Looking at photos, I’m not sure why the Lord’s Supper would occur to people. I’ve seen or seen photos of all the Masters’s artworks of the Last Supper, and this doesn’t look like any of those. I don’t know why someone would choose to pick this fight, but there are plenty of people complaining. I wonder how many of them have seen the artworks, and also, even how many of them actually watched the performance, which was not, as I understand what I read, at all about the Lord’s Supper, but was about French art. Hmm. “Weird” is a fine term. Also I know I love Strangely Blogged!
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Some conservatives are pushing back on claims that JD Vance and Donald Trump and maybe a lot of other Republicans are “weird”–but I’m sorry, it is what it is. I get that Republicans have put a lot of stock in saying they represent “Real America (TM)” and the cosmopolitan Big City Lefty Liberal Arugula-Eaters with Their Fancy Brown Mustard and Priuses and pronouns are oddball hippie Comsymps or whatever, But right off the bat, deciding lettuce, Grey Poupon and parts of speech are weird–is weird.
Being really mad at the Olympics because you were told Christianity was being insulted when the opening show had nothing to do with Christianity and demanding others agree with you–is weird.
Smashing coffee makers or shooting cases of Bud Lite because a talk show host told you to be mad is weird.
Pretending to be a party of small government but wanting to track women’s menses, stop them from travelling, or wanting to take inventory of people’s pee parts before they can use a public restroom, is weird.
Wanting women to carry dead fetuses is weird, and ghoulish. (snip-More)
A complete Christian take over if the US and an attempt to turn society back to 1850s mentality with a 1950s society. And if tRump wins, we all well have to start attending the hate church nearest us. The women in the back, on one side, black people in the back on the other, and white men in front to show their privilege. After church while the men relax the women and girls will be cooking meals. The gays will be converted in camps and if they still have the demon gays, the LGBTQ+, they will be removed from society. Hugs. Scottie
Heritage Foundation leader has long received spiritual guidance from group and his policy goals align with its teachings
Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president and the architect of Project 2025, the conservative thinktank’s road map for a second Trump presidency, has close ties and receives regular spiritual guidance from an Opus Dei-led center in Washington DC, a hub of activity for the radical and secretive Catholic group.
Roberts acknowledged in a speech last September that – for years – he has visited the Catholic Information Center, a K Street institution headed by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the archdiocese of Washington, on a weekly basis for mass and “formation”, or religious guidance. Opus Dei also organizes monthly retreats at the CIC.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, speaks at an event on 12 April 2023. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
In the speech – which he delivered at the CIC and was recorded and is available online – Roberts spoke candidly about his strategy for achieving extreme policy goals that he supports but are out of step with the views of a majority of Americans.
Outlawing birth control is the “hardest” political battle facing conservatives in the future, the 50-year-old political strategist said, but he urged conservatives to pursue even small legislative victories – what he called “radical incrementalism” – to advance their most rightwing policy objectives.
Kevin Roberts explains ‘radical incrementalism’ to advance rightwing policy objectives – video
Roberts gained notoriety this year as the leading force behind Project 2025, a foundation plan backed by more than 100 conservative groups that seeks to radically upend a broad range of policies if Trump gets elected again, from limiting abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights and dismantling the Department of Education, to ending diversity programs and increasing government support for “fertility awareness” programs, like ovulation tracking and practicing periodic abstinence, instead of more reliable contraception.
But Roberts’ personal ties to Opus Dei and the significance of his affiliation, have received far less attention.
Gareth Gore, the author of a forthcoming book on Opus Dei, called the Catholic organization “a political project shrouded in a veil of spirituality”. The group’s founder, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, saw his followers as part of a “rising militia”, Gore said, who were seeking to “enter battle against the enemies of Christ”.
“Like Project 2025, Opus Dei at its core is a reactionary stand against the progressive drift of society,” Gore said. “For decades now, the organization has thrown its resources at penetrating Washington’s political and legal elite – and finally seems to have succeeded through its close association with men like Kevin Roberts and Leonard Leo.”
Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society executive vice-president, speaks to the media at Trump Tower on 16 November 2016. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP
Leo is a conservative activist who has led the Republican mission to install the rightwing majority in the supreme court and finances many of the groups signed on to Project 2025.
Like Roberts, Leo also has links to the Opus Dei-linked CIC. In a 2022 speech accepting the CIC’s highest honor, the John Paul II New Evangelization award, Leo praised the center while also referring to his political opponents as “vile and amoral current day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who were under the influence of the devil.
Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have been sounding the alarm on Project 2025 to warn voters of what a second Trump administration could do.
“[Trump] and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. We know we have to take this thing seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing?” Harris said this week in her first presidential campaign rally, to laughter. “Read it. It’s 900 pages.”
Trump, for his part, has sought to distance himself from the project, though the people behind it have close ties to the former president, and the policies it envisions often align with Trump’s ideas. Roberts has said he is “good friends” with JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, and Vance has praised Project 2025 as having “some good ideas”. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, also wrote the foreword for Roberts’ forthcoming book, praising the author for articulating a “genuinely new future for conservatism”.
“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote.
JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, speaks at a campaign rally at Radford University on 22 July 2024 in Radford, Virginia. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Opus Dei does not disclose the names of its members. The group’s roots date back to a century ago, when the group was established in Spain in response to a clash between conservative Catholics and anti-Catholic socialism and communism in Spain. Decades later, the group was granted special status by the conservative pope John Paul II, who supported Opus Dei and saw it as a response to the rise of liberation theology in Latin America, a progressive church movement.
Some of Opus Dei’s special rights were revoked in recent years by Pope Francis, who is seen as a more progressive pontiff.
One of the core tenets of Opus Dei is that it does not believe in the traditional separation of church and state. Instead, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, it believes the two ought to have a symbiotic relationship.
“They are secretive, so while they are not [outwardly] part of this [Project 2025] per se, it is not surprising at all that some of their members are part of it. They see this moment in politics – and the possibility of allowing ‘woke ideology’ to win – as fundamentally changing the nature of America, western civilization and Christianity,” Faggioli said.
He added: “Opus Dei is part of [a movement of] US conservative and traditionalist Catholicism that holds a view that the United States is the last bastion of Christendom, so that if the United States goes a certain way, so goes Christianity, and Catholicism.”
Indeed Roberts made it clear earlier this month that he believes the US is at a crossroads, and“in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.
Asked whether it had a view on Roberts’ remarks or Project 2025, a spokesperson for Opus Dei told the Guardian in a statement: “Opus Dei is an institution of the Catholic Church that tries to help people come closer to God in their work and everyday lives. Opus Dei’s aims are purely spiritual and it does not endorse or have any opinion on any political project of any kind.”
Opus Dei is controversial not only in the US. Dozens of women from Argentina and Paraguay filed a complaint to the Vatican over labor exploitation and abuses of power they say they experienced after joining the group at sites in multiple countries. And reporting in Australia gave insight into schools run by Opus Dei, where former students allege their education left them with “psychological damage”.
Roberts’ personal background suggests his ties to Opus Dei are not just limited to the CIC. A school founded by Roberts in Louisiana, called John Paul the Great Academy, considers Opus Dei-founder Escrivá its “patron”.
Josemaría Escrivá, founder of the Catholic group named Opus Dei. Photograph: REUTERS
Roberts was also involved in an Opus Dei-affiliated high school leadership program in Austin, Texas. A website that tracks Opus Dei men’s activities called Where You Are included a profile of the high school program in Austin where Roberts appears to volunteer and “contributes significantly “ to the school’s career and leadership program.
Roberts was featured as a guest at another Opus Dei-linked school, the Camino Schools, in 2023. In introductory remarks before Roberts spoke, the school’s chairman, Bob Rose, praised schools that teach boys and girls they are “different”, they learn differently and are inspired by different things, and where boys are taught by “manly men” who serve as role models.
Roberts’ critics said concerns about his ties to Opus Dei were not connected to his identity or beliefs as a Roman Catholic.
“Kevin Roberts, like all Americans, has a guaranteed freedom to worship or not under our constitution,” said Lisa Graves, co-founder of Court Accountability, a non-partisan group that seeks to combat judicial corruption.” That is not at issue. What is of concern is how some powerful elites, like Roberts, who have failed to persuade the American people to embrace their agenda, seem eager to use the power of the executive branch to impose their personal religious views as binding law on other Americans – by barring abortion, using the government to endorse the rhythm method of contraception, even banning mention of ‘condoms’ in women’s preventative health, as well as assailing the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans.”
Heritage did not respond to a request for comment. The CIC did not respond to a request for comment.
During Roberts’ September 2023 speech, which received little notice at the time but is posted on the center’s YouTube page, Roberts detailed how conservative Catholics and their allies could advance US policy to end access to abortion, same-sex marriage and contraception.
Knowing the unpopularity of banning birth control – a harder political battle to wage than advancing anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage policies – he encouraged an incremental approach to pursuing this long-term goal.
“Even in a politically conservative setting, that can be a very difficult thing to advance,” Roberts told attendees at the CIC event. “A majority of Roman Catholics don’t believe in that teaching, if public opinion surveys are the case. And so it makes it very difficult to advocate for that.”
The faithful should practice the “gift of discernment” to know when to bring it up: “Sometimes the right thing at the right time to the right person isn’t the full teaching of humanity, right? It isn’t the full teaching of contraception. And recognizing that that’s not the time is no way turning into Judas. In fact, it’s being apostolic. And the very definition of the word, which is in modern common parlance, meeting someone where they are.”
In espousing his theory of “radical incrementalism”, or what he called the “enchilada theory”, he said it was critical for conservatives to work first to achieve a small part of a larger policy goal based on what’s politically possible at the moment. Sometimes, he said, having even half an enchilada could be a victory.
On abortion, he noted that Roman Catholics believe “no abortion can be morally justified”, but that even in conservative circles in the US, this is not a majority opinion, and it’s an “even more difficult position to hold” after the Dobbs decision. Using the “same vocabulary of our faith” in the policy arena has a negative effect on electoral outcomes, he said.
Roberts advised listeners not to accept the “narrative framing of the other side” on these issues. He said conservatives who are anti-abortion should stop talking about it the way the left wants them to and instead “talk about the fact that many of them want abortion to be legal until birth”.
Strategies of incrementalism and narrative framing don’t always apply, he added, because sometimes you just have to fight.
“Right now, we have to fight on religious liberty and, in particular, religious liberty as it relates to protecting institutions of faith,” he said. “And that’s not a time for strategic retreat. It’s not a time to be savvy, it’s not a time to be sweet. It’s not a time to develop friendships with the other side. It is a time to take our fist – figuratively, Father Charles – and bust them in the nose because they hate what you and I believe.”
My husband and I have five kids. Four are now adults and we have one still at home. We have raised wrestlers, football players, basketball players, and a softball player. We’ve had a cheerleader and two homecoming kings, but we never expected our last to hate sports and love theater. Let me tell you…it’s a breath of fresh air and I don’t have to take out special insurance riders for concussions and broken collar bones.
Our last kiddo is a theater kid and I love it.
I walked into my daughter’s yearly play performance a couple of days ago and saw a woman smiling at me as I passed. You have to remember that I am in a small town and if people know me, they also know my loud-mouth brand of politics, so I can be polarizing in person. If they know me, they like me or hate me. There’s no in-between.
So when I saw her smiling at me, I smiled back. Whew! She must be friendly. She said “Kamala” as I walked past. I turned back and said, “Kamala?” She responded with, “Yes, we Kam,” and her smile grew even bigger. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard.
Kamala.
That was the Friday night performance. My daughter also had a Saturday matinee. My husband and I sat closer to the stage for this one since we knew where to better see our kid as she sang and danced. As we sat down, a woman behind me said, “Jess!” I turned and she told me how much she appreciated me speaking out on rural issues. She held my hand as she told me how excited she was to hear Kamala would be the nominee. We talked for just a minute and I then turned back to see my husband scrolling Facebook marketplace as we waited for the play to begin…he’s always looking for a deal on an old car or a lawnmower. We need neither.
A couple of minutes passed when a former student (I adore her and her entire family) got my attention. Mrs. Piper! She introduced me to yet another woman who lives in my community and sat next to me nearly breathless in her excitement for the upcoming election. She asked how we could start organizing for 2024. How can we work to elect Crystal Quade as the first woman Governor of Missouri? How can we make sure abortion rights win on Missouri ballots? How can we organize in tiny Northwest Missouri to elect Kamala Harris?
Her eyes were clear and bright. She also held my hand while speaking. She and the other women were exhibiting something I had not seen in a long time…it looked like hope.
Adams County, Illinois.
I was asked to speak to a group of Democrats in Quincy, Illinois this week and I happily accepted. Quincy is a town just over the Mississippi River from Missouri. The landscape looks exactly like the corn and bean fields of Missouri, and it is just across the river, but I was suddenly bestowed with bodily autonomy and the rights of a first-class citizen as soon as I drove east across that muddy river.
“States’ Rights.”
The problem with driving several hours with only minutes to dress for an event? I am consistently dressing next to a toilet — changing out of my leggings or shorts and into a dress. I always hope for a stall with a hook to hang my things so I don’t have to drop my clothes onto a public bathroom floor. And, don’t even ask how I apply makeup while sitting on a toilet. I live a glamorous life, friend 😉
Anyway, I managed the toilet two-step and walked out ready to speak to a few people. The event organizer told me there are usually 50-60 people who attend.
As soon as folks started arriving for the event, I noticed it would be a bigger crowd than they had anticipated. The Adams County Dems had prepared enough food for 90 people — over and above what they hoped to host. They had over 100 show up. The organizer told me it was the biggest event they have had in years. I’d like to say it’s because people were there to hear me, but I know that’s not the case. People showed up because they were excited. They wanted to be around like-minded friends who are excited. They wanted to smile broadly and talk loudly. They wanted to hear others affirm what they felt.
They have hope.
I noticed a woman in a Kamala shirt…it had only been three days since Joe said he was stepping aside. I asked her if she had a Cricut machine in her basement. These folks are moving fast. Excitement.
I sat down at a table to eat my pulled pork sandwich before my talk and organizers from an abortion rights group were at the table already discussing the Plan B kits they send across the border to Missouri. One woman said they put together over 100 kits and sent them to bars in Missouri with a no-pay policy. If you need the kit, just walk in and ask. I was amazed at the work they are doing to help women in another state. My state. The first state to completely ban abortion after Roe fell.
Bless them.
The first speaker was a first-generation Mexican American who also served in the Army. He was fiery. He blew us away with his love of country and patriotism for a country that has not lived up to its potential. He reminded the audience that Democrats are patriots. That we are trying to live up to ideals that will pave the way for all to live freely in our country. He stands in the way of a Trump dictatorship.
I love to hear Dems remind us that the Republicans do not own patriotism or the flag. In fact, the leader of the Republican party is a shameful man who does not stand for American values. The audience came to their feet as he closed his message.
The next speaker was a young woman from rural Missouri. She is only 16, but she came with a speech that made me remember why Republicans want to ban books and ban the teaching of accurate history. She spoke of being a woman in a red state with an abortion ban. “Oh, to be a Woman.” She spoke of women activists and the suffrage movement. She is a woman of color and she spoke of the civil rights movement. She spoke of second-class citizenship and of her ability to see why politicians would want to oppress generations of women. Fear of our vote.
Republicans push fear while we move forward in hope.
And, this is where I should say something. Reader, you know I was in favor of Joe staying in the race, and this was the reason: Every time pundits and consultants spoke of Biden dropping out, they never named Kamala Harris. Her name did not appear on the lists for nomination, and I am not sure they would have ceded the nomination if Biden had not endorsed her as he did. If tens of thousands of us would not have immediately started donating and picking up the torch Joe had passed.
If we had not rallied behind the woman we hope to nominate for the presidency, I think we may have had another nominee and many Democrats would have felt the fracture in our party.
There is no fracture now. There is palpable hope and joy. Eyes are wide and clear and smiles abound. Folks hold my hand to tell me how excited they are to see where the party is going.
Admittedly, there’s a lot of frustration over the Biden administration’s failure to deliver on issues like police reform, voting rights legislation and student loan debt relief. But venting frustration doesn’t equate to disunity.
Over the years, there’s always been a fear that we won’t unite, but in the end, we do. That’s what makes Black America a powerful voting bloc.
A New York Times/Sienna College poll released last November set off alarm bells, finding that 22 percent of Black voters in six battleground states said they would support Trump. However, polls taken in June, before President Biden dropped out of the race, found that Black voters overwhelmingly disapproved of Trump and backed Biden.
And now that Vice President Kamala Harris is poised to become the Democratic nominee, Black voters are elated and even more united. Trump’s small gains with Black voters have declined with Harris as the presumptive nominee.
A narrative about Democrats losing Black men encouraged Trump’s team to do its damnedest to exploit a perceived weakness in our unity. One GOP ploy involved dispatching two Black Republicans, U.S. Reps. Wesley Hunt of Texas and Florida’s Byron Donalds, to persuade Black men at cigar and cognac events to vote for Trump.
(I ran across this on currentstatus.io . Also, Mr. Musk is a bigger ass yet than I already thought he was. Vivian Wilson, on the other hand, seems well adjusted.)
Vivian Wilson is fact-checking own father after billionaire Elon Musk made bigoted comments about her gender.
The billionaire recently attacked gender-affirming care in an interview with conspiracy theorist Jordan Peterson for conservative platform the Daily Wire, claiming that the life-saving treatment “killed” his daughter while repeatedly misgendering her.
Musk said that when his daughter wanted to begin transitioning, he “was essentially tricked into signing documents” before he “had really any understanding of what was going on.” He said that doctors told him his daughter “might commit suicide” if she was prevented from receiving care.
“I lost my son. They call it ‘deadnaming’ for a reason,” Musk said. “The reason it’s called ‘deadnaming’ is because, your son is dead. So my son is dead, killed by the woke mind virus.”
Wilson has since responded to Musk’s assertions on Threads, the rival to his platform Twitter/X, saying that her biological father’s claims are so blatantly false that she’s “just started to find it funny at this point.” “
“Calling me dead on a podcast with JORDAN PETERSON of all people while basically admitting you have zero reading comprehension by saying you were “tricked” into signing documents that you read over multiple times is basically a parody of itself,” she wrote. “Like it’s honestly camp-“
Wilson then debunked some of Musk’s other assertions about her, among them several homophobic stereotypes about her youth, including that she was a fan of musical theatre (she wasn’t) and picking out clothes for Musk to wear (she didn’t). Musk also claimed that Wilson was “born slightly autistic.”
“This entire thing is completely made up and there’s a reason for this. He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness,” Wilson wrote. “Obviously he can’t say that, so I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype f*g-ing along to use at his discretion. I think that says a lot about how he views queer people and children in general.”https://www.threads.net/@vivllainous/post/C91xDGJSUX_/embed/
Wilson, 20, is one of six children (five living) Musk had with his first wife, model Justine Wilson. She filed a petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court in April, 2022 to legally change her name and gender, citing the reason as “Gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
Wilson then shot back at her father’s claims that she is “not a girl,” telling Musk to “go touch some fucking grass.”
“As for if I’m not a woman… sure, Jan. Whatever you say. I’m legally recognized as a woman in the state of California and I don’t concern myself with the opinions of those who are below me,” she wrote. “Obviously Elon can’t say the same because in a ketamine-fueled haze, he’s desperate for attention and validation from an army of degenerate red-pilled incels and pick-mes who are quick to give it to him.”
The conservative blueprint envisions ‘a biblically based’ definition of marriage and wants to protect adoption agencies that only work with Christians
Rebecca McCrayWed 24 Jul 2024 07.00 EDTShare
In 2021, Liz and Gabe Rutan-Ram decided to take the next step toward growing their family and applied to foster a child. After identifying a three-year-old in Florida who they hoped to ultimately adopt, the Rutan-Rams turned back to their home state of Tennessee to start training to become foster parents.
But their plans quickly fell apart when the Christian state-funded foster care placement agency informed them by email that they “only provide adoption services to prospective adoptive families that share our belief system”. The Rutan-Rams, who are Jewish, were out of luck.
“There’s already emotions playing into wanting to be a parent, and then to have us attacked personally just made it that much harder,” Liz Rutan-Ram told the Guardian.
The Rutan-Rams sued the Tennessee department of children’s services, arguing that a state law permitting private agencies to refuse to work with prospective parents on religious grounds violates the Tennessee constitution’s equal protection and religious freedom guarantees. The case will soon go to trial.
The predicament facing the Rutan-Rams could become more common under a second Trump administration. Project 2025, a 900-plus page blueprint for the next Republican administration and the policy brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation, contains an explicitly sympathetic view toward “faith-based adoption agencies” like the one that rejected the Rutan-Rams, who are “under threat from lawsuits” because of the agencies’ religious beliefs.
Project 2025’s Adoption Reform section calls for the passage of legislation to ensure providers “cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage”. It also calls for the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that prohibits discrimination against prospective parents and subsequent amendments made by the Biden administration.
Though Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the project, his campaign’s own 16-page policy agenda echoes many of its goals, and his ties to the plan’s architects are well-established. In Milwaukee last week, the Heritage Foundation’s role in the Republican national convention was on full display, both on welcome banners at the airport and in the millions of dollars invested in the event itself. Following Trump’s announcement of his vice-presidential pick, the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, said he was “good friends” with JD Vance, and effusively declared him “a man who personifies hope for our nation’s future”. Vance has previously said there were “some good ideas” in Project 2025.
Project 2025 is divided into four broad pillars, the first of which is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. A conservative vision of family pervades the document, and the authors call on policymakers “to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family”.
The plan envisions upholding “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. It would remove nondiscrimination roadblocks governing faith-based grant recipients, such as the agency that denied the Rutan-Rams. The authors argue that “heterosexual, intact marriages” provide more stability for children than “all other family forms”. In addition to calling for the passage of the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act, which would allow adoption and foster care agencies to make placement decisions based on their “religious beliefs or moral convictions”, it also calls on Congress to ensure “religious employers” are exempt from nondiscrimination laws and free to make business decisions based on their religious beliefs.
To the Rev Naomi Washington-Leapheart, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and a queer parent, the image of family portrayed by the policy agenda is blatantly exclusionary. The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.
A billboard in Milwaukee, part of a campaign by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, to raise awareness of Project 2025, that ran during the Republican convention. Photograph: Americans United for Separation of Church and State
“The definition of family according to Project 2025 leaves a lot of folk out,” Washington-Leapheart told the Guardian. “This blueprint really delegitimizes the kinds of families that are day in and day out raising children, paying taxes, contributing meaningfully to society.”
The Rutan-Rams have become the face of a campaign led by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who are representing them in their lawsuit, that seeks to shed light on what they call the Christian nationalist goals of Project 2025. As part of the campaign, visitors to the Republican convention last week may have seen billboards reading “You gotta keep ’em separated,” in reference to church and state.
Project 2025’s vision is already law in a number of states. The Rutan-Rams are battling a Tennessee law, modeled after similar laws in at least 10 other states, that permits faith-based foster care and adoption agencies to exclusively work with prospective parents who share their beliefs.
Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and author of a book titled How to End Christian Nationalism, contends that the scale and reach of Project 2025 pose a far greater danger to democracy than a patchwork of state laws.
“What’s different about Project 2025 is the sweeping nature of its plan,” said Tyler. “It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”
The Holston Home for Children in Tennessee, Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
Tyler worries that Project 2025’s deliberate erosion of the separation between church and state, a founding principle embedded in the first amendment to the US constitution, will get a helping hand from the US supreme court, which has handed a series of victories in recent years to Christian activists. She specifically mentioned the 2021 decision in Carson v Makin, which struck down a Maine law that banned the use of public funds for religious schools. It was “an earthquake of a decision that a lot of people didn’t really pay attention to that has really opened the door to government funding of religion”, said Tyler.
The threat of a theocracy doesn’t seem far-fetched to Washington-Leapheart.
“Project 2025 says that religion is a permanent institution that should influence American life,” said Washington-Leapheart. “That alone communicates the kind of arrogant way Christianity is situated as an inevitability. And it’s not. I say that as a Christian person who is firmly grounded in my faith. It is not an inevitable part of my identity, it is a choice I make every day.
and first I was gonna post Calvin and Hobbes, then I was going to post Fur Babies, then Heathcliff, each time talking myself out of posting in favor of continuing to read. I did that, right up until this toon, which I have been enjoying for around a year. It’s got a storyline, and many fun/funny side storylines, and it’s just enjoyable to me. Today’s also is politically oriented, so I decided to break from reading and post it. Then we can discuss, or you can ask me to not post anymore comics, and I will stop. (I won’t stop reading and enjoying it, though!)
Scottie's Playtime 
