Ian Tuttle:
Over at the Washington Post today, Catherine Rampell has one of the dumber columns you’ll see this month. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Much-dreaded “sharia law,” or something resembling it, may well be coming to the United States.
Just not in the form many Americans expected.
That is, the religiously motivated laws creeping into public policymaking aren’t based on the Koran, and they aren’t coming from mythical hard-line Islamists in, say, Dearborn, Mich. They’re coming from the White House, which wants to make it easier for hard-line Christians to impose their beliefs and practices on the rest of us.
Rampell frames her minimal evidence – Trump’s apparent opposition to the Johnson Amendment, his draft executive order on religious freedom, and Betsy DeVos — in the most sinister language possible: DeVos, for example, speaks in “well-established code for supporting . . . dressed-up creationism.” As her kicker, she cites a Pew Research Center poll that found that about a third of Americans said being a Christian was necessary to be “truly American.”
The notion that allowing a Christian florist to decline participating in same-sex marriage ceremonies is ushering in a new Inquisition demonstrates a misunderstanding of the issue so entire it’s not really worth addressing. But it also seems not to have occurred to Rampell that the Pew research she cites probably undermines her thesis, given that that one-third statistic is historically low; the United States is in the midst of a long-term decline in religiosity, accompanied by a parallel increase in people who self-identify as having no religious affiliation (“Nones”). To the extent that there is any popular support for remaking the country according to the vision of “hard-line Christians” (minimal, at best), it’s waning. Likewise, Rampell seems not to have considered the possibility that it’s her own position — which takes for granted that religiously motivated lawmaking is unacceptable — that is the ahistorical imposition.
But set even that aside. Rampell is young, but she has a few years on me — yet between us, I seem to be the only one with a memory of the 2000s, when this sort of nonsense doom-mongering was standard fare in mainstream publications: George W. Bush was a tool of the “Christian Reconstructionist Movement” (whatever that was), and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were “holy wars” and “new crusades.” Kevin Phillips’ 2006 best seller was titled “American Theocracy.”
I see where Maxine Waters is already calling for trumps impeachment What a thetic old bat she is a typical liberal demacrat and a sore loser just like those idiots at U.C. Berkeley and frankly they all need to leave america for good