Not Quite Nostalgia (Easy Pickings)

#familyvalues | #WhatTheyVotedFor

This is a candidate for Freudian Slip of the Year:

The former judge condemned the Washington Post story during a campaign speech in Huntsville, Alabama. Earlier, another fellow Republican, Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, urged Moore to drop out of the race, saying Moore’s explanations had been inadequate.

In a Huntsville gym, Moore assured supporters that the Post story was “a desperate attempt to stop my political campaign” and that the allegations that he was “involved with a minor child are completely unfalse and untrue and for which they will be sued.”

(Associated Press; accent added)

Just sayin’.

Once upon a time, there was this short, angry man touring the daytime talk show circuit, cosplaying a Grand Something of the Kaykaykay, and to be honest when he got all worked up he reminded of a skinny, embittered, ranting garden gnome, and then someone would talk back to him and he would really go off, to the point we could not understand the words coming out of his mouth.

Whenever these good ol’ boys get themselves so worked up as to stop making any sense whatsoever, the beady-eyed joke in a robe, the unbelievable stereotype of what it takes to be a supremacist, finds time for a comeback tour. Or maybe Cartman is more accessible; imagine one of these angry, Southern, white supremacists getting so screechy and incomprehensible that you never realized until that moment the South Park character was actually a stereotype and not parody.

Oh.

Er … ah … well, now you know.

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Image note: Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore responds Wednesday, 27 April 2016, to complaints made in January by various groups protesting his administrative order explaining the legal status of the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Act and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act in Montgomery, Alabama. (Detail of photo by Julie Bennett)

Associated Press. “The Latest: Moore dismisses allegations, says suit to come”. 12 November 2017.

The Aftermath (These Days Later)

#epichatred | #WhatTheyVotedFor

The Baltimore Sun reports:

A year and a half after a city panel recommended that four Confederate-linked monuments be removed or altered, Mayor Catherine Pugh decided Tuesday to take them all down — and then watched as crews worked into early Wednesday to tear them from their pedestals.

“We moved quickly and quietly,” Pugh said. “There was enough grandstanding, enough speeches being made. Get it done.”

Pugh said crews removed the monuments unannounced and under cover of darkness between 11:30 p.m. Tuesday and 5:30 a.m. Wednesday in the hope of avoiding the potential for a violent conflict similar to the one Saturday in Charlottesville, Va.

It seems to be going around. On Sunday, Vox spread the word:

White nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, on Friday and Saturday to protest the city’s decision to take down Confederate monuments. But not only have the protests done nothing to change Charlottesville’s mind on this issue, it’s apparently prompted at least one other city to speed up action to remove its Confederate statues as well.

Mayor Jim Gray of Lexington, Kentucky, made the announcement on Twitter on Saturday ....

Meanwhile, the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, is seeing fit to challenge his state’s law to protect Confederate monuments. Furthermore, an abysmal white supremacist website that last year named suspected Jews and urged people to “take action” has fled to hidden quarters of the web after major hosting services rejected them, and the notorious neo-Nazi celebrity whose Nazi salutes and praise for Hitler raised controversy that led the newspaper to so openly target Jews is among many alt-right heroes cut off by PayPal after their problematic relationship with the company’s Acceptable Use Policy became unavoidably apparent. And just to make the point, a lede tells us, “At least four people have lost their jobs and several more are under scrutiny following the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville”.

Required Reading (Slouching Luxury)

The headline for Jemar Tisby, at the Washington Post, is pretty straightforward: “Why a racially insensitive photo of Southern Baptist seminary professors matters”.

Officials from the seminary requested that the post be removed, and David Allen, one of the men in the picture and dean of SWBTS’s School of Preaching, tweeted an apology: “I apologize for a recent image I posted which was offensive. Context is immaterial. @swbts stance on race is clear as is mine.”

It’s odd for a preaching professor to suggest “context is immaterial,” because seminary professors usually teach their students that context is everything. The SWBTS “Mission, Vision, & Values” page states that their global “strategy includes the training of persons from every national, ethnic and cultural background for a variety of ministries.” But when it comes to understanding this particular photo, understanding a larger Southern Baptist and evangelical context is key.

Inexplicable (Duke Bashar al Putin)

So … right. Nobody knows quite what to think. Willa Frej tries to explain for HuffPo―

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was busy on Twitter this weekend, showing his support for Syrian President Bashar Assad in a string of tweets after weighing in favorably on Iowa Rep. Steve King’s latest xenophobic remarks.

―but as ledes go, it seems significant that anyone should have cause to attempt such a sentence.

What It Comes To (Pelican Nutsack)

If, for instance, this is not surprising―

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has qualified for a televised debate in Louisiana’s Senate race after a new poll showed him drawing 5 percent of the vote.

Duke, a white supremacist, announced he was running late this summer, saying GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump had inspired him and drawn more followers to his cause. Other Republicans in the state have disavowed him and the Republican National Committee and Louisiana GOP explored booting him out of the party.

Raycom Media, which owns four television stations in the state, commissioned a poll to determine who would qualify for the Nov. 2 debate, and Duke met the 5 percent threshold, according to the Baton Rouge Advocate. Dillard University, a historically black university in New Orleans, is hosting the debate.

(Robillard)

―can we at least say this is disappointing?

The bit about David Duke pitching his U.S. Senate candidacy at an historically black university, though, ought to be worth something.

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Image note: Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke talks to the media at the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Friday, 22 July 2016, after registering to run for U.S. Senate. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)

Robillard, Kevin. “David Duke qualifies for Louisiana Senate debate”. Politico. 21 October 2016.

An Unfortunate Update (Dubious Hero)

“And Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many’.”

―Mark 5.9 (RSV)

Kim Davis is the sort of memory we might wish to let fade. The embittered Rowan County Clerk went so far this week as to honor the Kentucky Democratic Party by switching her registration to Republican; meanwhile, conservatives celebrated her cause:

Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who became a hero to conservatives after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, was compared to Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks as she was awarded a prize by a prominent Christian organization Friday evening.

Dabbing her eyes with a tissue and with a trembling voice, Davis told hundreds of evangelical Christians: “I feel so very undeserving.”

“I want to start by thanking my lord and my savior Jesus Christ, because without him it would never be possible, for he is my strength that carries me,” Davis said.

“I am only one,” she shouted to be heard above the cheering crowd. “But we are many.”

(Swan)

And while there are ironies aplenty, and some even sickening, about all that, the carryout point here is simple enough. I can still remember, in youth, a classmate earnestly trying to explain to me how we all had it wrong and the KKK was a misunderstood guardian of society and something about why Dr. King was a terrible person, and what strikes me about that recollection is that one could push such garbage unimpeded. In a day when feminsim is so (ahem!) “unflattering” as to require schoolhouse censorship, and Christians expel girls from school for not being girlish enough, we might understand why conservatives would wish to elevate a supremacist as some sort of civil rights hero, but it is also hard to imagine they might actually get away with it.

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Image note: Rowan County Clerk and infamous Christian supremacism icon Kim Davis receives the “Cost of Discipleship Award” at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., 25 Septemer 2015. (Photo: Jonathan Swan/The Hill)

Richardson, Bradford. “Kim Davis switches to GOP”. The Hill. 25 September 2015.

Swan, Jonathan. “Christian group honors Kim Davis with award”. The Hil. 25 September 2015.

Warren, Rosalyn. “A School Blurred Out This Girl’s Feminist T-Shirt Because It Was ‘Unflattering'”. BuzzFeed. 17 April 2015.