In case you missed it, Donald Trump released his final ad this weekend. In so doing, Trump ended his campaign in the same way he started it–with an appeal to hate and bigotry of the worst type. The ad was shot through with anti-Semitic dog whistles, set to the soundtrack of Trump’s blatantly anti-Semitic speech last month in West Palm Beach. If it wasn’t the most blatantly racist and bigoted ad that has ever been aired on behalf of a major-party campaign, it’s almost certainly in the top ten.
You would have thought that if nothing else, this would be enough for someone who passes for leadership on the religious right to speak out and condemn this for the bilge that it was. Well, as I write this on Monday night, this has been the response from the nation’s so-called moral guardians.
Yep, that’s right. Not a word. Indeed, most of them were helping Trump in his final push. Ralph Reed, who declared that Trump’s disgusting comments about women were not high on social conservatives’ priorities, had his Faith and Freedom Coalition churn out voter guides to churches across the country–mostly in swing states. James Dobson, who suggested Hillary was a greater threat to the nation’s future than Trump’s disrespect for women, was making the rounds of the talk shows on Trump’s behalf. Both Dobson and Reed are members of Trump’s evangelical advisory board.
Process this for a moment. Trump uses his final argument to the American people to blog an anti-Semitic dog whistle into a megaphone, thus proving beyond any doubt that he is manifestly unfit to clean the White House, let alone live in it. And yet, no so-called religious right leader has risen up to give it the condemnation it deserves.
I know what a lot of you are thinking–that may have been too much to ask after they collectively shrugged at Trump not only degrading women, but fobbing it off as “entertainment” and “locker room talk.” And they also overlooked the fact that Trump plastered a private cell phone number on social media, mocked the disabled, condoned violence at his rallies, and had a history of disrespecting women long before and long after those tapes came out.
But you would have thought they would have had at least some standards. After all, anti-Semitism has long been one of the third rails of any civilized society. Judging by their silence, apparently they don’t.
There is only one plausible conclusion you can draw from this despicable silence. The religious right is so fixated with ending abortion and rolling back marriage equality that they will support anyone and anything who makes the clucking noises they like, no matter how disreputable they may be in every other respect. So now we know that these causes are so important to them that they feel bound to help a man who is not only a raving misogynist, but a stone-cold anti-Semite, get in the White House. And they claim that Hillary is morally bankrupt? What nerve they all have.
To give you an example of how contorted and distorted the religious right has made our political climate, consider that Reed told NPR on the day after the “Access Hollywood” tapes went public that it wasn’t as big a deal for him as the Iran nuclear deal, which posed “an existential threat to Israel.” Uh huh. So giving a raving anti-Semite the keys to the most powerful elected office in the world isn’t a clear and present threat to Israel, Ralph?
I’ve seen this mentality first-hand. In my college days, I was deceived into joining a hypercultish campus ministry that was an outreach of a church linked with the New Apostolic Reformation, an overtly fascist offshoot of the religious right that thinks it can bring about the Second Coming by taking over the world. After I walked out on them, I discovered that their church had once been the Carolina chapter of Maranatha Campus Ministries, one of the more notorious campus cults of the 1980s. But when I told my former “brothers” and “sisters” about it, their collective response was “so what?” Apparently they wanted to be part of “what God was doing” in Chapel Hill–and legal danger and personal integrity be hanged.
More recently, I spent a few years of the new millennium as a rarity–a weakly pro-life liberal. However, seeing some of the things that the so-called “mainstream” pro-life movement embraced caused the scales to slowly fall off my eyes. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the pro-life movement doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the sanctity of life, and everything to do with destroying the right to privacy through the back door. The final straw came when Fort Worth paramedic Marlise Munoz was kept on life support for almost two months even though she was brain dead–and thus, legally dead under Texas law. And yet, they maintained she was only in a coma.
By the logic used to keep her on life support for that long, hospitals could be required to put dead women on life support if they’re pregnant. The discovery of how Orwellian the pro-life movement really was at bottom was enough to push me firmly on the side of a woman’s right to choose.
The religious right’s backing of Trump despite proof beyond all doubt that he is an anti-Semite is no different. If the religious right still backs Trump after his disgusting final ad, then they are snookering the American people–including, sadly, a number of my friends–into bowing before a golden calf. I’m just glad they’re finally being honest about it.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
