Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant № 2
Content Warning: Right Wingers Saying the Quiet Parts Out Loud
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. While these ideas may make sense to some people, I hope that folks will take a critical lens to what they read in pieces like this, just as they do any other piece. What worries me most about the ideas in pieces like these is that they are often demonstrably false, usually gross misinterpretations of decidedly democratic, and frequently scientifically-informed perspectives.
It should go without saying, but I do not support any of the views held by any of the individuals whose work I am sharing below. They are abhorrent, and, in my view, should be roundly condemned. They should not, however, be censored or scrubbed from the internet.
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The Rise of the Single Woke (and Young, Democratic) Female - Joel Kotkin - Real Clear Investigations
The Christian right has become emboldened lately to say the quiet parts out loud. Whether it’s their racism, or, in this case, their misogyny, it seems they can’t help themselves any longer. This piece, written by one of the same individuals that I featured last time, though this time for a different publication, was brought to my attention by this tweet:
The rest of his tweet thread is as follows:
Need I say any more?
School Establishment Clause Act - Shane Jett, Senator, State of Oklahoma
An Oklahoma Senator, Shane Jett, has introduced a bill to the State House that makes strange claims about what constitutes ‘secular religion’ vs. the Christian faith. In short, Jett claims that all forms of morality that he opposes are actually a form of ideological secular religion that the state is inappropriately imposing on the citizens of Oklahoma, and especially on the children.
His definition of Secular Humanism:
“Secular humanism” means a faith-based worldview that is also referred to as postmodern-western-individualistic moral relativism, expressive individualism, or antitheism and is often the mirror opposite of theism. The term refers to a religion that worships man as the source of all knowledge and truth. The term includes a belief system that is centered on the unproven assumptions that there are no moral absolutes and no one moral doctrine should be used as the superior basis for law and policy, except for the religious doctrines of secular humanism. The term includes a series of unproven faith-based assumptions and naked assertions that suggest that morality and truth are man-made conventions and that at the heart of liberty is man’s ability to define his own meaning of the universe. The term refers to a religion that tends to promote licentiousness and to justify practices that are inconsistent with the peace and safety of the state. The term refers to the belief that man is merely a bundle of chemicals, animated pieces of meat, or accidental particles, that nature is all there is, and that there is nothing after death. Nonsecular self-asserted sex-based identity narratives and sexual orientation orthodoxy are doctrines that are inseparably linked to secular humanism. The term includes but is not limited to a religion that has many different denominational sects and is expressed in widely varying ways;
And Sexual Orientation:
“Sexual orientation” means a person’s sexual identity or self-identification as homosexual, lesbian, or transgender. The term means a mythology, dogma, doctrine, ideology, or orthodoxy that is inseparably linked to the religion of secular humanism. The term includes non-secular self-asserted sex-based identity narratives that are often predicated on a series of unproven faith-based assumptions and naked assertions that are implicitly religious and have a tendency to erode community standards of decency and promote licentiousness. The term may be used interchangeably with gender identity, given that they are both faith-based sexual commentaries on morality that come from secular humanism;
The far-right Christian fascists are on the move, and without shame!
Survivors or thrivers? Questioning residential school testimonies - Hymie Rubenstein - Western Standard
This piece is among the most offensive I've read in a long time. However, these thoughts are finding publishable homes because they are more common than the rest of us might think.
Thousands of true survivors of genocide, mainly European Jews, were physically persecuted by the Nazis or their collaborators in enclosed ghettos, sealed concentration camps, and forced labor brigades, barely escaping physical execution in the process. Conversely, there is not a single authenticated case of an IRS student who was murdered while attending one of these schools.
This libel against the six million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945 also denigrates the sacrifices made by compassionate Christian teachers, religious leaders, and other school personnel who devoted years of service trying to enhance the life chances of their young charges, thousands of whom benefited from their residential school experience to become productive and influential figures in Canadian society and role models for their people.
These “complex truths” were never revealed because the Commission was deliberately preoccupied with the alleged harms and little else.
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.