University City
Piece in The Atlantic over the weekend was mildly interesting at first, so I only mentioned it on my social feeds.
But the more I think about it, the more I want to deep dive into it. It’s not that long, though, so the dive won’t be very deep.
And because John Inazu, the author, does law-religion matters at WU Law, it has a St. Louis angle.
Spoiler alert: I think he’s a bit off base; Democrats and the left will not long term regret what Beta said at the recent CNN-sponsored LGBTQ-BLT-BBQ-LOL issues shindig.
So, let’s begin.
The issue of gay rights and recognition and acceptance of the LGBTQ community has moved at warp speed—in political terms anyway—this past decade.
And then he spends the rest of this article trying to claim that the Democrats’ continuing to move at warp speed on gay rights issues will somehow hurt them, when their previous warp speed movement did not and still has not. Trump gets mentioned a bit later, but it should be noted that he’s the most pro-gay Republican President in American history and the second most overall, behind only Barack Obama.
“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage,” said the candidate Barack Obama in 2008.
He was faking it to make sure he didn’t talk himself out of winning that easily winnable election. Obama himself has all but openly admitted that. The “official” change happened in May 2012 after a North Carolina vote on gay marriage that didn’t go the way the LGBTQ-BLT-BBQ-LOL activists groups thought it would; They basically read Obama the Riot Act, and forced him to be open about what was all along his real position, otherwise the money would be cut off.
At Thursday night’s nationally televised forum on LGBTQ rights, candidate Beto O’Rourke showed how far, and how quickly, the Democratic Party has moved. The former Texas congressman caused quite a stir when he said he would support revoking the tax-exempt status of religious institutions—colleges, churches, and charities—if they opposed same-sex marriage.
I believe the real purpose of that is that Beta was using the figurative corpse of his failed candidacy as a sacrificial lamb to move the Overton Window leftward on that matter. Or, to be more detailed, he veered much father to the left in order to make not quite as far to the left solutions more palatable.
The candidate’s view isn’t entirely new to Democrats. It echoes, for example, then–Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s concession during his oral argument in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 that the tax-exempt status of Christian colleges and universities who hold traditional views of marriage was “going to be an issue.” And it aligns with the Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet’s policy recommendation to take a “hard line” with religious conservatives because, after all, “trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War,” and “taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.”
Godwin’s Law didn’t last long, here.
Even so, O’Rourke’s comments mark the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has overtly endorsed stripping the tax-exempt status of religious organizations who hold conservative views about marriage and sexuality. This feels very much like the candidate Obama’s “cling to guns and religion” comment at a 2008 San Francisco fundraiser that became first an attack line used by Hillary Clinton and then a well-worn conservative talking point that the would-be president was aloof and out of touch with small-town America. But more troubling than the rhetoric is where it leads. And for that, let me offer three suggestions to people with skill sets I lack: one for pollsters, one for journalists, and one for policy analysts.
Okay, but Obama’s “bitter clingers to guns and religion” comments, (which also included trade protectionism, that’s all but forgotten today), didn’t cost him. As I recall, he won the Presidency, twice, after his saying that came out publicly. I say that to remind you that Inazu is trying to make us think that Beta will hurt the Democrats.
First, pollsters should ask voters about O’Rourke’s comments and the issue of tax-exempt status, both now and in the exit polls for the 2020 presidential election. We can be certain this issue will be used in Republican political ads, especially in congressional districts that Obama won in 2012, but that Trump won in 2016. And I suspect this issue and O’Rourke’s framing of it will lead to increased turnout of evangelicals in states that matter to Democrats, such as Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. O’Rourke’s comment may quickly fall out of the national news cycle, but it won’t be forgotten among churches, religious organizations, and religious voters. And if the Democrats lose in 2020, this issue and their handling of it will likely be a contributing factor. That will be true regardless of who the eventual Republican or Democratic candidates are.
So the only real effects are short term, in that they might result in the most pro-gay Republican President ever winning re-election. That and I should add that Obama 2012 and Trump 2016 areas are areas where gay issues in either direction aren’t politically critical.
Second, journalists should ask O’Rourke and every other Democratic candidate how this policy position would affect conservative black churches, mosques and other Islamic organizations, and orthodox Jewish communities, among others. It is difficult to understand how Democratic candidates can be “for” these communities—advocating tolerance along the way—if they are actively lobbying to put them out of business.
The Coalition of the Fringes argument. All I can say there is that if this kind of thing mattered to any of those groups or institutions, it would have shown up politically by now. That it does not indicates to me that it will not ever. Besides, if it does happen to become a problem for them, they can just have the FBI have one of its assets dress up in a Klan robe and go shoot up a synagogue all while yelling “Islamophobic” slogans, and the subsequent investigation of his apparent social media feeds will reveal that he doubts anthropogenic climate change and gave five bucks to a European Identitarian organization. The good ole KKKrazy Glue.
In fact, religious individuals and organizations spend billions of their own dollars in the charitable sector and donate hundreds of millions of hours of service in global and domestic regions where the social fabric is the most distressed. They have spent generations building institutions, infrastructure, and networks that enable large-scale responses to natural disasters and other calamities. When hurricanes and tornadoes devastate entire communities, churches and religious organizations mobilize thousands of volunteers and many tons of relief supplies. Ending the tax-exempt status of these organizations would substantially weaken the charitable sector, which would result in more people suffering. Policy analysts should make that case evident so that voters can fully evaluate Democratic claims that the party cares for the least of these.
(snip)
When the next tornado hits the Midwest or the next hurricane hits Puerto Rico, I will gladly welcome the atheists and the National Guard to help in the relief efforts. But I’ll want the religious people there, too, through organizations such as Catholic Charities, the Southern Baptists’ North American Mission Board, the Salvation Army, and World Relief. Our nation’s politicians can choose to make that possibility more or less likely with their rhetoric and policies in the years to come. Threatening the loss of tax exemption to hundreds of thousands of religious organizations, including many that serve the most vulnerable in our society, is not the way to go.
Doesn’t matter, even if their tax exempt status is taken away, they’ll still be there to help. That’s what keeps this system going, that the people who are constantly bashed and trashed and should be going on strike still clock in and out every day just because they have too much pride and decency to do otherwise.
One other thing is that, if Beta’s proposal ever comes to pass, it won’t be that some dispassionate algorithm will be used to decide which groups should lose their 501-c status. Human beings, especially politically charged human beings, will do it. Remember the early part of this decade with the Tea Party Movement? Lois Lerner?
So where Inazu is missing the point is that it won’t be that a mass 501-c revocation that Beta seems to want will universally affect institutions that don’t toe the pink line. Like I said, Lois Lerner types will be making the subjective decisions. And it’s easy to see that they’ll revoke for conservative and Republican oriented institutions, but leave the precious black churches (et al) and the big mainstream institutions like the Catholic Church alone. That, and by the time such an effort can be undertaken, it will be a moot point, because by that time, conservative Evangelical organizations in the United States will be run by middle aged people who are young Evangelicals today, those young Evangelicals, as the media keep gloating, aren’t any kind of anti-gay at all, and are even bigger racial cucks than their older predecessors. As far as mainstream groups, they’ll side with Mammon, as they tend to do.
