From Rubbers to Casey Mattox America

     Casey Mattox is a friend from Collinsville Alabama. I was his substitute teacher in the sixth grade and now after UVA and Boston College law school, marinated in the culture issues of the religious right, he is now a lobbyist, legal consultant for the Koch Brothers.

    In  1992 or so with his pastor John Morgan and wife Gloria and several others mostly students who wanted to get a day out of class he went to Montgomery Alabama March for the Fetus. John and Gloria were devout Francis Schaefer types on the matter of abortion and for the last 40 years take three Sundays in January to indocrinate their Sunday school class and double down on the pulpit with their inerrant view on the matter.

    Problem is only one of their four sons seem to agree with them, and one married a girl whose first cousin worked for Planned Parenthood in Georgia for twenty years.One went to Duke and sought counsel of the great Methodist, Will Willimon.  Two went to UVA with Casey and one of them on the Yale Div School where he had a semester with Randall Balmer now at Dartmouth; Balmer a leader scholar of evangelical politics in America who has traced the right wing anti abortion politics to Bob Jones tax exempt resentments for being unable to  see people of color as equal to Strom Thurmond and George Wallace White Man.

    And who knows where Girl Scout Woman of the Decade, the Town Matriarch who taught one of the best home ec Departments in the state for thirty years for girls who numbered about 16 to twenty in their graduating classes. It is pretty clear where the Girl Scouts are on abortion, and I imagine Martha leans with them over her pastor and his wife. But after thirty years amongst them I can't say for certain, such are the ways of small towns and Baptist churches, critical thinking and discernment.

     Poppy Bush 41 was called Rubbers, such was his enthusiasm for birth control until Reagan and Neshoba county got a holt of him, and Lee Atwater and his N Word Memo of the early 80s . That's according to Maureen Dowd in today's scorching opinion piece in the NY Times on the Super Negro Clarence Thomas married to his whiter than white Birch Society bride Ginni. What a pair. Read the piece and see if you can do it without flinching looking away.

    My Presbyterian Hero, the Great Frank Harrington, in Atlanta the friend of Bill Self and Martin Luther Kings great friend Joseph Lowery , said The Weight of Protestant Theology comes down on the side of the Mother. That rings true for my progressive Baptist friends at Good faith Media and Baptist Global News. Also rings true for Frye Galliard and Cynthia Tucker in their recent much celebrated book on Southern Politics becoming the template for Rove and Atwater Strategies that brought us to this moment in the afterglow of Trump's America.

      I read Stansell, Holy War, New Republic ten years ago that concludes the politics of the Anti abortion movement are chocked full of mendacity. I think I got enough walking around sense to know mendacity is not a Christian Virtue.

    I got voted out of the Collinsville Baptist Church where my Mother was baptized and her side of the family goes back to the 1840s. I imagine if Casey Mattox were in town for this July Fourth, the pulpit would be given over to him for a Victory Celebration. Like they said in the Movie the Road to Perdition, it's all so fbombing Hysterical.

Are Jeff Duncan, William Timmons and Ralph Norman Legitimate Americans?

 Maybe I dont understand, comprehend the English Language but I think that is what the panel on Meet the Press Sunday was asking in the last 20 minutes of the show when it came to the question of illiberal democracy in the wake of the first round of the Insurrection committee on National Television except for Tucker and fox news.

     Here is a snippet of that conversation:

            

          On Republicans though, what was really telling is on Wednesday, the day before this hearing, or it might've even been Thursday, Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy was asked over and over again at a press conference if President Biden was legitimately elected. And he refused to say. January 6th, he said, but now he won't. And the reason is, is because this is so politically treacherous for Republican base voters for actually a Republican leader to come out and say that – who knows full well that Biden was legitimately elected – to actually say it.

DAVID FRENCH:

So that's cowardly and it's even more cowardly after the Georgia primaries because the Georgia primaries, you had one-on-one confrontation between the stop the steal candidates and Republican establishment, including Brad Raffensperger, who did probably more than anyone prior to Liz Cheney to directly confront, and Vice President Pence, to directly confront the president. And they won. They beat their MAGA primary challengers. And yet still, still these Republican officeholders in Washington are retreating from that question. They're terrified of that question. And yet, Georgia just demonstrated that there's a chance here to break the Republicans free.

CHUCK TODD:

And that to me is one of the – and Eddie, without pushing you into an answer, I kind of feel like the real measurement of success or failure of these hearings is how strong Donald Trump's grip is on the Republican Party in six months, not today or in a year. You know, I didn't know Tom Rice was going to vote to impeach. I don’t think anybody here – Tom Rice? Everybody had to quickly look up --

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL:

We thought it was a mistake.

CHUCK TODD:

– who's Tom Rice?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL:

We thought it was a mistake. Yes.

CHUCK TODD:

People thought it was a mistake. There are going to be a few people moved by this who say, "You know what? I'm off the train. This was horrible."

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.:

Right. So I think there are folks who have made their decisions, right? There are folks on the left, and folks on the right. They've made their decisions. But there are these people in between. There are these folks in the middle that we're always talking about, these Independents that we're always talking about, right? What does it mean for the committee to connect the dots? You know, I'm a professor. You know, we tell our students when you're writing your paper, "This is how you organize it. Tell me what you're going to do. Do it, then tell me what you did." What we saw on January 6th, they laid out the blueprint, the general architecture, the road map for what we will hear. So by connecting the dots narratively, they may convince folks. But I want to say this really quickly. We need to stop believing that some of these folks on the Republican side are actually democratic actors.

CHUCK TODD:

Meaning small D?

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.:

They are not democrat – they are illiberal. And when we treat them as typical opponents, we're actually contributing to the problem because some of these folks are using the democratic process to undermine democracy itself.

      It is clear to me Upstate Republican US Congressman in SC are playing that game. They are dancing with the devil on the thin ice of democracy. The continue to embrace the charlatan Trump. Way passed time for folks of influence in the region including the CBF, Westminster Prez in Greenville, the trustees of Furman, Wofford and Clemson to address this matter in language even school board trustees in Greer and Inman and Laurens can understand.

   Embracing Donald Trump is not patriotism, in UnAmerican, and worse molesting the soul of America for generations to come.

 

Ich Bin Ein Uvalde

     John Kennedy gave his Berliner Speech in 63 within a month of Martin Luther King's I have a Dream Speech in DC. It was a great time for the promise of America 100 years after the Civil War . The Greatness  of that moment registered with me for the first time in the early 90s as I was reading Taylor Branch what was to become a thousand page trilogy on the Civil Rights movement.

      Now after the NRA Leadership and the gun lobby perverted the meaning of the second Amendment in the nineties in a vision set into motion by Lee Atwater and his nigger memor two decade earlier, We are in a Dark place where sick Republican congressman like the Upstate's Jeff Duncan (Dabo Swinney's Congressman) Ralph Norman of the Westminster Presbyterian Church PCA in Rock Hill and Billy Timmons of Christ Church Episcopal dance with the Devil while Matthew McConaughey testifies on Capitol Hill about a fourth grade girl who could be identified only by her green shoes cause these "christian" politicians cant raise the age limit to 21 for assault weapons in the hands of 18 year old white males.

   Atwater said you cant play race baiting politics anymore so the sick GOP in its downward spin after Nixon engaged the politics of abortion, Critical Race theory and guns.

    The chief of Police of Austin, Houston, and Miami testified on Npr this morning folks in Buffalo and Uvalde would still be alive if so called christian politicians like the above could identify their hiney from a hole in the ground.

     For the Upstate look no further than Karen Guth, daughter of the Furman political science department, and her piece on the Misuse of Bonhoeffer to contest the sophomoric, Laodicean thinking of the cabal of the Upstate. Add Trey Gowdy and Nikki Haley to that sick cabal.

      https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2015-05/claims-bonhoeffer

     The Bible in the Old Testament has a word for politicians like the above. The Bible calls them BASTARDS, illegitimate witnesses for Scripture and in the greatness of King and Kennedy in 1963, illegitimate for America.

    Marshall Frady knew who Will Campbell was as did Furman greats of a few decades ago, LD Johnson and Jim Pitts. Have the Equity Committee of Greenville Furman President Davis, Minor Shaw and Baxter Wynn confront the GOP Delegation of SC informed by Will Campbell and his understanding of the Scriptural identity of Bastards.

   See Ryan Busse, NPR Fresh Air on the venal leadership of the NRA. Switch channels from Fox to PBS and NPR. Vote the Bastards out in Jesus name.