Subtitle: Jim Wallis is a self-serving asshat...AGAIN!!!
As soon as I read the title of Wallis’ latest screed on HuffPost “Politically Homeless: How Both Parties Are Leaving A Generation Of Christians Behind”, I knew I would be gnashing my teeth and scaring my landlord’s elderly dogs. I was right. His attack on Democrats was even worse than I expected.
To be fair, he begins with several paragraphs detailing how the GOP and evangelicals have sold their collective souls in supporting Trump. But he continues by using tired right-wing talking points about Dems and how we are beholden to Wall Street, have turned our backs on the poor, take African-Americans for granted, and are hostile to people of faith.
“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” Those words from Hubert H. Humphrey would likely not be described as the mission of Democrats today, many of whom are as connected to the Wall Street elites as the Republicans are.
One of the biggest offenses he makes is conflating party elites with Democratic voters. I don’t know any Dems who agree with cozying up to Wall Street and giving away our nation’s treasure to the top one percent. It gets worse with respect to African-Americans:
Despite being dependent on African-American voters, the Democratic Party has often taken them for granted instead of courageously addressing the realities of institutionalized racism and by refusing to invest in organizers, mobilizers and candidates in African-American and Latinx communities.
As usual, Wallis takes a real situation and over-dramatizes it to serve his point. Yes, we as progressives need to be bolder and continually vigilant in addressing racism and privilege in all forms. But the GOP denies its very existence! I’m not denying the need for Dems to do better in all these areas, but I utterly reject his gross caricature of them.
Then he gets to the heart of his attack:
Unfortunately, the Democrats are no longer a faith-friendly party. Voters with religious faith are often ignored or even dismissed without serious outreach or respectful dialogue.
. . . .
Moral issues of intrinsic concern to the faith community are often disregarded or disrespected by Democratic Party orthodoxy, which often takes extreme or overly strident views on issues like abortion. Many of us in the faith community regard abortion as a moral issue and part of a consistent ethic of life and seamless garment of concern for the many threats to human life and dignity. While many of us pro-life Christians don’t support the criminalization of often desperate and tragic choices, we find the Democrats even reluctant to make a commitment to reducing abortion by supporting women with health care, nutrition and social services. Many in Democratic leadership don’t seem to want to talk about or even being willing to use the word “reduction” as a positive term in relation to abortion.
As a battered and wounded survivor of evangelical xianity (and it turns out from DNA testing, the son of a prominent Baptist minister) I am sick of our party having to bend over backwards to appease the xianistas. But he is simply off the rails to say we have no “commitment to reducing abortion”. What part of “safe, legal, and rarely used” (I would substitute “rarely needed” for “rarely used”) doesn’t he get? Most democrats, like the majority of Americans, would like to reduce the need for abortion. But the only proven method to do so is the widespread availability of contraception and education in its proper use, which Democrats overwhelmingly support and large numbers of Goopers and talibangelicals oppose.
Wallis wants to be the reasonable arbiter of what a kinder, gentler form of religious dominance should look like. He sees himself as the “reasonable” face of so-called traditional values. He is to xianity what Gorbachev was to communism—he sees no problem with his ideology; he just wants a more effective and sustainable version of it.
I already knew Wallis was a self-serving blowhard. This steaming pile of manure only reinforced that opinion.