WTF?! Religious Right ‘Leaders’ Condone Trump’s Degrading Of Women (PHOTOS, TWEETS)

Ralph Reed, one of the religious right "leaders" who defended Trump (image from Reed's Facebook)
Ralph Reed, one of the religious right “leaders” who defended Trump (image from Reed’s Facebook)

It’s no secret that the religious right has been willing to overlook Donald Trump’s many outrages on the campaign trail because they think a President Trump is their best shot at outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage. But in the hours after Trump’s degrading and potentially criminal comments about women from 2005 surfaced, we learned just how far that support goes. Apparently a number of those who pass for leadership on the religious right think respect for women isn’t as important as stopping abortion.

CNN’s Ashley Killough asked veteran religious right activist Ralph Reed, the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, about the tape. Reed said this.

Excuse me, Ralph? Are you so determined to ban abortion and neuter Planned Parenthood that you are willing to put someone in the White House who finds degrading women even remotely acceptable? Apparently you forgot what you yourself said in 1998, when you declared that “character matters.” Apparently in Reed’s world, character only matters if you’re a Democrat.

If possible, Reed dug himself an even deeper hole when he took to Facebook on Saturday morning.

reed-defends-trump

Riddle me this, Ralph. If Trump were to say that he wanted to “move on” one of his daughters “like a bitch” and thought he could “grab them by the pussy,” would you allow him to stay in the same room? I would hope not. And yet, you are seriously saying that a guy who would even think about talking this way, and then fobs it off as mere entertainment, still deserves to be president because respect for women is “unlikely to rank high on the hierarchy” of evangelical voters’ concerns? If that’s what you’re saying, then you, sir, are as despicable as Trump.

But believe it or not, these may not have been the most tone-deaf comments from a religious right “leader.” Those may have come from Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. Perkins told BuzzFeed that his support for Trump was “not based on shared values,” but “shared concerns” about the country’s direction.

I hope I’m reading this wrong. I really am. Perkins is saying that he is willing to overlook the overwhelming evidence that Trump is utterly lacking in basic standards of decency just because he has “shared concerns” about the future of the nation. While I am as Democratic as they come, first and foremost I am a man who believes that respect for women is not optional. For that reason, no Democrat who said such degrading things would get my support, my money, or my vote–no matter how much I agree with them. It’s even more outrageous when you consider that Perkins has five children. It makes you wonder–is he teaching them that such things as basic decency don’t matter if you have “shared concerns” with someone?

Reed and Perkins weren’t the only religious right leaders to reveal just how much character matters to them. On Saturday morning, Franklin Graham said this:

franklin-graham-defends-trump
Unless I’m reading this wrong, Graham fils appeared to voice the main religious right shibboleth that for all of Trump’s flaws and outrages, the Supreme Court trumps everything else. Including respect for women, Franklin? I would think that if Trump had said something like this to your sisters, Anne and Ruth, the makeup of the Supreme Court would be the last thing on your mind. It certainly should be for anyone who’s a real man.

I’ve seen this mentality before. As many of you know, I was tricked into joining a horribly abusive and cultish campus ministry during my freshman year at Carolina. This ministry and its parent church had no problem with deceiving people about who they really were in order to increase their numbers. When I discovered that this church had been hiding the fact that it had once been the Carolina chapter of Maranatha Campus Ministries, one of the more notorious “campus cults” from the 1970s and 1980s, the collective response from my “brothers” and “sisters”–especially what passed for leadership–was “so what?”

Never mind that this so-called pastor had been deceiving them for no good-faith reason, or that he had put them at risk for being expelled. All that mattered to them was being part of “what God is doing.” This is no different. We have three prominent religious right leaders on record as saying that they are willing to put a man who thinks nothing about degrading women in the White House in the name of stopping abortion and marriage equality. If this doesn’t prove that the religious right is morally bankrupt, I don’t know what does.

 

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.