Texas GOP Should be Careful What They Wish For

The Republican Party of Texas’ 2022 platform calls for special privilege for Christians and demands that Christian prayers, Bible reading and the Ten Commandments be returned to public schools. Aside from the fact that the same folks who claim to be originalists venerating the U.S. Constitution don’t seem to understand either Article VI or the First Amendment which make it quite clear that this nation is secular. There is a great reason with historical examples of why they should be happy it's secular.

Let’s start with our 13 original colonies. As the Church of England was striving to establish a single, uniform religion across the kingdom, colonial America was divided, each of the colonies being dominated by their own brand of Christianity. Anglicans, who conformed to the Church of England, populated Virginia. Massachusetts was home to the Puritans.  Pennsylvania was ruled by and filled with Quakers.  Baptists ran Rhode Island.  Roman Catholics had Maryland. From Puritan Boston’s earliest days, Catholics often referred to as “Papists” were banned from the colony, along with other non-Puritans. Four Quakers were hanged in Boston between 1659 and 1661 for persistently returning to the city to stand up for their beliefs. Anglican Virginia was the scene of notorious acts of religious persecution against Baptists and Presbyterians.  In 1771, a local Virginia sheriff dragged a Baptist preacher from the stage at his parish and beat him to the ground outside, where he was also horsewhipped.  In 1778, a pair of Baptist ministers were conducting services at the Mill Swamp Baptist Church in Portsmouth, Virginia where a gang of men rushed the stage and grabbed them, took the ministers to the nearby Nansemond River swamp, then dunked and held their heads in the mud until they nearly drowning them.

In the 1830s and 1840s, a wave of anti-Catholic violence broke out in the Northeast and elsewhere, mostly directed at recent Irish immigrants.

The Mormons were chased out of New York, then Ohio, then Missouri. A few years after settling in area of Illinois they named Nauvoo an anti-Mormon mob attacked the settlement on June 27, 1844 and burned it to the ground. They also invaded the jail cells where Smith and his brother were being held “morals” charges, and executed them.

Between 1933 and 1939, the period of the Great Depression, anti-Semitic fervor reached new heights in areas such as New York and Boston, Jews were violently attacked. Assaults, propaganda and intimidation were mostly carried out by special societies, like the Ku Klux Klan.

Televangelist John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, which boasts of 22,000 active members, once claimed the Roman Catholic Church was the “great whore of Revelation,” a “false cult system” and the “anti-Christ.”

Temple Beth-El, in San Antonio canceled Shabbat services in-person and online last Saturday, July 9, due to security concerns presented by the local FBI office regarding threats to the safety of San Antonio synagogues. Anti-Semitic flyers appeared on residents' lawns in Alamo Heights and Helotes in February. The flyers have been tied to multiple anti-Semitic and neo-nazi groups.

The various Christian sects can’t even agree on the contents of the Ten Commandments let alone a single bible version.

Republicans who say they want a Christian nation might want to re-think that as President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are both Catholics as are six of the nine Supreme Court Justices: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. So all those apostate Protestants here in Texas might just find they’re not so happy to have the Papists in control.

Are We Terrorists or Christians?

In 2001 the entire country was up in arms after the attack on 9/11 that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. Thousands of people, rich and poor, teenagers and 30 somethings volunteered to join our military and risk their lives in order to take the battle to the terrorists.

This week the Congressional Budget Office reported that the Senate healthcare bill will cause 22 million Americans to lose their health insurance. We know from studies done after the release of the similar House bill which causes 23 million to lose their insurance that between 10,000 and 30,000 of those folks will then die unnecessarily.

Even taking the low number that’s more than three times as many people dying every year than who died in the 9/11 attack. We went to war over that attack. We spent trillions of dollars to fight that war on the basis of preventing another attack. Yet now, 16 years later, our elected leaders are willing to allow 10,000 mostly poor people to die every year in order to give rich people a tax break. Not only that but thousands more will go bankrupt, losing their homes and everything they’ve ever worked for.

How are we any better than the terrorists if we lie down and take it when the Donald Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress deny children healthcare simply because their parents are too poor to pay for it? How are we better than the terrorists if we accept that grandmothers will be turned out of the nursing homes that provide the medical care they need because their families don’t have the resources to pay for it? How are we any better than the terrorists if we continue to allow sick people to suffer and die to save a few dollars on our taxes?

I frequently hear claims that this is a Christian nation most often by some Republican elected official. If you believe that, how to you reconcile that with denying hardworking people and their families life saving healthcare? I can’t make that connection because the nuns who taught me at St. Lawrence the Martyr and the brothers who taught me at Archbishop Rummel made it very clear that “when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!"

The majority of Americans don’t want what John Cornyn wants to pass of on us. We disagree with Ted Cruz that the bill isn’t tough enough. Most Americans want something better than the Affordable Care Act not something worse. There is a better replacement available that most Americans do support. The replacement is called Medicare for All, or single payer. Medicare could be everyone’s health insurance plan whether a new born or a great-grandmother, sick or healthy, rich or poor. It wouldn’t matter if got cancer after the company you worked for went out of business or moved the factory to China because your health insurance wouldn’t be attached to your employer. You’d never be in the situation where you or your child got sick when you didn’t have insurance.

If America is really a Christian nation shouldn’t we start acting like one?

Response to letter claiming that our President is at war with religion

Dale Wehrle’s letter History and God is so full of half truths and outright fabrications that he out to take up fiction writing for a living.

In his first paragraph Wehrle claims that the “…Supreme Court has ruled it illegal to pray in school or mention God or Christianity in commencement addresses.” The fact is that the Supreme Court has said nothing of the sort, what they have said is that representatives of government meaning elected officials and those on government payrolls like superintendents, principals and teachers may not, in their official capacity, offer prayer as part of a commencement address or before the assembled student body.

Wehrle’s next fabrication is, “Our current president went on record to proclaim, ‘We are no longer a Christian nation!” All you have to do is look it up on Factcheck.org, a non-partisan organization, to learn that the real quote is “We are no longer ‘just’ a Christian nation, but a nation of many other faiths as well.”

I take personal exception to Wehrle’s last paragraph in which he refers to Hitler having overrun most of Europe “He appeared unstoppable, except for divine providence.” I know that it was the blood and sacrifice of WWII combat veterans like my three brothers and their buddies which drove Hitler’s troops back at the Battle of the Bulge.

We should all take heed of Sinclair Lewis’ prescient remark, “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”