Will Bunch: Herschel Walker mess proves Christian right cares only about power, not abortion

[Nevilledog]

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They never really cared about abortion, or the sanctity of marriage. The Walker mess reveals a GOP that only cares about 1 thing: Control, over women's bodies…and over democracy.

My new column on the true meaning of Herschel

inquirer.com
Herschel Walker mess proves Christian right cares only about power, not abortion | Will Bunch
A Senate candidate's scandals over abortion hypocrisy and abuse show why today's Christian right doesn't care about morality.
12:14 PM · Oct 6, 2022

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/herschel-walker-abortion-christian-right-20221006.html

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https://archive.ph/zCuEZ

In the increasingly fraught autumn of 2022, it’s beyond cliché to accuse an increasingly militant American right of “saying the quiet part out loud.” Once gently framed worries about rising authoritarianism in U.S. politics have given way to rally crowds raising their right arms in Nazi-looking salutes while the soundtrack of the wackadoodle conspiracy theory QAnon plays in the background.

But when Dana Loesch — the conservative bomb-thrower best known for her provocations on behalf of the National Rifle Association — took to the TV airwaves on Tuesday on a show called The First, she not only took on the big issue that more mainstream Republicans seemed eager to avoid, but she turned the volume dial way past 11, maybe to around 17.

It was just hours after the bombshell Daily Beast revelation that Georgia’s GOP U.S. Senate hopeful Herschel Walker — the ex-football star whose challenge to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is crucial to his party’s 2022 ambitions, and who claims he supports a total abortion ban — had paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009. To make matters worse, that story triggered the candidate’s son Christian Walker to go on a social media rampage accusing his dad of threatening to kill their family and forcing them to move six times in six months.

But unless you’ve spent the last six years in a cave or a coma, you may not be shocked to learn that Loesch doubled down on full-throated support for Walker’s election next month (in addition to attacking the millions of women who’ve aborted a pregnancy as “skanks,” just for the heck of it). She said the only virtue that matters on Election Day isn’t actual virtue, just “winning.”

*snip*

[Trueblue1968]

1. overwhelmed with depression reading this -- there is no scandal that trumps the desire by Republican

there is no scandal that trumps the desire by Republican voters for a GOP Senate that would block President Biden’s judicial nominees and prevent what they call “the woke liberal agenda.” And that’s surely part of it — but there’s also something much deeper in play.

The conservative movement is about one thing: preserving traditional hierarchies, especially around white privilege and patriarchy, by any means necessary. In the past, democracy — in times and places where white Protestants were the majority — often served that agenda well, and there were dirty tricks like Jim Crow laws for the places where it didn’t. But in an increasingly diverse and better-educated America, the old hierarchies are fading. So today, the far right has a brand new tool kit — a belief that Christian law trumps the will of the voters, or that vote counts don’t matter because elections are rigged (although they aren’t), or merely faith in the raw power of imposing unqualified candidates on the body politic.

“In that imagined past, white men ruled the roost, families went to church every Sunday and outsiders knew their place,” the Clemson University political scientist Laura Olson wrote in a 2020 essay. “A deep-rooted desire for a return to that past may have been why Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan has proved so potent. As Yale scholar Philip Gorski has argued, that phrase can be interpreted to mean ‘making white Christianity culturally dominant again.’”

[Initech]

2. The Christian right has made their vision clear: they want absolute power.

And they don't care who they stomp on or throw under the bus, or what incompetent buffoons they have to nominate and put up with in order to get it. It's a cult that will stop at nothing to steer the US towards a religious totalitarian regime. Fuck 'em all.