A particularly destructive week, as the dotard of the adult day car center on Pennsylvanias Avenue destroys where we cannot build. The slimy half-measures on the Iran agreement and the Affordable Care Act are part of it, his reneging on a pledge to protect the DACA kids, his winks and nods on Puerto Rico, the gutting of clean power regulations, the ever shriller whining about the power of the free press, the idolatry of the flag. But particularly disturbing is his going all-in with the culture war of the increasingly marginal Evangelical right, with so broad a defense of the "paramount" right of religious freedom as to render all other civil rights conditional. (Indeed, you're able now to discriminate on sincerely held "moral" grounds, too, a shabby and unprecedented legal invention.) Beyond mortification that the worst pseudo-Christians should again have seized the public flag of religion, I sorrow at this further undermining of the moral imperative of our shared life, with its commitment to the work of tolerance and civility, its acceptance if not indeed celebration of a pluralistic society. Pray for us.
