Conservative evangelicals need Trump like an addict needs his 'fix'

Conservative evangelicals willing to hold Trump up as Messiah as long as he gives them their psychological 'fix.'

I said it yesterday and lo and behold here it is.

Evangelical conservatives are doubling and tripling-down in supporting Donald Trump. In spite of all of his bad behaviors, including basic incompetence, racism, and allegations of adultery, religious conservative leaders are continuing to hold up Trump as the new Messiah. They claim that Trump, in spite of all of his problems, is ushering in "pro-family" and "pro-life" policies.

Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who knows he stepped into it earlier this week with his "religious conservatives will give Trump a do-over for his bad behavior"  comments, continued in attempts to soften the blow of hypocrisy.

According to Right Wing Watch:

Perkins said that evangelical faith leaders’ support for Trump is “not unconditional” but that “as long as he continues to be the most pro-life, pro-family president” and “continues to walk the straight and narrow with the right influence,” Perkins and his allies will continue to support his administration.

Perkins's group, FRC, also issued a public prayer for Trump:

“Thanks be to God for giving President Trump a burden to champion religious liberty. May Christians pray for and support the president for the good thing he is doing, even if they cannot approve of his past or present behavior in other respects.”

Not to be outdone, Franklin Graham, fresh from humiliating himself with awful defenses of Trump's behavior, is telling people to pray because Trump is supposedly facing a coup de etat. Franklin is echoing nonsense which shot up then fizzled down in right-wing circles about a secret government group working to overthrow Trump.

'Evangelical says religious right deserting Donald Trump would punish America' & other Thur midday news briefs

Bryan Fischer Says There Is No Reason For The Religious Right To ‘Punish America’ By Turning On Trump For His ‘Reprehensible’ Behavior -  Bryan Fischer becomes the latest religious right figure to show hypocrisy when it comes to Donald Trump. I am so enjoying taking down these receipts. I'm going to need another book to put them all in.

In three years, LGBT Americans have gone from triumph to backlash - This neither surprises nor scares me. Students of history will tell you that after every successful movement for civil rights comes a huge backlash. The key is to strap yourself down and solider on fighting no matter what.

Tolerance takes a hit: Americans less accepting of LGBT people in 2017, survey shows - Another view of the issue just in case the above link is behind a pay wall. Awful headline, though. LGBTQs are not dogs urinating on the good carpet. We don't need "tolerance" or "acceptance." We need fairness and all that we need, including fairness, will be what we will take because they all belong to us in the first place.

Conservative book ‘When Harry Became Sally’ attacks trans people while conveniently leaving them out - Another book attacking the LGBTQ community and like all of the others, it's filled with distortions. 

Nearly 700,000 adults in the US have received gay conversion therapy - And guess how much have worked . . . go ahead. 

Lastly: 

NOW would be a perfect time to remind people that support of Donald Trump is not the only area in which evangelical conservatives have displayed questionable morals. Let's talk about their DECADES-LONG war on the #LGBTQ community via propaganda and junk science.

Just click on here to read and send (even if you have already) my free 2103 online book How They See Us: Unmasking the Religious Right War on Gay America.

Pediatrician isn't here for the anti-LGBTQ religious liberty con game

Daniel Summers, a gay pediatrician, has something to say about the new division of HHS designed to protect healthcare workers who refuse to give certain treatments under the grounds of "religious liberty." He pulls no punches and makes no apologies for his rejection of this idea.

In a piece published by  The Slate , Summers says the following:

If you are a healthcare provider who doesn’t want to treat LGBTQ people or their families, please don’t waste your time and mine applying for a job in my practice.  

  .  .  . Because many people justify their bigotry against gender and sexual minorities in religious terms, this new division is quite alarming news for LGBTQ people. The creation of this division appears to open the door for medical providers to, for example, refuse to provide gender confirmation treatment for trans people, or refuse to treat children with same-sex parents. 

 One attendee at the ceremony announcing this new division was Sara Hellwege, a nurse-midwife who sued in 2014 after being denied a job at a Florida health center. The reason she didn’t get the job? She admitted that she would refuse to prescribe birth control pills because of her religious beliefs—and prescribing birth control pills was part of the job she applied for. 

 She had no business seeking the position in the first place. 

 David Gorski, a surgeon and editor of the website Science-Based Medicine, expressed the views of many medical providers, myself included, when he tweeted that “physicians who refuse to treat certain patients based on their religious beliefs are in the wrong profession and should never have become doctors in the first place.”

  . .   .If you don’t think same-sex couples should be raising children, you won’t be interacting with families in my practice at all. If you’re not willing to discuss PrEP with your gay male patients, and think HIV prevention funding would be better spent on conversion therapy, you won’t be seeing any patients here. If you’re going to ignore the needs of our trans patients or insist on mis-gendering them, we have no opening here for you. And I don’t care at all if you justify any of that with your religion. 

Check out the entire column here.

News brief special - Evangelical conservatives hit with huge backlash over hypocritical support of Donald Trump

Editor's note - What was first a small occasional drip . . . drip and moved to a slow but steady trickle is now a raging flood. Conservative evangelicals, particularly their leadership, are now facing a tremendous backlash for their dogged support of Trump and minimizing of his bad behavior (which includes racism and cheating on his wife with a porn star). It would do the LGBTQ community some good to pay attention to this firestorm and "collect receipts" for the future.  This much deserved backlash probably won't make a dent in the "true believers" crowd who support conservative evangelicals, but you would be surprised how a little sunlight makes the truth more powerful. The truth, in this case being how these folks love to demonize the LGBTQ community, but those attacks like their support of Trump, is rooted in hypocrisy, fear tactics, and un-Christian desires for power. And barring a public "come to Jesus" moment in which they admit their hypocrisy (which probably won't happen), expect them to double-down and even triple-down on their support of Trump. These conservative evangelical leaders are incapable of admitting that they are wrong.



Don Lemon perfectly nails Franklin Graham’s ‘ends justify the means’ moral hypocrisy on Trump - See above video. It means a lot to me to see an openly gay man drag Franklin Graham for his hypocrisy.

Evangelical leader defends ‘mulligan’ remark about Trump, Stormy Daniels - The Family Research Council's Tony Perkins makes a fool of himself.

After Years Of Questioning Obama’s Christianity, Tony Perkins Gives Trump A ‘Mulligan’ On Porn Star Affair - Oh if there were only a way to compare how religious evangelicals leaders dogged Obama (who ran a scandal free, successful administration ) in relation to how they lovingly embrace Trump (who has arguably the worse administration in the history of this country). Oh wait. There is this lovely piece which looks at Tony Perkins's  (the one in the last news brief) attacks on Obama when he was in office.

Former RNC Chair Michael Steele: Trump’s Evangelical Backers Need To ‘Shut The Hell Up’ - Never thought I would agree with Michael Steele, but here we are.

The religious activists on the rise inside Trump's health department - The fruits of their rotten labor Part 1. 

‘Religious freedom’ for adoption discrimination on Georgia Republican’s to-do list - The fruits of some of their rotten labor Part 2.

And the editorial pages have been brutal:

Trump's a true-believing Christian? Tell me, how does that work?

Michael Gerson: The Trump evangelicals have lost their gag reflex

Hypocritical conservative evangelicals shelter themselves from Stormygate

Franklin Graham rails against 'sin of homosexuality' days after justifying Donald Trump's sins

One would think that in light of all the scrutiny paid to the hypocritical support religious evangelicals give Donald Trump, they would be in a position of hiding or at least self-examination.

Not hardly. In spite of admissions that they only support Trump and defend his many bouts of behavior because of the power he gives them, religious evangelical leaders seem to want us to pretend that there nothing wrong with what they are doing.

Case in point is Franklin Graham. Today, he posted the following on his facebook page:

Please bear in mind that only days ago, Graham was giving poor denials to allegations that Trump racially slurred foreign countries or paid off a porn star he had an affair with at the time of present wife's pregnancy.

Finally, when pressed by about past comments he made claiming that America has a "sin problem," Graham said Trump wasn't perfect.

Keep it up, Mr. Franklin. Don't think people neither see nor know what you are doing. Dig that hole and when it gets deep enough, enjoy not being able to get out of it.

'Religious right leader Tony Perkins admits it - evangelicals don't care about Trump's behavior as long as he gives them power' & other Tue midday news briefs

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (first picture) admits that as long as Donald Trump gives the evangelical right power in terms of policy, they will overlook his consistent bad and incompetent behavior and  instead will treat him like the new Messiah (second picture.)

The Family Research Council head says that evangelical conservatives are willing to overlook Trump’s past behavior so long as he delivers for them on policy - So many things to unpack from this article:

1. Without a degree of shame, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council admits that the religious right are willing to overlook Trump's un-Christian behavior if he continues to give them what they want in terms of policy - i.e. the power to control people's lives and divert the direction of this country, less healthcare for women, and an undermining/reversal of the LGBTQ equality and safety. I always knew this. So many others already knew this. However. it's amazing to hear Perkins simply admit that all of the religious right's talk about a "moral crisis" in America over the years was a big fat lie. 

 2. If Perkins is accurate, evangelicals do not like John McCain and, just like Trump, don't view him as a war hero because he got captured. 

3. It's not just that evangelicals will overlook Trump's bad behavior. As shown in the article, they sometimes give justifications & lies about his bad behavior 

 4. The religious right should never get to demonize the LGBTQ community ever again without being strongly and repeatedly reminded of this moment.

Evangelical conservatives surrendered moral authority to Trump. They don't deserve to get it back.- A perfect time to remind folks about last night's post.

Here Are the 2018 GLAAD Media Awards Nominees - Congratulations to all of the nominees, including several of my friends for their nominations in the category of 'Outstanding Blog.' Having been nominated three times and winning one last year, I know how much of a thrill this is. Enjoy it because y'all deserve it. 

Laverne Cox Makes History As Cosmopolitan’s First Transgender Cover Girl - Not bad. Not bad at all.

Evangelical conservatives surrendered moral authority to Trump. They don't deserve to get it back.

Religious conservatives surrendered their moral authority to Trump. They don't deserve to get it back.

Recently, someone in my Sunday school put forth an interesting theory which got a lot of support. She claimed that God may have put Trump in the White House, not as a vouch of support, but to send a message to people about certain interests and concepts.

That may have a ring of truth when one considers how the evangelical right have acted with him in office, i.e. like greedy hogs at a trough constantly eating and not caring about being seen as gluttons. Today is yet another example.

According to this tweet, conservative evangelicals consider Trump's first year as a success.

The Trump administration is "genuinely interested and responsive to the concerns of the evangelical community." @tperkins @TheBrodyFile @CBNNews #POTUS https://t.co/N6ZGqgku2y

— FRC (@FRCdc) January 22, 2018

And why shouldn't they consider him a success for their cause. After all, he has given them unprecedented access and power. He has bowed to their desire for symbolic support, vouched for their ideas that their religion makes them superior, and has partly surrendered secular government agencies and judiciaries to their control.

But they don't seem to understand what they have lost.

The video below shows the many of the gaffes and horrors Trump has committed in his first year. From his awful Muslim ban to the mind-boggling irresponsible comments he made after the Charlottesville tragedy, the gaffes and horrors are many. America needed a loud and visible moral voice to remind us about the goodness of this country because of these gaffes and horrors. We received that moral voice, but it didn't come from the conservative evangelical community. They were too busy either counting the coins Trump threw at them or justifying his unjustifiable acts to receive more.

Bottom line - whenever Trump leaves office, Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, and the rest of that ilk shouldn't have moral authority to criticize folks for scratching their junk in the public, much less criticizing this country's moral climate. And as far as I am concerned, that specifically speaks about the LGBTQ community. Evangelical conservatives no longer have what little moral authority they did hold to call us out. Ever again.