Racist Baby
What religion are you and could you be fair with Catholics?
I am not paying strict attention to the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation in the Senate, but even so, I hear things that reassure me that the Republican senators are sweeping from their inner world any vestiges of the subtle intelligence which defines democratic society, and relying instead on cudgels.
Senator Lindsey Graham asks questions that a potential employer is not allowed to ask, such as, “What faith are you, by the way?” This is a wonderful question, with the same plumage as, “But I need you to do us a favor, though.” It is entirely inappropriate because in the United States, your religion, or lack of religion, is your own business. That’s why a potential employer can’t make that relevant to the hiring decision. When Jackson admitted to being Protestant, Graham asked her to rate her faith on a scale of one to ten. This reminded me of the Colbert Questionnaire, when he asks, “What number am I thinking of?”
Warthogs are worse than woodpeckers
Being a woodpecker, like Graham, can’t compete with warthog Ted Cruz. The disturbing thing about Cruz is that he is being himself. This strategy works for some people, but not for him. His insistence on being himself has made him the most despised man in the Senate. He did not disappoint in his questions to Jackson. He had made up a story about her being sympathetic toward child molesters and child pornography and he pressed on with it despite headwinds.
Nothing Jackson could say deterred him from his narrative. When she said that what he was presenting as her position, was, in fact, a student paper anticipating how newly passed predation laws would be interpreted before there was case law to guide decisions, Cruz continued saying it was her position to be soft on child pornography. He ignored her correction of his misinterpretation, attentive only to his prepared narrative, which was simple enough even for people who vote for him.
But the hard part about watching these hearings, or listening to Trump, or DeSantis, or any Fox News commentator, is how poisonous they are to the national psyche. There are so many things we need to do, and cannot, because of opposition research which reduces a person down to the the most negative thing that can be, not discovered, but produced, like a play is produced. It is no longer to expose corruption or malfeasance, but to find an anchor bolt for a false narrative, which is then produced and distributed to the troops by professional soul killers.
Cruz changed the tone of what was unremarkable in context into something one-sided, and thus nefarious out of context. Any child molester is equal to any other. Some drunk with an urgent bladder can be pissing on a wall and be turned in because the children saw him doing it, and he may be guilty of sex crime. Or a twenty year old can have a seventeen year old girlfriend and her father might insist on prosecution under statutory law.
And then there’s the monster who rapes and kills children by compulsion, and has to be put down like a rabid dog.
The reason we need a good judge is that there’s no one size fits all law that can be applied in these cases.
It is fundamentalist thinking which is ruining American society. People are afraid of Cruz and Trump and Graham and their ilk, because they profess to a morality without ethics. Ethics begins as esthetics in the body, not as a one-sided argument used to bludgeon anybody in your way.
Jackson could not possibly be as ideologically narrow a choice for the high court as the last three judges confirmed to the bench. They are of a fundamentalist mind set, wanting to “restore” Christian morality, which means they pass laws which are extensions of religious law. In some cases this matches civil law but in other cases it does not. Civil law includes everybody in town, but religious law excludes everybody who’s outside of its magic circle.
We know these people because we have lived in neighborhoods where their spiritual kin came to the potluck. There is always one guy who says, “I’d like to offer a prayer.” Nobody asked Tartuffe to be tedious, but, being Tartuffe, he can’t resist.
Many of us have lived in neighborhoods where there were people on the block who were always gossiping about other neighbors, pretending to be concerned that they don’t fit in. “They’re Italians, you know, from New York City.” Bring up any shared acquaintance, and in the first independent clause of the opening sentence they are okay because one should love all god’s children, but after the semi-colon the eyes cut downward and left as the image of the victim connects with trapped gas, or shame hidden beneath a cloak of morality, so that the next clause begins:
“But … and I am telling you this in strict confidence...”
If you ask these people what they want to happen they will say things like, get transgender girls out of sports, own the libs, or, get Critical Race Theory out of schools. The unifying theme is that by making others do what you know is right, you can restore the order and sanity to the world which exists just north of that loathsome internal part being caused, apparently, by other people. If we could get rid of them we could resurrect an America last seen on Kodachrome.
Best to not mention to Tartuffe that after a couple of hours in his company you feel like you’ve lost a quart of plasma. People like this are sensitive to perceived criticism, especially from a socialist.
The senate hearing is a bad neighborhood, and after I listen to Graham, Cruz, and others with this one-sided thought process, I feel like I’ve been tortured. They like torture because it’s punitive, not preventative, and they are punitive people. They are Americans, but they have counterparts in Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, anywhere religion can get into power over free society, disguised as just another political party. They are part of the thirty percent of people who always support the most authoritarian candidates right up to the day the elections are canceled.
