The YouTube video below entitled, ‘He Said It Out Loud’ makes an astounding assertions of a political conversion that has been in the works since the election of Ronald Reagan. While Reagan has been promoted as a great American President in Conservative quaters, he actually oversaw the building and implementation of the nations’s most deliberate and potentially destructive mechanism of the US economy, the Middle Class, economic equality, social equality, religious freedom, and our social safety-net. Regan gave flowery speeches about freedom and American Exceptionalism, but hidden among these seeds of niceties was the invitation to challenge ‘Liberalism’, tolerance, and economic justice with Theocracy, intolerance, and economic injustice. Indeed, he opened the door to insulate White Christian Nationalism with his reliance upon the Evangelicals of the’Christan Moral Majority’, ‘Trickle Down Economic policies’, and reinforcing the use of the criminal justice system to target all groups that are racially and economically disadvantaged.
This was always the objective of Conservatives, to dismantle the social safety net set up by the massive legislation implemented by the FDR and LBJ presidencies. The play allowed for Americans to become complacent in their middled-class status which many attributed to their religious views. Once the Trickle Down Economic polices and the wealth redistribution of tax laws benefitting the wealthiest individuals and corporations were implemented. The newly constructed drivers of in economic market place began to claw back a massive amount of wealth by offshoring industries, jobs and wealth to adversaries like China, Vietnam, and India.
By partnering with the racially Conservative minded Evangelical Christian Church, the Republican Party has become almost totally reliant on this group to hold political power on the state level and in Congress. They were able to effectively gain control of this power in 2010 following the election of Barrack Obama, when in a Census year they secured trifecta control (holding the Governorship, and control of both legislative houses) of state. They then gerrymandered election maps to totally control those legislatures and Congressional delegations even if they won fewer popular votes . (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/redmap-gop-gerrymandering-strategy/)
Since 2010, Conservative Republicans Christian Evangelicals hold complete control of 22 states. In those states voting rights, abortion rights, access to birth control, education funding, access to healthcare, school lunch programs, gun control, freedom to not observe Christianity. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, indeed the term ‘Freedom’, have truly become empty words.
In states dominated by racist religious Conservative lawmakers, women are forced to risk their lives carrying pregnancies to term regardless of the viability of the fetus. If a woman is raped, she is now forced to carry the seed of her rapist to term. A young girl who is molested and impregnated by a male relative, family friend, or neighbor is now deemed not old enough to determine if she wants an abortion, but she is old enough to risk death carrying the pregnancy to term.
States like Texas have even set up ‘Bounties’ where private citizens will now police and sue anyone they suspect helped a woman getting an abortion, even the Uber driver who unknowingly drops a woman off at a clinic. Some states are passing laws where women who get abortions and the doctors who perform them can be sentenced to prison. We’re talking about religious zealots who are stripping away personal freedom of women. Sadly, many of these zealots are women who embrace these steps under the influence of lobotomizing religious beliefs and conspiracy theories.
The invisible driving force behind all these actions is the original racist foundation by which Christianty was initially introduced into the Western Hemisphere and Africa. The motivation since 2010 was the election of Barak Obama as President and the realization that Black and Brown people would outnumber people of European descent in coming decades. So they are more interested in dramatically seeing a major increase in the birth rate of White babies.
Republicans realized that Democrats and minorities did not pay attention to local and state elections. When Ronald Reagan turned to the Evangelical Church with the likes of Jerry Farwell and Pat Robertson, they were able to create a rage against abortion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, gun control, and the minimum wage. They focused on locking in Conservative power on the state level.
An intriguing outcome and downside to the success this reliance on Evangelical Conservatism in the states Republicans control is they no longer feel they need to be responsive to public opinion on public policy. When the Supreme Court, controlled by religious Conservatives, appointed by Republican Presidents and confirmed by a Republican controlled Senate gave the rights to set abortion access to the states, those gerrymandered state legislatures disregarded the majority views of it’s citizens.
The Republican controlled states have implemented laws that ban abortion, much to the dismay of the majority of their citizens. These states have passed laws to protect the ‘Unborn’, while at the same time making it easier to access high powered high capacity guns. Translation, they legislate to protect gun rights but not the lives of living viable children. According to the ‘Gun Violence Archive’, in 2022 6,023 U.S. children 17 years old or younger have been killed or hurt in gunfire this year, surpassing the 5,708 killed or hurt 2021.
Most of these policy decisions are rooted in a revisionist view that America is a Christian Nation and the White Nationalist notion their religious beliefs take precedence over the Constitutional mandate that government be independent of any religion.
https://www.alternet.org/are-they-all-dumb/
“Senator Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) – a potential 2024 presidential contender, during a conversation with Iowa Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann at the 2023 Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition: “What should the, what should the next president do? What is the most immediate actions that the next president can do to stand for religious liberty?” Kaufmann asked Scott.
“We must tell the story of our Constitution that the First Amendment was written to protect the church from the state, not the state, from the church,” Scott replied.
The First Amendment is unequivocal in its language. It states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Scott’s assessment is not rooted in fact, precedent, or the intent of the Constitution’s framers, who were outspoken about their concerns about religion creeping into politics. His suggestion that the president has the power to declare a national religion also completely clashes with basic historical evidence.”
A Reasonable Point of View 