Joe Scarborough went off on a tear this morning about evangelicals, their chronic sense of persecution and victimhood, , and their rational for supporting Trump.
"I say this as a guy who's a Republican for 20, 25 years, so much of that also comes from just an overwhelming sense of victimhood. I swear if I hear one more friend of mine who's an evangelical talking about 'they're coming for us,' the persecuted church and I politely and gently remind them that over the past five years, no Supreme Court in the history of this republic has done more to protect religious rights than has the Roberts court. I can go down one ruling after another after another," he said.
He said to suggest that "somehow this federal government is hostile to faith and we must vote for Donald Trump to protect Christendom is one of the stupidest arguments I have ever heard in my life."
"Look at what the Supreme Court has done on religious liberty, specifically protecting religious liberty of conservative Christians. People that I have grown up with and been with in churches for, you know, the past 57 years. the sense of victimhood is outrageous.
"You know what it makes it more outrageous -- I'm sorry to get on this soap box -- is these are the same people that are talking about religious liberty are supporting a guy still who promoted a Muslim registry. Yes, yes, a Muslim registry. Sounds an awful lot like Jewish registries in Nazi Germany. Oh, you can't say -- but wait. that's what he proposed. and a lot of you evangelicals that run around screaming about religious freedom and religious liberty and how the libs are coming after you and your church and your beliefs and you're ignoring Supreme Court decisions, protecting your rights, which of course I support, because I'm a conservative, you don't feel that way.
He pointed out it wasn't Barack Obama's policy to deliberately find children and lock them up. "But that was Donald Trump's policy. In fact, they had a cabinet meeting where everybody raised their hands to support it except for Kirstjen Nielsen."
"That was a stated policy. So I really don't get it. I mean, the victimhood. Stop being a victim. Stop being a snowflake. I've got the same, most likely a lot of the same beliefs that you have. But those similarities stop when I think that the protection of my faith, of my evangelical faith should only be applied to me and not applied to Catholics, not applied to Jews, not applied to Muslims, not applied to the others.
"The blinders! I have to say of all of these years, the blinders are just extraordinary, Mika."
(Of course, Scarborough seems okay the burden these religious "protections" place on women who just want to get their birth control prescriptions filled and instead get publicly slut-shamed by a self-righteous pharmacist, or whose employers refuse to allow insurance coverage of their birth control. But then, patriarchal religions just don't care about women.)
