• Driving in to work last night, the lead stories on the news were flooding in Pensacola, Fla., and the derailing and explosion of an oil train in Lynchburg, Va. If twin disasters had struck, say, Las Vegas and San Francisco yesterday, we’d be knee-deep in the blasphemous theodicies of John Piper and Pat Robertson as they and others like them rushed to link those events to God’s specific intervention to punish the specific sins of specific Other People.
Be safe, Pensacola and Lynchburg. All of you — even you folks at PCC and Liberty — are in our thoughts and prayers. Be strong and rebuild and know that, as always, these disasters were not acts of God sent to punish you for your sins.
• The next story on the news last night was that I won’t be getting a raise any time soon. The Republican minority in the U.S. Senate prevented a vote on the matter because preventing votes is their idea of democracy and because screwing over workers is their idea of celebrating May Day.
That’s bad news for me because the proposed new federal minimum wage of $10.10/hour is more than my employer is paying me now. And it’s disastrous news for my employer — a massive chain of home-improvement stores — because tens of millions of their customers also won’t be getting a raise. Those would-be customers thus will keep deferring those home-improvement projects they’ve always wanted to get to some day, and instead of selling them all the things they need for those projects, we’ll just sell them another roll of duct-tape. (The smaller, $2.70 roll, not the giant, $8.28 roll. That’s for rich people like U.S. senators — you think I’m made of money?)
• Wage-earners making less than $10.10/hour aren’t the only ones deferring maintenance and other projects. Congress is doing a lot of that too, cutting taxes and cutting spending and budgeting little more for infrastructure than that small roll of duct tape. That short-sighted bet isn’t working out too well.
• Remember that joke about Christian ethics being little more than a scheme to find loopholes in the Sermon on the Mount? Yeah, that. Here’s Al Mohler — the guy who chased Glen Stassen out of Southern Seminary — writing for CNN about “Why Christians should support the death penalty.” Mohler’s cross doesn’t stand for Jesus, it stands for state-sponsored execution, because the Bible.
Such a courageous, innovative stand — a Southern American white man endorsing execution. Unprecedented.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that Al Mohler is a bad person because he supports the death penalty. That would be wrong to suggest and I certainly wouldn’t want to give that impression. What I’m saying, rather, is that Al Mohler supports the death penalty because he’s a bad person.
If you think that’s less charitable than saying that Mohler really finds his own argument convincing, then you haven’t looked at his argument.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, “This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist”
The problem with Cliven Bundy isn’t that he is a racist but that he is an oafish racist. He invokes the crudest stereotypes, like cotton picking. This makes white people feel bad. The elegant racist knows how to injure non-white people while never summoning the specter of white guilt. Elegant racism requires plausible deniability, as when Reagan just happened to stumble into the Neshoba County fair and mention state’s rights. Oafish racism leaves no escape hatch, as when Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond’s singularly segregationist candidacy.
Elegant racism is invisible, supple, and enduring. It disguises itself in the national vocabulary, avoids epithets and didacticism. Grace is the singular marker of elegant racism. One should never underestimate the touch needed to, say, injure the voting rights of black people without ever saying their names. Elegant racism lives at the border of white shame. Elegant racism was the poll tax. Elegant racism is voter-ID laws.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” John Roberts elegantly wrote. Liberals have yet to come up with a credible retort. That is because the theories of John Roberts are prettier than the theories of most liberals. But more, it is because liberals do not understand that America has never discriminated on the basis of race (which does not exist) but on the basis of racism (which most certainly does). … Ahistorical liberals — like most Americans — still believe that race invented racism, when in fact the reverse is true.
• The white evangelical culture warriors are pushing — and pushing hard — to turn their subculture into one that is as reflexively, unthinkingly anti-contraception as it is anti-feminist. Another recent example: A writer for the right-wing culture-war click factory, The Christian Post, asks “Why Aren’t Evangelicals Talking About Natural Family Planning?”
OK, I’ll bite. Here I am as an evangelical talking about natural family planning: It doesn’t work. You know what they call people who use NFP? Parents.
Oh, but it does work, proponents say, just so long as you’re intensely scrupulous about tracking temperatures and viscosities and schedules, using lots of charts, diagrams, calendars and fertility journals just as God ordained. Do all of that carefully and correctly, they say, and NFP is more effective than other methods of birth control. Whether or not that claim is true, the fact that these folks are making it completely undermines, contradicts and exposes as bullshit their entire argument against contraception — which is that it arrogantly interferes with God’s providence.
They are coming for your birth control. And they’ll just keep lying until they’ve taken it away.
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