U.S. Politics, Genocide of Palestinians

After GOP senators stalled for almost four months, Israel has a U.S. ambassador. Former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was confirmed on Halloween by 53-43, despite conservatives’ opposition to Lew’s work on President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham (SC) and Rand Paul (KY) joined all Democrats and independents for the approval.

In support of DDT, most of the GOP senators—and other Republicans—refuse to recognize that the agreement stopped Iran’s nuclear ambitions with rigorous monitoring and verification until DDT dropped out of the deal. He gave no reason for opposing his own team, perhaps part of his campaign to undo everything his Democratic predecessor accomplished. Without the agreement, Iran developed advanced centrifuges and ended its commitment to limit enrichment of uranium.

The next issue for the Senate is aid for Israel. The House votes on Thursday for a $14.3 billion aid bill to the country while eliminating the same amount for IRS auditing the wealthy and big business. Republicans never demand spending cuts during a Democratic administration, the reason that former Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) increased the deficit by $5.7 trillion, 25 percent, in only four years. Then the majority of House GOP members supported a coup to illegally keep DDT in the White House.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that the Israeli funding rewards tax cheats, and some GOP senators prefer President Joe Biden’s $105 billion aid bill that, unlike the House bill, provides humanitarian aid. According to Sen. John Thune (R-SD), a “significant” number of Senate Republicans see the efforts to fund border security, Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine as interconnected. “We want a broader package,” he said, because “this sort of axis of evil that’s developed between Russia, China and Iran … is something that needs to be addressed in its totality.”

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Lindsey Graham (SC), and Roger Wicker (MS) also want the funding to be in one bill. Wicker said that keeping Israel and Ukraine would be “the most prudent move.” About “offsets” to pay for the bill, Wicker said that “there’s plenty of room” in the Inflation Reduction Act. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said that bundling all the security funding is “solid.” Opposition, however, comes from conservative Sens. JD Vance (OH), Mike Lee (UT), Rick Scott (FL), and Ron Johnson (WI).

A judge’s injunction has temporarily blocked the mandate that doctors lie to their pregnant patients. After state’s residents passed a constitutional amendment permitting abortion until 22 weeks gestation, GOP legislators passed a law that doctors tell patients that a medication abortion can be reversed, a “reversal” that does not work and can cause hemorrhaging. Providers must also post inaccurate information on their websites and in clinics that abortions can increase breast cancer and future premature births. Another law requires that anti-abortion information use specific typeface, font size, and color in the mandated printed information for patients at least 24 hours before an abortion. Any slight deviation stops the procedure.

The injunction also blocks a 24-hour waiting period for the abortion or mandated anti-abortion talking points, a law from the 1990s. The judge said that the laws not only infringe on patients’ bodily autonomy guaranteed by the state constitution but also violate abortion providers’ free speech rights. The trial for the case is scheduled in 2024.

Three Lubbock County (TX) commissioners are trying to imprison pregnant women with an ordinance barring pregnant Texas women from traveling through the unincorporated area near New Mexico for an abortion outside the state. The county joined three others with a similar measure to be enforced by private citizens against pregnant women or those who help them. The state bans all abortions. A judge ruled the law too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications, but an appeal put that ruling on hold.

Texas AG Ken Paxton, who escaped a conviction at his impeachment trial, goes to trial on April 15, 2024, for criminal charges, over eight years ago, trying to solicit investors without disclosing the company paid him in 2011. Prosecutors in the case have not been paid for seven years because Paxton supporters have blocked it. Paxton faces two counts of securities fraud, and one count of failing to register with state securities regulators—all felonies. The trial has been delayed over arguments regarding prosecutors’ pay and venue.

The good news about banned books: they have become much more popular in states where they aren’t banned, 12 percent in some cases.

For donations of $50,000 or more to Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves’ reelection campaign, 15 donors received $1.4 billion in state contracts or grants from agencies overseen by the governor since 2020. The $1.4 billion doesn’t reflect dozens of other contracts they received from state agencies not led by Reeves as well as millions in incentives and tax breaks. Those donating under $50,000 also received benefits. The state has no “pay-to-play” prohibitions, restrictions, or special reporting requirements for donors doing business with the state government. The governor’s campaign accused the Democratic opponent, serving 15 years on the Public Service Commission, of illegally accepting campaign contributions from companies doing business with the commission.

Laws blocking these donations are more lax since 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, permitting dark money. Mississippi’s campaign reports are also not electronically searchable. Some of them are handwritten, and one was in calligraphy.

Israel’s War on Gaza:

Earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have decided he went too far in annihilation of Gazans. He reinstated some of the internet and phone service for the 2+ Gazans imprisoned in the 141-square-mile area although they still don’t receive food, water, medical supplies, and fuel. Following Israel’s two-day online blackout in Gaza, Elon Musk, perhaps trying to regain some in with the government, offered communication links in the area with his SpaceX’s Starlink. With his similar donation to Ukraine, Musk sometimes restricted its use for his own purposes.

Refusing to declare a cease fire, however, Netanyahu continues to kill women and children. After claiming that it didn’t bomb a hospital last week, Israel has ordered the evacuation of al-Quds hospital and then bombed nearby areas within 54 yards, less than half the length of a football field. With other hospitals destroyed by Israel, al-Quds has 400 patients, many of them children and in intensive care. At least 14,000 people have taken shelter there.  

Thus far, over 8,500 people have been killed in Gaza, almost all civilians and 70 percent of them women and children. Half the homes have been destroyed, and 1.4 million people have had to flee for their lives although they have no safe place to go. The 3,324+ children killed in Gaza since October 7, and 36 others in the West Bank are more than the total of 2,985 children killed across 24 countries in 2022, 2,515 in 2021, and 2,675 in 2020 across 22 countries.

Israelis also destroyed two refugee camps, one of them Gaza’s larges one with 116,000 people in one-half square mile. The camp came from the 1948 ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine when Israel founded its state. In addition, at least 50 people were killed by the strike in a nearby hospital.

Information is difficult to obtain from Gaza because they have little communication with the outside and Israeli military and political leaders are reluctant to provide details. Most of the news is consumed with sad stories about Hamas hostages. The primary news out of Israel is the intent to turn Gaza into a “deserted island” (Netanyahu) and wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth” (Defense Minister Yoav Gallant). Israel has no plans to help Palestinian civilians or provide a long-term stable future because its leaders wants to take over all the Palestinian land. 

Netanyahu has had to apologize for blaming his own military and security chiefs for the Hamas attack on October 7 because of massive lapses. Again, his ability to remain prime minister is being questioned, and responses from all sides are divided.

Some Jewish people also accuse Netanyahu of genocide. Raz Segal, a leading Israeli Holocaust scholar, has called his country’s assault on Gaza “a textbook case of genocide.” Another theologian stated that the prime minister’s reference to Amalek in declaring the imminent invasion of Gaza a “Holy Mission” is evidence of his intentions. According to the theologian, “the Bible commands to wipe out Amalek, including women, babies, children, and animals.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog echoed Netanyahu’s belief by saying Gaza has no innocent civilians.

An Israeli think tank, the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, wrote that Israel now has “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip.” The group’s goal is to pay Egypt to house former Gaza inhabitants. In 2017, Netanyahu appointed the think tank’s director as chief of staff for national security. George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden used the same language as Misgav, that the disaster is an “enormous” or “golden” opportunity.  

Denying war crimes in killing civilians, especially women and children, Netanyahu compared his actions to the Royal Air Force bombing raid in 1944 of the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen when British pilots missed, hitting a nearby children’s hospital and burning 84 children to death. The Hamas attack was like the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, according to the far-right Netanyahu.

Sunday: Religious Numbers Drop, Court Gives Christianity Preference

On Sunday, fewer people than ever are going to a church, synagogue, mosque, or other religious gathering. Pew Research reports that the share of religiously unaffiliated people in the U.S. has been growing across all demographic groups. The “nones”—those who self-identify as atheists, agnostics, or religion as “nothing in particular”—have become 23 percent of the population, almost 50 percent up from 2007 when 16 percent of people were “nones.” At the same time, the number of “Christians” have dropped from 78 percent to 71 percent.

More Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996) self-identify as “nones,” and the median age of unaffiliated adults is currently 36, down from 38 in 2007 and younger than the 46 years of media age of adults in the U.S. More in the older generations, however, are also becoming unaffiliated: 17 percent of Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are now unaffiliated, compared to 14 percent in 2007.

Of people raised as Christian or another faith, 18 percent now have no religious affiliation, compared to the roughly half of the 9 percent of U.S. adults raised without any affiliation now who identify with a religion, mostly Christianity. More men than women are “nones,” but education, race and ethnicity, and income make no difference. Nearly two-thirds of the seven percent of atheists and agnostics are men who are more educated and more White than the general population.

Two years ago, then-VP Mike Pence announced the nation’s religiosity “has remained remarkably consistent.” Yet a Gallup poll reinforced the Pew Research in its finding that only 47 percent belonged to a congregation in 2020, down from 70 percent in 2000. The percentage of people who think religion is important dropped to 48 percent with the number of people regularly attending worship services even lower.

While the general population becomes less religious, the Supreme Court, because of appointments by Deposed Dictator Trump (DDT) and confirmations by GOP senators, gives preference to Christians. Late Friday night, April 9, 2021, in a “shadow docket,” justices made a 5-4 decision in a case not on the docket and had no oral argument. The Tansom v. Newsom ruling determined that religious groups can gather in homes although other groups are still banned from this practice.

With no signature, the ruling changed the constitutional view of “religious liberty that now permits religious exemptions to situations not discriminating against religion. The court’s new rule, “most favored nation” permits any secular exemption to a law permitting a claim for a religious exemption. The decision stated required permission to gather for Bible study just as they would to get haircuts, food, or pedicures. Any time a government grants any exemption to a law for any reason, it has to grant the same exemption to religion—which in the U.S. typically means Christianity.

These conservative justices have gone far beyond the belief of Justice Antonin Scalia, formerly the most conservative judge of the modern era, when he said this type of ruling should be done “sparingly, and only in the most critical and exigent circumstances,” where “the legal rights at issue are indisputably clear.” The new ruling doesn’t fit these criteria because the high court gave a different meaning to the scope and applicability of the free exercise clause. With no explanation for the court’s decision, five justices are trying to bind lower courts to their personal opinion. The current Supreme Court has used its emergency injunctions seven times, all of them in COVID-19 cases. Before last November, the court had not done so for five years.

DDT used emergency relief from the high court 41 times, winning 28 of those appeals. In contrast, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama together went to the court for this relief only eight times in 16 years. Almost all DDT’s cases requested “stays” pending appeals against a lower court ruling, but the current support for a Christian group froze a government policy losing in the lower courts pending appeal. Scalia pointed out that an injunction “grants judicial intervention that has been withheld by lower courts,” unlike a stay, a short-term delay of a proceeding.

This injunction overrides the lower courts instead of the justices’ position from the past of “a court of review, not first view” as an “appellate tribunal.” The action reverses the function of the Supreme Court and exceeds the justices’ statutory authority to issue such relief—for the seventh time since October. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, the majority relied only on “separate opinions and unreasoned orders” to make a new constitutional rule. Conservative justices “using procedural tools meant to help them control their docket to make significant substantive changes in the law, in defiance not only of their own standards for such relief, but of fundamental principles of judicial decision making,” wrote legal expert Stephen I. Vladeck.

Since the new term began last October, the court has used shadow dockets at least 20 times to make secret rulings with no arguments and no identification of how each justice ruled. The new justices, in control of making law over legislatures and lower courts, remove transparency from the process of law.

The recent ruling agrees with an earlier decision that religion should allow people to infect others with COVID-19 by opening church services in California while other public activities are closed. Last December, SCOTUS also put religion over public health by siding with religious groups in Colorado and New Jersey. At that time, the U.S. had almost 400,000 deaths from COVID-19 and 16.5 million infections.

Over five years ago, Jerry Falwell Jr, then president of Liberty University, endorsed DDT for president which gave him the evangelical vote in 2016. The past few years have not been good for Falwell. After a series of failed to gain traction, the photo of him and his wife’s pregnant assistant in an inappropriate pose on a boat was the tipping point. He lost his leadership position at the university but claimed a resurrection comeback on Good Friday with his belief the “community still embraces him.” Denied a contracted $10.5 million severance package, Falwell, worth over $100 million, told the media the dispute was resolved.

Good Friday passed, and Liberty is now suing Falwell for over $40 million in damages, alleging breach of contract and fiduciary duty. The lawsuit states Falwell withheld “scandalous and potentially damaging information from Liberty’s board of trustees, while negotiating a generous new contract for himself in 2019 under false pretenses,” according to journalist Ruth Graham. Some of the scandal included an on-going three-some among himself, his wife, and a former pool boy. (More details about Falwell’s scandals.) 

Employees have been ordered to not communicate with either Falwell or his wife Becki Falwell other than any concerns about their daughter, a student. The university also wants Falwell to return its electronic equipment with confidential information. Their oldest son, Trey Falwell was also forced from his vice-presidency at Liberty, while Jerry Falwell Jr’s brother Jonathan Falwell has taken a bigger role at the school.

Also gone from Liberty University is the name for its political “think tank,” Falkirk Center, named after Falwell and DDT’s former pet, Charlie Kirk. Over 400 Liberty students and recent graduates signed a petition to close down the group because the Center “is trying to undo Liberty’s mission.” They rejected the idea they are “people who were educated to become champions for Trump and Western Civilization in the ‘cultural battlefield.’” They also object to the “fellows” using the Center as a “gateway for … people who claim Christ’s name because it is convenient for their personal or political gain.” The Falkirk Center sank $50,000 into political ads for DDT and other GOP candidates before the election.

The Center did not renew Charlie Kirk as a fellow, and he plans to start his own group called Turning Point Faith. Falkirk is now Standing for Freedom Center but kept its political philosophy and some of its questionable “fellows,” such as conservative commentator Eric Metaxas who punched an unarmed anti-DDT protester in the back of his head last year and continues to spread conspiracy theories about voter fraud.  

Liberty’s direction is shown by two new fellows, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, both wannabe presidential candidates—Huckabee in the past and Pompeo in 2024. Pompeo, claiming he wants “religious freedom, created many federal groups promoting evangelical Christianity around the world including one educating officials that the Bible mandates them to support back right-wing social, economic, environmental, and criminal justice policies. When in Congress, Pompeo worked with anti-Muslim activists to promote Christian nationalism. Pope Francis denied an audience with Pompeo because of his use of “religious freedom” for political gain.

Pompeo’s background as Secretary of State illustrates his lack of ethics. The Inspector General reported Pompeo violated government federal ethics rules in using the agency’s resources by asking its employees to carry out personal tasks over 100 times, as did Pompeo’s wife, Susan. Pompeo said they were just things friends did for friends—like working all weekend “to envelope, address, and mail personal Christmas cards for the Pompeos” with no compensation.

Just a few reasons that the number of religiously unaffiliated grows every year.