As you sow…

I have to confess feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude right now. For years I’ve been watching conservatives pushing themselves into an escalating cycle of dickishness, promoting tribalism, bravado, self-serving hypocrisy, self-righteous bigotry, and disregard (if not outright contempt) for the objective facts. This downwards political spiral was one of the things that led me to stop being so conservative myself: I felt shamed and betrayed by the political philosophy I was raised in, and I left it.

So I’m taking a certain amount of satisfaction right now in seeing Donald Trump running for president as a conservative. As others have pointed out, he has not been a particularly conservative person as far as his past attitudes and behaviors are concerned. But in many ways, he’s the epitome of everything the Republicans have worked so hard to make themselves into. He may not be the hero the GOP wants, but he’s the hero they deserve.

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The true shame of the Confederacy

I happened to flip on the local Christian talk radio briefly during my commute home last night, and heard an interesting conversation. They were talking about South Carolina taking down the Confederate flag from the state capitol, and how goose-bumpy they felt to see history in the making. And then one of the 2 co-hosts made a statement that really caught my attention. It was rush hour, so I didn’t have the opportunity to write it down, but as best I can recall, she said something like this.

“And of course the real shame of the Confederacy was that they used the Bible to justify slavery. God is not mocked.”

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