, even drop the distinction between accident and intention. He was struggling in a web of interrelation.

She might have no idea yet that embarrassment, relentless, punitive scorn, can wear away at a soul until it recedes into wordless loneliness. Maybe apophatic loneliness.

Robinson has said, in one of her essays, that she enjoys reading about “the apophatic—reality that eludes words,” and that “as a writer, I continuously attempt to make inroads on the vast terrain of what cannot be said…the unnamed is overwhelmingly present and real for me.” These are interesting clues to her pursuit of Jack. But she runs the risk of making him sound too like her.

In her essays, she has often drawn links between Shakespeare, Puritan writings, and American literature, which she sees as a sanctification of the individual,

a fascination with the commonest elements of life as they are mediated and entertained by perception and reflection…. Sacredness is realized in the act of attention…. The exalted mind could understand the ordinary as visionary.

Whether she’s writing about Renaissance literature or seventeenth-century Puritan preachers, Dickinson or Wallace Stevens, Robinson looks for that attention to “the incomprehensible complexity—spiritual, intellectual, and emotional—of anyone we encounter.”

Martha Barksdale of Collinsville Alabama versus the Yellowhammer and Tuberville Know Nothings

      Martha Barksdale is well known in Collinsville and NE Alabama to be the woman who keeps the trains running on time with her civic work, Women's study clubs, Historic association and a legend among Home Ec Teachers across the state. One of her mentors was Mary Katherine Reed of my Mothers 1940 Collinsville HS Class, MKat the first woman in the county to earn a doctorate, longtime mid 20th chair of the Home Ec department at U Bama who leaned forward in her day on race relations.

    Martha is a longtime Republican with her husband of Sand Mountain, Thomas who played football for both the Bear and Bobby Bowden.

    It is doubtful the Collinsville Baptist church would be solvent without the tithes of the Barksdales and their influence of the last 60 years and her father before that of the WV Graves Hardware store.

     I think Martha knows in her heart the Bama GOP today is not the same party of Eisenhower and Judge Frank Johnson. I was proud of Martha and Thomas for reading Furman grad Ed Bridges Bicentennial history of Bama just last year and hosting him at the Cricket Theatre with the Historical Society.

      The current GOP of Tuberville and Yellowhammer News is poison. See the links and conversation at the Covenant site of Baptistlife.com forums.

    It is a Know Nothing party and Kyle Whitmire easily googled recent column of Tommy Tuberville at the Rotary Club tells you all you need to know.

     In the 90s I read Harold Bloom's The American Religion that made a strong case the fundamentalists who took over the Southern Baptist Conventions had its antecedent in the Know Nothings of the 1850s who gave Lincoln Hell. Now they are on the march in Bama against Doug Jones.

     Among folks who understand that or have recognized it in other places include Hillary Beard of FBC Ft Payne whose father is associate pastor of FBC Guntersville; Cherilynne Crowe product of the same church, Samford and Vanderbilt grad now in the DC offices of the Baptist Joint Committee; Wayne Flynt and Mark Wilson of FBC Auburn and the Auburn Democracy project which has had an 8 year and counting relationship with the Collinsville Library which Martha's Study Club sponsors; Susan Weaver and her parents and her husband John Morgan the Third of Auburn UVA and now Habitat for Humanity; Coach Neal Thrash of Collinsville now in Fyffe and I have to believe when they think it through the 8 couples who hosted Judge Raines when the Know Nothings came after him ten years ago. Eight of Collinsville influential families came together to show their support at a reception at the Library to show their public support for Raines.

     I am hoping those folks connect the dots that even though stakes were high for Raines, they are exponentially higher now in the Senate Race and Doug Jones is the way forward for people who now know George Wallace was wrong in the 60s. Tuberville is just as wrong now and Wallace is his most flagrant Demagogue days was then. Vote for public education the leads to civic discernment, is not anti science and does not continue the distortions of the Daughters of the Confederacy.

   In Collinsville, if you really really understand what it means to be a Christian vote for the Hispanic children you have invited to Vacation Bible School for 25 years now, the Jesus of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Lottie Moon, Frank Johnson, Tom Corts, Harper Lee, Becky Kennedy, and Maria Fernanda Moreno.

   Don't be suckered by the hypocrisy of the mendacity of the politics of abortion which Lee Atwater adopted as a strategy because as he said you can't say the Nword in public anymore. Doubt me? Read Stuart Stevens the GOP operative from Mississippi in his book It was All a Lie.

    Vote with my Sunday School Teaching Mother and her Daughter my sister. Vote with the overwhelming Girl Scouts of America and their legacy.

     Vote with Nick Saban and Paul Finebaum Greg Sankey and the Honors Program of the University of Alabama, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the leadership of the United Methodist Church, Episcopalians, Jews and the Catholics at Nick Saban's St Francis.

    I don't know how Martha will vote. She played the piano at my Father's funeral and I am forever grateful for that and her friendship and Thomas over the years in Collinsville. She is a real person, but she is also a symbol.

    Progressive women talk and have their networks. As never before they can make a difference if they show up and lean forward in Alabama this year and add one more blanket on the fire to snuff out the Know Nothings.

Collinsville's Casey Mattox quoted in October 1 Tom Edsall Piece NY Times on Amy Coney Barrett

   I met both Casey and the writer Edsall in 1986 and made comments this morning at the History section of Baptistlife.com forums. You can see my comments there where I name names from Collinsville who affirm and oppose Casey's thinking on ACB and abortion in particular. Been frustrating today because yesterday I used the word "miscreant" at Yellowhammer News facebook discussion where I was practically lynched online with all the religious right comments at a media site alleged to have been created by Mike Hubbard and Cliff Simms, the former House speaker whose son clayte is a Furman grad but may not know much about Marshall Frady.

    Met Edsall at Atlanta SBC in June of 86 where we had a good twenty minute chat before his pivotal piece on page A4 Sat june 6 headlined New Right now Controls Huge SBC. Met Casey in December of that year when I subbed for his sixth grade class for Miss Smith. Allison Myers, Julie Arthur, Mark Morgan, the Dawg Nine, Brent Killian rising quarterback, Dale Rogers were all in class that day best I remember.

  I guess miscreant is abusive bullying language on Yellowhammer News but Trump calling two of Nick Saban's Heismann Trophy winners sons of bitches is Not.

    I will come back to this later but wanted to lay this firebrake down. Meantime you can explore some of the faith direction of Casey's Collinsville contemporaries at Bl dot com in the History of Collinsville and the special post on Casey.

   With all the penumbra of Amy Coney and the way it is going down, don't be surprised if 60 Minutes comes to Collinsville to update what Casey and Gloria Morgan portend for DACA justice for the burgeoning Hispanic community there. A Coney appear to know a lot about Federalism and White Supremacy under the skirts of the fetus, but not much about Justice of the Gospel of Jesus, MLKing, Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero to name a few; and of course Bonhoeffer.

    Collinsville Has been the subject of documentaries by Mick Jagger's great friend Brett Morgen, and U Bama's media Mike Letcher. Two separate documentaries shown on statewide Television, so 60 minutes should not be surprising, not a reach at all. Great chance for Jennifer Wilkins of the Auburn University Democracy Project to Shine.