Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant № 7
Exposing Right-Wing Extremism at the Source
As always, this post, like all Sunlight posts, contains disturbing and offensive material. However, as I said in the very first edition, “I have long believed that sunlight is the best disinfectant: it’s important to highlight the kinds of things that conservatives and right wing pundits are saying about and around the world, not because I want to amplify their bad ideas, but because I want to bring attention to where the dark places are.” How we react to these pieces in an effort to counteract the harm they cause is ultimately what matters.
Sections: ‘I Love Jesus More Than My Trans Child’ / Contraception = Bad / Tom Flanagan on Residential Schools / Rodney Clifton on Residential Schools
I Love My Transgender Child. I Love Jesus More. - Anonymous - The Gospel Coalition
In this piece, a father anonymously describes why he thinks rejecting his transgender child, referred to in the piece as his ‘son,’ is not only the right thing to do, but is actually the loving thing to do. Given the approach, we can almost be sure that his child is, at this moment, his daughter, and not his son. However, I don’t know that, and so I will refer to the child as ‘the child,’ despite the fact that the individual in question is 18 years old.
Throughout the piece, the father acts as if he is helpless, even as his child tells him exactly how they can help him avoid possible suicide:
During one conversation, when we said we couldn’t use his preferred name and pronouns, he said to us, “Then I can’t guarantee I won’t kill myself.” He eventually went to his room, wailing and weeping profusely. My wife and I were also crying, feeling helpless. Certainly, it’d be easier to simply call him by his preferred name and pronouns. Certainly, it’d be easier to celebrate the things he celebrates.
In these moments, it’s hard to remember that the change he’s asking for will harm him not only spiritually but also mentally and physically.
Last year, my son suffered severe depression and suicidal ideation, admitting himself to the ER during Christmas break. It was the bleakest Christmas my family had ever experienced, and those weeks led to months of wondering if I would find my child dead in his room. Our questions persisted: Why can’t we just hold him and make everything better? Does God care? (emphasis added by PT)
These parents are so convinced of their own rightness, that they are simply unwilling to hear their child’s plea. The father continues,
When my son thought we hated him, he didn’t realize our love for Jesus (and for him) is greater than he could imagine.
In Luke 14:26, when Jesus tells his disciples they’d have to “hate” their children, he wasn’t speaking of literal hatred. The Scriptures are replete with God’s good commands to enjoy and sacrificially love our children. Jesus doesn’t contradict this. Instead, he’s emphasizing the degree of the sacrifice you make when you love Jesus. Your love for Jesus can be viewed by your family, even your children, as hatred.
The reality is that my wife and I love our son, and we’ve always wanted to love what he loves because we love him. Yet in this, we couldn’t affirm him. We couldn’t “delight in evil.” We had to “delight in the truth” even if our son felt like our love was actually hatred.
Even when their world was so turned upside down, even when they had reason to reconsider what they believed, to ask questions in the name of loving their child, they chose not to. This closed-mindedness is considered a virtue in many places, conservative Christianity included. Conservative Christians consider it exemplary to stand up against ‘evil,’ however they have defined it, even to the point of turning their back on their own children.
In this case, we have parents who “consider it pure joy [to] face trials of many kinds, because [they] know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” (James 1:2-3) They consider the perseverance of their faith in Christ to be more important than the lives of their children. In their minds, loving Jesus means rejecting their child for who they are: it means disbelieving their child when they share with them about their inner life, and refusing to call their child by the name or pronouns they have requested. It means turning their backs on their child when their child needs their love and support the most. And they call that ‘love.’
The reality here is that some parents, while seemingly torn up inside, have no problems choosing their faith over their children, all while calling it right, good, and just. Adding insult to injury, they have the nerve to say that they are acting in accordance with the Love of God.
If that’s the Love of God, it’s no wonder so many are walking away.
No, Republicans Should Not Support Contraception Programs in 2024 - Michael J New - National Review
In this piece, a Catholic scholar suggests that contraception programs do not reduce teen pregnancies, and should therefore not be included in Republican messaging post-Dobbs. Instead, he suggests, they should rely on Pregnancy Help Centers to spread the message that sex is bad.
Since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, supporters of legal abortion and their allies in the mainstream media have frequently scolded the pro-life movement for not being more supportive of contraception programs. Pro-lifers have wisely realized that greater access to contraception often results in more sexual activity, more unintended pregnancies, and more abortions. The Dobbs decision poses some unique challenges to pro-life elected officials in moderate and liberal parts of the country. However, pro-life candidates would be better off emphasizing the great services offered by the thousands of pro-life pregnancy help centers in this country, instead of supporting failed contraception programs.
The fascinating reality is that Preganancy Help Centers do nothing at all to prevent unwanted pregnancies. They only enter the picture once a pregnancy is discovered, and then only to counsel young women away from abortion. In other words, the proposed solution isn’t a solution at all.
Grave Error: Correcting the False Narrative of Canada’s “Missing Children” [sic] - Tom Flanagan - C2C Journal
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Tom Flanagan, a University of Calgary economist and advisor to former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. While he made a career peddling falsehoods on cable television in the service of his political bosses, he has since turned his attention to ‘debunking’ what he calls the accepted narrative about Indigenous residential schools in Canada. Claiming that “the entire narrative is largely if not completely false,” Flanagan sets out to show how Indigenous people in Canada have been pulling the wool over the eyes of white Canadians. Largely a promotion of his new edited collection of essays carrying the same title as his C2C post, Flanagan offers a sneak peek of an essay by Frances Widdowson, an academic who was fired from her position at Mount Royal University in part because she claimed that residential schools were good for Indigenous children. Widdowson apparently claims that
the legend [sic] of murdered children and unmarked graves was spread by defrocked United Church minister Kevin Annett before it popped up again at Kamloops. Rubenstein and collaborators examine the evidence proffered in support of unmarked graves, such as the results of GPR, and find there is nothing – repeat nothing – there. One author, who published anonymously because of his fear of retaliation, shows how the GPR results at Kamloops probably are radar reflections of buried tile that was part of the school’s sewage disposal system.
If we are to believe Widdowson and Flanagan, the unmarked graves that were found in Kamloops were nothing more than tile from the school’s sewage system.
Flanagan continues, suggesting that the ‘false narrative’ of unmarked graves came about as the result of a counting error during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a process decried by Flanagan as ‘illegitimate.’ He says,
The truth is that there are no “missing children.” The fate of some children may have been forgotten with the passage of generations – forgotten by their own families, that is. But “forgotten” is not the same as “missing.” The myth of missing students arose from a failure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s researchers to cross-reference the vast number of historical documents about residential schools and the children who attended them. This documentation exists, but the Commissioners did not avail themselves of it.
Flanagan and his ilk, which includes high profile members of the media like National Post columnist Jonathan Kay, are not going to stop their racist attacks on the memories of Indigenous people who lost more than their lives at the hands of white European settlers. In my view, it’s a good idea to know what arguments they’re peddling, so that those of us who care about the survival and thriving of Indigenous people who live in Canadian territory can meet them head-on with the facts.
What is Missing From the Missing Children’s Story at Indian Residential Schools? - Rodney Clifton - Frontier Centre for Public Affairs
In this essay, Clifton asks a number of questions that he considers to be obvious questions, and expresses frustration that the public narrative on the horrors of the I***an Residential Schools doesn’t match up with his own idyllic understanding of the system as peaceful, church-run organizations that provided nothing but quality education to disadvantaged and ungrateful I***ans.
His third question shows a naïvete about the system that would be cute if it weren’t so damagingly stupid. He asks,
… It is inconceivable that Indigenous employees would take part in, or listen to accounts of, the murder of children without reporting this information to authorities, especially when some of the children would likely be relatives or the children of friends. Surprisingly, nothing is said in the TRC Report about Indigenous (or non-Indigenous) residential school employees reporting the murder of any children to either authorities or the commission.
He suggests that the fact that terrible acts were not reported deems Indigenous accusations unreliable in several other questions as well. But the idea that an Indigenous person had any standing with law enforcement at the time is laughable - the original purpose of the Northwest Mounted Police, which became Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was to ‘keep the I***ans in line.’ Even now in the third decade of the 21st century Indigenous people are massively overrepresented in Canada’s prison systems.
The authorities were never there to entertain Indigenous complaints of abuse at the hands of white people. They were there to ensure that Indigenous people took their abuse without complaining, labelling them drunks and child abusers whenever they ‘got out of line,’ sending them to prison.
Like Flanagan above, Clifton shows a deep lack of understanding of the role that the power of colonization by Empire and Dominion played in subjugating Indigenous people, all with intent of exterminating the Indigenous way of life.
I share these pieces because it is important that right-wing commentators be called out for the false prophets and fanatical liars that they are. There is no left wing plot to force authoritarian communism on the American (or Canadian) public. There is, however, a growing stable of increasingly unhinged right wing rants that don’t offer anything to the conversation, but instead look to utterly destroy those who disagree with them. And as those rants find themselves in mainstream publications, the Overton Window shifts even further to the right.