Since 1944, Gallup has polled Americans on their belief in God. Up until 2011, at least 90% of people in the US were believers. Since then, the number has dropped and it’s now at its lowest low since the survey began. According to the latest poll results, released today, 81% of American adults believe in God. No word though on how many Gods believe in America. From Gallup:
Belief in God has fallen the most in recent years among young adults and people on the left of the political spectrum (liberals and Democrats). These groups show drops of 10 or more percentage points comparing the 2022 figures to an average of the 2013-2017 polls[…]
The groups with the largest declines are also the groups that are currently least likely to believe in God, including liberals (62%), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%). Belief in God is highest among political conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%), reflecting that religiosity is a major determinant of political divisions in the U.S[…]
A follow-up question in the survey probed further into what Americans’ belief in God entails. Specifically, the question asked whether God hears prayers and whether God intervenes when people pray.
About half of those who believe in God — equal to 42% of all Americans — say God hears prayers and can intervene on a person’s behalf. Meanwhile, 28% of all Americans say God hears prayers but cannot intervene, while 11% think God does neither.
Wow, just holy shit wow! People need to read and understand the movement going on and how deeply they have worked themselves both into the Republican party and into the power levels of government. Shit we are so close to this minority of religious zealots taking over the country while the majority sleeps unaware. I just posted about Egypt which was a secular country until an authoritarian leader took over and used religion to stomp out any culture advances and to advance their conservative agenda of returning to a tradition where only they had power. It happened in Russia where democracy got started and the culture was advancing and opening up, only to have an authoritarian take over and use religion to push everything back to a time when he / they had power over the population. We are in danger of not just regressing but becoming an active theocracy where all people will be forced to live under the doctrine and dictates of a religion regardless of if you believe it. You will pay taxes / tithes regardless. Your private life will be scrutinized to make sure you are following the dictates of the church doctrines. Welcome to the Handmaidens tale. Hugs
Lauren Boebert prayed for Biden’s death — and that’s not even close to the craziest item on the GOP wish list
At the tail end of last week, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado took the stage at the Charis Christian Center’s Family Camp Meeting. The event claims that, “you will hear God’s Word shared through speakers who have proven God’s Word,” and follows the speakers’ list with Acts 2:17-18:
And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.
The apocalyptic context notwithstanding, Boebert’s talk made quite a splash because of her invocation of Psalm 109:8 in the context of praying for President Biden — “May his days be few and another take his office” — before laughing at the cheers of the crowd. This is certainly not a new use of that text by the GOP — Sen. David Perdue of Georgia invoked it against Obama in 2016, and it became an anti-Obama slogan featured on bumper stickers. With the passage divorced from its full context, people can laugh — but Psalm 109 is a war psalm, calling for the death of the man in question, with 109:9 reading “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.” And that’s the point: As with so many aspects of contemporary Christian nationalism, give the line people can nod along to, and hold back the violent context. This is a prayer for the death of the president, and it is one we can honestly say has become normal for Republicans to use about Democratic presidents.
Maybe that’s a big enough problem that we should acknowledge it not just as a fringe phenomenon, but as part of the core problem of the contemporary, MAGA-infused GOP.
Georgia candidate Kandiss Taylor called fellow Republican Brian Kemp “Luciferian” and defined the First Amendment as “our right to worship Jesus freely — that’s why we have a country.”
Kandiss Taylor’s failed Republican gubernatorial primary campaign in Georgia was incredibly instructive on where the GOP now stands. Her campaign bus, which literally had “Jesus, Guns, Babies” emblazoned on the side, was just the most overt aspect of her Christian nationalist campaign. She told followers to pray for good sheriffs and said that corrupt ones would be executed for treason, strongly implying her belief in the extremist “constitutional sheriff” doctrine, which holds sheriffs are arbiters of what the law is in their counties, not enforcers of it. She said at one campaign rally, “We’re gonna do a political rally and we’re gonna honor Jesus. They’re not gonna tell us ‘separation of church and state.’ We are the church! We run this state!” — an aggressively Christian nationalist idea. Taylor called Gov. Brian Kemp’s administration a “Luciferian regime,” said that as governor she would release an executive order against the “Satanic elites,” and vowed to tear down the “Satanic” Georgia Guidestones.
Taylor even championed Native genocide, saying, “The First Amendment right, which is our right to worship Jesus freely — that’s why we have a country. That’s why we have Georgia. That’s why we had our Founding Fathers come over here and destroy American Indians’ homes and their land. They took it.” And, of course, she champions the Big Lie, saying on Twitter, “We are in a spiritual war … it’s God versus Satan. If GA goes down, if we let them steal the election from us .. we’re gonna steal it back if we have to.” That carried over to her own loss — despite losing the primary by 70 points, she refused to concede.
We might well ask: So what? Taylor was defeated by a staggering margin, as were numerous other Christian nationalist candidates. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, for example, lost his primary race in North Carolina after the Republican establishment turned on him. Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin embraced extremism, appearing with militia members in photo ops, administering oaths to them reserved for the state military, and appeared on video at the America First PAC meeting, saying, “God calls us to pick up the sword and fight, and Christ will reign in the state of Idaho.” She lost by 20 points. The Republican candidate for secretary of state in California, Rachel Hamm, said she decided to run for office because she was a prophetic dreamer, and because her youngest son, “a seer,” had found Jesus in the closet where she prays, holding a scroll telling her to run. She also lost and then claimed fraud, tweeting, “When you’ve fought the good fight, had an honest contest & lost, that’s when you concede. So, in my case, there will be no concession. Stolen elections=stolen Republic.”
And then there those who are still running. Greg Lopez, a GOP gubernatorial candidate in Colorado, believes in a blanket ban on abortion, rejects climate change, has said that the “educational system has now been converted into state indoctrination centers” and is a proponent of the Big Lie. He appeared, alongside a range of conspiracy theorists and far right figures, at the Western Conservative Summit at the beginning of the month. And he is not shy about his negative views of the LGBTQ community, a common theme among GOP candidates.
Mark Burns in South Carolina, for example, was an early Trump supporter in 2016. He’s an evangelical minister, a conspiracy theorist and pastor at the Harvest Praise & Worship Center. He’s running for Congress in the state’s 4th congressional district, and his platform reads like a grab bag of right-wing ideas:
Our right to bear arms is INHERENT, given to us by God almighty — NOT by any man;
If we don’t fix these elections NOW, America will be lost. Without open, honest, transparent elections, no other issue matters;
Life begins at conception;
Marriage is defined as between one man and one woman;
Critical Race Theory is Communist, anti-white Racism;
Vaccine and mask mandates are medical tyranny, and have no place in America;
The Pelosi budget opens the door wide open to full-blown communism.
And while these may sound like wild ideas, they’re nothing compared to what Burns says. He has called for reviving the House Un-American Activities Committee — yes, the infamous Red-hunters of the 1940s — to investigate LGBTQ “indoctrination,” which he calls a national security threat, saying that anyone engaged in it (or in gun control) should be tried for treason, and executed. Burns is literally calling for reviving the “lavender scare,” which has a certain evil logic because that, in essence, is where Christian nationalists have settled in the culture wars: anti-trans legislation, anti-LGBTQ rallies and attacks, and pushing to re-criminalize sexual minorities.
One South Carolina candidate literally wants to bring back the anti-LGBTQ persecution of the “lavender scare,” which has a certain logic: That’s where Christian nationalists have landed in the culture wars.
The Jesus part is obvious. The guns have been covered, be it Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano’s links to the apocalyptic Rod of Iron Ministries or the marketing of AR-15-style guns as sacred weapons. But babies may be the most important part of it. Attacks on the LGBTQ community must be understood in the context of right-wing ideas about sexual purity and a full-blown mania for forced birth legislation. Anti-abortion laws, attacks on contraception and attacks on sexual minorities are all part of a Christian nationalist assault on the nation. Movements like Quiverfull, taken from Psalm 127, have a number of political aspects alongside a belief system that shuns birth control and believes God will give them the right number of children. They literally believe that whoever has the most babies wins, and see that as the fundamental political and spiritual battle. One Quiverfull-affiliated author has said:
It is the womb that conceives and nourishes the “godly seed” who will come forth to be the light in the darkness and who will destroy the works of Satan in this world. God is looking for an army. … The womb is a powerful weapon against Satan. Some women fear to bring babies into this evil world, but this is one of the greatest reasons for having children — to be the light in this dark world!
I would also suggest, rather forcefully, that Christian patriarchy and Christian nationalism are linked to the “great replacement” theory, the deeply racist and xenophobic notion that nonwhite people are being brought into Western countries to “replace” white voters, in order to further a specific political agenda, leading to the supposed extinction of white people. As is well understood, this delusional ideology has fueled multiple massacres, including the mass shooting in Buffalo in May and earlier mass shootings in El Paso, Pittsburgh and Christchurch, New Zealand. Forced-birth laws and abortion bans are also part of this perceived demographic war, part and parcel with the spiritual battles Christian nationalists believe they are fighting and the very real stockpiling of arms, association with militia groups and opposition to government. PRRI’s August 2021 survey shows that “great replacement” ideas are growing in evangelical circles, and have only become more mainstream since then.
Religious violence is the bedrock of Christian nationalism, and Christian Nationalism is becoming the bedrock of the contemporary Republican Party. Forced birth laws, anti-LGBTQ legislation and the “great replacement” theory are all forms of violence, and all but certain to fuel the spread of more lethal violence. is violence. “Jesus, Guns and Babies” may seem like a laughable slogan, stripped of context. But it isn’t funny at all.
Read more on Christian nationalism and the far right:
Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others. Follow him on Twitter: @tlecaque.
Two district governor’s offices in Istanbul have banned all LGBTI+ Pride Week events, scrapping what would have marked the 30th anniversary of the celebrations in the megacity.
The Beyoğlu and Kadıköy District Governor’s offices announced a ban on all gatherings in both districts, where Pride Week events have traditionally been held, on Monday, Diken news site reported, citing the Law on Demonstrations and Public Meetings.
The ban will be in effect for a period of one week starting on Tuesday, Diken said.
Istanbul’s gay pride parades, which attracted up to 100,000 people from across the region, have been banned since 2014 , with officials citing security reasons for the ban.
Turkey’s LGBTQ groups accuse the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of waging a “hate campaign” against them, encouraging violence against a vulnerable community.
Turkey has ranked second worst country in the European Union for LGBT people, scoring only above Azerbaijan, according the 2022 “Rainbow Europe” ranking compiled by Brussels-based NGO advocating for LGBT rights, ILGA-Europe.
Last month, Turkish police intervened in a Pride march held at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, briefly detaining at least 70 students participating in the protest, Evrensel newspaper reported.
“If I lost one of my children I’d be pretty devastated, especially in a way that is so senseless and seemingly has no purpose.
“I would just have to say, if I had the opportunity to talk to the people I’d have to say, look, there’s always a plan. I believe God always has a plan. Life is short no matter what it is.
“And certainly, we’re not going to make sense of, you know, a young child being shot and killed way before their life expectancy.” – Texas AG Ken Paxton, speaking on right wing radio.
.@KenPaxtonTX, as the father of Jaime Guttenberg who was murdered in Parkland, FUCK YOU!!! How dare you justify your failures by saying "god has a plan" & “Life is short no matter what.” People like you are the reason, not any plan godly plan.https://t.co/EZaNqaZb7M
We never heard Eve’s testimony about this. Adam readily blames his wife. How do we know she didn’t just whip an apple at Adam’s head because he was being a chauvinist pig, unlike the pigs, who were too busy building homes of straw, sticks & bricks to engage in any kind of sexist behavior?
OPINION: Kari Lake is worried about the impact of drag shows on children but a well-known Valley drag queen in Phoenix says she performed at Lake’s house, in front of Lake’s young daughter.
Count Kari Lake among the outraged over the latest controversy to fire up the far right.
Drag queens, that would be.
It is, Lake assures us, positively indecent that children have attended drag performances.
“They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the Drag Queens,” she said on Friday, on Instagram and Twitter. “They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow. They seek to disarm Americans and militarize our Enemies. Let’s bring back the basics: God, Guns & Glory.”
While we’re at it, let’s also bring in a drag queen who has known Lake for well over two decades.
Rick Stevens is one of the Valley’s best known drag artists, performing for the last 25 years as Barbra Seville at theaters, bars and parties around town — and, he says, at parties held at Kari Lake’s home.
One of those parties, he says, was attended by Lake’s then-elementary school-aged daughter.
So you can imagine that Lake’s social media posts demonizing drag were a stunner.
“She’s friends with drag queens,” he told me. “She’s had her kid in front of a drag queen. I’ve done drag in her home for her friends and family. She’s not threatened by them. She would come to shows constantly. To make me be the bogeyman for political gain it was just too much.”
Stevens, who is supporting Democrat Katie Hobbs for governor, on Friday evening posted pictures of Lake posing with him and another drag performer as well as some of their correspondence from 2015. Similar pictures, dated 2012 and 2014, are posted to Kari Lake’s social media.
The Lake campaign says Lake’s daughter has never attended a drag show.
“Richard’s accusations were full of lies,” she said, in a statement emailed to me. “The event in question was a party at someone else’s house, and the performer was there as a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. It wasn’t a drag show, and the issue we’re talking about isn’t adults attending drag shows, either. The issue is activists sexualizing young children, and that’s got to stop.”
Actually, a man dressing up as a female and entertaining an audience is considered a drag performance.
Drag shows are the latest front in America’s culture wars. It all started earlier this month in Texas (as so many things do) with a Dallas gay bar’s “Drag the Kids to Pride” event, which was billed as “a family friendly drag show.”
While conservative politicians were fairly fainting over what they called the “sexual perversion” of our children, it’s unclear what was giving them the vapors. In the video clip that went viral on social media, prompting all the outrage, the performers were clothed and the dancing didn’t appear overly sexual.
There was a neon sign that was rather risqué and a child was pictured handing a dollar bill to one of the dancers. But tipping a dancer doesn’t seem all that much different from tipping your garden variety street performer.
Regardless, Republican legislators in Arizona immediately swung into action week, vowing to “fight like hell to protect the most innocent from these horrifying and disturbing trends”.
Stevens is horrified and disturbed as well, though for a different reason: Hypocrisy.
He says he met Lake in the late 1990s when she and some of her Fox10 co-workers would come to the 307 Lounge, a downtown Phoenix gay bar that hosted (adult) drag shows featuring Barbra Seville, Ms. Ebony, Pussy Le Hoot and Celia Putty, among others.
“They (Lake and her co-workers) would come down to the 307 Lounge which was about a mile or two from the station and they would hang out,” he said. “She would come to the show pretty regularly. I wouldn’t say every week but it wasn’t uncommon.”
Stevens says he and Lake became friends — “I was sort of her go-to gay person sometimes” for interviews on news stories involving LGBTQ topics.
Stevens says Lake invited him to her central Phoenix home to perform as Marilyn Monroe at her birthday party 10 or 12 years ago and later to do a drag routine at a 2015 baby shower for a fellow news anchor. He says he specifically remembers Lake’s young daughter at one of the performances because she wore glasses and he sympathized, having hated wearing them when he was a child.
Drag shows can run the gamut from raunchy to G-rated, depending on the crowd. While there is no nudity involved, Stevens acknowledged there can be revealing costumes though that wouldn’t happen, he says, at a family event.
“The whole idea that you need to protect kids from drag is just ridiculous because there aren’t a lot of people that do that and there aren’t a lot of shows that cater to families,” he said.
He considers the recent attacks on drag queens a calculated response designed to rouse the right and distract people from the real danger to children.
“Everyone knows what’s going on,” he said. “People needed something else to talk about because the conversation was getting too real about gun control and children being killed in schools so people want to say let’s protect kids from drag queens instead of protecting kids from gun violence.”
As for Lake’s response in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre, she wants to end the tax on ammunition.
But oh, those dangerous drag shows.
Stevens believes Lake’s reincarnation as a warrior for the far right is an act.
“She supported Obama and now I’m here to tell you that she supported drag queens and had her kid in front of drag kids,” he said “So if I can do anything to expose the hypocrisy and if I can do anything to keep someone like that, a few votes away, from power, I’m happy to do that.”
After Kari Lake’s former Drag Queen friend called her out on hypocrisy and posted several photos, Lake issues a statement threatening to sue, and wants to know why the media isn’t focusing on Hunter Biden. pic.twitter.com/0w9H0dSFAL
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 19, 2022
Here’s another drag show Kari Lake posted from in 2014.
Two different protest groups were asked to leave downtown Franklin Saturday after attempting to disrupt the Juneteenth celebration.
Franklin Police said one of the groups consisted of people carrying signs that read “White Lives Matter” and “Stop White Replacement.” They added that another group, who said they were a buffer between festival-goers and the other group, included people who were armed and wearing ballistic vests.
Members of each group were also reportedly handling out pamphlets saying they are protesting because “the anti-white system is committed to our physical genocide” to festival attendees before police arrived.
Authorities asked both groups to leave and they complied. No violence or arrests were reported after Franklin officers intervened.
Aside from the confrontation, there were big smiles for the celebration organized by the Franklin Justice and Equity Coalition.
“It unites people together and you get networking,” Carol Johnson said. “It shows the world that we can come together and unite to do different things.”
More than 100 businesses, food vendors and churches participated in the event.
The Texas Republican Party passed a resolution over the weekend rejecting the 2020 election, calling President Biden the “acting” president, and outlining policy goals that include overturning same-sex marriage and possibly seceding from the United States. CBS News political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns joins anchors Tanya Rivero and Tony Dokoupil with details.
Hello Randy. An incredibly beautiful video. It is just sad that a child that young had to make it. It breaks my heart that a child her age understand people hate her for just existing. Hugs
Lauren Boebert is now demanding more than $33 million for an infrastructure project after voting against the infrastructure bill. Texas Paul gives his thoughts.
Trump’s ‘friend’ dig at Pence was not childish talk but a coded Mafia-style threat, claims Michael Cohen
Trump’s former lawyer ‘decodes’ then-president’s speeches before 6 January riots
Laurie Roberts
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