Jindal, cynical charlatan: How a one-time GOP star turned into another scheming religious wingnut

[DonViejo]

Bobby Jindal, cynical charlatan: How a one-time GOP star turned into another scheming religious wingnut

The Rhodes scholar seemed likely to run for president on policy. Instead, he's pushing religion and intolerance

ROBERT MANN

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who declared his candidacy for president last Wednesday, is passionate about what he calls “religious freedom.” In speech after speech over recent years, the Indian-American governor – a convert from Hinduism to Catholicism in his teens – warns Christian evangelical audiences that liberals are hell-bent on squelching religious speech.

On Friday, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling affirming same-sex marriage rights, Jindal reacted with predictable outrage. He cast the ruling as an assault on Christian values.

“This decision will pave the way for an all out assault against the religious freedom rights of Christians who disagree with this decision,” Jindal said in his statement. “This ruling must not be used as pretext by Washington to erode our right to religious liberty.

“The government should not force those who have sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage to participate in these ceremonies,” Jindal added, previewing a struggle over whether businesses may deny services to same-sex couples. “That would be a clear violation of America’s long held commitment to religious liberty as protected in the First Amendment.”

Long before he declared his candidacy, some political observers pegged Jindal as the presidential hopeful most likely to rely on his policy chops to win support for a White House bid (he ran the University of Louisiana System, served as the state’s secretary of Health and Hospitals and was an assistant secretary of George W. Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services).

Instead, the former Rhodes scholar has emerged as the candidate most eager to cash in on his religious faith.

Jindal routinely speaks at churches and religious gatherings in early primary and caucus states. He delivered the spring 2014 commencement speech at Virginia’s Liberty University, asking the graduates, “What happens when our government decides it no longer needs a ‘moral and religious people?’”

This is how Jindal answered his question: “It is a war – a silent war — against religious liberty. This war is waged in our courts and in the halls of political power. It is pursued with grim and relentless determination by a group of like-minded elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith — into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed.”

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http://www.salon.com/2015/06/28/bobby_jindal_cynical_charlatan_how_a_one_time_gop_star_turned_into_another_scheming_religious_wingnut/

[Katashi_itto]

1. K&R

[SwankyXomb]

2. He went from decrying the "party of stupid" to embracing it

because he was told that was the only way to get elected to higher office.

[gratuitous]

3. Faith is privatized, Governor?

I thought privatization was doubleplus good? It's been the Republicans' mission for decades to privatize so much of what was once thought of as The Commons, following the paradoxical notion that by handing things over to the greediest motherfuckers ever to walk the planet, we would all benefit somehow, somewhere, someday.

But now Gov. Jindal is all upset that faith (carefully defined by a select few) can't simply be imposed on the masses under the guise of morality and religion. What's moral about spending $2 billion a day on the machinery of war and death while our citizens have inadequate food, clothing and housing? What's moral about an economic system that doesn't require the biggest winners to pay their fair share to support it? What's moral about punishing the most oppressed strata of our society with further oppression, while celebrating and promoting the biggest thieves in our financial sector?