September 23, 2018

Frank Schaeffer has unique positioning to opine on the Republican party's relationship with evangelical Christians. His father, Francis Schaeffer, helped found the Religious Right Conservative movement of the last two generations. Thankfully for the rest of the world, Frank rejected this as an adult and has made it his mission to educate people about the hypocrisy within that movement, and how to effectively navigate its traps. Even better, he never, EVER minces words.

Saturday, on AMJoy, Joy Reid asked Schaeffer what he thought would happen with evangelicals if Brett Kavanaugh ends up being confirmed to the Supreme Court, in which case two of the six men on the bench would have these clouds of sexual harassment hanging over their heads. Both of them conservative, both of them Republican. Doesn't that go against what so many of their values preach?

There are evangelical white women voters who voted for Trump who will not vote for a Democrat under any circumstances except one. When they really get the idea they are being abused wholesale as women and you have to understand something, the Republican Party is starting to look like the party of misogyny, abuse, fondling, groping, that is what the president is, and we know that. And so this -- this illness of denying all your morality, the so-called family values base that the evangelicals said they represented and wholesale defending people like Kavanaugh, Roy Moore, Donald Trump himself is going to peel people away, and I say again, that is why someone like myself is hopeful going on the road with Vote Common Good that we could appeal to this and just say, "Hey, listen. There has to be somebody left trying to follow Jesus and not Donald Trump.

There has to be someone left in this Christian group who is interested in the integrity and the morality and the character of these individuals and if we can't appeal to that, then it is not just America that is in trouble, any vestige of so-called evangelical Christian witness is going to be finished. That's what is on the line.

Well, now. There's a slogan. "Republicans: The Party of Misogyny! Abuse! Fondling! Groping!" Works for me...can't truly get much more accurate, given the way those in power, and so many voting for them behave. I just hope Schaeffer is correct that he and Vote Common Good will be able to peel some of them away to vote with humanity.

I have my doubts, though, about what he said in the beginning. I don't think the evangelical white women who voted for Trump will vote for a Democrat, even under the one circumstance Schaeffer described. Republicans have been the party of misogyny for a very long time, and their wholesale support of abusers is not new. When are they going to get the message that it's bad for them? When will their proximity to the power of white Christian men become less valuable currency than their own self-worth?

I'm not hopeful it will be anytime soon, since according to polling, Kavanaugh's support among Republican women has gone UP, even with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's allegations of sexual assault having surfaced.

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