Christian Right Protestant complains that Joe Biden is a bad Catholic

Richard Land, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), had to step down from that position after comments he made after Trayvon Martin's murder. Morgan Feddes reported for Christianity Today in Richard Land's Comments On Trayvon Martin Investigated By SBC 04/20/2012:

Land, the president of the ERLC, accused black political leaders, including President Obama, of trying to "gin up the black vote" on his radio show on March 31.

"Instead of letting the legal process take its independent course, race mongers are anointing themselves judge, jury, and executioners," Land said. "The rule of law is being assaulted by racial demagogues, and it's disgusting, and it should stop."

Land also stated a black man is "statistically more likely to do you harm than a white man."

But Land is still considered downright respectable among the Christian Right, with his commentaries regularly appearing in the conservative Christian Post, including this recent one, Ask Dr. Land: What does President Biden’s pro-abortion blitz say about America? 02/05/2021. No, I hadn't heard about this "pro-abortion blitz," either.)

Land is currently president of Southern Evangelical Seminary and Bible College in Charlotte, North Carolina. Which is basically a fundamentalist Protestant institution. Some not insignificant number of conservative American Protestants think Catholics aren't "true" Christians and are therefore going to Hell.

Land's column includes some thinly-concealed disdain for Catholics in politics. Just so his readership understands that Biden is a Catholic - excuse me, a Roman Catholic:, he writes:

President Biden is the second Roman Catholic to be elected president. However, as JFK so cleverly put it 61 years ago in his appearance before the Protestant ministers gathered in Houston to hear him address the then controversial subject of his Catholicism —controversial because a Catholic had never been elected to the presidency to that point in the nation’s history.

With a hint of irritation which can be both seen and heard on the video recording of the speech, JFK said, “for contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic party’s candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic.” JFK then proceeded to expand by stating, “I do not speak for my church on public matters — and the church does not speak for me.” [my emphasis]

He then flips his perspective to make one of those points that conservatives seem to think are very clever and criticize both JFK and Biden for not being good Catholics by his own conservative Protestant perspective: "That was true for JFK and by now as it is crystal clear for anyone with eyes to see, Joe Biden has completely broken with his church’s bedrock beliefs in the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death."

This because Biden does not support legislation banning abortion. Although as far as I know, Biden has never said he disagrees with the Church's position on abortion being bad, he does support mainstream Democratic pro-choice political positions. Which conservative Christians understand - correctly in this case - as being a key issue in the defense of women's rights. Which is not something that the Christian Right wants to embrace.

Citing poll numbers from unidentified sources, Land tries to create the impression that most American voters agree with the Christian Right that abortion should be banned, which is very far from accurate. And argues from there:

So, why then, 48 years after the Supreme Court attempted to “settle” the troublesome issue of abortion on behalf of the American people in Roe v. Wade, are we now confronted with a pro-abortion Trojan horse like Joe Biden. I, like many Americans, thought America was supposed to be about government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Clearly a bipartisan cultural political elite in this country believes it has the right to ignore the will of the people and to impose on the people the policies they believe should hold sway and to force the American people to subsidize such policies. And, they have successfully implemented such anti-democratic policies for nearly five decades.

This is a mild, clean-shaven version of the argument. But he portrays the US is a country following "anti-democratic policies" due to abortion being legal under the principle established in Roe v. Wade. And the Christian Right portrays abortion as an absolute moral issue involving the killing of millions of babies, as they frame it. And it is common to hear from anti-abortionists that this makes the US morally much worse than Hitler Germany.

So for people sharing the Christian Right view of abortion, Land's statement very much reinforces the notion that the current democracy in America is radically evil and illegitimate. In other words, it supports the attitude of the seditionist lynch mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6.

But in a mild, clean-shaven way, of course.

Adolph Reed on "left-identitarians" vs. "class reductionism"

Ana Kasparian and John Iadarola on The Young Turks of 01/23/2020 reference this piece from last year by Adolph Reed, Jr.: The Myth of Class Reductionism New Republic 09/15/2019.

It deals with the political argument between the corporate-liberal and progressive wings of the Democratic Party, one that has taken on a quasi-theological form, over how to articulate the proper relationships among race relations, women's rights, and economics. It's not a new discussion, nor is it unique to the Democratic Party in the 21st century.

I've tried to avoid the specific incarnations in the current Presidential primary race. In theory, there's not much difference between liberals and progressives over the first two, although policies and priorities are what really count.

On economic issues, the differences are understood similarly on both sides. Progressives want Medicare for All and tax policies aimed at closing the wealth and income gap between the One Percent and everyone else. Liberals don't, although they want policies that move at least somewhat in that direction. Progressives aren't afraid of the Republicans calling them socialist, liberal are. Despite the fact that Republicans have been doing just that for generations.

What I think of as the quasi-theological aspect of the current argument comes from the argument that corporate Democrats use against the progressives, and currently against Bernie Sanders in particular, that they are sexist and racist, though it's usually not put quite that crassly. There's also a Bernie-Sanders-makes-my-skin-crawl argument, but that's not really the same thing. (It's also borderline anti-Semitic.)

The anti-Sanders argument is that Sanders doesn't take white racism and sexism seriously enough, and that his talk about class and redistribution issues are a way to minimize the seriousness of racism and sexism in the US.

Reed refers to the two sides of this controversy as left-identitarian and class-reductionist. The first is probably more obvious than the latter, which refers tot he notion that "that inequalities apparently attributable to race, gender, or other categories of group identification are either secondary in importance or reducible to generic economic inequality." He argues that the class-reductionist position is more a polemical construct. "I know of no one who embraces that position," he writes.

Reed does make an important observation here

As American politics shifted steadily rightward between the Nixon and Clinton presidencies, so, too, did the discourse surrounding race and the country’s political economy. Conservatives attributed black socioeconomic inequalities to bad values; liberals attributed them to bad values and racism. Once it was effectively decoupled from political-economic dynamics, “racism” became increasingly amorphous as a charge or diagnosis - a blur of attitudes, utterances, individual actions, and patterned disparities, an autonomous force that acts outside of historically specific social relations. Today it serves as a single, all-purpose explanation for mass incarceration, the wealth gap, the wage gap, police brutality, racially disproportionate rates of poverty and unemployment, slavery, the Southern Jim Crow regime, health disparities, the drug war, random outbursts of individual bigotry, voter suppression, and more. ...

As Cedric Johnson and Dean Robinson have argued, post-civil rights black politics has tended to emphasize an “ethnic group” notion of racial solidarity that masks the face that this race politics is itself a class politics. Black Democratic and other neoliberal elites have shown again and again in their sustained denunciations of the Sanders program since 2016 that they ultimately rely on race-specific arguments to oppose broadly redistributive initiatives that would improve the circumstances of African American working people along with all others. Ironically, this means that the constituencies most affected by economic inequality and disadvantage have the least voice in contemporary policy debates. [my emphasis]

Of course, in a high-stakes political campaign like the Presidential race, campaigns are going to use dubious attacks. Some of which will be closer to true. Some of which will be less fair than others. Politics is politics.

The liberal, pro-corporate verisons of neoliberalism combines free-market fundmentalism (with a bit more humane face than the conservatives version) with a classic liberal defense of equal rights. In theory, a society with severe class divisions and a severe maldistribution of wealth and income could have complete equality between for minorities and women. There are mountains of rigorous research that show why in practice that cannot and will happen in the real world.

But the soundbite version are always going to be imprecise.

Anti-abortion-rights Democratic Congressman Dan Lipinski

Dan Lipinski has been a Democratic Congressman from Illinois since 2005. As Joan McCarter reports, he's staunch opposed to abortion rights ('Democrat' Lipinski attacks fellow Democrats using the worst abortion lies in weekend rally Daily Kos 01/13/2020):

He crowed about being a "pro-life Democrat," saying "we need Democrats, Republicans, independents, everyone working together" and then attacking Democrats as "people out there who want to force taxpayers to pay for abortions." What Democrats are actually advocating for is access to full, and still legal, healthcare services for all women, especially low-income women. That's a regular smear the forced birthers have been using for decades, now, and Lipinkski is happy to promote it.

But that's not the worst he had in store. He picked up the latest big forced birth lie, that doctors are performing abortions up to the moment of birth. This is specifically what he said: "A child who’s born during an abortion - we are trying to get a bill passed that says you must care for that child." This myth has been around for years and persists because irresponsible politicians - Republicans and Lipinski - continue to repeat it. It is not a real thing. It is a figment of the sick and manipulative minds in the forced birth community. [my emphasis]

The Democratic Party really needs to be straightforwardly supportive of abortion rights. He has a progressive primary challenger, Marie Newman. Aída Chávez reported on her campaign last October (House Democrats, Dodging Party Policy, are Privately Supporting Marie Newman The Intercept 10/01/2019):

On September 17, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told the New York Times that she would endorse Marie Newman, the pro-choice woman challenging Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, one of the few remaining anti-abortion Democrats in Congress. The following day, when asked about her endorsement, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters that there’s “absolutely” room in the Democratic Party for anti-choice lawmakers. “That doesn’t mean we’re not a pro-choice party — we are,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that … either the Speaker or I believe that we ought to exclude people who have a different view.” ...

Many progressive House Democrats who want to stand up for reproductive rights have been privately helping Newman’s campaign, but are trying to keep it under wraps out of fear of retribution by party leadership. Other members have quietly expressed their desire to help. Much of the hesitation stems from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s longtime position of protecting incumbents, which DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos intensified through a contentious blacklist policy back in April.

But the eight-term incumbent is hardly a Democrat by today’s standards. Lipinski, who inherited the seat from his father, Bill Lipinski, in 2005, opposes abortion rights, LGBTQ equality, voted against the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and refused to endorse Barack Obama for reelection in 2012. According to one analysis, he votes with President Donald Trump about 40 percent of the time. [my emphasis]

If the US had a multiparty parliamentary system similar to those of most EU countries, the Democratic Party would be at least two separate parties, a labor-oriented progressive one and a corporate neoliberal ones. The official Party institutions are controlled by corporate Democrats and their donors. It's good to see progressives building parallel structures, which they need to have a fighting chance of becoming the dominant force in the party structure.

Until then, they will often be competing with the party establishment. And, yes, if progressive actually do take control of the party machinery, corporate donors will make sure of existing and new parallel structures of their own to try to take it back.