Monday Miscellany, 6/9/25

The Supreme Court has ruled that so-called “reverse discrimination” is also illegal and that charges of reverse discrimination may not be held to a higher burden of proof than minority discrimination.

In Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, Marlean Ames sued the state agency she had worked for since 2004, alleging that her gay supervisor passed her over for a promotion in favor of a less qualified gay women, then demoted her from her current position and replaced her with a gay man.  Ames claimed that she was discriminated against because she is heterosexual.

Lower courts ruled against her on the grounds that she had failed to establish “background circumstances,” the higher burden of proof that has been applied to reverse discrimination claims, which must provide evidence that the bias is from “that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.”

But the Supreme Court threw out the “background circumstances” requirement.  Significantly, this was a unanimous ruling.  The opinion was authored by the liberal black female justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wrote:  “By establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’ – without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group – Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone.”

A Bigger Percentage of Blacks Are “Christian Nationalists” Than Whites

While some Christians do identify as “Christian Nationalists,” the term is mostly used by progressives to frighten voters and to motivate their base to oppose religious ideas in the public square.

History professor Ansley Quiros has written a provocative post at the Patheos blog the  Anxious Bench entitled A Rise in Black Christian Nationalism?

She has mined the voluminous data from the Public Religion Research Institute about Americans’ religious beliefs and found a surprising fact:  Black Americans are more likely than white Americans to hold the beliefs associated with Christian Nationalism.

She found that 34% of Black Americans hold such beliefs, compared to 30% of white Americans.  (So do 28% of Hispanics and 21% of Asian Americans.)

When asked if they think U.S. laws should be based on Christian values, Black Americans and white Americans returned the same results, with 14% completely agreeing and 28% mostly agreeing. But when asked if being Christian was an important part of being American, a higher percentage of Black Americans completely agreed (14%) or mostly agreed (22%). Black Americans were in line with white, hispanic, AAPI [Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders], and multiracial Americans in responses to the prompt “If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we won’t have a country anymore,” and polled slightly higher in favor of the statement “The U.S. government should declare American a Christian nation.” When asked if “God has called Christians to exercise dominion of all areas of American society,”  30% of Black Americans completely agreed or agreed. Bafflingly, 6% Black Americans completely agreed with the statement “America was chosen as a new promised land for European Christians,” a higher rate than any other group, albeit still very low.

I would argue that such beliefs among all Christian demographics are more in the category of pious sentiments than allegiance to a particular theological-political ideology.

Though Republicans made big inroads with black Americans in the last presidential election, 86% still voted for Kamala Harris (which was less than the 92% who had voted for Biden).  These Harris voters must have included most of these “Christian Nationalists.”

Interestingly, Quiros also found that black Americans are the racial group that scores highest in beliefs associated with the Q-Anon conspiracy theory.  Agreeing, for example,  that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.” Some 24% of Black Americans believe such things, as compared to 19% of all Americans.

The new technology is really a variation of the hybrid, a car that has both an electric and a gasoline engine.  In today’s hybrids, the gasoline engine does most of the work, but the range is extended by the electric motor.  In the EREVs, the electric engine does most of the work, with the gasoline motor continually recharging it.

The recent Shanghai auto show unveiled a mid-sized SUV from the Chinese auto giant Huawei that can go 1,000 miles before it needs to be recharged, which, using Huawei’s new technology, can be done in 15 minutes.

Americans can’t buy Chinese electric cars.   President Biden slapped a 100% tariff on them and imposed regulatory restrictions on Chinese software.  With President Trump’s additional tariffs, not only on the cars but on their components, the fees come to nearly  250%. So no American companies are importing them.  European countries are, though, as are other nations, including near-by Mexico.