I can’t help but be amused by Indiana’s experience with what, up to this time, has been a tried and true pander sure to reap positive results. What I’m talking about is the controversy over the state’s “religious liberty” law. When things didn’t go as expected with this effort to institutionalize discrimination under the rubric of religion, the poor schmuck of a governor, Republican Mike Pence, caught between an elderly, Christian fundamentalist rock and a corporate hard place, didn’t know which way to turn. As Paul Waldman noted in The Washington Post, Pence and the bevy of GOP movers and shakers who thought it was a sure winner to line up behind Indiana’s effort to okay discrimination, were “surprised by just how many directions that criticism came from, with everyone from business leaders to religious groups making their opposition clear.”

After all, for several years hardline conservatives have assumed with some justification that the way to impinge on the rights of groups or individuals they find unsympathetic is to assert a “competing right,” no matter how silly or unfounded. In this particular case, there’s a special helping of deja vu for many of us: “religious freedom” was, of course, invoked by many in the 1950s and 60s to justify discrimination against African-Americans. However, as E. J. Dionne observed:

Religious-liberty exceptions that have been carefully thought through make good sense. They involve balancing when it is appropriate to exempt religious people from laws of general application and when it isn’t. But turning religious liberty into a sweeping slogan that can be invoked to resist any social change that some group of Americans doesn’t like will create a backlash against all efforts at accommodating religion. Forgive me, but this is bad for the brand of religious liberty.

And maybe that is what is finally happening. In spite of the potentially negative consequences that Dionne suggests, after years of having exaggerated and spurious claims of religious victimhood treated as serious by a compliant media, it is both surprising and gratifying to witness the backlash to this particular instance of the religious right’s faux poor me whining. It’s fun to see those political friends of big business, often euphemistically referred to as GOP “moderates,” most of whom have rather obviously been playing the God game for political purposes only, suddenly try to back off the right to discriminate ledge without alienating those on the religious right who won’t vote for anyone who doesn’t leap.

Which brings me to Roy Blunt, one of the very best friend of big business . Blunt, who is, I have to admit, a little too rational to completely satisfy the true, hardcore, Missouri rightwing, seems to have thought that he had a real winner with this religious liberty schtick, a way to burnish his conservative bona fides without actually hurting any of his real constituents – you know, Monsanto, AT&T, Big Oil, etc. If the well-being of corporations is his main job, religious liberty has become his hobby. A few of the high points of Blunt’s religious liberty preoccupation:

–In 2012 he introduced the Blunt amendment which would “have given unprecedented discretion to any employer or insurance plan, whether or not religious, to exclude coverage for critical health care services on the basis of undefined “moral convictions.” As Think Progress noted:

Among those with the greatest to lose from proposals like the Blunt Amendment is the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Broad and unfettered language of the kind advanced by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) would grant insurers and employers the right to deny coverage for nearly any service provided to LGBT patients.

— In 2013, Blunt was a co-sponsor of the senate version of a “Marriage and Religious Freedom Act” that could have potentially codified wholesale bigotry:

… the implications for this legislation are numerous, but could allow businesses to discriminate against employees with a same-sex spouse, government officials to discriminate against same-sex couples filing their taxes jointly, or religiously affiliated hospitals discriminating against patients with same-sex spouses.

— Blunt’s objections to updating ENDA were couched in terms of religous liberty:

As a former president of a Baptist college in Missouri, supporters of this bill have been quick to assure me that its most onerous provisions would not apply to that school. But no such exemption is available for Christian bookstore owners, as an example, or any other small business in which people of faith and deep religious conviction are relied upon as an integral part of the workforce.

Remind you of the  old feature vs. bug argument?

— In 2014, Blunt filed an amicus brief in support of the infamous Hobby-Lobby Supreme Court case.

As you can see, Senator Blunt has been very busy, rarely missing an opportunity to identify himself with the religious victims who might be forced to live and let live in a diverse culture. Will he persist in this leisure-time pursuit now that the efficacy of the word “religious” to obscure ugly intent seems to be waning? Should we share Brittany Cooper’s optimism?:

What this vocal contingent of the religious right is seeking to restore is not religious freedom but a sense of safety in expressing and imposing dangerous, retrograde and discriminatory ideas in the name of religion. I continue to support the free and unimpeded expression of religion. And I am hopeful that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s call for “clarification of the law” amid a massive backlash will actually force the Legislature to explicitly ban discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation. Then perhaps the law could do what some legal scholars claim it was meant to do, namely, protect freedom of religious expression for religious minorities in the U.S.

Will Roy Blunt ever have to deal with the consequences of his actions? Or is Missouri really the kind of place where he’ll never have to say he’s sorry?

A few months ago an acquaintance drew my attention to the fact that a local rightwing blogger was a bit agitated by the way I pointed out that Republicans were attempting to exploit their sparse crop of female legislators in order to mute the furore caused by anti-woman rhetoric used by male GOPers to justify anti-woman policies. I had observed that the GOP House leadership had “trotted” Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) out to manage another of their endless anti-abortion bills, this one initially sponsored and nearly sunk by Todd Akin clone, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ). The use of the word “trotted” seemed to strike a deep chord:

“A woman…was ‘trotted out?'”

Trotted out?  Like a horse or a piece of livestock?

Like an animal that doesn’t have the ability to think for itself?

WillyK shows a contempt here that needs highlighting.

In WillyK’s opinion, Blackburn was told by her superiors to go out and use her lady parts to save the bill, and she just nodded along and did what she was told, presumably because she was “a woman.”

It’s not that Blackburn is stridently pro-life and volunteered for the job.  It’s not that Blackburn is an intelligent and capable legislator who felt passionately about the bill.

Nope.  She was “trotted out.”

That’s sexist, my friends. …  

High dudgeon indeed! Unfortunately, I wasn’t the one doing the trotting out nor did I condone it. It was the leaders of the Republican Party in the House who seemed hellbent on displaying their female colleagues like show ponies. Disgraceful, I absolutely agree, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. There was at the time a general consensus that Blackburn’s gender (or her lady parts, as the blogger would have it) was intended to help ameliorate the damage done by Frank, who, like Akin, is apt to express the uncensored GOP id.

The fact that the GOP “trots” out their female “show ponies” – and it is they who treat them that way, not those of us who call them out for it – does not mean that the women in question aren’t competent and capable at what they do – although, I have to admit, Blackburn, specifically, has never struck me as more than a fairly adroit ideologue. Missouri’s Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2), the actual focus of the post that so incensed this blogger, though, is another issue. She strikes me as a very competent corporatist Republican and I am sure that her rapid rise in the House GOP leadership reflects not only her gender, but her ability to play ball very effectively.

Evidence of Wagner’s skills abound in her regular email newsletters. She frequently references her motherhood and implies that her wealthy family shares the travails of a middle class beset by what she represents as governmental incompetence. Her schtick is “caring.” She wants us to know that mama’s gonna fix the booboo the naughty black man made. She asks in one of her recent newsletters, “do you trust government?” – and then reassures us that, “I hear your shouts, I read your letters and I will not stop fighting until you have a government that you can trust in again.” A bit over-the-top (shouts? really?), but clever. What do Republicans want more than to undermine our faith in our government as an agent that serves average people? Isn’t that at the heart of the made-up scandals and misrepresentations about which Wagner agonizes so eagerly in most of her newsletters? You gotta hand it to her – she’s good.

The feminine touch. Invaluable. Except when you put it into context and yesterday we got some real context. The Supreme Court dealt a blow to women’s reproductive rights and at the same time effectively undercut the rights of men and women to be free from the other guy’s religion. I’m talking about the infamous Hobby Lobby decision. Wagner, that oh so feminine, caring and motherly woman, was one of the 71 representatives who signed an amicus curie brief on behalf of Hobby Lobby.

And let us be clear. This decision, delivered under the rubric of religious freedom, is about anything but the exercise of liberty. Ed Kilgore accurately observes that:

… the whole “religious liberty” movement of which Hobby Lobby is so conspicuous represents a new strategy of “aggressive separatism” in which supposedly persecuted conservative Christians claim the right to create their own segregated world of laws and institutions that its proprietors ultimately intend to impose on us all.

And it gets even worse, uniting oppressive religion with the conservative devotion to maintaining and increasing corporate power. As Paul Waldman writes:

In Hobby Lobby, the court ruled that corporations have religious rights that trump the rights of their employees and allow the corporation to pick which laws it would like to follow and which it would like to ignore. The decision extends the corporation’s control over its employees’ lives beyond what happens when they’re working, beyond even things they do that could affect their work, to a purely private arena that touches on their employment only because that’s where they’re getting their health insurance.

And Ann Wagner, clearly part the GOP’s strategy to put a feminine face on their destructive policies, is just fine with that, women’s rights, women’s lives, be damned. Yesterday, she proudly celebrated the decision to make it harder for women to use any form of contraception, proclaiming on her Facebook place that “I stand with Hobby Lobby.” I would suggest that women who are concerned about the ability to exercise control over their own bodies carefully avoid standing anywhere near the vicinity of Ann Wagner when it comes time to vote.

Second sentence in fourth paragraph replaced with text inadvertently omitted.

Ever notice how certain religious types think that their faith is a get-out-of-jail card that excuses just about any kind of nastiness? The most obvious recent example is the conservative braying about religious freedom that was occasioned by the A&E television channel’s half-hearted effort to censure Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, a reality “star” who gifted the public with a few vulgar homophobic, Islamophobic and racist bon mots. According to the conservative commentariat, the statements were A-OK since Robertson claimed that the general nastiness just reflected his faith tradition, and, you know, freedom of speech and religion must surely come into play here. Of course, mired as we are in the culture wars, using God to deflect attention from various types of bigotry has become so commonplace that we hardly notice it anymore – this particular incident only got some play because of the pseudo-celebrity status of Robertson.

If one were, however, to exercise one’s right to freedom of thought and speech and ask what it means about Robertson’s religion that he can use it to justify his bigoted world-view, we might find out that the right-wing concern with freedom of belief and expression is a one-sided proposition. The owner of a British blog, Futile Democracy, aptly summarizes the situation:

The use of the phrase “free expression” – which to the Christian-right means; freedom from any sort of repercussion or challenge – is only ever invoked when the views expressed confirm Christian prejudices. The same people then demand repercussions for anyone, or any business whose expression doesn’t confirm Christian-right prejudices. It’s a terribly hypocritical state of affairs, all in the hope of retaining the get out of bigotry free card for that which they call “faith”.

The same blogger also noted that the intellectual dishonesty involved in playing the God card can have consequences that go even deeper than simple hypocrisy; he notes that conservative evangelicals “are not happy unless their faith dictates the operation of the state, the media, private businesses, the womb of every woman on the planet, and whom individuals are allowed to marry. The arrogance is astounding, and the religious supremacy that promotes and perpetuates homophobia is cancerous.” Amen, brother.

We can see this religious triumphalism at work in Missouri where four representatives of such fundamentalist Christian-centric organizations as the Missouri Baptist Convention, the Missouri Family Network, and the Missouri Family Policy Council have filed a lawsuit to reverse Governor Nixon’s decision that a Missouri law tying state and federal income tax returns mandates allowing same-sex couples married in states other than Missouri to file joint tax returns, which would be in line with federal policy since the overthrow of the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013.

The excuse for the lawsuit is provided by a Missouri constitutional amendment approved in 2004 that bans same-sex marriage. The amendment itself was in large part the work of the very folks who are today citing it in their lawsuit. These people are secure in the free practice and expression of their religion and its tenets. Nobody is forcing them to engage in same sex marriage or associate with such  couples, nor is government suppressing their freedom to express hateful sentiments about such people – although you should please note that expressions of distaste directed at bigoted speech are no more than the exercise of freedom of speech from the other side of the street. Nevertheless, they’re trying to use government to make the precepts of their specific religion the norm for the rest of society, including those of us who not only don’t share their beliefs, but often find them repugnant.  

We see the same dynamic at work in the anti-Obamacare lawsuit filed by the Little Sisters of the Poor. These religious are so preoccupied with the sin of contraception that they believe signing a piece of paper stating that they seek a religious exemption from providing birth control coverage to employees who might desire it would be akin to, as one of their apologists put it, hiring a hit man to kill your neighbor. You see, if they sign that paper, their employees could, theoretically, get birth control coverage from the insurance company free of charge – which process the Little Sisters would be putting into motion by seeking an exemption from doing the same. Of course, since the Little Sisters are insured by a company run by the Christian Brothers which, in turn, qualifies for the exemption, this is not really the case, but, hey, who cares – it’s the principle of the thing, right?

This leads one to ask if perhaps the sensibilities of such folks are so delicate that they are unfit to play certain roles in a diverse society like ours – an important question given the continuing consolidation of hospitals and the growing dominance of Catholic health organizations. The Guardian’s Jill Filipovic very aptly describes attempts on the part of religious organizations to play the God card:

Their claim that even this accommodation violates their religious liberty is telling. These ACA-related “religious liberty” arguments aren’t actually about the freedom to exercise your own religion, or the right to be free of doing something that violates your conscience. These assertions are about an overwhelming sense of entitlement on behalf of religious organizations to force anyone within their reach to adhere to their beliefs.

Those playing the God card, be they religious organizations, their affiliates or followers are acting as if their religious liberty and freedom of expresion is contingent upon denying the same rights to others as well as to defend and perpetuate bigotry. This can’t be what the Founders, sons of the Enlightenment that they were, had in mind when they dealt with the vexing issues of religious liberty. As historian Kenneth Davis notes, George Washington wrote that:

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunity of citizenship. …For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.

Get that bigots? So much for your frayed God card.

Cross-Posted to DailyKos