Texas, climate change, gays, guns, Christians
Salon, Igor Derysh, 21 Jun 2022: New “radical” Texas GOP platform rejects Biden’s win and pushes vote to secede from the U.S., subtitled, “Texas GOP also called to repeal the Voting Rights Act and labeled homosexuality an ‘abnormal lifestyle choice'”
“The Texas GOP doesn’t want to return to the 1950s,” tweeted New York Times columnist James Surowiecki. “It wants to return to the 19th century.”
\
Vox: Rebecca Leber, 21 Jun 2022:
The SEC did a sensible thing on climate change. A right-wing campaign is trying to kill it., subtitled, “Even a Wall Street-endorsed climate rule is facing serious headwinds.”
\
NYT, Charles M. Blow, 22 Jun 2022: The G.O.P. Tries to Build a Gay Ghetto
There is no finality in the battle for civil rights. Wins don’t stay won. They must be defended and can sometimes be reversed.
Republicans may not be able to push people back into the closet, but they can try to re-establish some stigma to prevent them from coming out in the first place and build them — us — cultural gay ghettos if we do.
\
NYT, Peter Manseau guest essay, 23 Jun 2022: The Myth of the ‘Good Guy With a Gun’ Has Religious Roots
Daniel Defense, the Georgia company whose gun enabled the slaughter at Robb Elementary School, presents its corporate identity in explicitly religious terms. At the time of the shooting, the company’s social media presence included an image of a toddler with a rifle in his lap above the text of Proverbs 22:6 (“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it”). For Easter, it posted a photograph of a gun and a cross resting on scriptural passages recounting the Resurrection.
\
NYT, Esau McCaulley guest essay, 10 Jun 2022: What Supporters of Gun Rights Mean When They Talk About ‘Evil’
Christians believe humans do wicked things because there is something within us that is broken.
It seems that Christian politicians who favor fewer restrictions on guns highlight this idea because it limits the responsibility for evil to the individual. We cannot eliminate evil hearts, so we cannot stop mass shootings. It does not matter that America far outpaces other nations in mass shootings; we must have an unexplainable abundance of evil hearts here.
The problem with such thinking isn’t that it is completely false but that it is dangerously inadequate as an account of evil in Christian theology.
[…]
The reason that some Christians cannot bring themselves to support gun law reforms, then, is the same reason some Christians cannot effectively battle racism beyond condemning individual racists. They have a deficient doctrine of sin and evil, limiting it to the individual.