Hard to argue with

John Danforth on the Thing that Used to be Conservatism:

What have been the big applause lines in these debates? Well, a statement that the governor of Texas is responsible for killing 234 people on death row. Or that we favor torture. Or that we’re creating a fence on the Mexican border that electrocutes people when they try to cross it. Or when people show up at the emergency room at hospitals and they’re not insured don’t treat them. And that, I mean these are the big applause lines, people just hoop and holler when they hear all that. […]

It doesn’t have anything to do with the Republican party that I was a part of. This is just totally different. And all of these people who are saying this, y’know, and claiming that, y’know, they’re for all this stuff, they also sort of ostentatiously say, “Oh, we’re very religious people. We really, we’re just very pious, Christian people.” They were for torture, and electrocution of the people on along the border and all of that. That doesn’t have anything to do with, is contrary to the Christianity that I understand.

I am politically homeless. And so are a lot of people who are appalled by the Thing that Used to Be Conservatism. And the Christians who try to sell this stuff as somehow being identifiable with the name of Jesus are only setting themselves up for the day when people–especially the young–who might have believed in Jesus turn away, not from him, but from this base alloy of semi-Protestantized secular messianism. May they find, instead of this gross parody, the Catholic faith, whole and entire, and not the bowdlerized version which picks and chooses from the faith in order to support a deranged political agenda of war, torture, and violence.