The whole thread on Twitter is worth a read, especially the excerpts of Justice Sotomayor’s dissent.
How will evangelical churches and institutions, as well as other conservative religious organizations, abuse this ruling? Follow the link to leave comment on Substack, or join the conversation by following me on Twitter.
Just as they already abuse it. Take members of the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), or whatever they are calling it now, which has members outside the US too. They've always required their full members to exclude from employment anyone who is not a trinitarian Christian, and some of these members further require their faculty to be members of specific denominations and sign doctrinal and other statements constraining their speech and actions (in all areas of life) typically regarding sexuality these days, but creationist positions have a history there too. Some even require that faculty either homeschool their children or enroll them in their associated K-12 schools, which in some states have been funded through tax-free student tuition organizations (STOs) and denominational contributions, which means employers, churches, and schools all share and discuss the private financial and other information they share on their members, often quite casually.
Under these conditions, a non-employee spouse or dependent child had better not come out as non-cishet or engage in any public speech or democratic activism contrary to this airtight theocratic system or their employee spouse will be threatened with job termination, their children will be harassed, and their property will be vandalized. The same things will happen if any family members take a contrary position in any local politics to the theocratic regime's old boy network, which is indeed all male.
It will also be unremarkable to get a call from a church secretary asking if there's a problem and you need financial help because your tuition payment to the school is late, even though the school is not formally tied to the church congregation.
If a college faculty member belongs to a church that does not contribute to the private school funding, he will be pressured by the school to donate at a higher level than his colleagues.
If a teacher at the Christian school that many parents have warned about and sought to have their children avoid ends up in prison for sexually molesting several hundred students over more than a decade, nothing fundamentally changes to the strictures families are under regarding school choice.
If sexual assault, sexting, revenge porn, and racist, homophobobic, islamophobic, and sexist targeting of minors is adversely affecting your child's security and well-being in this type of Christian K-university system at any level, you can be certain it will be covered up, whistleblowers will be punished, and you remain locked in unless you are prepared to leave or be pushed out.
It is possible and even common for mayors, city council members, etc. to be elected leaders in the local churches and school boards of trustees, etc. It is probably unusual for any "city father" (yes, typically all male and referred to as such) not to hold several or all of these roles in his career sequentially or concurrently.
Faculty divorces will be investigated via university administrators and church disciplinary courts (consistories) as well as other interested parties from employers and busybody neighbors and relatives. Private investigators retained by the university will be used to confirm affairs or non-marital cohabitation even of people engaged to be married if one is an employee. Couples in the process of potential separation may be "counseled" and directly pressured by employers and related church entities to remain married.
In such a town there will be an extensive sexual predator list composed primarily of cishet males who offended at age 18-19 with a cishet female <18. There will also be a long history of older males of fairly high status who were known to engage in consensual relations with students and younger males over a long period of time until something suddenly makes it a scandal.
These are all things that happened to me, my family, or around us with friends, reatives, and acquaintances during the Obama years.
Right on! I think the 1st amdt should be expanded to the work place. In the same way the govt can't jail you for speech your boss shouldn't be able to fire you for speech. This is actually the socialist position bc in a democratic workplace you have no boss! Seriously, think about how many people lost their livelihoods bc they pissed off their boss by speaking their mind. This is a subtle form of tyranny that we just accept bc we're used to it. Doesn't make it any less tyrannical. Incredibly funny how the mental image that the concept of "a worker who has any rights whatsoever" has immediately evoked a non-cis individual who hollers the n word nonstop while abusing every single woman in a 10 mile radius and run out and have a bunch of abortions
Evangelical academic communities have the least free speech, and they've led the way in arguing (well before Stanley Fish) that there's no such thing, and it's a good thing too. This path leads from MacIntyre to Dreher with "communities of tradition" federally protected as preserves against civil rights where a postliberal dominionism is now free to experiment with denial or assertion of whatever truths it likes.
I don't know these names you dropped so I had to Google them. I just clicked on the twitter link I guess you or someone posted on Mark's tweet to see what it's about. Dreher must be well funded he's all over the place. What I read is concerning. he defends a yoga studio owner who hides behind fake activism and is called out by his Brown and Trans employees and cries when he loses his businesses! He wasn't doing enough, gets called out and instead of apologizing and doing more he cries about it! Smh at these people and "religious" people like dreher who defend them. But I had to Google dominionism to. I can't find anything on Orthodox dominionism. Dreher is one of them, but putting 2 and 2 together it makes sense they would be dominionism. For example, I know orthodox is tied in with Putin in Russia. It also wouldn't surprise me if other orthodox have problematic people inside. What we need is more truth tellers like DeSean Jackson but we need to continue to take protests inside the buildings of these institutions which is essential so they know we won't be intimidated and we will hold them accountable
The famous closing of Alasdair MacIntyre's book _After Virtue_ is referenced in the title of Dreher's, The Benedict Option_. While MacIntyre disclaims Dreher's type of conclusions and development of his ideas, they are part of a tradition of post-liberal dissent that has obviously been very influential on the religious right. Given the lack of consensus on basic values in liberal societies that tend to relativize them, what can people with moral absolutes do but separate in Amish-like enclave cultures? That is more or less the street-level reception of this line of thinking. Stanley Fish's _There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and Its a Good Thing Too_ made the late liberal case for a certain measure of intolerance in the 1990s when people like Fish expected liberal intolerance would keep people like Dreher out of academe and their views at the margins. On the right, people took Fish as validation for the idea that academe and the "secular mainstream culture" was intractable hostile, requiring a Benedict-Option style of strategic retreat if it could not be defeated.
Ironically Dreher and his supporters have notably all backed away from their former Dominionist-ish efforts to theorize and support a hegemonic Christian position in the culture wars to make it a dominant force directing society through the law. They disclaim responsibility now for Trump and all that has happened as right-wing reactionaries and their erstwhile confederates have begun to achieve significant victories. If, during the second Obama administration, Dreher et al. decided their cause was lost, mainly in relation to same-sex marriage, I wonder what they will do now that Trump has packed the federal courts with young extrmists who will cripple civil rights for two generations. The prospects for an American "Gilead" (Margaret Atwood's dystopia) have never been greater.
Putin and Russia's relation to Orthodoxy as a world religion and in the US for "traditionalists" like Dreher is naturally indirect and complex, but roughly they all align (as Pat Buchanan pointed out ca. 2012-13 in _The American Conservative_) with their anti-liberal, patriarchal, theocratic tendencies that usually come with ethno-nationalism, thinly veiled white supremacism, open homophobia and hostility to Muslims. Perhaps the indirect connections of the should not be overstated... Steve Bannon and other intermediaries close to organizations like TAC have been working on a kind of Christian nationalist international that cooperates especially in Europe with anti-EU, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim groups, while Putin's Russian nationalist party has been an open supporter of these groups and parties as well. It is not some kind of insidious conspiracy but a fairly open and longstanding effort among reactionaries in the northern hemisphere to bring about a post-liberal order controlled by them.
Dreher and _The American Conservative_ (and much else) have the Ahmanson family as patrons; that is how he got his role at TAC. They carried him along when his career was in the gutter the second time for a racist outburst. Howard Ahmanson no longer identifies as a Christian Reconstructionist, but he financed R. J. Rushdoony until his death, and that is the major source of legal and populist movement from the right since the 1960s-70s that has culminated in the court appointments and decisions coming down now.
Just as they already abuse it. Take members of the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), or whatever they are calling it now, which has members outside the US too. They've always required their full members to exclude from employment anyone who is not a trinitarian Christian, and some of these members further require their faculty to be members of specific denominations and sign doctrinal and other statements constraining their speech and actions (in all areas of life) typically regarding sexuality these days, but creationist positions have a history there too. Some even require that faculty either homeschool their children or enroll them in their associated K-12 schools, which in some states have been funded through tax-free student tuition organizations (STOs) and denominational contributions, which means employers, churches, and schools all share and discuss the private financial and other information they share on their members, often quite casually.
Under these conditions, a non-employee spouse or dependent child had better not come out as non-cishet or engage in any public speech or democratic activism contrary to this airtight theocratic system or their employee spouse will be threatened with job termination, their children will be harassed, and their property will be vandalized. The same things will happen if any family members take a contrary position in any local politics to the theocratic regime's old boy network, which is indeed all male.
It will also be unremarkable to get a call from a church secretary asking if there's a problem and you need financial help because your tuition payment to the school is late, even though the school is not formally tied to the church congregation.
If a college faculty member belongs to a church that does not contribute to the private school funding, he will be pressured by the school to donate at a higher level than his colleagues.
If a teacher at the Christian school that many parents have warned about and sought to have their children avoid ends up in prison for sexually molesting several hundred students over more than a decade, nothing fundamentally changes to the strictures families are under regarding school choice.
If sexual assault, sexting, revenge porn, and racist, homophobobic, islamophobic, and sexist targeting of minors is adversely affecting your child's security and well-being in this type of Christian K-university system at any level, you can be certain it will be covered up, whistleblowers will be punished, and you remain locked in unless you are prepared to leave or be pushed out.
It is possible and even common for mayors, city council members, etc. to be elected leaders in the local churches and school boards of trustees, etc. It is probably unusual for any "city father" (yes, typically all male and referred to as such) not to hold several or all of these roles in his career sequentially or concurrently.
Faculty divorces will be investigated via university administrators and church disciplinary courts (consistories) as well as other interested parties from employers and busybody neighbors and relatives. Private investigators retained by the university will be used to confirm affairs or non-marital cohabitation even of people engaged to be married if one is an employee. Couples in the process of potential separation may be "counseled" and directly pressured by employers and related church entities to remain married.
In such a town there will be an extensive sexual predator list composed primarily of cishet males who offended at age 18-19 with a cishet female <18. There will also be a long history of older males of fairly high status who were known to engage in consensual relations with students and younger males over a long period of time until something suddenly makes it a scandal.
These are all things that happened to me, my family, or around us with friends, reatives, and acquaintances during the Obama years.
Right on! I think the 1st amdt should be expanded to the work place. In the same way the govt can't jail you for speech your boss shouldn't be able to fire you for speech. This is actually the socialist position bc in a democratic workplace you have no boss! Seriously, think about how many people lost their livelihoods bc they pissed off their boss by speaking their mind. This is a subtle form of tyranny that we just accept bc we're used to it. Doesn't make it any less tyrannical. Incredibly funny how the mental image that the concept of "a worker who has any rights whatsoever" has immediately evoked a non-cis individual who hollers the n word nonstop while abusing every single woman in a 10 mile radius and run out and have a bunch of abortions
Evangelical academic communities have the least free speech, and they've led the way in arguing (well before Stanley Fish) that there's no such thing, and it's a good thing too. This path leads from MacIntyre to Dreher with "communities of tradition" federally protected as preserves against civil rights where a postliberal dominionism is now free to experiment with denial or assertion of whatever truths it likes.
I don't know these names you dropped so I had to Google them. I just clicked on the twitter link I guess you or someone posted on Mark's tweet to see what it's about. Dreher must be well funded he's all over the place. What I read is concerning. he defends a yoga studio owner who hides behind fake activism and is called out by his Brown and Trans employees and cries when he loses his businesses! He wasn't doing enough, gets called out and instead of apologizing and doing more he cries about it! Smh at these people and "religious" people like dreher who defend them. But I had to Google dominionism to. I can't find anything on Orthodox dominionism. Dreher is one of them, but putting 2 and 2 together it makes sense they would be dominionism. For example, I know orthodox is tied in with Putin in Russia. It also wouldn't surprise me if other orthodox have problematic people inside. What we need is more truth tellers like DeSean Jackson but we need to continue to take protests inside the buildings of these institutions which is essential so they know we won't be intimidated and we will hold them accountable
The famous closing of Alasdair MacIntyre's book _After Virtue_ is referenced in the title of Dreher's, The Benedict Option_. While MacIntyre disclaims Dreher's type of conclusions and development of his ideas, they are part of a tradition of post-liberal dissent that has obviously been very influential on the religious right. Given the lack of consensus on basic values in liberal societies that tend to relativize them, what can people with moral absolutes do but separate in Amish-like enclave cultures? That is more or less the street-level reception of this line of thinking. Stanley Fish's _There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and Its a Good Thing Too_ made the late liberal case for a certain measure of intolerance in the 1990s when people like Fish expected liberal intolerance would keep people like Dreher out of academe and their views at the margins. On the right, people took Fish as validation for the idea that academe and the "secular mainstream culture" was intractable hostile, requiring a Benedict-Option style of strategic retreat if it could not be defeated.
Ironically Dreher and his supporters have notably all backed away from their former Dominionist-ish efforts to theorize and support a hegemonic Christian position in the culture wars to make it a dominant force directing society through the law. They disclaim responsibility now for Trump and all that has happened as right-wing reactionaries and their erstwhile confederates have begun to achieve significant victories. If, during the second Obama administration, Dreher et al. decided their cause was lost, mainly in relation to same-sex marriage, I wonder what they will do now that Trump has packed the federal courts with young extrmists who will cripple civil rights for two generations. The prospects for an American "Gilead" (Margaret Atwood's dystopia) have never been greater.
Putin and Russia's relation to Orthodoxy as a world religion and in the US for "traditionalists" like Dreher is naturally indirect and complex, but roughly they all align (as Pat Buchanan pointed out ca. 2012-13 in _The American Conservative_) with their anti-liberal, patriarchal, theocratic tendencies that usually come with ethno-nationalism, thinly veiled white supremacism, open homophobia and hostility to Muslims. Perhaps the indirect connections of the should not be overstated... Steve Bannon and other intermediaries close to organizations like TAC have been working on a kind of Christian nationalist international that cooperates especially in Europe with anti-EU, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim groups, while Putin's Russian nationalist party has been an open supporter of these groups and parties as well. It is not some kind of insidious conspiracy but a fairly open and longstanding effort among reactionaries in the northern hemisphere to bring about a post-liberal order controlled by them.
Dreher and _The American Conservative_ (and much else) have the Ahmanson family as patrons; that is how he got his role at TAC. They carried him along when his career was in the gutter the second time for a racist outburst. Howard Ahmanson no longer identifies as a Christian Reconstructionist, but he financed R. J. Rushdoony until his death, and that is the major source of legal and populist movement from the right since the 1960s-70s that has culminated in the court appointments and decisions coming down now.