{"id":95708,"date":"2016-06-10T09:07:09","date_gmt":"2016-06-10T16:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=95708"},"modified":"2016-06-10T09:07:09","modified_gmt":"2016-06-10T16:07:09","slug":"uncle-screwtape-on-prolife-catholic-trumpkin-leaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2016\/06\/uncle-screwtape-on-prolife-catholic-trumpkin-leaders.html","title":{"rendered":"Uncle Screwtape on “Prolife” Catholic Trumpkin Leaders"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

When you declare that Trump\u2019s behavior is the \u201ctextbook definition of racism\u201d and \u201coutrageous\u201d<\/a> but then don\u2019t withdraw your support for him, you make clear that you and your party, in fact, support racism and that everything your critics have been saying about you and your party all these years is true.<\/p>\n

The pretense that the racism which deems a judge unfit for office purely because of his ethnicity is something new <\/em>in Trump\u2019s campaign is rubbish and these guys know it. Michael Gerson does the autopsy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

But it is not materially more bigoted than the central premise of Trump\u2019s campaign: that foreigners and outsiders are exploiting, infiltrating and adulterating the real America. How is attacking the impartiality of a judge worse than characterizing undocumented Mexicans as invading predators intent on raping American women? Or pledging to keep all Muslim migrants out of the country? Or citing the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II as positive precedent?<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

Republican leaders, in other words, thought they were in a normal political moment\u2014a time for pragmatism, give-and-take, holding your nose and eventually getting past an unpleasant chore.<\/p>\n

But it is not a normal political moment. It is one of those rare times\u2014like the repudiation of Joe McCarthy, or consideration of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Watergate crisis\u2014when the spotlight of history stops on a single decision, and a whole political career is remembered in a single pose. The test here: Can you support, for pragmatic reasons, a presidential candidate who purposely and consistently appeals to racism?<\/p>\n

When the choice came, only a handful of Republicans at the national level answered with a firm \u201cno.\u201d A handful. It was not shocking to me that the plurality of an angry Republican primary electorate\u2014grown distrustful of establishment leaders\u2014might choose a populist who appeals to racial prejudice. It is shocking to me\u2014and depressing and infuriating\u2014that almost no elected Republicans of national standing would stand up to it.<\/p>\n

By this standard, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska is the moral leader of the GOP. But given the thinness of his company, many of us will never be able to think about the Republican Party in quite the same way again. It still carries many of the ideological convictions I share. Collectively, however, it has failed one of the most basic tests of public justice: Don\u2019t support racists\u2014or candidates who appeal to racism\u2014for public office. If this commitment is not a primary, non-negotiable element of Republican identity, then the party of Lincoln is dead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

George Will also does yeoman work dissecting the multiple ways in which Trump, the Assyrian rod of judgment sent by God to smash this cynical Party of deadly hypocrisy to pieces, has reduced men like Ryan and other Prolife Conservative Catholic Folk Heroes to whoredom in an essay that begins: \u201cThe Caligulan malice with which Donald Trump administered Paul Ryan\u2019s degradation is an object lesson in the price of abject capitulation to power<\/a>\u201d just gets better from there.<\/p>\n

But nobody is more grotesquely compromised than \u201cprolife\u201d leaders like Fr. Peter West, Fr. Frank Pavone, Priests for Life, the Susan B. Anthony List and the growing number of others who are, with cringeworthy reliability, instructing the faithful to Vote Trump or the Baby Get It and appealing to abortion and the other \u201cnon-negotiables\u201d as the only things that matter in this election.<\/p>\n

For, of course, as Trump makes clear every day, he does not care one iota about abortion. What he cares about is racism, the lawless use of power, and Donald Trump. And so prolife leaders, including Paul Ryan and Fr. Peter West and their followers who flood St. Blog\u2019s comboxes, spend their energy, not defending the unborn, but defending their choice to support a racist (among the many evils he openly advocates). And in addition to the doublethink deployed by Ryan, they actually use excuses like \u201cRacism is a negotiable issue. Who even really can define racism anyway? And besides it\u2019s not as serious a sin as abortion.\u201d And so, once again, the unborn become human shields for GOP Culture of Death priorities, the prolife movement takes its place as a subculture devoted to defending those priorities and fighting the Church on their behalf, and God\u2019s Name is blasphemed among the Gentiles.<\/p>\n

Solution: Stop. Fighting. the. Church. Listen to the Magisterium. Stop the failed brain-dead strategy of pitting the unborn against all the rest of the Church\u2019s teaching. Decouple from the thoroughly prostituted embrace of the GOP and its racist leader and the Frankenstein base that adores him. Be *more* prolife, not less, by listening to the *whole* teaching of the Church which condemns racism as well as abortion, and stop using the unborn as human shields for every filthy thing Trump says and does. For the truth is that as long as you support him, all your energy will go, not to defending the unborn, but to defending the filthy things he says and does.<\/p>\n

And when he is done with the prolife movement, it will be such a tarted-up whore for him that its credibility will be gone forever and Christians who backed him will have set back the evangelistic mission of the Church for decades. \u201cProlife\u201d will\u2013permanently\u2013be code for \u201cracist\u201d in most minds, for the very good reason that it tried to move heaven and earth, not to defend the unborn, but to defend the racist Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo get the man\u2019s soul and give him nothing <\/em>in return\u2014that is what really gladdens our Father\u2019s heart.\u201d \u2013 Uncle Screwtape<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you declare that Trump\u2019s behavior is the \u201ctextbook definition of racism\u201d and \u201coutrageous\u201d but then don\u2019t withdraw your support for him, you make clear that you and your party, in fact, support racism and that everything your critics have been saying about you and your party all these years is true. The pretense that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[775],"class_list":["post-95708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-never-trump"],"yoast_head":"\nUncle Screwtape on "Prolife" Catholic Trumpkin Leaders<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When you declare that Trump's behavior is the "textbook definition of racism" and "outrageous" but then don't withdraw your support for him, you make\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2016\/06\/uncle-screwtape-on-prolife-catholic-trumpkin-leaders.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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