You Have To Be The Contented Affluent Kind Of Movie Addled Commie Fan Boy To Think There Is Something Wrong With What I Said

Normal People Know Better, Or Should.  

THIS IS THE POST I'LL POST instead of the long piece I'd thought of to answer the silly comment that me saying I was an "anti-anti-anti-communist meant I was a big fat fan of such things as the House Unamerican Activities Committee from the late 40s through early 60's, Red Channels, Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, Westbrook Pegler - actually I doubt the commenter knows the history of that other than what they saw in some stupid movie treatment so he probably doesn't understand what I just said.  Instead of a long drawn out answer I'll give you this wisdom on opposing our opponents and why some of that is worthwhile and some isn't from the very good young evangelical LGBTQ+ equality champion Matthew Vines.

All of those questions don't take place in a vacuum. That experience of alienation (of LGBGTQ+ Christians) is difficult to undergo at any time.  But it's been even harder in the last few years as so many of us who have grown up in the evangelical church have had reason to lose confidence and trust of many of those who have played a formative role in nurturing our faith.  

Flagrant hypocrisy and the pursuit of power seemingly at any cost have damaged the church's witness and felt like a betrayal for many of us who've watched as the Jesus we invited into our hearts as children has been reduced, too often, to a team mascot in our increasingly ugly and mean spirited culture wars.

If the People who introduced me to Jesus can live in such contradictory ways to the values they once taught me it's natural for many to ask how much of this was ever true in the first place?  How much of what I was taught about Christianity is actually real?  And how much of it should I still believe?

The term that's now widely used for those who are going through this extensive questioning of what they'd once been taught about their faith is "deconstruction."  For many of us this is an unavoidable process once we come to believe that any significant aspect of the theology and beliefs we were taught growing up is untrue. That could be about same-sex relationships but it could also be about the role of Women in the church, about questions of science or about whether Christians all need to vote for the same political party.

But whatever the impetus for it or the term that's used to describe it this process is one that millions of People today and especially millions of younger People in the church have gone through or are going through.  And that reality and how wide spread it is can provoke different responses. Including responses that I think err in two different directions.

On the one hand, seeing deconstruction lead to a loss of faith for many can lead to a fearful or condemning response from some in the church who prefer to interpret this phenomenon as merely People falling away from the faith because of the attraction of sin and cultural relevance in an increasingly secular and post-Christian society.  But that sort of perspective overlooks the many real problems in the church that are pushing People away.  Rethinking beliefs and attitudes that aren't true or that aren't faithful to Jesus and Scripture isn't a bad thing. It's a helpful and necessary thing and it can help to make the church better.

But, at the same time, just as deconstruction shouldn't be uncritically dismissed or condemned, it also isn't something that should be uncritically praised regardless of what beliefs somebody is deconstructing or what measuring stick they're using to judge what's true and what's not in the process.

As Paul reminds us in First Corinthians 10:23, - I have the right to do anything, you say, but not everything is beneficial. I have the right to do everything but not everything is constructive.  If deconstruction is pursued in an overly reactive way then it can easily lead to a whip-lash inducing rush to embrace the opposite of whatever beliefs someone started with.  And that almost inevitably involves sweeping away some beliefs that are good and true along with those that are flawed.  The proverbial baby with the bath water.  And even when someone seeks to maintain a Christian identity this highly reactive approach is usually unsustainable.

This, "it can easily lead to a whip-lash inducing rush to embrace the opposite of whatever beliefs someone started with," is certainly at work in the typical liberalish, leftishish anti-anti-communism which was just such a reaction and with catastrophic and counter-productive results, as the high point of liberal political life in the United States, which I measure from the short period when the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and Medicare and Medicaid were adopted and made law.  Of course that short period  was no epoch of human perfection, it was just the high water mark of achievement.  It wasn't long before one of the most idiotic rulings of the Warren Court made lying in the mass media, the corporate media and the minuscule lefty media immune from action resulting directly in Nixon and our long slide into Republican-fascism.  American involvement in Vietnam and a number of other countries was a disaster for egalitarian democracy, as well.

The anti-anti-communism was in full swing leading too many on the left to feel pity for those poor, put-upon commies, so many of them falling for the legends and lies of their tales of self-pity as told on stage, on screen and in novels and in the pages of small, little read lefty magazines.  That was some of the most misplaced pity in the history of the American left, pretty much all of those who were, in fact, communists or Marxists of some other denomination were supporters of some of the most evil dictators in human history, some who would not blacklist them if they were dissidents but would shoot them in the head or torture them to death, not unlikely, their families.  Shoot them in the head with no due process or send them to die in the gulag slave-labor camps. Communism has been, in fact, as thoroughly tied into slavery as any other gangster system of governance, American communists have championed some of the worst enslavers in human history.  

They may have been due their due process under the law that, with its terrible imperfections and downright corruptions was superior to what they advocated for millions and, with time, far over a billion other people lived and still live under.  I wonder why those dear old commies never seemed to really be concerned about the scores of millions murdered, enslaved, starved to death, etc. under their heroes' rule.  Only as most of them were affluent to comfortable white Americans (the passion of Dalton Trumbo, really), I really don't wonder how they could do it any more than I wonder why the majority of the present Supreme Court can administer such brutal injustice to the large majority of Americans right now.

Anyone who doesn't understand that is bound to be about as helpful to saving our imperfect democracy as the RFK jr. supporting-Trump voting Bernie or buster-Green Party repeat ratfucker-Putin supporting enemy of Ukrainian freedom and egalitarian democracy as the Stalin lovin' later Mao lovin' play-left were all along.

I hate the anti-democratic poseur left and anything "moderate," "liberal" or other which advocates doing anything other than voting for Democrats for the foreseeable future so as to get and keep Republican-fascists out of power, expand the damned Court, swamping the billionaire tool white supremacists.  

And let me take a second to ask, is Clarence Thomas not the most vile person to ever have sat on that court?  I would put him right down there with Taney and the other champions of slavery and white supremacy, only he sold out all other People of Color to do what they did. AND THAT REALLY DOES FIGURE INTO HIS EPIC VILENESS.  

Those traitors to the genuine left should be called out and exposed for what they are and always were and definitively, publicly and permanently be kicked out of the real left. Wash, rinse, repeat as often as necessary.  Once you get past their self-generated fake hagiographic "history," there is so little that the most leftiest lefties in the room ever accomplished as compared to Democrats from FDR on to make real radical change, changing laws and making lives better.  And there is so much that is counterproductive and destructive in that real as opposed to phonied up lefty history that the safest thing to do is to forget nuance and scrap the entire thing.  Their legend is a millstone around the neck of the real left that gains office, holds office and changes things and it always will be.  Junk it, be done with it once and for all.  

If there's one thing I have learned from my original reluctance to see Joe Biden win the Democratic nomination, it is that there is nothing that can compare with having someone with his extensive experience in government as a Democratic President, along with the extensive experience of the greatest Speaker of the House in American history, Nancy Pelosi and the skilled Chuck Schumer as the Democratic leader of the Senate.  One of the most impressive acts of politics I've ever seen was Nancy Pelosi convincing her leadership team hand over that role to entirely new but also very skilled and experienced successors.  I have never seen anything like that happen on the play-left.  But if I went into the disgusting details I won't get anything else done.  

I'm too busy to waste time arguing that bullshit history again.