In Obvious and Obviously Horrible News…


From AlterNet

In early 2016, few evangelical leaders were on Team Trump, as they had Ted Cruz and other conservative Christians to choose from in a crowded Republican presidential field. After Donald Trump embarrassed his GOP competition and became the party’s nominee, prominent evangelicals began changing their tune. Some, including a number of outspoken anti-LGBT activists, worked with the Trump campaign on a large evangelical advisory board. After Trump won the presidency with 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, most far-right Christian leaders who hadn’t endorsed him came around. Many were gleeful, and some even pronounced that God had stepped in and handed Trump the job.

That excitement has grown since the election as Trump prepared for and took office, nominating several ultra-conservative Christians for key posts and promptly following through on several of his campaign promises tailored to evangelical voters. Trump had already picked far-right evangelical Mike Pence for vice president. Then he nominated Betsy DeVos, who was raised in a Calvinist community in Michigan, for secretary of education and Seventh-Day Adventist Ben Carson for Housing and Urban Development secretary, and appointed several other conservative Christians to additional top positions in the administration.

Ronnie Floyd, an Arkansas megachurch pastor and former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told the Washington Post that the Trump administration was full of “followers of Christ,” not just DeVos but Health and Human Services Sec. Tom Price, EPA head Scott Pruitt, Energy nominee Rick Perry, Agriculture nominee Sonny Perdue and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

I’m struggling to not just rehost the entire article here. It’s more terrifying shit…

Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University who was the first major evangelical figure to endorse Trump, has said that hundreds of evangelicals are getting lower-level positions in the Trump administration.

On January 31, Trump nominated the ultra-conservative judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. He’s the judge who wrote the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, enabling businesses to refuse to pay for insurance coverage of contraception based on “religious objections.” Gorsuch, who is considered to the right of even the late Antonin Scalia, is seen by conservative Christians as someone they can count on to oppose abortion and expand their ability to legally discriminate against LGBT people via “religious freedom.”

“I thank God that if confirmed, this administration will have delivered on one of its most critical campaign promises—to appoint a judge in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia,” said far-right Christian James Dobson, who served on Trump’s evangelical advisory board.

Don’t make me barf. A judge in the mold of Antonin Scalia? What we need is someone who will be the exact opposite. But we’re not going to get that any time soon. I imagine that, even if Neil Gorsuch isn’t confirmed (and I fully expect him to be), Agent Orange will nominate someone just as bad, if not worse. All we really can do is hunker down for a long number of decades made up of a disgusting Supreme Court, no matter who replaces Antonin Scalia.

This is how the Alternet article ends:

Few would have predicted Trump’s stellar relationship with far-right Christians. But now that he’s won them over, benefited from their political support and amassed a White House featuring many evangelical conservatives, LGBT protections, abortion rights and public school funding are on the line.

I could be broken record right now, talking about how we need to fight, call our representatives, protest, and so on, but… see, I could saying that to convince myself… and I’m doing a terrible job…

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