Alito’s majority opinion is bereft of both principle and reason. He could have been more concise and lost little nuance by simply writing: ‘The 40ft tall Christian cross is really old and people will get upset if we remove it, so it stays.’
While the “exvangelical” community was designed to help former evangelicals heal from a toxic environment, a subgroup of exvangelicals calling itself the “Magdalene Collective” released a statement that’s been called transphobic and that many see as a replication of the very abusive patterns from which they’d been trying to escape.
Trump’s election was less an aberration than a reflection of changes in the New Right coalition, which brought business elites, evangelicals, and neoconservatives together under the Republican umbrella in the late 1970s.
O’Reilly and Dugard’s interpretation of the gospels in Killing Jesus was motivated by the same politics of resentment that Trump inherited from the Tea Party—a politics of fiscal, ethnic/racial, and religious conservatism.
While TST is not the first Satanic organization to obtain this status, it is the first group that clearly intends to deploy this status in legal challenges. TST’s demands for equal treatment under the law are going to be much harder to dismiss from here on out.
In right-wing circles, theories about cultural Marxism in the era of Trumpism come entangled with other anti-Semitic theories, often arguing that George Soros and a shadowy “globalist” cabal are working to dissolve national borders and sovereignty into a totalitarian-communist “New World Order.”
While the focus of the sentencing memo is on Butina’s connections to organizations like the NRA, the memo also cites her connection to the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event that’s been hosted by The Family since 1953.
In the run up to Easter and the National Day of Prayer, chaplains and guest chaplains around the nation have sowed religious division and discord as they delivered prayers at state legislatures, and now, federal courts are giving them their stamp of approval.