YOU HAVE TO FEAR WHAT STRONGER LESSONS ARE NECESSARY TO PRODUCE AND PROTECT EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY

THE GREATEST SIN of Roman Catholicism and a number of other Christian Churches is the same in that was the focus of the Prophetic attacks on the Temple in Jerusalem, becoming a part of the oppression of those with power and wealth which is inevitable in any but a strictly egalitarian democracy.  The sins of wealth and exercising oppressive power to gain more wealth and more power and to protect those from the People who are being governed are THE story of organized governance and where there is no central authority that exercises legitimate control,  less formal gangster governance is almost certain to arise.  I would suspect that if you looked to the beginning of all of the various hereditary rulers in human history you would find they started in the most ruthless of local thugs in an area gaining power and duping or scaring The People into accepting that thuggery as legitimate.  It is certain that's how the Israeli kings came to power as Scripture indicates though the story warning about accepting a king seems to have been altered to give Saul and David and Solomon, etc. a patina of legitimacy from God, even though God warned The People against having a king.

The tragedy of the United States as an alleged democracy is in the fact that from the beginning the fabled founders certainly imposed inequality as best suited their pursuits of wealth and power, the United States started and continued as a system in which People of Color were in a similar situation as the Helots of Sparta or those bound up in the Caste systems of India.  Only it was under a secular regime which pretended to some of the more fashionable notions of 18th century democracy, notions which, as soon as the underclass had won their revolution, they reneged on in the Constitution.  The slogans of "liberty" and the far less pushed one of "equality" have never been much of the practice of the United States.  Oh, there are certainly opportunities for such among a large but narrow part of the population who are white, male and, especially, if they started out with family affluence of some measure.  Especially if they could get credentialed by one of the elite finishing schools of oligarchy, the Ivy League level institutions, especially their professional schools for lawyers and, as time went on, that most anti-intellectual adjuncts, "business schools."  The recently revealed testimony that the minor Ivy that the Trumps attended left all of them without any repeatable knowledge of "generally accepted accounting practices" is certainly telling about the actual educational status of such respected, well-financed training grounds of oligarchy and their relationship to the decadence of the United States at the start of the 2000s.  

When you mix the sins of Catholicism with the ambient Mammonism of the American system and, perhaps, somewhat less the general culture of the United States you get the billionaire-millionaire financed astro-turf phenomeon of "traditional catholicism" which has been trying to sandbag  Pope Francis, probably starting when he first appeared without gold-embroidered scarlet and ermine on his first appearance after being elected Pope.   After the disastrously degenerate and immorally incompetent reign of Benedict XVI and the somewhat more competent one of John Paul II, the election of a Pope who takes Jesus seriously was certainly as unwelcome a thing as could be imagined.  I mean, under JPII and Benedict, the right-wingers had "converted" a number of the worst Republicans to Catholicism and promoted some of the worst among cradle-Catholics.  I mean, they accepted the serial adulterer Newt Gingrich into Catholicism, he and his adulteress third wife who was sleeping with him adulterously as she literally sang in the Cathedral choir were taken in as Catholics in good standing even as the very same "traditional Catholics" attacked Pope Francis for considering allowing non-adulterous remarried, divorced Catholics who didn't screw around fully back into communion.  The hypocrisies of the Catholic Church as they have done such two-steps around such issues are only less than those around the amassing of wealth and hoarding of it by the rich, the rich who maintain many of the richest and most corrupt Catholic institutions such as its universities and colleges and, especially, it's elite prep-schools.  The Kavanaugh hearings were certainly an eye-opener to such Catholic institutions which, as Charles Pierce noted, were not the ever closing blue-collar Catholic schools most of us have some familiarity with.  

The Synod on Synodality which Pope Francis has called, two sessions in October this year and next year, may be the last chance the Catholic Church gets to actually make up its mind to be a Christian Church, as such it is under the full attack of the, especially American and English language, right-wing, billionaire-millionaire financed catholic mafia.  I am beginning to think that it is the English speaking Catholic churches where that undermining operation is strongest is not an accident but a consequence of, first, the English political culture and then that under the influence of the United States which developed from English practices being steeped in inequality and the dishonest cultural, political and legal habits that infect English culture.  The very same culture which cannot, despite the claims of equality and democracy, seem to give up the British class system and American apartheid, something which has been the predominant political reality of American history since its beginning.  I know that my repeatedly pointing out that white supremacy is the indigenous form of American fascism is upsetting and controversial to some people but that has certainly been the reality of non-white People, Native Americans, Black People, Latinos, etc. from the start, through the very brief periods when it was in retreat under Reconstruction and the few decades after the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts were passed before the Supreme Court, using the Constitution to first make mass media lies and hate speech safe from suppression and, with that, the re-imposition of American apartheid under the Robert's court, that is the reality of life away from the secluded white neighborhoods.  Especially those in which the rich live and play.  

I don't think there is any living with fascism, as I noted in one of the first things I posted online that got me major flack, it's not as if fascists are all going to go to some seminar in new thinking about fascism that is going to make them and their ideology safe for those they want to oppress, enslave, attack and murder as they rule over even a majority.  For most of America's history, I hate to tell you, those willing to live with fascism have constituted an actual majority of white Americans, the ease with which they overturned the gains from the legal ending of de jure slavery, both through Electoral College political corruption and by Supreme Court fiat and the overturning of the Voting Rights Act in the wake of the mid-20th century Civil Rights movement, the Trump regime following the Bush II regime, proves how powerful that indigenous form of fascism is.   To think that any egalitarian democracy could passively and effectively, not even consider decisively "more speech" that into impotence is the major stupidity of the American liberals and left during my lifetime.  You cannot allow them to lie with impunity and not get a resulting traditional American fascist minority rule under the inequality baked into the American Constitutional system.   From the time of Richard Viguerie's computer driven direct mail propaganda operation to the Billonaire-Putin-Xi-MBE, etc. organization and inciting those who love fascism and hate equality, the "civil libertarians" have given the American fascists their weapons against equality and democracy, itself.  The ways in which such thinking is baked into the culture of the United States is a clear and present danger to us all and, these days, the foremost engines of that are the mass media, the wild-west internet, the degeneracy and fascism promoting film and TV industry - THE "ENTERTAINMENT" PART OF THAT THE MOST EFFECTIVE ENGINE TO PROMOTE IT.  

I think the Catholic Church's experience of an attack against Pope Francis trying to make Catholicism into a truly Christian religion is a model of the English language use of "liberty" for some to attack egalitarian democracy for all are not only related, I think they are as intertwined as they can be.  It is one of the ironies that the Pope whose nationalism was the predominant factor of his Papacy, Karol Wotyla, Pope JPII was a thorough despot in matters of governance of the Catholic Church he came to head.  It was also one of the ironies that is extreme right-wing notion of sexual morality ended up in his papacy and that of his hand-chosen successor are now being most known for being those who permitted and covered up the priest-child molester scandal.  I don't remember the "traditional-Catholics" being much troubled by that scandal, other then them following Benedict's lead in blaming it on gay priests, making use of one of the most traditional calumnies against gay men.  I think the emphasis on priests who raped and molested males while ignoring the many who raped and molested Girls and Women was telling about the deeper issues of inequality that are bound to come with patriarchal rule.  I think that is as much a product of a long standing culture of patriarchal rule as the in-baked assumptions of inequality are a feature of any place which was ruled under something like the British class system.  I think it's plainly clear that in the United States, on land stolen from Native Americans, where the enslavement of kidnapped Africans became a major engine of wealth creation, getting rid of those is not something that can be left to just letting us let go and see what will come out of it.   

I think wherever there is actual inequality, gender, racial, ethnic, gender-identity, there will be other and more basic expressions of cultural, political and legal fascism.  I think wherever the media is allowed to promote that, especially mass media, violence against those targeted and cultural, political and legally promoted and permitted inequality will reign.  That it turns out that the media freed to lie with impunity, free to promote images and words stereotyping and mocking and denigrating and smearing Black People, Latinos, Native Americans, Women, LGBTQ+ People, that liberty to lie and spread false witness will destroy equality and democracy.  The old 18th century superstition embedded in the American Constitution and, from it, elsewhere in the world, that all speech should be equally permitted turns out in the actual practice of the 20th century, especially as mass media became real, has been about as definitively proven as anything can be on a sociological scale.   The dangers of regulating against hate speech, against lies are, of course, real but they are no more real than the possible abuses of every single other regulation there is.  Including those against such crimes as murder.  That judges and "justices" and jurors can be dishonest and corrupt is a fact of life.  The answer to the cowardly question "who among us is to decide these things,"  the answer is as plain as the claim that democracy is better than autocracy WE MUST DO THAT.  There is no one else who can.   I think that the modern expression of that grew out of the Darwinist "survival of the fittest" controlled mind of Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. one of the putrid flowers of the Harvard educated elite of Massachusetts, the author of the infamous Buck v. Bell decision is something that has to be confronted.  He had no belief in equality, he seems to have eagerly anticipated some kind of fight to the death with the strongest winning it.  Any "liberalism" that mistook him for a champion of egalitarian democracy is as historically ill informed as those who believe the founders were gods among men when they were just a bunch of slave-holders and sharp businessmen.

The 20th century reaction promoting "free speech-press absolutism" that lies must be permitted and fought with "more speech" is an experiment that has been tried and it has produced disaster - IF THE MASS MEDIA CREATED TRUMP REGIME IS NOT THE MOST SERIOUS WARNING THE UNITED STATES HAS BEEN GIVEN, YOU HAVE TO FEAR WHAT STRONGER LESSONS ARE NECESSARY TO PRODUCE AND PROTECT EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.  

I don't trust any notions of governance that aren't founded in an obligation to tell the truth, to forbid lying, to the equal prevision and permission to have a life of decency and freedom respectful of the needs and rights of all others on an equal basis.  I don't trust any Christianity which is patriarchal, hierarchical or comfortable with wealth held by it and comfortable with those who hold it in a secular context.  I don't think any decent government or religion is possible except on the basis of holding of religious truths to be really true, whether or not you call those holdings religious or not.  They are unavailable in any but a non-materialist, non-scientific basis because they just simply are true and must be taken to be such.  You won't get them in a modern, academic context, they are largely experiential, not a product of logic, reason and science.  If the Roman Catholic church gets closer to them with this present and most democratic of Synods in history before it does under the American Constitution, I wouldn't be surprised.  Though in neither one is it a guaranteed given.