• Last Wednesday had to be a really strange day at the right-wing, MAGA-White-Christian “ministry” My Faith Votes.
On the one hand, the group was celebrating the culmination of all of its efforts with the victory of the authoritarian, patriarchal, great-replacement-theory ethnic-cleansing agenda it was created to promote. This was the day they had been waiting for and working toward ever since the group was founded.
On the other hand, the CEO of My Faith Votes, was arrested and charged with eight counts of possessing child pornography.
What a strange, ironic twist that the leader of a Q-Anon-adjacent Christian nationalist advocacy group should be found to have “a hard drive with digital pornographic images of minors under 14 years of age” hidden in his office.
Wait, is that ironic? Or is it just predictable? I always get those confused.
• The right-wing click-bait Weekly World News for White Christians site Christian Post is still culture-warring like Pat Buchanan in 1992: “Easier for students to come out as gay than Christian, Evangelical group says.”
This claim isn’t even supported by anything as squishy as a poll or survey. Turns out it’s just One Guy’s Opinion, a man named David Smyth.
To be fair, I suspect Smyth is right. It almost certainly is easier for your classmates to hear you say “I like dudes” than it is for them to hear you say “I hate you and seek to leverage the full power of the government to force you to live as I see fit.”
The kicker here is that this is a story from Northern Ireland. Smyth does not seem prone to the kind of self-reflection that might make a person wonder “Why is that?” I mean, just consider this in terms of body count. Christians, explicitly and directly acting on behalf of their preferred form of Christianity, have killed or oppressed people for generations there in Northern Ireland. Hearing a classmate tell you they enthusiastically align with all of that might well be a bit off-putting. On the other hand, hearing a classmate tell you that they’re gay doesn’t align them with anything directly threatening, lethal, or odious.
Both Smyth and he Christian Post are dimly aware that they are regarded as more threatening and hostile than any LGBT person. And yet their only response to this realization is to double-down on hating Teh Gay.
• The curmudgeonly Texan rmj of Adventus blog is responding to last week’s election by brushing up on his Niebuhr. Seems appropriate.
I’ll just note, again, that Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer” could just as accurately be called the “Wisdom Prayer” and/or the “Courage Prayer.” And maybe that last one is where we need to put more of our focus just now.
• Undine brings us the story of Helena Scheuberin, who demonstrated the courage to change the things she could: “The Witches of Innsbruck Strike Back.”
To be clear, Helena was not a witch — and was not, as accused, the leader of a coven of Austrian witches in the 1480s. She was, rather, a whip-smart, defiant Christian who argued that belief in witchcraft was a foolish superstition and that the witch-sniffing monk who had come to her city to stir up an inquisition was, himself, a dangerous heretic.
• The title for this post comes from the lyrics to a brand new song from 2024, “Lola,” by The Kinks.
I’ve seen some people claim that this song is not new — that it’s actually more than 50 years old.
But that can’t be right because I’ve been assured that gender was strictly binary until just a few years ago when Kamala Harris and “woke elites” began imposing it on our children in order to be trendy. And a majority of American voters have affirmed this view of history.
So whenever anyone tries to tell you that “Lola” was a hit song back in 1970, and that even then the story it tells was nothing suddenly new, you just ask them why they hate America.
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